Month: October 2014

How Did The Ferguson Shooting Really Go Down? Ctd

After new reporting on Michael Brown’s death, Ambinder asks, “did the media get Ferguson wrong?”

Police militarization and an unequal justice system are real problems that deserve sustained scrutiny. These problems are more insidious than a rush to judgment against one particular officer, presumption of innocence be damned. So maybe the best thing to do would be to say, well, in this particular case, it turns out that the police officer might not have acted as wantonly as we thought. But it really doesn’t matter, because the response to the shooting called attention to police abuse and discrimination in a way that resonated across the world. They had tanks! They threatened to killed reporters! The truth here is less important than Truth.

For the news media, though, the “injustice is the story, not Darren Wilson” story won’t wash.

… The journey for racial justice rejects the notion that truth is an effect of power. It is based on the notion that truth transcends power. The media wants to be on the right side of history when it comes to race. Accepting truth wherever we find it, no matter how painful it is to our sensibilities, is even more important when fundamental issues of justice are at stake.

Alex Altman, on the other hand, focuses on what the leaks don’t say:

They don’t explain the origin of the skirmish, which seems to have escalated abruptly. In describing the toxicology report, the Post’s sources say “the levels in Brown’s body may have been high enough to trigger hallucinations,” but there is no scientific link between marijuana and violent behavior.

Most importantly, the leaks do not provide new forensic information about the sequence of fatal shots. “What we want to know is why Officer Wilson shot Michael Brown multiple times and killed him even though he was more than 20 feet away from his patrol car,” Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Brown’s family, said in a statement. “This is the crux of the matter!” The autopsy does not offer any answers.

Bouie makes related points:

[W]e’re stuck with the facts we’ve had since August, none of which gives a conclusive answer to the key question in the case: Who started it? And even if it did—and even if Brown was at fault for the whole encounter—we’re still left with the other important question: Why did Wilson keep firing after Brown moved away?

At this point, any answer is tied tightly to your sympathies. Side with Michael Brown and the Ferguson protesters, and you’re likely to think Wilson overreacted or—at worst—actively abused his power. And if you support Darren Wilson, you’re just as likely to see an honest cop just defending himself from a dangerous aggressor.

“Being A Nerd Is Not Supposed To Be A Good Thing” Ctd

The owner of the above title-quote follows up:

Hey, I’m the guy who wrote the thing that pissed a bunch of women off. In my defense, I didn’t mean to suggest that women CAN’T be nerds, and when I said I tend to be skeptical of the idea, I actually meant it as a compliment. I understand the over-reaction, as the misogynistic argument many people seem to think I’m making (that only men can be nerds and women must be faking) is far too common, and largely a translation of male nerd insecurity. Then again, if they weren’t insecure, they probably wouldn’t be nerds. I tend to assume women are more confident, well adjusted, and psychologically centered – all things nerds lack in the real world, and only claim when we create our own insular ones.

Again, the point is that being a nerd isn’t just about what one likes or even being ostracized for liking it, but about how one reacts to that ostracism. There are many healthy ways of doing this, either by attempting to acclimate to the group or attempting to forge one’s own identity independent of it. Recoiling into your own obsession until it consumes you to the point where you can’t fit into normal society even if you wanted to (i.e. devolving from an enthusiast into a nerd) isn’t one of them. Most of the women I’ve known in my life, even the avid D&D players and Whovians, were better than that. They can divorce their identity from their passions when the need arises. Being a nerd means you can’t.

A few others defend that reader:

It’s a shame to see people so adamantly reject an opportunity to practice some empathy. Not that there should be empathy for people making death threats, but they (the threateners) are enabled by people who might actually have some lived experience that is worth listening to. There is a market for what Gamergate is selling and we should be asking why.

Look, girl nerds didn’t have it great. But I’m going to venture a guess that they weren’t physically abused over it to the extent that boy nerds were.

The stereotypical jokes – pantsings, wedgies, being chased home by the jocks, getting your stuff stolen, all because you didn’t ascribe to a specific identify type – these things were real, Andrew. Boy nerds actually got the shit kicked out of them for what they liked and watched. I remember it decades later.

Does that mean it’s ok to treat Sarkesian the way she’s being treated? It’s a fucking insult to feminism to suggest your reader said it was, not to mention an insult to intellectual honesty and honest discussion.

Here you have a reader who says, “Hey, you know what? Gender roles were a problem for me too. And they really messed up a lot of people like me, and this Gamergate business is an outgrowth of how we were marginalized, and some people see it as a harmful extension – but an extension nonetheless – of the community that formed out of getting beat the fuck up for liking Star Trek.” And how do people respond? By saying that experience isn’t legitimate.

Please. Haven’t we told enough people that their experiences aren’t worthy of being listened to already? I mean, for fuck’s sake.

Another is roughly on the same page:

I think that boy nerdiness vs girl nerdiness comes down to the differences between systemic male and female bullying.  Boy bullying starts younger because policing gender roles is so critical to male identity.  Many boys, once they identify as nerds, seek to claim the label for their own acceptance and delayed revenge of being ‘smarter’ than the other boys. Looking around they don’t see girls with the same outlook, instead seeing girls who mostly run with groups of other girls and who wouldn’t risk their social capital on an outcast.  Boys suffer much cruelty from both genders and physical abuse from other boys at this age.

Girls, meanwhile, act nasty toward each other later.  Middle school becomes a grapple for power for girls that simply doesn’t exist in the same way for boys whose roles are much the same as earlier.  Girls will take lifelong friends and make them into enemies in middle high.  It is at this point that girl nerds become an identity (not that they weren’t nerds before, just that they begin to identify that way).  Meanwhile, boy nerds who have put up with this ostracism for long enough, see these girls as trying to invade and claim the identity they have had and have had to live with for years.  Plus, constant peer rejection especially from girls has led them to be suspicious of all outsiders as possible turncoats.

Personally, I think the girls have it harder because their rejection is sudden and senseless.  But from the boys’ perspective, the girls have always been complicit in their ongoing rejection and, since cold revenge was always their only solace, they take sick delight in the rejections that they can issue.

I say all of this as a man who thought this way many times growing up and who still must stifle his superiority impulses, especially over women.  It seems to me, though, that the solution is to remove the bullying of all stripes and at all levels of childhood.  Hard work, but if there had not been complicit adults in my childhood persecution, I wonder if it would have been so damaging.

Read the whole discussion on Gamergate and nerdom more generally here.

Why Do Americans Go Out Sick?

Howard Markel tries to understand why NYC’s first Ebola patient went out on the town the day before going to the hospital:

I cannot presume to know what Dr. Spencer was thinking when he went out bowling the other night. He might have just been bored. He might have just not been thinking at all about the potential risks to himself or others. But if he is like me when I was a bold, young physician out to conquer illness as if I were a soldier in a good war, I bet he just thought Ebola could not happen to him.

Julia Ioffe confesses that this was “something my Soviet family and I could never get used to in the States, the stubbornness with which Americans trudge to work or school with triple-digit fevers or noses like spigots”:

Just look at this survey by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, published at the height of flu season in 2011, that shows that a full two-thirds of Americans don’t stay home—as the CDC advises them to do—despite having symptoms of the flu and therefore being highly contagious. Forty percent said that the stuff they needed to do outside the home—work, school, trying my beverage—was more important than the risk of spreading the flu.

She attributes this to more than simply the Protestant work ethic:

From where I sit, it often looks like the other side of American individualism, which becomes selfishness when you lay it on thick. It’s the belief that you and your needs are acutely exceptional and important, and take precedence over those of the people around you. It’s the unspoken belief that your day radiating sickness at the office is worth a couple of your colleagues being bedridden with your flu for a week.

The Other Failed State In The Middle East

Ishaan Tharoor calls attention to Yemen, which remains embroiled in a civil conflict with a dangerous sectarian dimension after Houthi rebels took over the capital Sanaa last month:

The Houthis are alleged to be Iranian-backed; their traditional slogan (“Death to America! Death to Israel!”) echoes that of Hezbollah, Iran’s Shiite proxy in Lebanon. Al-Qaeda and its Sunni allies have energetically taken the fight to the Houthis, giving the conflict a worrisome sectarian edge — one that is similar to the awful bloodshed wracking Syria and Iraq.

But like in Syria and Iraq, the situation is not that simple. The Houthis are from the Zaydi branch, a distinct sect of Shiite Islam that is closer to Sunni Islam than most. … There are also suggestions that Sunni regimes in the Gulf have tacitly backed the Houthi surge, seeing it as the best bet for stability in perennially fractious Yemen. Whatever the case, a narrative of sectarian violence plays into al-Qaeda’s hands. Some elements of the Yemeni branch also declared support for the Islamic State, extremists who butcher all those they consider heretics or apostates. Things could very well get worse before they get any better.

Indeed, the crisis has re-invigorated southern Yemeni separatists, and fighting is ongoing in several parts of the country:

Fighting continues in Yemen between the Houthi rebels and al-Qaeda-backed Sunni tribesmen, leaving at least 68 Houthi fighters dead in the province of Bayda. The news came as protesters in Yemen’s capital Sanaa called on the Houthi fighters to leave after a deadline to form a new government passed on Tuesday without an agreement.

Sporadic clashes erupted between the Houthis and tribesmen in Radaa after the Houthis killed an army officer belonging to the Qaifa tribe, Al Jazeera has learned. In retaliation, tribesmen reportedly attacked Houthi armed rebels in the northeast of Radaa. Al-Qaeda fighters are also reportedly in control of the four main areas of Odain district, with the goal of preventing Houthi fighters from advancing in Ibb province in central Yemen.

Looking back at the history of the Houthi movement earlier this month, Peter Salisbury examined the conditions that enabled their sudden rise to power:

Conditions were ripe for the group to enter the capital. Sanaa is home to a number of traditionally Zaydi families, plenty of intellectuals and liberals fed up with the remnants of the Saleh regime, and many of others who do not approve of the way the country is being run. Living standards have scarcely improved in Yemen in the three years since the uprising and elite infighting of 2011. Half the population is out of work and a similar proportion under the poverty line. A roster of names familiar from the Saleh era occupied the top jobs in government as part of a power-sharing agreement. Corruption is endemic — worse, even, than it was under Saleh. Yemenis who supported the 2011 uprising have become dejected, realizing that they are unlikely to see tangible improvements in the way the country is run.

Ebola Reaches NYC

New York's Bellevue Hospital Prepares For Possible Ebola Cases

Last night, New York’s first case of Ebola was confirmed. Margaret Hartmann has a helpful primer on what we know about the situation:

On Thursday, Dr. Craig Spencer, who had been working with Doctors Without Borders treating Ebola patients in Guinea, was rushed to New York’s Bellevue Hospital with a high fever. A few hours later, tests confirmed the worst: Spencer has Ebola, making him the fourth person diagnosed with the disease in the United States, and the first diagnosed outside of Texas. So far, the situation appears to be under control: Bellevue has been preparing for weeks, Spencer was hospitalized shortly after becoming symptomatic, and officials are already tracking down anyone he may have come into contact with. However, the fact that he went to a bowling alley, took a taxi, and rode the subway on Wednesday night is not likely to calm those already on edge about the virus.

Alexandra Sifferlin examines the city’s preparations:

New York City has been prepping and drilling its hospitals for the possibility of an Ebola patient since July 28, when it was confirmed that Americans Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol had contracted Ebola in Liberia. “I wanted to know that our staff was able to handle [a possible Ebola patient],” says Dr. Marc Napp, senior vice president of medical affairs at Mount Sinai Health System.

“We’ve prepared for a variety of different things in the past: anthrax, H1N1, small pox, 9/11, Hurricane Sandy,” Kenneth Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) told TIME. “This preparation is not unusual.”

Cohn compares NYC’s Ebola response to the one in Dallas:

CDC has dispatched a “go” team of advisers and clinicians, although some were already in New York anyway. They will not simply track down possible contacts, as they did in Dallas. They will also help health care workers avoid infection, which they did not do in Dallas. That’s important, because the biggest threat right now almost surely isn’t to subway riders or bowlers. It’s the public health workers who will be taking care of Spencer.

Cohn also remarks that the response “looks and feels a lot different than what took place a few weeks ago, when the first American diagnosis took place in Dallas, Texas, and neither the hospital nor public health officials seemed quite certain what to do”:

The tragic horror of Ebola is that the people most at risk of getting the disease are those caring for the sick. That’s likely how Spencer got it, after all, and as a worker with Doctors Without Borders he presumably knew what he was doing. But what was true yesterday is true today. Experts expect isolated cases of Ebola to show up here and there, but they don’t expect outbreaks, because the U.S. has the resources and infrastructure to contain the spread and treat those who get it.

However, Ed Morrissey thinks this case “raises a whole lot of questions about the CDC’s latest approach to dealing with travelers from western Africa”:

They expect to control the potential spread of the disease by asking them to take their temperatures for 21 days and keep from being in public too much. If a health professional who’s had experience with Ebola can’t follow those guidelines, why should we expect anyone else to follow them?

Now we have a fresh case in the most populous city in the nation, and the potential for hundreds of contacts thanks to the subway ride, the cab, and the use of the bowling alley. Did he have a drink at the bowling alley? Eat food? Did wait staff handle any glasses or dishes? Did he use rental shoes and house bowling balls?

But Matthew Herper talks to infectious disease expert William Schaffner, who isn’t worried about New Yorkers getting Ebola from the subway:

“I think the risk is close to zero. I would even say it’s zero because none of those people had any contact with his body fluids,” Schaffner says. “I would feel no concern had I been standing next to him on the subway.”

The reason, Schaffner says, is because when patients first become sick with Ebola, there simply isn’t that much virus in their bodies. “It’s very hard to transmit the virus in those first days of illness,” he says. “As the illness progresses, for sure the viral load in the body increases. It can get into the skin cells or onto the surface of your skin. That’s when people are near death.”

The risk of transmission is not constant, he says. It gets worse and worse as patients get sicker and sicker. When they are very sick, Ebola is very much like cholera, with large volumes of fluid flooding out of the body as diarrhea or vomit. Those fluids are teeming with virus, and that is what health care workers are exposed to.

Sarah Kliff wants us to remember that Spencer “a doctor who decided, voluntarily, to go to Guinea to treat Ebola patients”:

This is a country that desperately needs more doctors to fight back an epidemic. The United States has 245.2 doctors per 100,000 people. Guinea has 10. Spencer is not part of the problem. From what we know, he did not put New Yorkers at risk for Ebola. He’s part of the solution, one of a small handful of doctors who worked to combat a deadly, overwhelming disease.

And Abby Haglage worries that Spencer getting sick will stop other doctors from following his example:

His brave mission, followed by a devastating diagnosis, complicates an already nightmarish scenario for health-care workers fighting against Ebola: It may be deterring doctors from helping—right when they’re needed most. The news of Spencer’s positive test for the virus, announced Thursday night in New York City, might achieve the exact opposite of his stated goal.

(Photo: A member of Bellevue’s Hospital staff wears protective clothing during a demonstration on how they would receive a suspected Ebola patient on October 8, 2014 in New York City. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The Constant Self-Reinvention Of Susan Sontag

Reviewing Daniel Schreiber’s Susan Sontag: A Biography, Carl Rollyson attributes the late critic and novelist’s decades-long prominence to “the time-tested American trick of self reinvention” – and he doesn’t mean that entirely as a compliment:

When the argument of Against Interpretation that art is a matter of form, not content—that conveying messages is not the purpose of art, but that art in itself is the message—got stale and became a staple of too many critics, Sontag switched sides. In “Fascinating Fascism,” she declared that the content of Leni Riefenstahl’s films and photographs is irretrievably fascist and cannot be countermanded by considerations of form and style. At every stage of her career, Sontag performed a similar volte face, saying, for example, that communism is fascism with a human face—although earlier she had shouted “Viva Fidel!” The capper on this career-long repudiation of her own ideas came when she said she never really believed what she wrote in Against Interpretation.

And, she added, she never really liked the nouveau roman that her some of her own work—The Benefactor, for example—was said to emulate. In fact, when her novel The Volcano Lover became a bestseller, she even claimed that she would not be upset if posterity favored her novels and forgot her essays. Her last works of fiction were essentially conventional historical novels, as Schreiber admits, so all her pretensions about subverting conventional narrative became . . . well, just pretensions.

But Sontag, so expert at marketing herself, always proclaimed her recantations as discoveries, bold revisions by an intellectual who was always ready to reconsider and deepen her understanding of art and politics. And in some cases—as with her best books, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor—she did succeed in exploring the play of ideas that have made these works classics. Similarly, her literary portraits in Under the Sign of Saturn display an inquiring intellect that remains beguiling and provocative. All these works show her arguing with herself, revealing a powerful mind at work. They constitute the core of what will probably remain as her legacy.

Nudges Won’t Solve The Kidney Shortage

That’s Keith Humphreys’ determination:

One commonly proposed solution to the organ shortage derives from behavioral economic “nudge” principles. Rather than requiring Americans to complete paperwork in order to opt-in to donation at death, the country could shift to the European model of presuming that donation at death was acceptable. But Tom Mone, chief executive of OneLegacy, the nation’s largest organ and tissue recovery organization, points out that “The recovery rate for deceased donors in the United States is actually better than that of European nations with presumed consent laws. The United States rigorously follows individual donor registrations whereas presumed consent countries actually defer to family objections.”

In any event, because less than 1% of deceased individuals are medically eligible to donate organs, and 75% of this group in the United States in fact does so, there simply isn’t enough “there there” to remedy the shortage with improved recovery from deceased donors.

He interviews Sally Satel, who advocates for compensating living donors:

No one is talking about a traditional free market or private contract system. No organ “sales.” And no large lump sum of cash to donors. Those of us who want to test the power of incentives to increase the number of people receiving kidney transplants – and it is a rich network of transplant surgeons, nephrologists, legal scholars, economists, and bioethicists – envision a system where every needy patient, not just the financially well-off, can benefit.

Here is one model: a governmental entity, or a designated charity, would offer in-kind rewards, like a contribution to the donor’s retirement fund, an income tax credit or a tuition voucher, or a gift to a charity designated by the donor. Because a third party provides the reward, all patients, not just the financially secure, will benefit.

Eric Posner supports the charitable donation option:

Suppose that Martha needs a kidney for her daughter but Frank’s son does not need a kidney. Martha proposes to Frank that if Frank donates his kidney to her daughter, Martha (or, actually, Martha’s insurer, which, remember, wants to avoid the high cost of dialysis) will make a $100,000 contribution to Frank’s favorite charity—say, Doctors Without Borders, which could use the money to combat Ebola in Liberia. Frank, of course, might say no; but there are likely other people who might be willing to take Martha up on the deal.

“Being A Nerd Is Not Supposed To Be A Good Thing” Ctd

A reader writes, “I’m surprised no one has recommended the film Zero Charisma to the discussion – here’s the trailer”:

Yet another reader responds to this nerd’s cri de coeur:

I am nerdy, but not a nerd. Let me explain. I am nerdy because I have a Joker bobble heads on my desk, I have Final Fantasy VI on my phone and a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man keychain. But I’m also an attorney, a theater major, a lover of F. Scott Fitzgerald and a Dish Subscriber. I am nerdy because I am fluent in Batman and love video games. But I am not a nerd, because if you are not interested in those things, I am capable (nay, enjoy) discussing other things. Current events, dramas, poetry, even baseball. In short, I am more than the things I love. nerdy things does not make one a nerd. A nerd is a person who can only view life through the things they are obsessed over. It doesn’t matter how they got there, what matters is their inability to see their own tunnel-vision.  Therefore, yes, there are sports nerds, political junkie nerds, historical accuracy nerds. They’re everywhere, and they want what they want on their own terms. Alas. Here’s a guy who said it better – Robert Ebert on Revenge of the Nerds II:

These aren’t nerds. They’re a bunch of interesting guys, and that’s the problem with “Revenge of the Nerds II.” The movie doesn’t have the nerve to be about real nerds. It unnamed (11)hedges its bets. A nerd is not a nerd because he understands computers and wears a plastic pen protector in his shirt pocket. A nerd is a nerd because he brings a special lack of elegance to life. An absence of style. An inability to notice the feelings of other people. A nerd is a nerd from the inside out, which is something the nerds who made this movie will never understand.

Another reader:

Holy shit. As problematic as the actual content of what this reader wrote is, I find it absolutely spot on as an explanation for why I drifted away from all those stereotypical subcultural things that nerds are into: comic books, video games, sci-fi/fantasy, etc. Loved them as a shy and awkward kid. Learned how to deal with others, be sociable, talk to girls, and get laid when I was about 16. And it wasn’t like I didn’t still enjoy those things. No, it was that it seemed everyone else who enjoyed them was, as your reader writes, in some various stage of arrested development, and pretty insufferable to be around (e.g. “because we’re smarter than the idiots who wouldn’t let us in”). This was two decades ago: I kind of wish the mainstreaming of the things I like had happened back then, because then I could have continued to enjoy them without having to deal with the basement dwellers.

Several, less churlish readers sound off:

Hi Chris, Andrew, and team! I’ve been reading the Dish on and off for more than 10 years, and this is the first topic I’ve ever felt inspired to write in about. Forgive me if this is long, but I feel that a lot of people have been led astray by Gamergate.

First, thank you for posting Jesse Singal’s Reddit letter. It clarified a lot of things for me.  Another truly excellent article that clarifies the fog that is GamerGate is by Katherine Cross. Second, I have a response to your reader who wrote:

I went home and played videogames because I couldn’t play sports and didn’t have the competitive instinct, but eventually the jocks followed me home, demanding sports games and fighting games and soon the market shifted to cater to them, leaving me to find another thing. Then it was comics, and then the dopes followed me home again and demanded lowest common denominator action nonsense with the names of the things I liked slapped onto them. This is the plight of the nerds; we have to listen to media morons talk about how mainstream being a nerd is as what we love, what we devote our lives to, is co-opted by the very people who we sought escape from through our eclectic obsessions.

I’ve liked “nerdy things” since I was a kid who collected comics, played D&D, read fantasy and sci-fi, had encyclopedic knowledge of the Star Trek and Star Wars universes.  I don’t know if that makes me a nerd.  I know I definitely had my moments of feeling socially outcast when I was a kid who liked to make manga drawings in class. Regardless, I disagree with your reader’s chronology of the special worlds that belonged to nerds only. Some of these things have never been nerd only.  I’m definitely not a hardcore gamer. But even what little I know of games shows your previous letter-writer is wrong about jocks forcing the industry to cater to them by producing “sports and fighting games”. Wikipedia clearly shows that video games have been featured sports in some form or other since the very beginning.  (Um, what is Pong?? or Atari Olympics (1977)?)  American football was all the rage on NES starting in 1989 with Tecmo Bowl. Street Fighter II is one of the most popular games of all time (fighting or otherwise). It came out in 1991.  Did the jock takeover happen then? No. The majority of nerds I knew loved Street Fighter.  And the ones who didn’t were partisans of other fighting games like Mortal Kombat. Now let’s talk comics.  I’ve been buying comics for decades. I can tell you from both personal experience and some reading about the history of the industry, comics have always been a mass medium.  For a long time, it was decidedly not a niche for nerds only.  From the 1930s to the 1960s, they were read by boys and girls, nerds, jocks, and everyone in-between.  That’s just in the US.  Obviously, comics are still popular across all demographics today in Japan. Sure, comics became less of a universal medium in the US as other forms of popular entertainment became important (esp. TV and rock music in the 1950s and 60s), but it’s wrong to think that somehow the jocks decided to only invade comics sometime in the ’80s or ’90s or 2000s.  It was the adult and teenage male nerds in the 1980s who celebrated the rise of the grim, dark, revisionist comics of the 80s (exemplified by The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and almost everything by Frank Miller in this period). Jocks didn’t do this.  Nerds did. And we loved it (except when we are arguing about it ;) ).  And we kept collecting – before, during, and after the comics bubble burst in the early ’90s. This desire to keep the world of comics, games, or other nerd-dom free of politics shows no sense of history and a lack of self-awareness.

Another points to more history:

Here is a very interesting factoid that should enliven the debate: while in the late ’60s role-playing games and D&D were the province of males, Star Trek fandom was essentially a female endeavor. All the early fanzines, the fan fiction, the early conventions and the devotion to the universe were driven by female fans. It is well known in the world of fandom that ladies are those who make their own gear and costumes. Very few guys do (except Adam Savage, of course). Guys buy stuff. That is also why most of the advertising is directed at boys – it is well known that “girls don’t buy the fuckin’ toys” and therefore nerd programming for women is of little use to the entertainment industry. A recent Star Trek fan survey done by an anthropologist showed that 57% of fans are female. On the role of female fans, I recommend reading Prof. Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers. If you set aside the usual comp-lit/de Certeau/post-structuralist blah blah, it’s a fascinating book that destroys the myth of the nerd as a young man (with Spock ears). Early fandom was female and queer.

Speaking of the gays, another reader:

Like nerd culture, gay culture has recently seen a great deal of upheaval, going from an ostracized and marginalized fringe to a wide acceptance from the mainstream that happened in a relatively short period of time.  I’ve long felt these two groups shared some similarities in their shunting from normal society, and now they are in similar positions in their cultural evolution.  There are some parallels beyond the sudden co-opting by the masses. Take the comic-book/gaming shop as an analog for a gay bar.  Pre-internet, the back rooms of comic shops were the first place that many nerds first found their like-minded compatriots after a lifetime of ridicule and ostracism from the mainstream.  Also, the importance of these places are being diminished by both the Internet becoming the de facto hangout for these groups, their acceptance in less specialized areas of society, and less persecution in general, which made the need for strength-in-numbers support less of an issue. The “self-identified” nerd you posted rings just the same as the “gay kids today have no idea how hard it was” types.  I also self-identify as a nerd, and have done so for 30-plus years, so I know all about the dark days.  However, I choose to embrace this influx of interest rather than try to maintain an air of purity that is as artificial as calling someone a “fake” geek.  Genuinity of someone’s “Geek Cred” is an arbitrary and pointless exercise that will differ radically from person to person based on whatever they consider to be a “real nerd” and is a fallacy both old and well known to many as “No True Scotsman”. Young, old; man, woman; newbie, vet. Everyone brings something to the nerd table.  Those who are constantly trying to keep the gates closed are having trouble adapting.  They aren’t trying to contribute or preserve the culture, they are trying to devolve it.  The environment just isn’t the same, and it is not going to go back.  Thank God.

Follow the whole discussion on Gamergate and nerdom more generally here.

The Best Of The Dish Today

For late-breaking Dish coverage of the first confirmed case of Ebola in New York, follow the updates compiled by Bodenner below. For continued coverage of Gamergate, here’s some perspective from Christina Hoff Sommers:

God, I love Christina. More on why I find myself increasingly on the side of the much-despised gamers tomorrow.

Meanwhile, more absurdity from Amanda Taub over yesterday’s shooting spree in Ottawa:

Reports imply that because Zehaf-Bibeau was Muslim, jihad is the likely motivation for his attack. But at this stage, without any actual evidence, it makes no more sense to come to that conclusion than it would to assume that he was motivated by Quebecois separatism, just because he was from Quebec. At this point, our focus on the Ottawa shooter’s religion says more about our own fears than it does about anything to do with Islamist terrorism.

A Canadian reader spat out his coffee:

Taub repeatedly refers to him as an (alleged) Muslim even though Canada’s Globe and Mail confirmed his conversion with his Imam, his best friend, his mother and the RCMP within 5 hours of the shooting. Then she implies that there is no real reason to believe in a connection between Islam and the attack even though Canada’s parliament just voted to attack ISIS and two other soldiers were run down by a separate Islamic extremist last week

But the best part, the part that makes this one of the worst articles of the year coming from a credible news source, is when she writes the following about the 1979 shooting at Quebec’s national assembly: “If we applied the same logic to people from Quebec that we apply to Muslims, then today we would see media reports suggesting that their shared Quebecois heritage likely explains this attack.”

Actually, if we applied the same logic to Muslims that we applied to people from Quebec, our prime minister would invoke the War Powers Act, immediately declare martial law in the affected province and round up and arrest any and all suspected sympathizers with the attackers.

Look: it may well turn out Zehaf-Bibeau was mentally ill and Islam got into his muddled head. But he was already on a list as a possible flight risk to ISIS. And the reflexive denial of the salience of a warped version of Islam in countless recent shootings strikes me as pure p.c. posturing. Along with Ezra’s recent capitulation to the “affirmative consent” machine – a few hangings of a few men will suffice for them all to get the message! – the dreary Vox tropes against “Islamophobia” depress the hell out of me. For a saner review of the facts, check out our post here.

Today was Palin day on the Dish! Feels like old times. My response to the right’s jerking knee in defense of the indefensible is here; my fisking of Bristol’s latest self-serving victimology is here. Our Face of the Day was the Canadian Parliament’s Sergeant-at-Arms – don’t miss the video of him getting a standing ovation entering the House of Commons here. It gave me a lump in my throat. And then some.

Plus: our book club discussion of Sam Harris’ negation of the “self” is here (and your collective mind never disappoints) and an exploration of the changing face of nerdom is here (ditto).

dish-beerMany of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 26 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including the new “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here.

See you in the morning.

(Photo from a Dish reader at Oktoberfest in Stuttgart)

Patient Four?

[Re-posted and updated from earlier today, at 6.02 pm]

Still a big question mark surrounding a possible case of Ebola in New York is confirmed:

But Mali joins the dreadful club of countries:

New tweets posted below:

https://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/status/525445777997709313

https://twitter.com/AntDeRosa/status/525458361979260929