Author: Andrew Sullivan

Sam Anderson investigates a new phenomenon called ChatRoulette, something John Heilemann just tipped me off about:

The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click “start” you’re suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they’re staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click “next,” instantly calling up someone else.

The result is surreal on many levels.

Early ChatRoulette users traded anecdotes on comment boards with the eerie intensity of shipwreck survivors, both excited and freaked out by what they’d seen. There was a man who wore a deer head and opened every conversation with “What up DOE!?” A guy from Sweden was reportedly speed-drawing strangers’ portraits. Someone with a guitar was improvising songs for anyone who’d give him a topic. One man popped up on people’s screens in the act of fornicating with a head of lettuce. Others dressed like ninjas, tried to persuade women to expose themselves, and played spontaneous transcontinental games of Connect Four.

The whole piece is a fascinating read. Money quote:

As Internet culture has grown, we’ve come to romanticize certain kinds of unmediated, old-fashioned “human” interactions. But this fantasy ignores how much of normal social interaction is fleeting, bite-size, instant, tweetlike. Humans have always talked to each other via a kind of analog Twitter. These new technologies just get us there with maximum efficiency. Meeting a new person is thrilling, in a primal way—your attention focuses completely, if only for a nanosecond, to see if the creature in front of you has the power to change your life for better or worse. ChatRoulette creates this moment over and over again; it privileges it over actual conversation.

Kottke spent a half-hour on the site:

During my session, the average “chat” lasted about 5 seconds and I observed several people drinking malt liquor, two girls making out, many many guys who disconnected as soon as they saw I wasn’t female, several girls who disconnected after seeing my face (but not before I caught the looks of disgust on theirs), 3 couples having sex, and 11 erect penises. In a Malkovichian moment, I was even connected to myself once…and then the other me quickly disconnected. In short, Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now.

(Screenshots captured by Richard Lawson)

Wockner reports:

Four members of a new ACT UP-like group known as Queer Rising were arrested in Manhattan on Feb. 12 after chaining themselves to the entrance of the New York City Marriage Bureau… Twenty same-sex couples went inside and tried to obtain marriage licenses. They were rebuffed. A gay man and a lesbian then presented themselves as a faux couple, asked for a license and were given one.

We need more direct action on these lines: sit-ins, demos, and brilliant actions like this one.

Gladwell describes drinking:

Put a stressed-out drinker in front of an exciting football game and he’ll forget his troubles. But put him in a quiet bar somewhere, all by himself and he’ll grow mare anxious. Alcohol's principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental field of vision.

It causes, “a state of short- sightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion." Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the in the background disappear. That’s why drinking makes you think you are attractive when the world thinks otherwise: the alcohol removes the little constraining voice from the outside world that normally keeps our self-assessments in check. Drinking relaxes the man watching football because the game is front and center, and alcohol makes every secondary consideration fade away. But in a quiet bar his problems are front and center and every potentially comforting or mitigating thought recedes. Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.

(Hat tip: Sunil)

The Seychelles, 5 pm

Robert Fulford focuses on obesity among men:

After years spent running weight loss programs for both sexes, in 1985 [Harvey] Brooker began his unique class for men. He’d come to realize that men and women approach the problem of weight in strikingly different ways, almost like two species. Men aren’t socialized to think about it, as many women are. Since men typically cook far less than women, we are less equipped to analyze the content of what we eat. We don’t often read food labels, and many of us wrongly believe we can work off the pounds through exercise alone. Above all, our culture genially forgives fatness in men, as it does not in women. Men’s magazines provide plenty of advice on muscle development but show little interest in weight. Brooker makes that point in a book he wrote two years ago, It’s Different for Men: “Would Outdoor Life suggest a program to lose ten pounds in two weeks?”

A reader writes:

The reader who wrote claiming that the enemies of Israel possess no self-interest or sanity is, at the very least, unhinged.

If the Iranian Republic truly believed that wiping Israel off the face of the Earth were "righteous and beautiful", that Israel's destruction was a goal of ultimate primacy before even the lives of the Iranian people, then the Ayatollahs would have made a peace with Saddam Hussein in the 80's and 90's, when he was the most influential supporter of militant Palestinian groups, and marched their combined armies through the contiguous bridge of the Iran-Iraq-Syria alliance to crush the hated Jewish enemy.  Instead, the Iranians spent the 80's and 90's vying with Mr. Hussein for regional supremacy, attempting to play Iran's historical role (a role they have played off and on since before monotheism existed) as arbiter of politics and culture in the Fertile Crescent.

If the leaders of Hamas were only concerned with killing Israelis, with training suicide-bombers and sending them out to destroy shopping centers, then they'd dedicate the majority of their funding to that purpose. Instead, they build and operate hospitals, schools, soup kitchens, car pools, cell services, and all the other goods, public and private, that organizations without an explicit military arm would provide for the Palestinians if any building was allowed to stay standing long enough to house them.  All those doctors and teachers and cooks and bureaucrats who are part of Hamas must be pretty poor members, failing to murder Israelis everyday as they do; one wonders how some of them ever managed to rise to positions of authority without ever having killed an Israeli at all in an organization only dedicated to military objectives. 

Extreme?  Yes.  Intransigent?  Yes.  Far too violent and stubborn for their own good, or their people's good?  Yes. But willing to watch the Palestinian people destroyed utterly to achieve the destruction of Israel?  Indifferent to Palestinian suffering?  Hardly.  If that were the case, why negotiate cease-fire agreements?  Why capture Israeli soldiers explicitly to extract concessions and revenues that they cannot extract from the Israelis at the negotiating table?  That organization exists precisely because of Palestinian suffering; it fights specifically to alleviate that suffering, as wrong-headed as that is, but desperation and rage are not known for instilling logic. 

And as for the "right to live" line, one could just as easily say that Israel could have peace tomorrow if they recognized a Palestinian right to return. That position is not more politically viable than it would be for Hamas, as the duly elected government of the Palestinian authority, to lay down the gun without a settlement freeze or the territorial concessions needed to make a Palestinian state viable.  If Israel cannot even bring itself to give these concessions to the generally peaceful Palestinians of the West Bank; if Israel cannot even bring itself to stop settlements from being built in the West Bank, then what reason could Hamas possibly have for thinking that unilaterally forsaking the fight would lead to a real, respected sovereignty in Gaza?

This claim that Israel's enemies are irrational, blood-thirsty, slavering man-beasts, unable to contain their lust for spilling Jewish blood in the name of Allah is, quite simply, not supported by the behavior of either regime, or of Syria, for that matter, which has always coolly and calmly steered for that course most likely to insure its continued existence and indispensability.  If either were indifferent to destruction, so long as Israel were destroyed, then they would have risked global wrath and war striking at Israel and illegal Israeli settlements long ago.  Instead of spending decades jockeying for internal or regional supremacy they would have made the deals necessary to press genocide with heedless fanaticism, and would be throwing themselves on the walls of Jerusalem, right this very minute, with hatred in their eyes and paradise on their lips. 

Of course this never has, and never will, happen.  Israel's enemies aren't monsters anymore than they are caricatures; they are men, despicable men largely, but still men, and with all the concerns and desire to live that comes with that. 

And Israel, it should be pointed out, has its own fair share of despicable men, just as intractable, just as hateful of peace as any Hamas bomber or Revolutionary Guard thug.  Perhaps it would be easier for Israel if they WERE beasts and the IDF could simply sit atop their walls with flame-throwers and machine guns slaughtering them as they threw themselves at the interloper in a blind rage.  But men are patient, and men plan, and in the end, you have to sit down and deal with them or they'll never go away.  The longer Israel and the defenders of her most fanatical citizens put that off, the heavier the toll of that final squaring will be. 

Christopher Ryan doesn't buy a new theory on why gays exist:

The currently dominant theory turns on self-interest, as is the case with most current evolutionary thinking. Gay men, the theory posits, will be much more nurturing of their nieces and nephews than would heterosexual men (who would, after all, have their own kids to worry about). Thus, in increasing the reproductive potential of their nieces and nephews (by helping more of them survive to adulthood), a fraction of the man's DNA is carried forward to future generations….[T]his theory seems to be bending over backward to account for something that really needs no explanation.

Human sexuality in pre-agricultural societies was likely to have been more about maintaining relationships than about basic reproduction itself. Don’t believe me? E. O. Wilson, the founding thinker of what’s come to be known as evolutionary psychology, wrote that homosexuality is “above all a form of bonding,” and that, like “the greater part of heterosexual behavior,” homosexuality is “a device that cements relationships”

It is as natural as anything else on God's earth.

Only on Youtube. Owen Wilson is especially good.

A tumblr.