February 2014 – Page 58

“A Man’s-Man Game”

Marc Tracy eagerly awaits the draft, which is in May:

A comparison to Jason Collins, the National Basketball Association player who came out last spring, is instructive … Collins came out at age 34 and near or at the conclusion of his career as a professional athlete, having made a living playing ball for 12 years. Sam came out at age 24 and the very beginning of his career, with all of his earning years ahead of him. Especially given where they respectively are, Sam is simply better, and therefore risking more.

Sports Illustrated lets anonymous NFL insiders sound off:

“I don’t think football is ready for [an openly gay player] just yet,” said an NFL player personnel assistant. “In the coming decade or two, it’s going to be acceptable, but at this point in time it’s still a man’s-man game. To call somebody a [gay slur] is still so commonplace. It’d chemically imbalance an NFL locker room and meeting room.”

All the NFL personnel members interviewed believed that Sam’s announcement will cause him to drop in the draft. He was projected between the third and seventh rounds prior to the announcement. The question is: How far will he fall?

“I just know with this going on this is going to drop him down,” said a veteran NFL scout. “There’s no question about it. It’s human nature. Do you want to be the team to quote-unquote ‘break that barrier?'”

A “man’s-man game.” What’s interesting to me is how that assessment of football is used to exclude homosexuals!

But that’s simply a function of ignorance. That formulation equates homosexuality with femininity, but it’s a much more complicated and diverse phenomenon than that. There are, it seems to me, many homosexualities – across the entire male-female spectrum, with many different routes to adulthood. Yes there are many gays who identify with women and the company of women. But there are also many who identify with men and the company of men (and along the entire spectrum in between). There are hyper-masculine gays as well as hyper-feminine ones and everything in between. (There’s also, I’d argue, more muted diversity along these lines among straight men as well.)

What we’ve been witnessing these last couple of decades, as the stigma against gayness has abated, is the emergence of more and more gay men who could have passed for straight and remained closeted or even married to a woman in days gone by. These gay men are often invisible both to gay insiders who revere and enjoy more traditional manifestations of gayness and to straight people who simply assume that more traditionally masculine-type men are never gay. But these gay men exist, are out in increasing numbers, and deserve just as much dignity and acceptance as anyone else. What Sam’s honesty has done is help explode crude and overly-narrow assumptions about gay men – particularly among sports-fans and African-Americans. And yes, I think his race is important. The stereotypes about gay men as intrinsically feminine are deeply embedded in African-American culture. If black gay men are to have the future they deserve, the stereotypes need to end. Michael Sam just opened up a whole new arena for mutual understanding and human dignity.

Ian Crouch also pushes back against the SI piece:

[I]t is deeply unfair and disingenuous of N.F.L. personnel to somehow suggest that Michael Sam has made himself into a distraction by coming out. Rumors about his sexual orientation were reportedly already being passed around by teams. And, last year, the word leaked that, before the draft, teams were asking prospective players questions like “Do you have a girlfriend?” and “Do you like girls?” Sam hasn’t made his sexual orientation a so-called “issue,” he simply took control of his story before the N.F.L. could.

Tyler Lopez expects Sam to make the team that drafts him a lot of money:

Contrary to the age-old “gays hate sports” stereotype, the LGBTQ community is currently embracing sports. And it’s not just the homoerotic spectacle of uniformed men grinding it out on the gridiron. The gay sports world has never been more profitable. … Mike Sam will unite legions of gay sports fans behind one player like never before. (David Beckham doesn’t count.) Aside from bringing more LGBTQ fans to stadiums across the country, Sam’s drafting will signal a sea change for fans who previously feared the testosterone-laden beer pits of the past. While some homophobic fans will avoid your merchandise, Sam won’t be the only player to come out in the next few years. But he will always be the first.

TNC zooms out:

When black soldiers joined the Union Army they were not merely confronting prejudice—they were pushing the boundaries of manhood. And when the Night Witches flew over German lines, they were confronting something more—the boundaries of humanity itself. Groups define themselves by what they are and what they are not: Niggers are never men, ladies are never soldiers, and faggots don’t play football. When Michael Sam steps on a football field, he likely will not merely be playing for his career but, in some sense, for his people.

In that sense he will be challenging a deep and discrepant mythology of who is capable of inflicting violence and who isn’t.

(Photo: Michael Sam #52 of the Missouri Tigers participates in pregame activities prior to a game against the Ole Miss Rebels at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium on November 23, 2013 in Oxford, Mississippi. Missouri defeated Ole Miss 24-10. By Stacy Revere/Getty Images.)

Will The Government Go After Greenwald?

The Intercept is serious about protecting sources. Use our @SecureDrop if you have info the public needs to know https://t.co/TZaEKQfbxK

— Micah Lee (@micahflee) February 10, 2014

Glenn will return to America, despite the risk:

Greenwald believes he and his reporting partner Laura Poitras face unique threats for four reasons.

1) Greenwald and Poitras went to Hong Kong to meet with Snowden and discuss the documents, “for almost two weeks — six days before the first story came out and every day after that until he went into hiding.”

2) They were in contact with Snowden, and perhaps under surveillance themselves, at the time that he went into hiding and have remained in very regular contact with him since then.

3) Greenwald has paired his reporting with forceful advocacy: “vehemently condemning the U.S. government, defending Snowden.”

4) Unlike U.S.-based reporters, he and Poitras have been freelancing stories at publications all around the world.

“Everybody I’ve talked to, including experienced lawyers — nobody has said ‘this is crazy,’” Greenwald added, stipulating that he doubts he’d actually be charged with anything — less than 50 percent chance of that in his mind. Nevertheless, “Everybody recognizes that there’s some risk.”

It’s great to see the new site, Intercept, launch. It’s simple, well-organized and the lead story is fascinating. It reveals how electronic data – and electronic data alone – have been integral in the targeting of drone strikes. Money quote:

The NSA often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a SIM card, rather than the actual content of the calls. Based on his experience, this former drone operator has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata. “People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” he says. “It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people – we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”

For me, this is an important piece of information, because it shifts the morality of such acts. I disagree with Glenn on this question in principle, since I believe it is morally defensible to target terrorists actively attempting to launch attacks – but only if innocent life is spared as far as is humanly possible, and the intelligence is rock-solid. But if you’re targeting drone strikes by SIM cards, all of that goes distinctly wobbly. As the piece notes:

Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s how they confuse us.” As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike.

From this launch, I’d say the rationale for a super-blog like the Intercept is solid. It’s particularly smart to revive Glenn’s blog.

I miss it – even though he really can go on at times – because it bristles with his energy, fanaticism, mastery of the hyper-link, and gob-smacking attention to detail. Starting a general site without that critical personal touch would not have had the same alchemy – and I suspect Glenn is best suited to pursuing his passion than in managing a newsroom. Poitras, Scahill and Wheeler are also, to my mind, all superb at what they do, whatever your view of their respective politics.

My one reservation is that the site inherently leverages vital public information – the NSA docs – to help fund and launch a website. If your sole goal is to responsibly air the documents you have, then you simply release them (with rigorous redactions) as soon as possibe and let the web do its best. You don’t withhold them, threaten to embarrass governments with them, and then reveal them in stages, while launching a new website based on their news-worthiness. And if you do, you’re running the risk of appearing too much like the NSA itself. You’re withholding critical information from the public and releasing it in a way that benefits you financially. That’s not exactly entirely public interest journalism.

Of course, that’s true of most newspapers, which already have an economic interest in securing and publishing vital public information. But it gets a bit more troublesome when you are launching a website originally devoted primarily to disseminating the information in those docs. Still, if it means more accessible and clear stories about those very docs, it can be justified. And today’s lead story does just that. If more arrive that are as well-done as that one, three cheers for Glenn.

America And The Protestant Work Ethic, Ctd

Matt Steinglass is unfazed by the idea that Obamacare will enable some Americans to work less:

Americans work more hours per person than citizens of almost any other wealthy nation. If America suffered from a shortage of low-wage labour, we would likely see the evidence in the form of rising wages at the lower end of the spectrum. Instead, the opposite is true: wages for the bottom quartile did not even keep pace with inflation over the past ten years. It seems then that America has a surplus of low-wage labour. If some of those workers decide that, because they’re receiving a new benefit, they can work less and spend more time raising their kids, playing basketball, launching home renovation projects, taking night classes, cooking, going to church, playing video games, or whatever it is they want to do with their free time, I can’t see what the problem is.

Pareene thinks liberals should embrace an agenda of freeing people from work for work’s sake:

It’s easy for the thought-leader and executive classes to embrace a “do what you love and love what you do” philosophy when they are wealthy enough to work hard only voluntarily, and when their jobs grant them status. But this is a truth most Americans know in their bones: Most work sucks and people don’t like doing it. The song “Take This Job and Shove It” spent 18 weeks on the country charts in 1977. 1970s country music fans had a clearer understanding of the ennui of wage-slavery than modern elites.

Josh Marshall expands on the “wage slavery” metaphor:

Obamacare doesn’t create a disincentive to work. To be more precise is removes one incentive to work. And no, this is no mere semantic difference. One incentive that keeps some people either in their current job or in the labor market in general is the risk of themselves or their family facing a catastrophic health care situation without insurance.

One might note that abolishing slavery also removed a powerful incentive to work, namely whippings, torture, various deprivations and in some cases death. We could also incentive people to work by threatening them with the loss of their children if they did not hold full time jobs. But in a capitalist economy, the primary incentive to work is supposed to be money, not the risk of being prevented from purchasing a life saving commodity.

Chait thinks Republicans are being disingenuous:

One could easily imagine any number of legislative changes that might satisfy the right’s newfound concern for prodding the middle class to work harder. Republicans aren’t going to accept any such solution because the main impetus of its gleeful embrace of the CBO report is not any policy reform at all, but to generate a new message about Obamacare welfare queens mooching off your hard work.

Philip Klein proposes encouraging older Americans to work more and retire later:

One obvious move would be to gradually raise the Social Security and Medicare retirement ages and then index them to gains in life expectancy. Another option would be to change the way benefits are calculated to encourage Americans to work longer. A 2006 paper from researches at Stanford University described a number of disincentives to longer careers created by the Social Security system. For instance, Social Security calculates benefits based on an average of the highest 35 years of earnings and thus, “an individual who has already worked for 35 years has a diminished incentive to work an additional year.”

Lastly, Benjamin Kline Hunnicut looks at how the American approach to work has changed over time:

For more than a century before 1930, the average American’s working hours were gradually reduced—cut nearly in half. Labor played a part in these reductions, but they were largely a product of the free market, reflecting individuals’ choices to work less and less.

Most Americans approved, counting work reductions as the better half of industrial progress (higher wages and shorter hours). No one expected this progress would end. Quite the contrary. Through the last century, observers such as John Maynard Keynes, Julien Huxley, Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Eric Sevareid regularly predicted that soon America would enter an age of leisure in which we would chose to devote more and more of our lives to the “pursuit of happiness” promised in the Declaration of Independence.

Previous Dish on Obamacare and work here and here. My take is here.

Face Of The Day

Adrian Chesser photographed friends and family right after revealing he’s HIV+:

When I tested positive for HIV and was diagnosed with AIDS, I had an extreme physical reaction whenever I thought about having to tell my friends and family. Looking at this reaction more closely, I realized that it was the same reaction I had as a kid whenever I had to disclose something uncomfortable to my parents, fearing rejection or even abandonment if larger secrets were revealed. It occurred to me that it might be possible to overcome this paralyzing fear by photographing my friends as I told them about my diagnosis. I invited each friend to come to my studio to have their picture taken, a simple head shot for a new project. They weren’t given any other information. For a backdrop I used the curtains from the living room of the house I grew up in. I put everyone through the same routine, creating a formal process that proved to be transformative. At the beginning of each shoot I would start by saying, “I have something to tell you”.

All of us who have this virus went through something similar. Twenty-one years ago, of course, the reactions were more extreme. I saw some faces look at me as if I were already dead. The shift in their expressions carried with them all the baggage of stigma, horror, and, worst of all, pity. My mum’s face barely changed – she simply refused to believe it, and went on for a while as if nothing had happened. My dad’s face fell like a sudden mini-avalanche. Every small point of animation collapsed. It registered in a second all the fear and terror and sadness I had been experiencing – and oddly made me begin to resist all three. If only to help my family cope.

More photos from the series here.

We Can’t Bend The World To Our Whim

Fred Kaplan defends Obama against the charge that he is too disengaged from global events:

No one country can shape the world the way it once did, because the world has grown less malleable. The turning point, in this regard, wasn’t 9/11 but 11/9—Nov. 9, 1989, the date the Berlin Wall fell, followed soon after by the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, the Cold War. The Cold War was a time of dread, but it was also the dominant feature of global politics since the end of World War II. It set the alliances, rules, and measures of power that fostered and fed America’s rise.

With the system’s implosion came a global diffusion of power. Take Egypt. In the mid-1970s, when President Anwar Sadat broke away from the Soviet orbit, he turned to the United States—and, as a consequence, had to change his country’s policies on a number of issues, especially relations with Israel—because he had no choice; he needed protection from one superpower or the other. In today’s multipolar (or, in some ways, polarless) world, Egypt’s ruling generals can pursue their own interests as they see them, consorting with and dangling a number of countries. If our interests collide with theirs, no American president can do much to rein them in.

Fully Loaded Home Decor

Jasper White photographed bedrooms of young Israeli soldiers:

In his series Young Guns, British photographer Jasper White gives us a peek inside the bedrooms of Israel’s young ‘fighters’ as they are called—the men and women who are required by law to enter into the military at age 18. At the time of this compulsory conscription, youth are issued guns that they must keep with them at all times during their three-year service. Working with a local assistant who had recently left the army, White gained access to the bedrooms of young fighters between the ages of 18 and 22.

Robert Epstein covered the project back in December:

The participants’ guns were placed by White in the centre of each scene, but as he explains, “It’s not meant to be a literal representation – nor is it meant to be sensationalist. It’s more about the idea.” The idea being the discrepancy between youthful innocence and the “everyday” quality of the weaponry.

(Photo by Jasper White)

China’s Bachelor Society

Nicholas Hune-Brown looks ahead to its consequences:

China’s unbalanced sex ratio has existed for years. Now, though, as that generation’s first group of men reach marrying age, we’re about to see the results. A recent study by Catherine Tucker and Jennifer Van Hook in Population and Development Review attempts to assess the seriousness of the problem. Gender imbalance at birth, after all, isn’t identical to imbalance at marriage. Men tend to have a higher mortality rate, and there’s usually an age gap between husbands and wives.

Examining the figures, however, Tucker and Van Hook come up with some scary predictions.

By 2030, they estimate, a full 25 percent of the male population will be single—a bachelor society of 30 million men. And even if sex-selective abortions stop tomorrow and the male-female ratios level out, it will take until 2050 for the percentage of single men to drop below 10 percent. What that kind of world looks like is hard to imagine. The authors muse about an increase in commercial sex, a rise in HIV/AIDS, widespread poverty, higher levels of criminality and violence. Certainly the loneliness and depression that marked the lives of many of the men living in North America’s bachelor societies will be reproduced on a vast, national scale.

How A Fruit Fly Could Save Your Life

Researchers are exploring how the sensitive olfactory systems of insects might help detect cancer in humans:

[P]erhaps the most promising method for using insects to diagnose tumors comes from a recent experiment carried out by researchers from the University of Konstanz in Germany and the University La Sapienza in Italy, which demonstrated that fruit flies can be genetically modified to glow the moment they come in contact with these volatile molecules.

It doesn’t get more straightforward than that. A fruit fly possesses less than half as many odor-sensing receptors as a bee, but its olfactory system is apparently still sensitive enough to distinguish cancerous cells from healthy ones, according to the team’s report. Moreover, the researchers found that the receptor neurons on the flies’ antennae were able to differentiate between five types of breast cancer.

For the study, detailed in the journal Nature, the investigators devised a machine that blew the odor emitted from five different strains of lab-grown breast cancer cells, along with healthy in vitro human breast tissue, over an area containing the flies. They then used a microscope to examine the fluorescent patterns that became visible on the flies’ antennae as their receptor neurons detected the odors.

(Photo of orange fruit fly by Chun Xing Wong)

Unfriending Facebook

A decade after the social network’s launch, Nicholas Tufnell has given up on the site, explaining that “there’s something about the relentless happiness of people on Facebook that I find monstrous”:

Everyone is apparently always somewhere better than I am and what’s more, they’re having a brilliant time. My life is not like that. In reality, no one’s life is like that, these are of course constructed narratives, our “best ofs” — but sometimes it’s hard to reason to yourself that these people aren’t having fun all the time when all you ever see of them is pictures of them having fun all the time. I suddenly start to feel pangs of inadequacy and jealousy… and these people are supposed to be my friends. In this regard, Facebook is truly poisonous.

Some research indicates that Facebook may really lower the spirits of users:

[L]ast summer, a team of psychologists from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the University of Leuven in Belgium decided to drill a bit deeper by evaluating how life satisfaction changes over time with Facebook use. Ethan Kross and colleagues questioned a group of people five times a day over two weeks about their emotional state. They asked questions such as “how do you feel right now?”, “how lonely do you feel right now?”, “how much have you used Facebook since we last asked?” and so on. This gave them a snapshot of each individual’s well-being and Facebook usage throughout the day.

The team found that Facebook use correlated with a low sense of well-being. “The more people used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time,” they said. “Rather than enhancing well-being … these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.”

Maria Konnikova examines common motivations for quitting Facebook:

At the University of Texas at Austin, [psychologist Sam] Gosling and one of his graduate students, Gabriella Harari, have been examining why people decide to leave Facebook. They have found three broad themes: people see Facebook as pointless and unnecessary, they see it as a problematic distraction, and they are worried about privacy. As you experience a constant stream of updates from more people, the possibilities for distraction or frustration at a pointless update (did I really need to know that her baby is now teething?) rise apace. And as you share more information with more people, it all becomes a window into who you are—even the parts you might prefer to keep private. The more publicly we form and affirm social bonds—and the more people we form and affirm them with—the more likely we are to see our mental bandwidth filled and our privacy eroded.

Peanut Portraits

Steve Casino creates them:

To begin, Casino studies images of the person he will paint. The next step is finding the peanut — the artist may sift through hundreds of nuts before he finds the perfect one. Once the perfectly-shaped peanut is found, the nut inside is extracted, and the shell is glued back together. A shell of wood filler is that spread onto the front, making for a smooth painting surface. Legs and a stand are added, followed by the arms once the painting is completed.

How he got started:

Steve Casino became the “Painter of Nuts” on a snack-time whim. He sketched a quick self-portrait on a shelled peanut that he thought matched his shape, and his legume likeness cracked up his coworkers. Casino, a former New Yorker, then hurried to enshrine hometown heroes The Ramones, adding paint and limbs to peanut bodies. After a minor social-media explosion, Casino set about cashing in on the attention.

See more images from the series on the artist’s Facebook page.

(Photo by Steve Casino)