Author: Dish Staff

The Drag Queens Of Lucha Libre

by Dish Staff

In a fascinating profile of gay luchador Saúl Armendáriz, William Finnegan offers a brief history of the gender-bending exótico:

Exóticos have been around since the 1940s. At first, they were dandies, a subset of rudos with capes and valets. They struck glamour-boy poses and threw flowers to the audience. As exóticos got swishier and more flirtatious, and started dressing in drag, the shtick became old-school limp-wristed gay caricature. Crowds loved to hate them, screaming “Maricón!” and “Joto!” (“Faggot!”). The exóticos made a delightful contrast with the super-masculine brutes they met in the ring. Popular exóticos insisted that it was all an act—in real life, they were straight. Baby Sharon was among the first, according to Armendáriz, to publicly say that, no, he was actually gay.

At his début as an exótico, Armendáriz wore no mask. “For my entrance, I wore a butterfly blouse of my mother’s. I wore the tail of my sister’s quinceañera dress. And then, to wrestle, a woman’s bathing suit.” He was billed as Rosa Salvaje, but the match was in Juárez, where everybody knew him. It was a terrifying night. “I thought it was a secret that I was gay, so I thought I was coming out. But everybody already knew. I was the only one who didn’t know.” Still, people yelled, “Kill the fag!” Rosa Salvaje, like Mister Romano, was quick and tough. No limp wrists or squealing. Maybe a brief bump and grind after hurling an opponent from the ring into the first row of seats. Maybe a shock kiss on the mouth for some stud he had in a submission hold. The crowds adored the act.

Previous Dish on exóticos here.

Another Land Grab, Or Much Ado About Nothing?

by Dish Staff

https://twitter.com/arabiaenquirer/statuses/507058535021445121

On Sunday, Israel declared nearly 1,000 acres of land near Bethlehem in the West Bank to be “state land”, allowing it to be developed into a new settlement, in what Haaretz describes as a partly punitive measure:

The announcement follows the cabinet’s decision last week to take over the land in response to the June kidnapping and killing of three teenage Jewish boys by Hamas militants in the area. Peace Now, which monitors settlement construction, said it was the largest Israeli appropriation of West Bank land in 30 years. … The appropriated land belongs to five Palestinian villages in the Bethlehem area: Jaba, Surif, Wadi Fukin, Husan and Nahalin. The move is the latest of a series of plans designed to attach the Etzion settlement bloc to Jerusalem and its environs. Construction of a major settlement, known as Gvaot, at the location has been mooted by Israel since the year 2000. Last year, the government invited bids for the building of 1,000 housing units at the site, and 523 are currently under construction. Ten families now live on the site, which is adjacent to a yeshiva.

Jonathan Tobin defends the decision by pointing out that this particular area would end up going to Israel in any conceivable two-state deal anyway:

Let’s be clear about this. Neither the ownership nor the future of Gush Etzion is up for debate in any peace talks. In every peace plan, whether put forward by Israel’s government or its left-wing opponents, the bloc remains part of Israel, a reality that most sensible Palestinians accept. The legal dispute about whether empty land can be converted to state use for development or settlement or if it is actually the property of neighboring Arab villages is one that will play itself out in Israel’s courts. Given the scrupulous manner with which Israel’s independent judiciary has handled such cases in the past, if the local Arabs can prove their dubious assertions of ownership, the land will be theirs.

But Damon Linker gets why the continual expansion of the settlements rankles:

Israel’s defenders say the country will repatriate hundreds of thousands of settlers and dismantle and remove or turn over to the Palestinians many thousands of homes, apartments, and buildings used by businesses, as well as roads, electricity, plumbing, and other infrastructure. That sounds like a stunningly foolish and wasteful policy. And yet, against all apparent good sense, Israel apparently intends to continue and expand it. No wonder so many Palestinians have despaired of ever reaching a two-state solution with Israel. Regardless of what Israel’s leaders and apologists say — and these days they often sound ambivalent at best — its actions are those of a country that has no intention of ever leaving the West Bank.

To Will Saletan, the move looks creepily Putinesque:

What’s more disturbing, from the standpoint of international norms, is the close resemblance between Israel’s and Russia’s rationalizations. Israelis point out that hundreds of thousands of Jews live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Russians make the same case for protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Israelis say they need the new patch of land to connect their West Bank outposts to Israel proper. Russians use the same logic to justify carving a land bridge to Crimea. Israelis say they captured the West Bank fairly in a long-ago war started by the other side. Russia could say the same about its World War II reclamation of Ukraine. Israel says it’s still willing to negotiate peace; the ongoing settlements just add to its leverage. That’s exactly how Russian officials view their bullying in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Hamas has grown more popular since the Gaza war:

A new poll appears to show that support for Hamas has surged among Palestinians – in spite of (or perhaps due to) a huge Israeli military operation that battered Gaza and left many of the militant group’s fighters dead. It’s a stark shift. If presidential elections were held today with just the two top candidates, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) found that 61 percent of Palestinians would vote for the militant’s leader Ismail Haniyeh over current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. That’s a big increase over a poll conducted in June, which found that 53 percent supported Abbas and 41 percent supported Haniyeh. PCPSR note that it’s the first time that Haniyeh has received a majority in the eight years they have asked the question.

Manipulated By Metaphors

by Dish Staff

Figurative language may warp your perception of reality. Britt Peterson explains:

Lera Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego, has written a series of papers on the effect of figurative language, particularly metaphors of space and time, on reasoning. One paper, written with Paul Thibodeau, an assistant professor of psychology at Oberlin College, showed that substituting just one word in a text about a crime wave ravaging an imaginary town – comparing crime to a “beast” instead of a “virus” – completely changed how readers responded to the problem. People who read that crime was a beast were far more likely to advocate putting more police on the streets or locking up criminals; people who read “virus” were far more likely to push for education and social reforms. And yet, when people cited the factors behind their decisions, no one mentioned the metaphor. “People love to think that they’re being rational, and all of us love to think that we’re basing our opinion entirely on facts,” Boroditsky told me. “But in fact it was the metaphor that people overlooked.”

Meanwhile, Michael Chorost looks at what happens in our brains when we interpret metaphors:

Neuroscientists agree on what happens with literal sentences like “The player kicked the ball.” The brain reacts as if it were carrying out the described actions. This is called “simulation.” Take the sentence “Harry picked up the glass.” “If you can’t imagine picking up a glass or seeing someone picking up a glass,” [linguist George] Lakoff wrote in a paper with Vittorio Gallese, a professor of human physiology at the University of Parma, in Italy, “then you can’t understand that sentence.” Lakoff argues that the brain understands sentences not just by analyzing syntax and looking up neural dictionaries, but also by igniting its memories of kicking and picking up.

But what about metaphorical sentences like “The patient kicked the habit”? An addiction can’t literally be struck with a foot. Does the brain simulate the action of kicking anyway? Or does it somehow automatically substitute a more literal verb, such as “stopped”? This is where functional MRI can help, because it can watch to see if the brain’s motor cortex lights up in areas related to the leg and foot.

The evidence says it does. “When you read action-related metaphors,” says Valentina Cuccio, a philosophy postdoc at the University of Palermo, in Italy, “you have activation of the motor area of the brain.” In a 2011 paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Rutvik Desai, an associate professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina, and his colleagues presented fMRI evidence that brains do in fact simulate metaphorical sentences that use action verbs. When reading both literal and metaphorical sentences, their subjects’ brains activated areas associated with control of action. “The understanding of sensory-motor metaphors is not abstracted away from their sensory-motor origins,” the researchers concluded.

Faces Of The Day

by Dish Staff

GUATEMALA-RELIGION-RIGHTS

Children members of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group remain at the building where the group will stay in Guatemala City on September 2, 2014. Two hundred and thirty ultra-Orthodox Jews were expelled from the town of San Juan La Laguna by Mayan indigenous leaders. By Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images. More details on the controversial Orthodox group here.

Making Cops Wear Cameras

by Dish Staff

New York City Public Advocate Displays Police Wearable Cameras

It’s happening:

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that two companies, Safety Visions and Digital Ally, donated about 50 cameras to the Ferguson Police Department a week ago. Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson said they are “still playing with them,” but officers started using the cameras at a protest march on Saturday. Jackson said the officers captured video of protesters taunting them.

More than 153,000 people have signed a“We the People” petition to create a “Mike Brown Law” that would require all police to wear cameras, and several police departments across the country have moved toward implementing them in the wake of Brown’s shooting. Police in Columbia, South Carolina just started testing the cameras, and last week the police chief in Houston, Texas requested $8 million to equip 3,500 officers over the next three years.

But Justin T. Ready and Jacob T.N. Young, who have done research on cop cameras and support their use, caution that “many assumptions people make about body-worn cameras simply aren’t true.” A big one:

The first myth is that video evidence is completely objective and free of interpretation. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth at least a million. Or is it? For example, we’ve been working on a study surveying residents in a large West Coast city about their experiences with police officers during traffic stops. One finding was surprising: When asked whether they observed the officer touch his gun when approaching the car, 50.9 percent of black motorists said yes. In contrast, only 11.5 percent of white motorists observed the officer touch his gun. What’s surprising is not the disparity but that police training and policy in this city required all officers to approach vehicles during traffic stops with their hand on their service weapon. Essentially, white motorists may not have been paying as much attention to where the officer was placing his or her hands when approaching the vehicle. What was a subtlety of behavior for whites was not a minor detail for blacks. The police in this city did not wear on-officer video cameras. It is possible that police were more likely to disregard their training with white motorists, but a 2007 study by the Rand Corp.found that when researchers matched stops involving black drivers with similarly situated white drivers (those stopped at the same time, place, etc.), officers were no more likely to disregard their training for white motorists. What do you think—was our finding due to a difference in police behavior or selective awareness of the officer touching his firearm?

The point is that two people observing the same police activity may see different things because each person will focus her attention on details that are most important to her own self-interest. A video clip from body cams is part of a larger story, some of which is not caught on camera.

Previous Dish on cop cameras here.

(Photo: New York City Public Advocate Letitia James displays a video camera that police officers could wear on patrol during a press conference on August 21, 2014 in New York City. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Celebrities: They Sext Like Us, Ctd

by Dish Staff

David Auerbach blames Apple for the photo hacking:

Apple is currently delighted that people are talking about how you shouldn’t take naked photos of yourself in the first place, but make no mistake: Apple has been provably irresponsible with users’ security. It is currently unclear how the naked photos were gathered—most likely through a number of different methods and different servers over a period of months if not years. What is clear is that Apple has had a known security vulnerability in its iCloud service for months and has been careless about protecting its users. Apple patched this vulnerability shortly after the leak, so even if we’re not sure of exactly how the photos got hacked, evidently Apple thinks it might have had something to do with it. Whether or not this particular vulnerability was used to gather some of the photos—Apple is not commenting, as usual, but the ubiquity and popularity of Apple’s products certainly points to the iCloud of being a likely source—its existence is reason enough for users to be deeply upset at their beloved company for not taking security seriously enough.

Yishai Schwartz points a finger at the private sector more generally:

[A]s this week’s photos scandal demonstrates, the threat to privacy comes from the private sector as much as from the government. Is another Nixon, and particularly one powerful enough to overcome layers of post-Watergate oversight and compliance mechanisms, really more likely than an iCloud or Gmail hacker? When corporations cannot even be relied upon to secure our content, it seems naïve to automatically entrust our privacy to the private sector rather than the government. And it seems odd to allow Verizon commercial access to the same information that we deny the NSA for the purpose of counterterrorism.

In the modern era, it is the large corporations that pose the greatest threat to privacy. Google, Amazon, and Facebook may know things about us that we have never written in an email or stored in a file. We may never even know what is included in the mosaics of our lives that corporations are already weaving. With the government, we can take comfort that layers of bureaucracy, minimization procedures, and oversight prevent tyranny and mitigates the damage from leaks. But with private corporations, we have no such assurances.

On the subject of Apple, a reader responds to Sue Halpern’s post last week on the upcoming release of the iPhone 6:

There are a lot of these anti-Apple articles written by people who claim to understand Apple products. But they don’t ever seem to discuss the real reasons that exist for owning one. Here are mine:

1. Top notch hardware – if you’ve compared the responsiveness between and Apple touch screen and another brand, there is a difference that matters to some people. Another example, the always amazing and always improving iPhone camera.

2. No malware – the threat of malware grows every year on Android-installed gadgets. Thanks to Apple‘s careful administration of their app store, there is virtually no threat on iOS.

3. Product support – Apple makes it easy for their owners to ALL have the latest version operating system. Many, many phone makers ignore new versions, or make their own versions. Their refusal to support the standards set forth by Google make it difficult sometimes to be sure the phone you’re buying now can run an app now, and even more unlikely, to be sure it will be able to run new apps a year from now. Which leads to #4:

4. Developer support – Developers have to test on dozens of different devices and operating systems if they want their app to work in the Android ecosystem. This is costly and often their app is made long after the iOS version, if they decide ever to make it at all.

5. Forward thinking – Apple introduces innovative features every year. This year they’re rumored to be implementing NFC payments. With their reputation and the strength of the usage of their products in the real world, things like NFC which failed before, are more likely to succeed. Meaning iPhone owners are prepared for the future already, while other brands follow suit. Same with 64 bit processing: most of us don’t know what that is, but perhaps our experience of the device will be improved thanks to this technology.

6. User experience – this is the top reason I use Apple devices. While nothing is perfect, Apple places an importance on how users interact with their products. Something like a 64 bit processor is a small part of the carefully-crafted ecosystem which makes the whole entirety a pleasure to use. Other manufacturers get this, but just as often as not, other aspects such as price or deadline take priority.

I’m an Apple fanboy for these reasons, and not because of some mystique that anti-Apple articles like the quoted one prefer to present. If I someday feel these are no longer Apple‘s priorities, I will certainly look elsewhere. Till then, it’s nice to buy a device and not have to worry about if I did enough research or made the right choice.

Beheading, Baiting, Backfiring

by Dish Staff

In response to ISIS’s brutal murder of American journalist Steven Sotloff in a video released yesterday, the Obama administration is vowing justice for both Sotloff’s death and that of James Foley, with Obama announcing in Estonia this morning that “we will not be intimidated” and “justice will be served”. Bearing in mind that these atrocities against Americans makes an escalated US military operation against ISIS more likely, not less, Keating wonders what the group expects to accomplish by killing these hostages:

ISIS may be ruthless and fanatical, but it would be impossible to expand as quickly as it has thus far without an understanding of strategy. The group’s leaders surely know that they are likely drawing the U.S. military further into this conflict and believe this is to their advantage. Kurdish and Iraqi forces, with help from the U.S. and Iran, seem to be rolling back ISIS’s territorial gains in Iraq, so the group’s best hope of remaining a viable and prominent militant group may be to go underground and continue to inflict terror on its enemies. And those enemies aren’t just American. ISIS also recently released videos showing the beheading of a Kurdish peshmerga fighter and a Lebanese soldier. Hopefully this strategy will backfire before any more hostages are killed.

He follows up with some speculative answers, including the possibility that ISIS really thinks it can deter the US:

ISIS may believe that it can continue to demonstrate that it can strike the U.S. by executing these prisoners, and that the U.S. isn’t going to do anything about it. If this really is their thinking, they don’t have a very good grasp of history. Americans are traditionally reluctant to go to war right up until they do. Saddam Hussein didn’t think the U.S. would really attack him either.

Shane Harris and Kate Brannen suspect that by threatening to kill a British hostage, the jihadists are baiting the UK into getting involved militarily:

At the end of the Sotloff video, the killer threatens to execute another captive, who, the killer claims, is British citizen David Cawthorne Haines. That claim couldn’t be immediately verified. But if true, it would show that the Islamic State is broadening its terrorism campaign to include British civilians, a move that could well prompt a military response by the United Kingdom. This week, British Prime Minister David Cameron said he is weighing whether to join the United States in carrying out airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq, and potentially in Syria. Without naming Cameron specifically, Sotloff’s killer warns “governments that enter this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State to back off and leave our people alone.” That threat seemed timed to coincide with deliberations in London.

Jamie Dettmer argues against suppressing reporting about ISIS hostages, saying it only amplifies the value of these videos:

Openness would take away some of the control the jihadists have to administer shock as they go on killing. The U.S. and U.K. with their blackouts are handing ISIS the propaganda initiative, leaving it to the jihadists to decide when captives should be named, allowing them to add to the drama of the unveiling when they first threaten hostages with execution on camera and then carrying out the brutal deed. At least this power of naming could be taken from the jihadists, who already are in the position to taunt their foes and turn their slaughtering of Westerners into a global spectacle.

But Dexter Filkins asks whether ISIS’s snuff films are about something other than propaganda:

It’s hard to watch the video of Steven Sotloff’s last moments and not conclude … the ostensible objective of securing an Islamic state is nowhere near as important as killing people. For the guys who signed up for ISIS—including, especially, the masked man with the English accent who wielded the knife—killing is the real point of being there. Last month, when ISIS forces overran a Syrian Army base in the city of Raqqa, they beheaded dozens of soldiers and displayed their trophies on bloody spikes. “Here are heads that have ripened, that were ready for the plucking,” an ISIS fighter said in narration. Two soldiers were crucified. This sounds less like a battle than like some kind of macabre party.

Let The End Times Roll

by Dish Staff

Bob Marshall warns that in Louisiana, “one of the greatest environmental and economic disasters in the nation’s history is rushing toward a catastrophic conclusion over the next 50 years”:

At the current rates that the sea is rising and land is sinking, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists say by 2100 the Gulf of Mexico could rise as much as 4.3 feet across this landscape, which has an average elevation of about 3 feet. If that happens, everything outside the protective levees – most of Southeast Louisiana – would be underwater.

The effects would be felt far beyond bayou country. The region best known for its self-proclaimed motto “laissez les bons temps rouler” – let the good times roll – is one of the nation’s economic linchpins. This land being swallowed by the Gulf is home to half of the country’s oil refineries, a matrix of pipelines that serve 90 percent of the nation’s offshore energy production and 30 percent of its total oil and gas supply, a port vital to 31 states, and 2 million people who would need to find other places to live. The landscape on which all that is built is washing away at a rate of a football field every hour, 16 square miles per year.

Brad Plumer notes that climate change is only one of the environmental problems facing the region:

The land in southeast Louisiana was built up over thousands of years from sediment washed down by the Mississippi River and anchored by plant life in the marshes and wetlands. Without this replenishing, the soil would simply sink into the Gulf of Mexico. And over the past century, various human activities have disrupted this ecosystem. After the Great Flood of 1927, the US Army Corps of Engineers built up a series of levees along the Mississippi that controlled springtime flooding but also blocked sediment from washing down the river and replenishing the delta.

At the same time, the Louisiana coast became a major source of oil and gas during the 20th century. That meant two things. Energy companies dredged thousands of miles of canals through the wetlands to transport equipment through – and those canals allowed shoreline to crumble and saltwater to seep in, killing off plants. Meanwhile, some scientists argue that the land itself has sunk after companies extracted oil and gas from underground wells.

Can Burger Flippers Unionize?

by Dish Staff

Jonathan Cohn relays the latest on tomorrow’s fast food industry strikes:

On Thursday, fast food workers across the country are planning to walk off the job and, in at least a few places, engage in civil disobedience. It’s part of a two-year-old campaign, backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), to lift the wages of fast food workers and to make it possible for them to join unions. Presently, jobs in the fast food industry are the lowest paying in the country: The mean hourly salary for a cook is $9.07 an hour, which works out to a little less than $19,000 a year for full-time employment. But many people in fast food don’t work full time and, naturally, many of them make less than the mean.

He sees this as a fight worth fighting:

SEIU’s president, Mary Kay Henry, has apparently taken some grief for spending so much of the union’s money on an effort unlikely to swell the organization’s ranks anytime soon. But labor has always been at its best when it was an advocate for all working people, not just those paying dues.

Megan McArdle is skeptical:

I would like to believe in the possible success of this effort. But I find it hard to suspend my disbelief. The classic union successes were in mass industries that enjoyed large economies of scale and few ready substitutes for their products. That meant a union only had to organize a handful of firms with workers concentrated in a few large plants. Once they had unionized those plants, it was easy to extract wage and benefit gains for the workers, because when economies of scale are high, so is worker productivity. The average auto worker generates hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of output; the average fast food worker, much less. That matters a lot. …

If unions want to turn fast-food operations into “good union jobs,” there may be a way through the government: getting the National Labor Relations Board to help them unionize McDonald’s rather than picking away at its franchisees, or pushing governments at various levels to pass a much higher minimum wage. I’m skeptical of either plan, for reasons I have outlined before. But they seem much more likely to work than another high-publicity, low-participation walkout.