Month: June 2014

Engaging The T, Ctd

One of our G readers can relate:

I loved the email from your transgender reader, recounting the normalcy of her MTF life. I admire how she successfully navigates in her complicated hi-tech office world and rejects transgender movement cant. There were no weepy complaints about anti-trans “hate” – which exists, to be sure, but is often overblown. She’s essentially my trans-analog. As a gay man I experienced in the gay world what she’s experiencing as a trans person. I always wondered if there were people like her out there – so glad to hear there are.

When I came out 25 years ago, I thought I’d be meeting guys who were basically like my straight buddies, except for sexuality. I’d read Andrew Tobias’ book – I thought I knew how this coming out thing worked: lots of “regular guy” types, doing regular guy stuff, comfortable in their own skin with no interest in waging gender revolution.

Oh how wrong I was.

What I found was a community where most of the leaders, spokespeople, organizations, and figureheads were in full-scale retreat from gender, didn’t believe gender roles are biologically hard wired, and disliked even the slightest vestige of traditional masculinity. It took me a long time to adjust. I’d come out to a community that doesn’t really know what to make of people like me.

I sympathize with the DL gay athletes and celebs we read so much about. They are inevitably portrayed in the gay media as closet cases, cowering in fear, afraid to be true to themselves. It never occurs to the gay establishment that perhaps these guys are being true to themselves. Perhaps they don’t “come out” because they haven’t been offered anything worth coming out to. They see the gay community in 21st century America as a tedious bore, and at times a bit of a freak show.

Like your writer, I no longer truck with gay officialdom (I was an early member of my college gay rights group back in the day, and an original “ACTUP-er”). I have nothing to say to those folks that they are even remotely interested in hearing. I no longer describe myself, or even think of myself, as “gay”. The term is now about gender, not sexuality.

For men like me (not only comfortable, but raucously enthusiastic, about trad gender), it’s best to avoid Gayworld altogether. Like an agnostic in church, sooner or later it dawns on you to move along and find new friends. Let one of the true believers have the pew space.

I like the term “MSM” [Men who have Sex with Men], popular with DL African-American guys for years (although I realize black MSMs often have a touch of denial about sexual orientation, which seems to lead unsafe sex – not good). For “MSMs” like me, the Internet is perfect for finding like minded guys, and weeding out the rainbow-flaggers. I also believe the strictly apolitical bears represent a quiet rebuke to the gay left establishment. So I hang out with the bears whenever possible.

Gay groups that skew towards conservative interests are great places to meet normal gay guys. I go to Log Cabin meetings, even though I’m a moderate Democrat. I go to Dignity services, although I’m not a super devout Catholic. I hang out at gay country western bars, even though I don’t like country music. I’m not a great ballplayer, but I join the gay softball leagues. As a lawyer, I’ve found gay bar associations are a great place to socialize with like-minded guys, as long as the politicos aren’t in charge.  I’m even trying to break into a cop/firefighter/military gay group, even though I’ve never been any of those things. Strange yes, but extreme measures are called for once you’ve lost interest in rainbow flag world.

Of course, I have huge sympathy for my reader. I’ve long had issues with a super-gay world as portrayed by the pomo-left tendency. And I think many in the gay community don’t fully understand how their hostility to old-fashioned comfort in one’s own gender marginalizes many who deserve no such thing. As more gay men come out, this has changed somewhat. There are now far more places for men who have no gender issues and who enjoy more traditionally masculine pastimes to meet and congregate and socialize and find husbands and boyfriends and flings. From a plethora of sports bars to sports teams to online hookups, “non-scene” gays now have a foothold. But it’s a precarious one, and often subject to a certain amount of shunning or even ridicule.

In some ways, the emphasis on military service and marriage equality was designed to create an atmosphere in which more gender-conforming gay men could feel welcome, enfranchised, and equal in both the gay and straight worlds, and, of course, to reach a place where that division is not so clear-cut. But it can also mean a drifting away from the gay “community” in favor of a simpler and less defined way of life as a man who can fall in love with another man, or just fuck one. That’s in part what I mean by the end of gay culture. It may also be a birth of a new, and more inclusive, one.

Chart Of The Day

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On what other subject is the public so grotesquely misinformed? And what does it say about the acumen of the Human Rights Campaign that its Number One legislative priority for the last 25 years (with 76 percent national support!) remains as out of sight as ever? Just keep sending them your checks, guys. In another quarter century, you might get something back for them.

It’s OK To Call Her “Hillary”

I try not to, because it can come off as belittling a woman in politics, but maybe I shouldn’t care. Beinart grants absolution:

When was the last time you heard Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, or Dianne Feinstein referred to primarily by her first name? When a man shares a last name with another famous pol, by contrast, he often gets the first name treatment. A certain ex-Florida governor is constantly referred to merely as “Jeb.” With his brother George W. Bush—who shared first and last names with his president-father—the press often accentuated his middle initial, as in “George W.,” “W” or even “Dubya.”

Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd

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Iraqi Kurdish leaders are reportedly hinting that they’re on board with partitioning Iraq. That’s not surprising, as they’d get their own state out of such an arrangement:

Kurdistan Democratic Party figure Abdul Salam Berwari said in a phone interview with Al-Hayat, “The Kurdish political leadership sees since the 1990s that the only solution for the survival of a unified Iraq is to transform the structure of the state to reflect the population distribution of Iraqis. The basic components are the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and the experience of the last 10 years supports what has always believed. … There is no solution except by establishing three regions for Iraq’s main components.” …

Pointing to the worsening differences between Erbil and Baghdad, Nechirvan [Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government] told the BBC that Iraq can never return to the period before ISIS’s expansion and called on “Maliki to step down from office after the completion of the current phase,” [saying] “an independent Sunni region” is the “best solution to rule the country.”

Reporting on the Kurdish fight against ISIS in the north, Jaime Dettmer relays the peshmerga’s scorn for Maliki and his soldiers who abandoned their posts to the Jihadist advance:

Convoys of trucks carrying peshmerga, who flash thumbs-up signs when locals wave, have been scurrying along the highways of Iraqi Kurdistan strengthening positions in readiness to block jihadists and their Sunni militant allies from gaining any territory. But stopping jihadist infiltration will be no easy feat and the Kurds are relying on sympathizers among the Sunni tribes around Mosul and to the south of Kirkuk to alert them to ISIS movements.

The Kurds have no faith in the Iraqi military rallying and the confident note struck on Wednesday by beleaguered Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki only prompted peshmerga derision. In a televised address announcing that a fight-back had begun, he promised government forces would retake Mosul. But the Kurds don’t see al-Maliki as the man who can save Iraq: they blame his exclusionary Shiite politics for the disaster that has befallen the country. Like the Americans they want al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government to be replaced by one able to reach out to Sunni Muslims and start a process of reconciliation to undercut the jihadist exploitation of Sunni resentment.

Meanwhile, Marsha Cohen explores Israel’s longstanding, complicated relationship with the Kurds:

For decades, Israel has been a silent stakeholder in northern Iraq, training and arming its restive Kurds. Massimiliano Fiore, a fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, cites a CIA document found in the US Embassy in Tehran and subsequently published, which reportedly attested that the Kurds aided Israel’s military in the June 1967 (Six Day) War by launching a major offensive against the Iraqi Army. This kept Iraq from joining the other Arab armies in Israel, in return for which, “after the war, massive quantities of Soviet equipment captured from the Egyptians and Syrians were transferred to the Kurds.”

So what stake does Israel have in Kurdish fortunes today?

Less than a year ago, Lazar Berman of the Times of Israel, under the optimistic headline, “Is a Free Kurdistan, and a New Israeli Ally, Upon Us?” quoted Kurdish journalist Ayub Nuri who argued that Kurds were “deeply sympathetic to Israel and an independent Kurdistan will be beneficial to Israel.” Fast forward a year later to Neriah’s article titled, “The fall of Mosul could become the beginning of Kurdish quest for independence,” where he says nothing about the stakes for Israel. Would an increasingly independent Kurdistan continue to look to Israel as its patron?

Or will Kurdistan fully join an anti-ISIS Iraqi alliance, backed jointly, if discreetly, by Iran, with the approval of the US? Any scenario in which Iran is part of the solution, rather than the underlying problem, is a nightmare for Israel.

Previous Dish on the Kurds here, here, and here.

(Map via Jeremy Bender)

If You Liked The Old GOP Leaders, You’ll Love The New GOP Leaders

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As the public’s view of Congress sinks to a near-incredible low in Gallup’s polling – not only the lowest on record, but also the lowest Gallup has recorded for any institution in the 41-year trend – House Republicans are staying the course. They just elected California Congressman Kevin McCarthy as the new majority leader yesterday, and Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise to fill McCarthy’s former seat as whip. Ezra Klein doubts McCarthy will be much different from Eric Cantor:

They both want to cut taxes. They both voted for the Ryan budget. They both want to repeal Obamacare. And, for all the talk of Cantor’s defeat being about immigration reform, McCarthy has basically the same position on immigration reform: he’s abstractly for immigration reform, but he’s not going to bring any solution to the problem up for a vote. Which is probably as it should be. When the conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru dove deep into polls of tea party supporters, he was comforted by what he found. “Tea party advocates already believed the same things that regular Republicans did. They basically were regular Republicans, just, if you will, more so. The differences between the tea party and ‘establishment Republicans’ have largely concerned style and attitude rather than program and ideology.”

But Al Hunt expects immigration to be just as much a thorn in McCarthy’s side as it was for his predecessor:

McCarthy, who earlier served in the California Assembly, knows how the immigration issue has destroyed the Republican party in his home state ever since then-Governor Pete Wilson went on an anti-immigration campaign two decades ago. At every level of government in California, Democrats dominate consistently, running up big margins with the fast-growing Latino and Asian-American constituencies. But McCarthy also will lead a party in the House that has a strong nativist bloc, and may resist taking up a serious immigration effort in this Congress and perhaps the next one too.

More than a few political experts, including Boehner, believe this would be devastating for the party in national elections. McCarthy shares that view, but sensitive to his own party conference — he’ll have to be reelected to a leadership post after the November elections — he’ll be very cautious on the issue.

So does Dara Lind, who observes that McCarthy’s position on the issue is deeply unpopular:

In January, before House Republican leadership released its principles for immigration reform, McCarthy told local television station KBAK/KBFX: “In my personal belief, I think it’ll go with legal status that will allow you to work and pay taxes.” But extremely few people actually support “legal status” that doesn’t result in citizenship for the undocumented. Most Americans want unauthorized immigrants to become citizens, either immediately or eventually; most of the rest want them deported. … There’s no real middle ground.

Weigel calls both McCarthy and Scalise “safe as milk” come November, which he suspects was part of their appeal:

If you’re looking for a “conservative victory” here, look to Scalise. The fast-talking Southerner bested Rep. Peter Roskam, a deputy whip who’d been groomed for big things, and Rep. Marlin Stutzman, a sort-of Tea Party candidate who nonetheless gets farm subsidies back home in Indiana. He becomes, as some reporters quickly pointed out, the first Republican from a “red” state to take a leadership job since Barack Obama won the presidency.

But “red state” is a sort of useless term when you’re talking about congressmen. The victories of McCarthy and Scalise are good news for Republicans who want to avoid future Cantordammerung-style upsets. Why? Simple: There are three states where party primaries have been replaced by jungle primaries, followed by runoffs between the top two finishers. After John Boehner, the rest of the GOP’s leadership hails from these states.

Jonathan Bernstein cautions against reading too much into these choices:

House leadership is quite important. But it is also severely constrained by the conference’s stance on issues of public policy. On the margins, or perhaps a bit more, leadership has some ability to choose the bills it will schedule and those it will bury, and perhaps one leadership team is more able than another to get over the finish line to 218 votes. But it’s not as if the conference will automatically fall in line with whatever leadership wants. Leaders who misjudge what individual members want is the perfect recipe for coups.

So today’s elections are meaningful. Just don’t be too sure you know exactly what they mean.

Is it Time To Abolish Iraq? Ctd

Jeffrey Goldberg – now back full time (yay!) at the Atlantic – rightly claims some prescience. In 2007, he sketched a slightly fanciful map of the future of the region and it looked like this:

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His bottom line:

One of the reasons I don’t find myself overly exercised by the apparent collapse of Iraq (and one of the reasons I don’t think it would be wise for the U.S. to rush into Iraq in order to “fix” it) is that I’ve believed for a while that no glue could possibly hold the place together.

The case for Kurdistan is pretty powerful, I’d say, and there are some hints that the Turks may not be quite so hostile. British Tory Daniel Hannan wonders whether partition is such a bad idea after all:

How much disorder, horror, fear and mutiny might have been avoided had Iraq been divided along ethnographic lines in 2003 – or, better yet, in 1920. (If you don’t like the word “ethnographic”, substitute “democratic”: it amounts to the same thing.)

Any mention of partition sends some pundits scurrying to their keyboards. What about Yugoslavia, they say, or Ireland, or India, eh eh? Well, I wonder whether, in each of those cases, an agreed separation beforehand might have left us with something very like today’s borders without the intervening war. We’ll never know, obviously, but it’s worth noting that several partitions happened amicably enough, from Czechoslovakia to the West Indies Federation. More to the point, look at the consequences of non-partition. The civil wars have driven 2.1 million Iraqis and 1.4 million Syrians into exile. How much worse do things have to get before we consider an alternative?

Mordechai Kedar posits that Iraqis’ loyalties are not to “Iraq” anyway:

“The tribe always succeeds against the state,” Kedar emphasized. If one doubts this, one need not look further than the number of Iraqi soldiers that deserted Mosul. If they felt loyal to a country called Iraq, they would have staid and fought against Al Qaeda. However, their loyalties were to their tribes and clans. Why die fighting for something that they don’t believe in? “People are loyal to the tribe rather than to the state,” Kedar noted.

Aside from the tribal issues in Iraq, Kedar explained that the country is also full of religious tension, as Iraq is the home to 10 different religions. Among them are Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Alawis, Druze, Bahais, etc. Kedar emphasized, “As we speak, Christians are getting killed and persecuted. Only a third of the Christians that existed in Sadamn Hussein’s Iraq are still in the country.” These tensions don’t even include the Shia-Sunni divide, which has been going on since the advent of Islam even though the Caliphate no longer exists, rendering the question of who his rightful successor should be to be almost irrelevant.

But Mansoor Moaddel collects survey data from the past decade that complicates the narrative that Iraq is hopelessly incoherent:

The Sunnis and Shia converge in defining selves as Iraqi, rather than Muslim or Arab, above all. This support rose from 22% in 2004 to 80% in 2008, and then dropped to 60% among the Sunnis. Among the Shia, it was 28% in 2004, increased to 72% in 2007, and then dropped to 62% in 2013. There is not much support for Iraqi identity among the Kurds. Among the Kurds, on the other hand, there has been a shift from predominantly Kurdish identity to religion.

Reinforcing attachment to the nation rather than to the religion of Islam in politics is the fact that both the Sunnis and Shia (1) prefer politicians who are committed to the national interests over politicians who have strong religious convictions by at least a factor of 4 to 1, and (2) consider a good government one that makes laws according to the wishes of the people over the one that implements only the sharia by at least a factor of 3 to 1.

And Jocelyne Cesari has faith in reconciliation, provided anyone is willing to try and make it happen:

In sum, the main reason for the rise of ISIS is the growing disillusion of the Iraqi Sunnis with the government of Al Malki who has marginalized Sunni in different areas of politics and public life. In other words, the main issue that fuels the influence of ISIS is not religion, even if the war is couched in religious terms, but the unbalance in the distribution of power between Shia and Sunni. Although ISIS aims to establish a Caliphate across Iraq, Syria and beyond, it is not the main goal of the Sunni population of Iraq. In fact the political violence of Sunnis in Iraq is governed primarily by tactical and strategic choices rather than by religious motivations. No doubt that communal antagonism plays a significant role but is the outcome, not the cause, of the discriminatory political mechanisms in Iraq.

Successful conflict regulation requires the recognition and accommodation of the core cause ‐ in this case effective power sharing ‐ rather than a containment of the violent symptoms of the conflict. In this case, defeating ISIS is certainly necessary but not sufficient. It is imperative for the Iraqi rulers to create the conditions for a national reconciliation between Sunni, Shia and Kurds and devise a constitutional compromise which offers each community sufficient protection which eliminates the resort to violence. It is probably easier said than done, especially in the current regional environment and the transnational ideology of ISIS. But its is where the international community, including the US, could positively influence Iraqi protagonists: all of them.

Meanwhile, Andrew Lee Butters cautions that the states that would emerge from partition might not be viable:

It’s not just the mass executions that are going to leave a bad taste. In the chain-smoking Arab world, the days are numbered for a regime whose interpretation of Islamic law is so severe that it bans cigarettes. And an ISIL regime in northern Iraq can’t exactly put oil on the international market, or get Baiji‘s barely functioning gasoline refineries and pipelines up and running at full speed. The billions of dollars in U.S.-donated war material that ISIL is now capturing from the Iraqi army can’t really be put to effective use without substantial maintenance, training and support capability that ISIL lacks.

Substantial checks also remain on the nationalist impulses of both Kurds in the north and Shias in the South. The southern city of Basra may have a ton of oil and access to the Persian Gulf, but if it broke away from the rest of Iraq with a Shia sectarian agenda, it could find itself dangerously isolated or becoming a battle ground for Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Kurdish leadership in the north has consistently shown more interest in consolidating control and the economic viability of the Kurdish region than in national independence. For all their success at boosting trade and relations with their neighbors — particularly Turkey and Iran, each of which has large Kurdish minorities with national aspirations of their own — the old rules still apply. The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) has power, and the support of these key neighbors, as long as they are bringing stability to their part of a weak Iraqi state. They make enemies if they declare statehood.

Gunnin’ For Goals

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Monday’s 0-0 match between Iran and Nigeria was the first draw of the ongoing World Cup. As the above chart from The Economist illustrates, that’s pretty unusual:

The match was conspicuous in an otherwise high-scoring tournament, which so far has seen 44 goals, or 3.14 per match. It is proving to be one of the most exciting World Cups of recent times, including shock results such as the Netherlands’ 5-1 win over Spain, the reigning champions. Such excitement bucks the modern trend. Until this year, the tournament had been losing its kick. … Prior to this tournament, more matches have resulted in stalemate, often scoreless, in the last six tournaments than the previous 13 combined. Even the 1994 and 2006 cup finals ended in a draw (the former without a single goal) and had to be decided by penalty shoot-outs.

Elaine Teng notices a recent trend toward higher-scoring matches:

The scoring barrage is no fluke.

Over the past four years, with some exceptions (including a big one named Jose Mourinho), elite football has become more offensive-minded as a whole. In Europe’s top leagues, where over half of the World Cup players ply their trade, the average number of goals per match has been consistently on the rise. According to The Telegraph, the Premier League averaged 2.58 goals per game between 2006 and 2010. Since then, that number has jumped to 2.79, and the trend holds true in Spain, Germany, and Italy. Possession-based football—most famously Spain’s tiki-taka—is looking vulnerable, as the counterattacking style has reasserted itself. Many teams are now happy to let the other team have the ball, then exploit space and hit their opponents on the back foot when chances come.

But Daniel Alarcón sticks up for 0-0 matches:

I’ve always been a fan of the scoreless draw—the good kind, of course, not the Nigeria-Iran kind. This stems, in part, from being raised in the United States in the 1980s, the dark ages for footballing culture in the U.S., when one was consistently subjected to the mainstream notion that soccer was both foreign and boring. The possibility of a 0-0 final score was exhibit A for that ignorant thesis. A fan knows that this is ridiculous, of course. A fan knows that the score tells only part of the story, that a nil-nil, un empate a ceros, can have all the drama and entertainment of a 3-2 or a penalty shootout.

Watching soccer is about expectation, it’s about anxiety. Something is always happening, and unlike other sports, the scoreline is not necessarily an accurate barometer of the quality of the match, nor does the superior team always score more goals. Sometimes, no one scores, and it can be amazing. To put it another way, there are nil-nils, and then there are nil-nils.

But such low scoring is among the chief reasons David Post doubts the US will ever love soccer the way other countries do:

[S]occer has wa-a-a-y too much failure in it, and, generally speaking, Americans don’t like failure, and don’t like to dwell upon it.  Soccer is all about failure — about failure and the ability (and will) to overcome it.  Over and over and over again they charge down the field, knowing full well that the chances that they get the ball into the net on the attack are awfully slim; think about that the next time you watch some left back running full tilt in the 88th minute of a 0-0 game to try to get himself in position to receive the ball on the counter-attack; he knows damned well that the whole enterprise is almost surely for naught, yet on he goes (at least, if he’s good, and “determined,” and “committed” – words you hear a lot at a soccer game).  Succeed a couple or three times in 90 minutes (plus extra time!) of hard work and your team’s a juggernaut.  Soccer fans do more cheering for the “good effort”, the fabulously-constructed set of passes that sets up a chance that doesn’t result in anything on the scoresheet, than fans in any other sport.