Month: July 2013

Feeling Safe In Numbers

Christian Jarrett describes a study that examines how men size up conflict:

[Researchers] approached 149 men who were either on their own or in a group dish_aggressionchart of 2 to 7 friends. Each participant was taken to one side and shown a picture of a turbaned, bearded terrorist pointing a gun. The photo was cropped so the aggressor’s physical size was hidden. The participants were asked to estimate his physical size and muscularity …

The key finding was that participants with one or more friends tended to estimate that the terrorist was shorter by around one and a half inches, and less muscular (having more than one friend in tow didn’t exaggerate this effect). In contrast, participants who were alone or smaller stature tended to guess that the terrorist was more physically formidable.

The researchers also approached men in groups and gave them the same test either away from or nearby their friends:

Once again, the men tested with their friends nearby tended to estimate that the terrorist was less physically formidable, as compared with men tested on their own. “These findings indicate that the immediate presence of allies is an important factor in men’s estimations of the formidability of potential opponents,” the researchers said – a result that they suggested could be relevant for “violence prevention, policing and military science”.

Jarrett wonders, “Would the study replicate with women?”

Keep It Classy, NRO

National Review dead-ender, Ed Whelan, still refuses to use the simple term marriage when referring to gay people who are married. We are “married,” not married. Under the law, of course, I am married in state and federal law – indistinguishably from my fellow straight married couples. I do not walk around with quotation marks around my relationship any more – and, as Wally Olson notes, not even Scalia and Alito went so far as to insult fellow citizens in this manner.  Wally makes a point I have long insisted upon – which is the double standard deployed by some theocons with respect to divorce and marriage. No traditional Catholic can recognize a civil divorce or re-marriage. Do they put scare quotes around “divorced” or “re-married”? No. Do they threaten to end all their social services if they unwittingly employ a “divorced” non-Catholic or Catholic in their social services? No.

This they reserve for gay people. And they bridle at the suggestion that they are motivated in any way by animus. Well, Ed, prove it.

Ask Dan Savage Anything: Props To “Porno Pete”

In today’s video, Dan explains how he kind of respects the “batshittery” of Peter LaBarbera, head of the anti-gay group Truth About Homosexuality:

For a more extensive rundown on LaBarbera and his group, watch this video from Dan. His new book, American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics, is in bookstores now. My recent conversation with him at the New York Public Library is here. Dan’s previous answers are here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

What’s Left Of The Left?

Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick wonder what issue liberals will trumpet after marriage equality:

Abortion, the death penalty, gun control, economic injustice, all that stuff was fraught enough to make you just want to triangulate. Abortion clinics don’t poll well. Good grief, even access to primary health care polls poorly. And those issues are as popular as plums compared with the rights of death row inmates and freedom from religious coercion … Now that gay marriage is looking like a check in the win column, it is precisely the right moment to ask: What does it mean to be left anymore? Is there even a left left? Or just a center that calls itself left because it is always standing next to the dude labeled “right” in the photographs?

First off, a quibble. Not all those in favor of marriage equality are on the left. We just look that way because the right has become a faction of religious fundamentalism. Second, these questions are somewhat premature; Enten expects that the fight over marriage will last for many decades in the South:

All the southern states except for West Virginia have in place a constitutional ban against same-sex marriage. All the southern states – except for Arkansas and Mississippi, where support for gay marriage is somewhere between 20% and 30% – require state legislative action before overturning a state constitutional amendment against gay marriage.

The fact that state legislatures will be required to act changes the entire equation for the south. All the southern legislatures with a constitutional ban against gay marriage also feature Republican control of at least one house of the state legislature. In most cases, Republicans control both houses with plenty of room to spare and no sign that control is going to switch anytime soon. All of the states that require going to the legislature demand super-majorities (60%+) and/or at least two consecutively elected legislatures to approve an amendment for it to reach the popular ballot.

What this basically means is the same-sex marriage debate is not even about what the majority of the people thinks in most of these states. Republican legislators control the action. That’s the whole game.

Monogamy: Gay Men, Lesbians, And Straights

Gay Marriage Becomes Legal In California

Nathaniel Frank rebuts a Hannah Rosin’s post on same-sex marriage, which cites “decades-old statistics from the counterculture” to argue that married gays won’t likely be monogamous:

[H]ow different are gay and straight couples? Probably different but not that different. Data on straight monogamy are all over the map. One report suggests 70 percent of married men cheat. (OK, that was a Fox News report, but shouldn’t that skew toward idealizing heterosexuality?) A nationally representative survey of 884 men put the number at only 23 percent. A much bigger but unrepresentative MSNBC survey found that nearly half of adults cheat—exactly the same percentage as the San Francisco study found with gay men. Other reports have found the same—that 50 percent of married men cheat—and one also found that the vast majority will not admit to it, perhaps even on surveys.

The gay male culture of nonmonogamy, rooted in gay liberation (and again, not all gay men are part of it), is likely to encourage both nonmonogamy and honest reporting of it, a key difference from the norms and expectations of the heterosexual mainstream.

I’m not so sure, if only because these things tend to be kept private (for good reasons); and because the possibility of a monogamish marriage diminishes very quickly among heterosexuals and lesbians. And gay men are, to my mind, more likely to be influenced by the 99 percent of marriages that adhere to cultural norms than the 99 percent are to be influenced by the 1 percent. Dreher offers a critique of Steve Thrasher’s piece on married non-monogamous gays:

In the piece, someone praises gays for being “honest” about their sexual behavior, unlike hetero hypocrites like “Newt Gingrich.” But that’s just it: Gingrich’s infidelities were an occasion of moral opprobrium and legal consequence for him. If Gingrich and one of his wives had written a prenuptial contract that provided for his desire to wander sexually, there would have been stigma attached to it. That stigma is important to maintain. Of course there are straight people who commit infidelity within marriage, and there are, no doubt, straight people (swingers) who negotiate infidelity within the context of their marriage. The point is that these people are outside the norm, and are seen as outlaws in some sense. On Thrasher’s account, that’s not the case for gay men.

Gingrich is such an outlaw he has just been given a spot on CNN’s Crossfire and had a good run for president as a Catholic Republican! So I think Rod overplays his hand here. That barn door has been swinging wide or at least ajar for quite a while now. Nonetheless: it’s obvious that marriage between two men and between two women will be inherently different in some respects both from each other and from heterosexual marriages. But the core issue isn’t gay or straight, it seems to me; it’s male and female.

We do not hear moral panic around lesbian marriages, for example, because they tend to be more monogamous than straight ones – and more numerous than gay male ones. Hence the net result of marriage equality may be a slight uptick in monogamy as more women enter the institution. Heterosexual men are also constrained powerfully by the woman they are married to – but do break those constraints (often by lies or discretion) as the stats show.

The other core issue, it seems to me, is whether you have kids or not. Again this distinction is much more salient than gay vs straight. Monogamy matters much more insofar as it helps rear children in a clear and settled and stable environment. But childless couples? I would not want to peer into whatever arrangements they might have made with each other (or not). I’d simply hope they protect their own privacy, and be able to forgive one another and communicate with each other.

What’s different about a gay male couple is that extra-marital indiscretions can be – but not always are – negotiated/forgiven/understood – because men understand men and male desire, and the difference between mere sex and major betrayal. Dan Savage and I discussed this here. Does this mean gay male couples should publicly challenge the social norm of monogamy? I don’t believe so. What we can do – and what some straight couples do – is contain the details of our relationships to one another. It’s called discretion. And discretion is not the same as infidelity, which is ultimately and rightly defined by the couple themselves. (By the way, I see no relevance at all in the way any couple meets. Very sleazy hookups can lead to very stable marriages; squeaky-clean introductions can become living hells.)

Is there some hypocrisy here? Of course there is – as there is among straight couples who deal with an infidelity privately while “keeping up appearances”. A little hypocrisy is sometimes the tribute vice pays to virtue. Bottom line: I don’t want to investigate the private details of people’s marriages, straight or gay, but I do think upholding a public norm of fidelity is worthwhile, and more than worthwhile when children are involved. Equally, I think the obsession with sex in marriage mistakes wood for the trees (that was an attempt at a pun). Marriage is about so much more than sex. Fidelity is about much more than monogamy. And the more we appreciate that, the stabler and happier our marriages will be.

More Dish on gays and monogamy here, here, and here.

(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty)

Where Now For Snowden?

The leaker’s options for safe haven are vanishing:

Russian officials say Snowden withdrew his request for asylum in their country after President Vladimir Putin warned Snowden that he would have to stop harming American interests. He’s already lost Ecuador, too, which now says they regret trying to help at all. On Tuesday morning, India flat out said no, adding “we see no reason to accede to the request.” The extra ‘We’re suppposed to be allies with the United States, by the way’ was unsaid, but probably implied. And just moments ago, Brazil joined the chorus of negatives, by officially choosing to ignore him.

Joshua Tucker ponders Putin’s apparent gesture of goodwill to the US:

I wonder if Putin has found himself in a bit of a bind.  Snowden has become quite popular in Russia – not the least because he probably was a great tool for the regime to bolster its claim of the US as a threat to Russian national security, Putin’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding – but I wonder if Putin is beginning to have second thoughts about having someone around long term who has made his name arguing that regimes shouldn’t monitor the online behavior of their citizens ….

Julia Ioffe isn’t too surprised:

What? Since when does Russia make people stop “inflicting damage on our American partners”? Is it a violation of Russia’s America-baiting monopoly?

Unlikely. As I’ve written before, Russia—well, Putin—is not hostile to the U.S. when it thinks the U.S. finds itself in a position with which it can empathize. For example, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Putin was the first to reach out to the U.S., just as he was the first world leader to call George W. Bush on 9/11. Russia has an insurgency and terrorist training camps on its own terroritory, and has been battling these guys for well over a decade. And it sees terrorism as a universal, largely undiferentiated foe, so it is in its interests to link up its efforts with the U.S. in fighting it. Thus, we’ve seen an unprecedented level of cooperation in counter-terrorism activities between the two countries, as well as in places like Afghanistan.

The Split In Egyptian Politics

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vux_-vJvHww]

Last week, Nathan Brown declared that “Egyptian politics now seems to operate in two parallel universes”:

On the one side is a simple story of a president and ruling political party that suffered years of oppression but were finally rewarded by the Egyptian people for their endurance, dedication, and honesty. Endowed with clear democratic and constitutional legitimacy — and brought to power on the heels of a popular uprising that his movement helped lead — President Morsi suddenly faces an array of forces who wish to rewrite the rules of the political game in a blatant attempt to overthrow the express will of the people. Stopping at nothing (the opposition uses false charges, accepts foreign assistance, uses shrill and incendiary rhetoric, refuses dialogue, and does not even stop at violating common decency by demonstrating in underwear), a collection of rude youth, power-hungry secular politicians, old regime elements, and scheming security services have conspired to declare, in effect, that Egyptians must be called to the ballot box only on condition that they reject Islamists (and if they make a mistake, they must be summoned back again).

On the other side is an equally simple story of a president who narrowly won office promising competence, inclusiveness, and conciliation but who delivered instead inflation, unemployment, power outages, fuel shortages, autocracy, sectarianism, and divisive rhetoric. Offering meaningless dialogues without the hint of concessions, his erstwhile allies have all abandoned him. And as the ranks of his critics have grown to the extent that they clearly have come to speak for the vast majority of Egyptians, the society has quite simply withdrawn confidence in him as president. Rather than following the text of a constitution that the president’s party rammed through for its own purposes — a constitution that would force the country through three more years of deterioration and despair — Morsi should leave office now and allow the people to pick new leadership.

(Hat tip: Judis)

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #160

Screen Shot 2013-06-28 at 5.54.40 PM

A reader writes:

I’m getting an Eastern European vibe from the architecture, but not overwhelmingly so. Perhaps a former part of the USSR? Romania? Bucharest?

Another:

This is my very first submission to VFYW, but I have a strong hunch this is from the former Yugoslavia, specifically Sarajevo, with its hilly topography, ugly government buildings, and charming red-shingled roofs.

Another:

I am in the midst of planning the final details of my vacation, later this month, to Croatia, which is why I’m sure this isn’t Zagreb, even though it looks exactly like all of the photos I’ve been poring over on websites and in guide books.  That would be just too much of a coincidence.

Another:

Dubrovnik, Croatia? Total guess.  I’ve got nothing more than “somewhere in Croatia” but figured I should at least try to guess a city.  Even the country is a guess!  I know someone will have rescued a family of marmosets from a fire in that building on the left but it wasn’t me!

Another gets close:

The hills, the whitewashed buildings with red-tiled roofs … gotta be Lisbon, looking southwest.

Another locks down the right location:

Based on the architecture it seemed obviously Mediterranean or at least Southern European.  I started in Athens, nope.  Naples, nope.  Tunis, nope.  Lisbon – looks like it!  But it couldn’t find the hill in the background with the corresponding out-of-place high-rise.  So I tried Porto … nope.  Coimbra … voila!

coimbra-aerial

The picture was taken from the Hotel Tivoli in Coimbra, Portugal.  The Google map screenshot above shows the Hotel Tivoli in the upper left, the 6-peaked zig-zaggy roof in the foreground of the VFYW is just right and below the hotel, and the dark glass high-rise prominent in the VFYW is in the bottom right of the Google map screenshot.

I won with Granada a couple weeks ago, so I’m DQ’d from the winner, but I still like to be in the winners’ circle.

Another previous winner in the winner’s circle

So I’ve noted a similar sentiment before, but if you can work your way past all the pornography and cat videos, the remaining 8% or so of the internet is all about cataloguing bridges.  Is bridge-spotting a thing?  If it is, I’m becoming an accidental enthusiast.  When we VFYWers write the book on how to play this game, a prominent chapter will be devoted to identifying bridges.300px-Puente_Coimbra2

And this week’s bridge in the background is a cable-stayed bridge with a single slanted pylon, and in searching for it I happened across a dude whose life’s work appears to be a website featuring circa-1996 HTML that alphabetically lists every bridge in Europe, with photos.

Italy, nope.  Spain, nope.  Portugal … perhaps?  I found one that seemed to fit the general shape and scope of the bridge in the window view, and so we checked the town of Coimbra for another age-old VFYW trick – the Ugly Building That Should Not Be.  It’s almost always tall, dark, 40 or so years old, and disrupts an otherwise scenic or historical tableau.  Sure enough, we found it – so Coimbra it is.

The view is from the Hotel Tivoli Coimbra.  6th floor?  Why not.  From here I’ll let the yet-to-win crowd send in maps and visuals. By the way, between this and the view from the South of France a few weeks back, Europe needs a pressure washing.  I know it’s been a tough decade and budgets are tight, but still.  Have the Queen of Europe contact me to discuss rates.

Enjoyed as always – made for a nice little Saturday night at home.  Y’all enjoy the 4th – America, Fuck Yeah!

Our all-time best player strikes again:

VFYW Coimbra Overhead Marked - Copy

Despite its size, and the fact that it contains one of the oldest universities in Europe, I don’t think I’d ever even heard the name of the city featured in your viewer’s photo. Nothing like the VFYW contest to reveal one’s ignorance of the world.

This week’s view comes from Coimbra, Portugal. The picture was taken from the top floor of the Tivoli Hotel and looks south, south east along a heading of 162 degrees towards the Torre Arnado, the modernist high rise at center frame. The large buildings atop the hill in the distance are those of the University of Coimbra, founded in 1290 and the thirteenth oldest university on Earth. A marked overhead map as well as a near view of the likely window are attached.

VFYW Coimbra Actual Window Marked - Copy

The winner this week is the reader with the most specific guess who hasn’t won already but guessed a difficult view in the past:

This is in Coimbra, Portugal, whose university, visible in the foreground, was just classified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Although I’m Portuguese, and have been to Coimbra many times, this wasn’t immediately apparent from the photo, as they can be tricky, and if this contest has teached me something is that faraway places can look very familiar sometimes.

So the first clue wasn’t the university, but the bridge, just barely visible peeking over a building. It’s called the Europa Bridge and is infamous in Portugal for the time it took to build and for going seriously over budget in the meantime, having been projected at 38 million, and ending up costing 111 million.

Using the orientation of pillar as a compass, a little search with google maps led me to the main tower in the picture, and from there to Tivoli Hotel, at João Machado Street, from where this picture was taken:

Ecra_126

I’m guessing from a room high up the hotel, probably in the last floor. No doubt lots of people will get this one right, and someone will probably tell you exactly the room number, but it’s always fun to get one right.

Even more fun to win. Details from the submitter:

This was the first time you’ve ever picked one of my views (I’ve only submitted a half dozen or so) and for a contest no less! I was pretty excited. I suspect you’ll get quite a few correct answers to this contest, as anyone who has visited this picturesque university town will likely remember the ugly building that sticks out like a sore thumb. The picture is taken from the 5th floor (6th floor US style) of the Tivoli Hotel in Coimbra, Portugal, room 515. It’s the 3rd room after the elevator, in case you have people who tried to identify the specific window.

An honorable mention from a first-time correct guesser:

I thought this one was going to take a lot longer than it did. It probably means I just got lucky sooner this time. It also probably means that you are going to again shatter my weekend’s sense of triumphalism at doing the impossible by labeling this an “easy” view.

The architecture and the red tiled roofs had me thinking somewhere around the Mediterranean. The building up on the hill on the left looks to be a university or government building of some sort so I started scanning maps of cities with famous colleges around the Mediterranean. The black tower in the center of the photo jumped out on Google Earth almost as soon as I called up Coimbra. From there it was easy to trace back the view to one of the rooms on the top floors of the Hotel Tivoli. The black railing from the photo matches those that you can see from StreetView. From the angle it is from the right side of the hotel entrance when facing it from the street and from one of the top two floors. My guess is fourth window from the center, second floor down:

vfyw-160

(Archive)

How Would The GOP Run Against Clinton?

Jonathan Martin reported over the weekend that “Republican strategists and presidential hopefuls, in ways subtle and overt, are eager to focus a spotlight on Mrs. Clinton’s age.” Tomasky expects that strategy to backfire:

[J]ust as the Republicans cemented that loyalty by overdoing their attacks on her in the earlier White House years, so they will again, and they’ll make her a figure of sympathy to Middle America just as they did before. Talk about hard-wired: they so seethe with hatred for her, and are so incapable of understanding that the vast majority of America not only doesn’t share their hatred but indeed has named her our country’s most admired woman in 17 of the last 20 years, that they’ll say and do things that may well convert young people into her most ardent defenders. After a few Republican “jokes” about Clinton’s appearance, 70 will never have seemed so appealing.

Allahpundit suggests a slightly different line of attack:

The problem with Hillary isn’t that she’ll be almost 70 by election day, it’s that she’ll have been a Beltway institution for close to 25 years at that point. If, like many Americans, you’re disgusted with the federal government generally and Congress in particular, why nominate someone who’s been a “co-president,” senator, and Secretary of State, and not particularly effective in any role?

Barro counters:

[L]et’s say Republicans manage to walk a fine line: hit her for having “old ideas” and being around Washington too long without directly invoking her age. The strategy still doesn’t make any sense, because the Republicans are the party of old, tired ideas.

And Marc Tracy wants Hillary to embrace her status as a boomer:

There is no seeing Clinton without the Baby Boomer connotation. So she should make that work for her. Her campaign could be the Boomers’ last go-round. She could explicitly ask the country to give her generation, through her, one last chance to address those problems—from dangeous climate change to galloping entitlement costs—that in the past her generation has been fairly accused of selfishly ignoring or even abetting. And at the same time she could run as an advocate and even embodiment of all the big things the Boomers got right: personal freedoms, including abortion rights; tolerance of gays and lesbians and other classes of citizens who 50 years ago were outcasts; and, above all, feminism.

God save us from another boomer president.

The Final Busting Of Cardinal Dolan’s Lies

Pope Benedict XVI Holds Concistory

You know where this man is coming from when he dismissed the organization SNAP – Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests – as having “no credibility“. The records from his old diocese in Milwaukee show he authorized pay-offs to child-rapist priests to encourage them to leave the ministry. (In the Catholic hierarchy, you don’t report rapists to the police; you eventually offer them financial incentives to leave.) Nonetheless, at the time, Dolan insisted that these charges were “false, preposterous and unjust,” whatever the records or even the spokesman for his old diocese said. Now, in another piece of stellar reporting, Laurie Goodstein adds more context to this man’s record:

Files released by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee on Monday reveal that in 2007, Cardinal Timothy F. Dolan, then the archbishop there, requested permission from the Vatican to move nearly $57 million into a cemetery trust fund to protect the assets from victims of clergy sexual abuse who were demanding compensation.

Cardinal Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, has emphatically denied seeking to shield church funds as the archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009. He reiterated in a statement Monday that these were “old and discredited attacks.”

However, the files contain a 2007 letter to the Vatican in which he explains that by transferring the assets, “I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.” The Vatican approved the request in five weeks, the files show.

So, twice now, we have been forced to choose between his words and our lyin’ eyes, when it comes to questions of how he handled and cosseted child-rapists under his jurisdiction in Milwaukee. We now know he deliberately sequestered church assets so he could argue he had no more funds to compensate those raped by his subordinates. He was once again putting the institutional church’s interests above those of the raped. And he seems to be able to lie about all of it – in the face of massive evidence – with nary a flicker of hesitation.

(Photo: New cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan, Archbishop of New York, receives the biretta cap from Pope Benedict XVI in Saint Peter’s Basilica on February 18, 2012 in Vatican City, Vatican. By Franco Origlia/Getty Images.)