By examining the mental health of Gone Girl:
Author: Andrew Sullivan
The Politics Of “Fertility Fog” Ctd
A few readers write in:
I read Amy Klein’s article (and your accompanying post) with great interest. Whenever the fertility issue arises in my group of friends (as it does often, given that we are a group of professional women in our mid- to late 30s), I inwardly cringe. On the one hand, it would be viewed as incredibly anti-feminist and mean to say, “Maybe you SHOULDN’T wait to have a baby. Maybe you SHOULD put your career on hold for a year or two. You’re 38. All the statistics show that the chances of having a baby drop precipitously from here on out.” On the other hand, it’s incredibly dishonest to say what I’ve learned you’re *supposed* to say in these situations: “You have plenty of time! Don’t worry about it! Look at (insert celebrity)! She had a baby at (age over 45)!”
It becomes a political issue at work, as well. Several years ago, I became a professor.
My husband and I already had one child and we wanted a second. Our strong inclination was to try for the next baby right away given that we were in our mid-30s. Every single one of my female mentors and peers on the faculty, however, STRONGLY dissuaded me from doing so. “Wait until you get tenure,” everyone cried, “No one will take you seriously if you have a baby so early in your career.”
My desire to avoid fertility issues won out, though, and I became pregnant at the end of my first year of at the university. While having our second child has not impacted my productivity at work, a number of my female colleagues have treated my childbearing almost as a personal offense. One colleague, in particular, who waited to have children until she attained tenure and who is currently in the midst of a difficult battle with infertility, seems incredibly resentful. I’m convinced that I made the right choice, but I didn’t anticipate the political fallout from women who have negotiated the fertility minefield differently.
Another woman:
Just as doctors are sometimes reticent to talk to patients about obesity, I get how the fertility topic can seem like a third rail. This to me is total bullshit from a medical perspective and a real disservice to women. A lot of women don’t think about their fertility at all. In fact, as a young woman, I spent way more time trying to make sure I avoided pregnancy.
My husband and I are currently embarking on IVF (I’m 39, he’s 44) and it’s just plain hard. Injections, appointments, copious blood work – just to name a few of the things you have to go through (multiple transvaginal ultrasounds anyone?). I, and many of my Ivy League, high-income friends, really didn’t give our fertility the weight it deserved relative to work, school, travel and even mate selection (e.g. “Hey, maybe I shouldn’t be selecting guys based on cuteness or income but rather paternal fitness”).
I don’t regret my life, because it has been pretty freaking awesome, but dammit I really would have appreciated looking at these charts and having an honest dialogue about what my future options would be. To a person, all the women in my circle totally underestimated what it would take to get pregnant over the age of 35. I work in science, so yes, I always knew IVF was an option, but to be candid, my present self would gladly skip all these steps to do something my body (and my husband’s, for that matter) were much better suited for 10-15 years ago.
That quote from NOW you cited is why I’m in conflict with organized feminism. By all means women should be free to pursue their academic and professional goals, but that doesn’t reflect a holistic representation of womanhood. I want to be a mother, and it’s hard to accept that now something that should be natural has to happen so unnaturally.
Meanwhile In Nigeria, Ctd
Earlier this week, Alexis Okeowo filed an update that lowered the death toll from Boko Haram’s recent assault on the Nigerian village of Baga to “hundreds, but not as many as a thousand.” The UN additionally estimates that some 20,000 people have been displaced by the fighting in the past two weeks. And as Peter Dörrie notes, the atrocity in Baga was only part of the increasingly-distressing story:
The Islamists [also] captured and partially destroyed no fewer than 16 other towns and villages in Borno state. The army repelled a large-scale attack on Damaturu, the capital of neighboring Yobe state. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up in a market in Potiskum, a town in Yobe. The blasts killed at least 19 people. One attacker was a 10-year-old girl. …
The attack also hit the official base for the Multi-National Joint Task Force tasked with beating back the militants. It’s a further blow to a force that was already struggling. The MNJTF originally planned to incorporate 700 soldiers each from Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon to counter the insurgents in a region where borders have little practical relevance. But the MNJTF never took off, and now Niger has officially ruled out helping Nigeria take back Baga. Chad and Cameroon kept their distance from the project, citing Nigeria’s unwillingness to live up to its troop commitments for the force.
Sadly, Obinna Anyadike notes that neither Boko Haram’s use of teenage girls as suicide bombers nor the inability of Nigerian troops to hold territory is news at this point. She asserts that “Nigeria is proof that military spending does not necessarily buy security”:
The 2014 defence budget was $2.1 billion and the overall security allotment $5.8 billion – the largest slice of the government’s expenditure pie. And yet the regular excuse is that its soldiers are out-gunned by Boko Haram, despite the helicopter gunships, ground-attack aircraft, and surveillance drones in the official inventory. … Corruption is said to the biggest enemy, with money and fuel meant for the troops siphoned off by senior officers. The repeated failure to destroy munitions and equipment before positions are surrendered to Boko Haram is another factor, as is – sadly, given Nigeria’s peacekeeping pedigree – military incompetence.
When the troops are well led and properly supplied they win their battles. But there have been repeated reports of the military even failing to make use of reliable intelligence provided by its allies. And now the government has splurged on opaque defence contracts, with more helicopter gunships, mine-resistant armoured vehicles and possibly a squadron of new, never-before flown by any other air force, counter-insurgency aircraft.
The response to Boko Haram from Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has been lackluster at best. As for the timing of the new violence, last month Ryan Cummings predicted the militants would attempt to influence February’s presidential election:
From an ideological perspective, Boko Haram [will] undoubtedly seek to undermine any process which would underpin its greatest adversary; namely, a secular Western-styled democracy. By violently disrupting the election cycle, the sect could raise serious questions regarding the perceived inclusiveness and transparency of the ballot—a move which could delegitimize the voting process and its eventual victor.
To deal with such a threat, the Bloomberg editors argue that Nigeria’s leaders and the international community need to step up – and fast:
The parties contesting the vote can best respond by toning down their mutual antagonism and bloodthirsty rhetoric. The government must also try harder to provide security for polling places, especially in the north, and speed up its introduction of biometric voting cards. More international observers, deployed for longer, would help.
There’s a limit to what outsiders can do, though. The U.S. and U.K. have curtailed cooperation with Nigeria’s beleaguered army because of human-rights abuses. Specific, vetted units might still be receptive to training and assistance. Beyond that, strengthening the ability of Nigeria’s neighbors to prevent Boko Haram’s incursions might be the best outsiders can do.
Remi Adekoya suggests that Nigeria’s former military dictator, the opposition presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari, might be just what the country needs:
[A]fter a year in which Boko Haram and government corruption has dominated local headlines, the ex-general has two things going for him: a reputation for strong leadership and incorruptibility. He is probably the only prominent Nigerian politician today who isn’t hounded by allegations of embezzling public funds. [Also, a] president with military experience to take on corrupt army officers would surely serve as a morale booster to the Nigerian soldiers battling Boko Haram.
Granted, the ex-general has no magic wand to make the militants simply vanish. But in this period of existential crisis, Nigeria may need a wartime leader who can project reassuring strength and provide a plausible strategy for overcoming the insecurity in the country. Time is running out.
But in a recent profile, the BBC highlighted Buhari’s mixed record during the 20 months he led the country:
About 500 politicians, officials and businessmen were jailed as part of a campaign against waste and corruption. Some saw this as the heavy-handed repression of military rule.
But others remember it as a praiseworthy attempt to fight the endemic graft that prevented Nigeria’s development. He retains a rare reputation for honesty among Nigeria’s politicians, both military and civilian, largely because of this campaign. As part of his “War Against Indiscipline”, he ordered Nigerians to form neat queues at bus stops, under the sharp eyes of whip-wielding soldiers. Civil servants who were late for work were publicly humiliated by being forced to do frog jumps. He also introduced a notorious decree to restrict press freedom, under which two journalists were jailed. However, his attempts to re-balance public finances by curbing imports led to many job losses and the closure of businesses.
Which Romney Will Run This Time?
David Graham’s best guess:
Incredibly, Romney now wants to run in 2016 as The Compassionate Conservative Champion of the Poor. There’s a logic here. Since the economy has been steadily improving for years now, there’s no need for a Mr. Fix-It, and in a field with candidates like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, Mitt Romney will never be the conservative choice. The premises of both of Romney’s previous runs have been completely demolished, so he’s creating a new one out of whole cloth. According to John Dickerson, he has acknowledged that the weak economy is no longer a good basis for a campaign, but he somehow is spinning it as a boon.
Joe Klein asks whether Romney 3.0 will “come equipped with a backbone”:
The last two certainly didn’t, to the point of embarrassment. In neither campaign did Romney take a position that was even vaguely controversial with his party’s rabid base. He was disgraceful on immigration, “self-deporting” himself to Dantean circles of chicanery. He was craven on fiscal sanity, opposing in one debate—along with all his fellow candidates—a budget proposal that would include 90% cuts and 10% revenue increases. Worst of all, he self-lobotomized on the subject of health care, dumbing himself down egregiously, denying that his (successful) universal-health-coverage program in Massachusetts was the exact same thing as Barack Obama’s (increasingly successful) national version.
Suderman expects Romney to shape-shift once again:
He’s still someone whose interest in running for and being president comes before any serious inkling about what, exactly, he’d do if he got the job, and he’s still someone willing to overhaul his self-presentation in order to sell himself to whatever cohort he thinks is politically ascendant at the moment. So sure, the third installment in the Romney franchise would be different in the sense that every Romney reinvention is different from the last one. But in the ways that matter, every sign so far suggests it would just be more of the same.
The Boston Globe hears that foreign policy will one of Romney’s ace issues this time around. Drezner laughs at his adviser’s claim that, were he president right now, “There wouldn’t be an ISIS at all, and Putin would know his place in life.” Larison pounces on that quote:
It would be one thing for Romney backers to think that U.S. policies would be better than they are if he were president, but it is absurd to believe that other regimes and groups around the world would behave in a dramatically different fashion or would not exist under a different administration. By what magical powers of resolve would Romney have eliminated ISIS? How exactly would he have made Putin to “know his place”? Presumably this adviser thinks this would happen because Romney’s policies would convey “strength” rather than “weakness,” but that just underscores that this adviser–like Romney–doesn’t have a clue how this would happen.
I don’t doubt Romney’s sincerity. But I do think he and those close to him are fooling themselves that he can simply proclaim that he is running a new and different campaign — one based on foreign policy and poverty, according to Politico — and that will be that. … There’s no question that Romney feels a call to service and believes that he is uniquely able to solve the problems of the GOP and the country at the moment. But, the assumption that he can pluck the good things from his past candidacies while wiping away — “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”-style — all the bad stuff from voters’ minds is a deeply flawed reading of how politics works. And it’s why it makes little sense for Romney to run again.
Yglesias suspects that greed is fueling this run:
To really understand why it’s happening, you need to remember this one sentence from an article Sean Sullivan wrote in December 2013: “Romney’s seven highest-paid campaign staffers all made more in 2012 than anyone on Obama’s campaign.” That is nice work if you can get it. Another relevant point is from Jim Rutenberg’s July 2012 article about the network of wealthy Mormon families who’ve supported Romney in his every political campaign. Add access to a unique donor base to a candidate whose known for generously compensating his senior campaign staff, and you have not quite a rationale for a national campaign but a reason for a group of seasoned political operatives to come up with one.
Cassidy’s view of the big picture:
Perhaps the lesson is that Presidential candidates aren’t like the rest of us. The same qualities of overconfidence, manic ambition, and propensity for risk-taking that enable them to embrace the horrors of a modern campaign also make it hard for them to grasp reality.
(Photo from Getty)
And The CIA Gets Away With It Yet Again
The agency that committed war crimes on a vast and horrific scale has emerged from the Senate Intelligence Committee report with what it has gotten since the 1970s: total impunity and the option to reinstate torture at any time under a future president. No consequences for torture will follow – on the president’s orders. And it can come back – thanks to the president’s backing of John Brennan who does not rule it out in the future.
But there are consequences for those who violate the CIA code, even if there are none for CIA officials who violate the law. And so the only person actually prosecuted in the entire saga was a whistle-blower. So this is no big surprise either:
The CIA’s internal watchdog will resign at the end of January, a departure that comes just months after his office found that the spy agency had hacked into computers used by Senate staffers to investigate its Bush-era “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the CIA said Monday. David Buckley will leave the agency on Jan. 31 to “pursue an opportunity in the private sector,” the CIA said in a statement.
Buckley proved that John Brennan is a liar, when he denied any such hacking. And so he is now gone. As for those CIA employees who violated basic constitutional norms and hacked into the computers of their Senate over-seers, as discovered by Buckley? What will their punishment be? Well, no surprise there either:
A panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode, according to current and former government officials. The panel will make that recommendation after the five C.I.A. officials who were singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director.
Their defense is that Brennan told them to do it – and then lied about it, and then had to apologize for the lie. This is no defense. And if true, it surely requires the president to fire Brennan for both subverting the Senate’s constitutional oversight role and also lying about it. And so we end up again at Barack Obama’s desk, where he will quietly put it out with the trash. As war criminals walk the corridors at Langley and the CIA chief who defended every last one of them sails forward with impunity. And the beat goes on.
(Photo: Director of Central Intelligence Agency John Brennan takes questions from reporters during a press conference at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, December 11, 2014. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty.)
France Cracks Down On Free Speech
I am a little confused, isn’t this freedom of speech?? http://t.co/a54Jk2fZT0
— Craig Edmondson (@theeonlycraig) January 15, 2015
[Dieudonné] was detained for questioning on Wednesday for writing on his Facebook account he felt “Charlie Coulibaly,” a word play combining the widespread “I am Charlie” vigil slogan and the name of one of the three gunmen.
And he isn’t the only one. According to the AP, French authorities said “54 people had been arrested for hate speech and defending terrorism in the last week.” So the French are arresting people for committing acts of free speech just after a massive rally defending those principles. Dieudonné, for one, claims he is being misunderstood:
What he had meant to say on Facebook, he said, was that “I am considered like another Amedy Coulibaly when in fact I am no different from Charlie.” His original statement on his Facebook page was as follows:
“After this historic, no legendary, march, a magic moment equal to the Big Bang which created the Universe, or in a smaller (more local) way comparable to the crowning of the (ancient Gaullish king) Vercingétorix, I am going home. Let me say that this evening, as far as I am concerned, I feel I am Charlie Coulibaly.”
The very idea that one can be arrested for writing such a thing is appalling – but par for the course in much of the West. Josh Lowe provides background on Dieudonné:
Originally called Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, the comedian is the son of a French woman and a Cameroonian man. His jokes have frequently got him into trouble, in particular those deemed to be anti-Semitic. Last year, the French government issued a strong recommendation to local authorities across France to cancel his scheduled shows, on the grounds that he had repeatedly violated French laws against inciting racial and religious hatred. In 2003, he appeared on French TV dressed in orthodox Jewish garb, performing a Nazi salute and crying “Israheil!” He makes fun of the Nazi atrocities in a song called Shoananas which mixes the French word for “holocaust” with that for “pineapple.” He began his career in the early 90s as part of a controversial double act with the Jewish comic Elie Semoun. Since the pair went their separate ways, however, Semoun has criticised him, writing (in an open letter to Libération in 2004) that: “You and me, we made fun of everyone, people loved it… but that’s why I feel so betrayed. You are not the same Dieudo.”
Tom Reiss profiled the comedian back in 2007:
“Dieudonné is the spokesman, the godfather, the icon of a new kind of anti-Semitism,” Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher and memoirist of Jewish identity, told me. “It is an explicitly anti-racist anti-Semitism, which inverts traditional anti-Semitism by asserting that the Nazis today are in fact the Jews. The idiom of anti-Semitism is no longer racism; it is now anti-racism. Dieudonné’s followers say that they don’t hate Jews, they hate Jewish racism. They say that Israel is like Nazism, like apartheid.”
So of course he must be punished! Matt Welch expects the arrest to backfire:
Any speech made criminally taboo will thrive unchallenged in the shadows, rather than be refuted and ridiculed out in the open. If you’re alarmed by Dieudonné’s infamous quenelle gesture, how popular do you think it will get if he’s behind bars?
Très. Greenwald uses the arrest to question the motivations of Charlie supporters:
It is certainly true that many of Dieudonné’s views and statements are noxious, although he and his supporters insist that they are “satire” and all in good humor. In that regard, the controversy they provoke is similar to the now-much-beloved Charlie Hebdo cartoons (one French leftist insists the cartoonists were mocking rather than adopting racism and bigotry, but Olivier Cyran, a former writer at the magazine who resigned in 2001, wrote a powerful 2013 letter with ample documentation condemning Charlie Hebdo for descending in the post-9/11 era into full-scale, obsessive anti-Muslim bigotry).
Despite the obvious threat to free speech posed by this arrest, it is inconceivable that any mainstream western media figures would start tweeting “#JeSuisDieudonné” or would upload photographs of themselves performing his ugly Nazi-evoking arm gesture in “solidarity” with his free speech rights. That’s true even if he were murdered for his ideas rather than “merely” arrested and prosecuted for them. That’s because last week’s celebration of the Hebdo cartoonists (well beyond mourning their horrifically unjust murders) was at least as much about approval for their anti-Muslim messages as it was about the free speech rights that were invoked in their support – at least as much.
Although I find Glenn’s refusal to admit the link between terror and Islam befuddling, I do think he is right to point out the double standards of some of the free speech crowd. Once you establish limits on free speech, the consistency of their application matters. To have different rules of censorship for anti-Semites and anti-Muslims is to deepen the conflict even further. Sullum rightly fears that the criminalizing of speech “teaches people that the use of force is an appropriate response to words and images that offend—a principle that is poisonous to free speech and conducive to violence”:
Since the French government has announced that offending the wrong people by saying the wrong thing in the wrong context can be treated as a crime, it would not be surprising if some people, convinced that their rights had been violated and that they could not count on the courts to vindicate them, resorted to self-help.
Other countries that criminalize “hate speech,” including Germany, the Netherlands, the U.K., Sweden, and Canada, are likewise sending a dangerous message that offending people with words or images is akin to assaulting them with fists or knives. Instead of facilitating censorship by the sensitive, a government truly committed to open debate and freedom of speech would make it clear, in no uncertain terms, that offending Muslims (or any other religious group) is not a crime.
Amen. And particularly religion, which should be open to the most merciless attacks and denunciations and mockery precisely because of the grandeur of its claims and the power of its social authority. A true believer is relieved to see the all-too human institutions of church or mosque or synagogue ridiculed, precisely because those institutions are prone to corruption on a vast scale. And faith should easily survive mockery. Jesus himself encouraged his followers not to be dismayed when they are maligned or disparaged because of their faith. It is not something Christians should avenge; it is something that at times Christians should even seek. But even a spiritual figure like Jesus was ignored for millennia once Christianity got worldly power. When Muhammed himself authorizes a hit on someone who insulted him and Allah, the journey is going to be considerably longer.
“No Basis To Believe That An Incident Occurred”
Phi Kappa Psi, the frat accused of gang rape by Rolling Stone, is no longer suspended:
As the spring semester started at UVA, the school reinstated its chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, saying police have cleared the frat, for now. Charlottesville police Captain Gary Pleasants confirmed that while they’re still investigating the case, “We found no basis to believe that an incident occurred at that fraternity, so there’s no reason to keep them suspended.”
Friedersdorf feels that the frat deserves apologies:
The fact that Phi Kappa Psi’s membership was falsely accused of this crime does not mean that most rape accusations are false–the opposite is true–or that there isn’t a need to reduce the number of rapes and sexual assaults that happen on college campuses, even granting that some activists overstate the number of victims.
It should be possible to push for reforms that would reduce the too-high number of rape victims while advocating against rushes to judgment in individual cases. All credible rape accusations should be investigated. Before the results are in the accuser should have the private support of friends and various resources. But nothing is gained when angry mobs with no particular knowledge of a case gather en masse to shout epithets at people who weren’t even accused as individuals.
Amen, Conor. Erik Wemple points out that the “awful Rolling Stone story continues to drive reforms”:
To diminish the chances that drugs will get dropped into drinks, the changes ban kegs, require “sober brother monitors” at parties and ban “pre-mixed drinks, punches, or any other common source of alcohol.” Examples of actual journalism rarely land with such impact.
But some frats are resisting the new rules:
Alpha Tau Omega and Kappa Alpha have released nearly identical statements refusing to sign U.Va.’s new requirements that fraternities alter their activities following a two-month suspension on social activities. The new rules require a certain number of fraternity brothers to be sober and present and different places around the house and set limits on what kinds of alcohol can be served and in what containers.
I think that’s a splendid idea. At Burning Man, a highly organized party, each camp had designated sober members every night on watch for trouble or accidents or anything else. If 60,000 partiers in the Nevada desert can organize that, I don’t see why a frat cannot. Eliza Gray wonders if the reforms will do any good:
[I]t appears that UVA may not be doing much to enforce the reforms—a reflection of the tricky nature of governing private organizations on campus. According to ABC News, UVA spokesman Anthony de Bruyn said the university would not provide staff to monitor the fraternities to because they are privately owned. “The University will work closely with Greek leadership to support them in seeking compliance with the new practices by their members,” de Bruyn told Time. “Should violations be brought to the University’s attention, as has been the case it the past, the Dean of Students Office will investigate, and any appropriate next steps would be based upon the details of each case.”
The lack of formal monitoring raises questions as to whether the reforms will have any teeth.
(Cropped photo from a protest against Phi Kappa Psi by Bob Mical.)
What Is Paul Ryan’s Game?
Earlier this week, he ruled out a presidential run. Ezra sees this as a power play:
If Ryan was running for president in 2016 — or if Republicans even thought he might run for president in 2016 — they would assume his work at Ways and Means was really preparatory work on behalf of Ryan 2016. Worse, his fellow potential candidates would have to distance themselves from Ryan’s ideas, as he would be a threat to them. But now Ryan can work to shape all their agendas simultaneously, and they will have to compete for his favor — they’ll want both his endorsement and, if they win, his help.
Ryan has been better at understanding how much power ideas can have in American politics than pretty much any member of Congress in recent years. This shows that he’s got a clear-eyed view of how much power congressional process holds, too. If he was running for president in such a crowded field, odds are that he probably wouldn’t win — and, thus, neither would his ideas. But now that he’s forsworn any interest in the presidency while making clear he’s going to really use the power of the House Ways and Means Committee, no Republican will be able to win and govern without adopting Ryan’s ideas.
Reihan has mixed feelings about Ryan’s absence from the race:
He would have been the candidate of ideas and would have pressed his Republican rivals to think seriously about upward mobility and the need to modernize America’s safety net, among other issues conservatives tend to neglect.
Yet there is a silver lining in Ryan’s decision not to run, which is highlighted by the sweeping tax overhaul just proposed by House Democrats. Though Ryan is more open-minded and intellectually serious than we have any right to expect from an elected official, on tax policy, at least, he’s failed to come to terms with how the country has changed. A supply-sider to the bitter end, Ryan has made it clear that his first priority in reforming the tax code is to lower tax rates for everyone, including high-earners. In a conversation this summer with John McCormack of the Weekly Standard, Ryan insisted that “the best way to help the economy is to reduce rates across the board” and that “if you want faster growth, more upward mobility, and faster job creation,” lower tax rates are “the secret sauce.” Well, this is a secret sauce that is past its expiration date.
Who Does Torrenting Hurt? Ctd
Everything is Free from Rain Perry on Vimeo.
Gillian Welch’s lovely 2001 lament is as relevant now as ever. Released at the height of Napster, Welch saw the plug pulled on musicians’ ability to make a living, and correctly predicted what’s happening now – the music business is circling the drain. The single is available for purchase at CDBaby (cdbaby.com/cd/rainperrymarkhallman). (iTunes is coming.)
A former freeloader writes:
Here I was, having just done my little trick to get around The Dish’s pay-meter, only to read the piiiissed artist’s argument … and now I’m a subscriber.
You can join him and 30,462 others here! Another subscriber:
I used to torrent a ton. I used to download 17 TV shows a week, plus movies, plus an artist’s entire discography at once. I don’t anymore. I have Hulu, which has freed me from my physical TV and even my cable package. I have Pandora and Spotify for my music needs. I have Netflix for on-demand movies and DVD rentals. So I don’t need to pirate anymore. I pay less for all of that than I did for cable (which I had to offset my pirate guilt). And the Industries are still getting screwed! It’s a win/win for me!
Another former pirate:
Forgive me if I don’t shed a tear for the music and film industries; they brought this on themselves. Like the rest of the Napster generation, growing up I pirated everything – music, movies, sofware, you name it. The thing is, now that I’m older, with a job, I’d rather just pay and get something legit. I can afford it, and in theory it should be less hassle. The ease of buying music on iTunes was the main reason I started paying money for things.
Having said that, trying to be a good citizen with TV and movies is the worst. Three brief anecdotes:
- At Christmas I discovered my girlfriend has never seen It’s a Wonderful Life, and decided to remedy that. So I loaded up iTunes on my laptop, paid for a rental copy, then went to beam it onto our TV. Only “You cannot play this movie as your TV does not support Copy Protection”. Great work fellas. You know what movie can be played on my TV? The pirated version I downloaded 10 minutes later.
- The very same girlfriend, it also turned out, hadn’t seen Wall-E. Well that won’t do; a day or so later I went to rent a copy. Unfortunately, Wall-E is only available for purchase – at three times the cost of a rental – which is hardly worth it when we only want to watch it once.
- A year or so ago a friend recommended I check out Battlestar Galactica; so I went to buy it online. The cheapest digital version I could find was £50. The same thing on DVD was £19 from Amazon. In what universe is the digital copy of a TV series significantly more expensive than a physical copy requiring warehouse space and shipping costs?
Three times there, I was at the brink of spending some money and was thwarted by the stupidity and greed of the TV industry. Legit copies of things cost more than they should, are burdened with horseshit copy protection and other restrictions, or aren’t available at all. The only way to beat piracy is to offer a superior product, and right now, that isn’t happening.
Another reader on how people are willing to pay for content as long as the industries can get with the times:
When I think about buying data, I want it to be mine. If I want to store backups, that shouldn’t be technically illegal. If I want to compress a movie so it fits on my portable drive, I should be able to. Ditto if I want to, for example, add a subtitle track, delete an audio track I don’t need, or even just trim a movie down to a selection of favorite clips. I have been stopped from doing all these things, with data that I paid to own, by Digital Rights Management. And then there are horror stories about purchased content simply disappearing from your devices one day, or becoming inaccessible because that old DRM format is no longer supported.
I recently paid a high price for an indie film because it was available online in a DRM-free format (independent distributor). Felt great. And kudos to the music industry for already caving on this one.
Another looks back to the early days:
I think it is worth looking back at how torrenting started. Namely Napster. At that point in time you did not have an option to buy a song. It just didn’t exist. I could go out and buy a shitty CD with one good single for $18.99 (while the much more expensive to make cassette only cost $9.99) or I could do without. So I had pricing that didn’t make sense and the inability to buy the product I wanted. You bet I stole a lot of music.
Eventually Apple started the iTunes store. I could buy at a reasonable price what I wanted and I did. Furthermore, there seemed to be an explosion of smaller labels (probably always existed but I just wasn’t aware) that put out albums that played solid from beginning to end. I bought lots of those. Most the people I know who stole music went legit once there was a decent way to do so. Today I subscribe to Spotify, buy music on iTunes if it isn’t on Spotify, and occasional buy a physical album if I love it or want to support the artist. Also, I go to shows, which I think is still the best form of revenue for an artist.
I do, however, torrent (okay, steal) TV shows, live sports, and occasionally movies. I always look to buy first but sometimes it just isn’t an option. Want to watch ESPN? Subscribe to cable. Want to watch Game Of Thrones? Subscribe to cable and HBO. Want to watch Battle Star Galactica? Go buy physical copies of the seasons.
Napster put pressure on the record industry to change their model, and now torrenting is putting pressure on the television and the movie industry to do the same. I subscribe to Netflix and I’m an Amazon Prime member. You can bet if HBO is offered at a reasonable price I would buy that as well. With the football playoff I would probably pay to watch ESPN as a standalone (cheaper than a bar tab I’m sure). I would buy lots of things if I did not have to maintain a cable subscription or go to movie theater to get them.
Follow the whole thread here. More of your emails soon.
Is My Husband’s Not Gay Really Worth Getting Upset About?
The trailer for TLC’s special, which aired on Sunday:
Zack Ford provides some background:
When TLC announced it would air a one-hour special called My Husband’s Not Gay about Mormon men with same-sex attractions who pursue relationships with women, the LGBT community was understandably upset. Over 75,000 signed a petition calling on the network to cancel the show because it “promotes the false and dangerous idea that gay people can and should choose to be straight in order to be part of their faith communities.” GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis denounced the show as “downright irresponsible” and potentially harmful to young people.
Juzwiak defends the show:
I did not find the [“same sex attraction” (SSA)] guys aspirational, just like I don’t find the majority of people on reality TV aspirational.
I think much of what they do is ridiculous and the show is peppered with winking moments that reveal the underlying absurdity of their situation (“I don’t feel like I fit the mold of guys that are attracted to other men by other then my deep and abiding love for Broadway show tunes and my attraction to other males. Those are the things that are kind of gay about me,” says the single guy, Tom). We read story after story about the failure of reparative therapy, and if you know anything about sexuality, you know how suppressing it is a setup for failure.
But look, what My Husband’s Not Gay presents is an actual phenomenon within American culture, an imperfect way that people negotiate themselves with their religion.
But Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart finds fault:
The fact that most gay men do not experience attractions to the opposite sex, or feel that their sexuality is fluid, is not addressed. It is, however, referenced briefly by a guy identified as Shaun, who spends a few seconds acting as a pro-gay foil for the show’s protagonists. Shaun says that he feels no attraction to women, only to be told that his lack of ”familiarity with the equipment” doesn’t mean that he could never learn to enjoy sex with a woman. In that moment, when a gay man’s assertion that he is not and could not be attracted to women is challenged, the pretense that the show deals only with these particular men’s individual experience evaporates. They do not believe that they are different from gay men because they are also attracted to women; they believe that it is possible for gay men to become attracted to women, and they explicitly say so.
Emma Green levels a different sort of complaint:
The show is a pre-packaged TLC special on yet another group who “live their lives a little … differently,” offering neither the courtesy of creative production nor moments of true feeling. This makes it it very difficult to find empathy for these men, who believe God made them to be flawed, nor the women who love them. Watching My Husband’s Not Gay is like the passive emotional experience of wandering through a low-budget carnival, gawking at the sideshow freaks for a short moment before losing attention and moving on.
Moze Halperi denounces the special:
For every Mormon man who vocally discusses his attraction to men in order to move on to lead a normative existence, there’s a Mormon kid who might bravely come out as “gay, not SSA”, and who might be subjected to bigotry: getting excommunicated from the Church and ostracized by his families. This is the other story that My Husband’s Not Gay isn’t interested in showing. It won’t present actual tragedy, because it wishes to be amorally lighthearted.
J. Bryan Lowder, on the other hand, has difficulty getting outraged:
[M]y main reaction to the show was, to be honest, something of a shrug. Over the course of the hour, I did not see an advertisement for ex-gay therapy (despite some of the men’s involvement in related organizations), nor really a suggestion that “curing” homosexuality is even possible. (These men are very clearly still homosexuals, by the strictest definition, in theory if not practice.) What I did see was a model of living and relating to others that felt not only alien, but also pointlessly difficult and inadvisable—and yet, in no way offensive or illegitimate.
We can read all kinds of condescending things into the psychology and motivations of these men (and, for that matter, their wives and dates), but in the final analysis, it’s not really for us to judge the validity of how consenting, informed adults build their lives or pursue happiness: Gays should know better than most where that logic leads.
On this, I’m with Lowder. I watched the show and was riveted by it for a simple reason: it shows a big shift in social and religious attitudes toward the reality of gay people in religious faiths. I don’t expect their path forward to be linear; and I found the show oddly affecting. These people deserve to have their story told as well.
The Dish 