A dangerously ill HIV patient waits to be taken to the hospital for treatment on November 29, 2014 in Yangon, Burma. The center, which has be been in operation since 2002, is owned and has been operated by the opposition party, the National League for Democracy, after the failure of the Myanmar government to take action and NGO’s being prevented from intervening. By Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Julia Ioffe posted a reflection on how her Russian-Jewish family came to the US that zooms out into a history lesson on our immigration laws – a history replete with political calculations, arbitrary rules, exceptions, and yes, presidential fiats. Far from offering a clear-cut distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, she concludes, “American immigration law is perhaps one of the most mercurial sets of laws we have”:
It is not set in stone, nor has it ever been. Historically, it has depended on racism, trade priorities, and geopolitical considerations, just as it does today. And as Senator Ted Cruz, son of a Cuban immigrant, rails against Hondurans and Mexicans for coming to America illegally, keep in mind just how lucky his family is to come from a country that got the kind of special status that allowed, and still allows, Cubans to come to U.S. in ways that would be considered illegal for other populations and to get a green card in a year. Consider that this is not because of a law passed in the U.S. Congress, but because some guy we didn’t like seized power in 1959 and a few American presidents decided to help the Cuban bourgeoisie—and to stick it to Nikita Khrushchev. It’s why I and my 60 relatives are here, too. And it is quite likely that one of your ancestors got in through some giant, executive loophole ages and ages ago. Or got here when there were no loopholes because there were simply no laws pertaining to immigration.
The Dish previously covered the “cutting the line” argument against amnesty for illegal immigrants here.
Honest Trailers finally tackles the most polarizing rom-com in history:
It’s more complicated than you might expect:
The study, recently published in the journal Demography, does not dispute the tendency to move for a husband’s career. Rather, the new study takes issue with the reasons behind the move. The big take-away: Women enter professions that make it easy to work anywhere, and move for any reason, including for a spouse. Men choose careers in fields that are geographically-constrained. In other words, men have to move in order to move up.
“The tendency for men to move more often than women is completely explained by the types of jobs they enter, not that they are men or women,” [study author Alan] Benson said in an interview. “Men who enter female-dominated jobs don’t tend to move as much for work. If you look at women who enter male-dominated jobs, they tend to move a lot.”
And if you look at women who are not married, they relocate for a job less often than men do.
Shane Ferro reads through the same study:
This segregation, Benson finds, is particularly pronounced among people with college degrees.
There are a lot of things this could mean. One of those is that women happen to like more flexible jobs. Another is that women feel a lot of pressure, from a young age, to sort themselves into flexible jobs.
At the end of the day, this goes back to a common conclusion from research concerning gender and careers: women often trade a lot of earning potential for flexibility, for better or for worse.
Carrabelle, Florida, 12 pm
In light of the horrific allegations that UVA covered up a student’s gang-rape, Libby Nelson imagines applying the university’s honor code – which has seen 183 students expelled over academic infractions since 1998 – to sexual assault allegations:
When California colleges began requiring affirmative consent, or “yes means yes,” there was an outcry from commentators afraid that they were reclassifying ordinary sex as rape. But “yes means yes” is simply the sexual version of an academic honor code. It’s acknowledgment that attending a college is not a right but a privilege that comes with responsibilities, and that one of those responsibilities is to treat fellow students with respect. …
Although false accusations of rape are extremely rare, a wrongful criminal conviction for sexual assault is a travesty. A wrongful expulsion from college after due process for the accused is deeply unfair, but it leaves a less permanent stain. If a student expelled for sexual assault enrolls elsewhere, their transcript doesn’t usually list the reason for the expulsion, and colleges don’t have to disclose the details.
Wendy McElroy disagrees on that last point:
A common rejoinder is that hearings are not legal proceedings. But the hearings actually operate in a legal gray zone.
For example, the last campaign from the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault includes improving cooperation with the police. Increasingly, the testimony an accused gives without due process can be turned over for use by the police and courts. Moreover, the hearings impose penalties as draconian as a court. A student can be expelled with the word “rapist” permanently in his file. He may be tens of thousands of dollars in debt with no ability to obtain a license to practice his chosen profession. Many unlicensed professions will shun him as well. What university of quality will accept him? His reputation and belief in justice may be damaged beyond repair.
Rebecca Plante and Andrew Smiler take a different view, arguing that the low standards of evidence used by the university’s misconduct board actually make them less likely to “convict”:
Although apparently the president’s office was aware of allegations of sexual felonies, including gang rapes, it also appears that the Charlottesville police were not asked to investigate until recently. Why are colleges and universities investigating allegations of felony sex-related crimes without having to involve local law enforcement? Given the paucity of the training, is it reasonable to expect board members and university staff members to investigate and adjudicate such serious criminal allegations? Board members are also expected to base their findings on a preponderance of evidence (for example, a 51-percent likelihood that a crime was committed). That standard may dissuade board members from finding the accused guilty.
Meanwhile, like one of our readers, Richard Bradley finds the Rolling Stone story incredible:
Jackie makes her way downstairs, her red dress apparently sufficiently intact to wear; the party is still raging. Though she is blood-stained – three hours with shards of glass “digging into her back,” and gang-raped, including with a beer bottle – and must surely look deeply traumatized, no one notices her. She makes her way out a side entrance she hadn’t seen before. She calls her friends, who tell her that she doesn’t want to be known as the girl who cried rape and worry that if they take her to the hospital they won’t get invited to subsequent frat parties.
Nothing in this story is impossible; it’s important to note that. It could have happened. But to believe it beyond a doubt, without a question mark – as virtually all the people who’ve read the article seem to – requires a lot of leaps of faith. It requires you to indulge your pre-existing biases.
Bradley’s skepticism makes Robby Soave wonder:
[W]hen I say that I was initially inclined to believe the story, it’s not because I wanted or needed it to be true to fit my worldview. Rather, I assumed honesty on the part of the author and her source—not because I’m naive, but because I didn’t think someone would lie about such an unbelievable story. This isn’t a case of he-said / she-said; this is an extraordinary crime that indicts a dozen people and an entire university administration. Assuming a proper investigation—which the police are now conducting—confirming many of the specific details should be relatively easy. If “Jackie” is lying, there is a good chance she will be caught (and Erdely’s career ruined). So I believed it.
However, some of the details do strike me as perplexing on subsequent re-reads.
Ben McGrath has a long and fascinating profile of Sasha Hostyn, aka Scarlett, “the most accomplished woman in the young history of electronic sports,” namely Starcraft II:
Some context from McGrath:
“It’s not a sport,” John Skipper, the president of ESPN and, by extension, the emperor of contemporary sports, has declared, referring to gaming in general. “It’s a competition.” He added, “Mostly, I’m interested in doing real sports.”
That “mostly” was an acknowledgment that the network has nonetheless begun hedging its bet against a cyber-athlete insurgency. In July, ESPN2 aired a half-hour program previewing an annual tournament for a game called Defense of the Ancients 2, or Dota 2, thereby enraging football and basketball fans who would have preferred round-the-clock speculation about off-season roster moves, and who vented on Twitter: “None of these people are anywhere near athletic,” “Wtf man. This is our society now,” “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING ON ESPN2?,” and so on. Meanwhile, the winners of the Dota 2 tournament took home a total of five million dollars.
Back to Scarlet, and how her story touches on the themes of gamergate:
[A]s an academic Rob [Scarlet’s father] had been a longtime observer of online communities, with their anonymous sniping and trolling. He was one of the first few hundred people to create an account on the social-networking site Reddit, and still recalled the coarsening of the site’s tone as its user base expanded beyond programmer geeks. “I knew that small communities are pretty good, and big ones get toxic,” he said. … The toxicity of gaming culture, with its adolescent sexuality and its tendency toward misogyny, was of particular relevance in Scarlett’s case. Shortly after she turned pro, word got out on the Internet that she was a transgender woman.
(She won’t discuss the subject with journalists, as she feels that it has no bearing on her role in gaming.) That was in early April of 2012, about a year after she began playing the game casually, and about a month after a controversy arose in a coarser corner of the e-sports world, when a prominent Street Fighter personality named Aris Bakhtanians was asked by a Twitch employee, Jared Rea, whether the fighting-game community’s habits of using vulgar and, in some cases, hostile language toward women could be tamped down. As Rea put it, “Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?”
Bakhtanians replied, “You can’t, because they’re one and the same thing. This is a community that’s, you know, fifteen or twenty years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting-game community it’s not the fighting-game community—it’s StarCraft.” …
In the rush to discover more about this new sensation, a few people noticed that the previous fall she’d entered—and won, easily—a couple of Iron Lady events, women-only tournaments organized online by the Electronic Sports League. No fair, some argued, apparently believing that StarCraft players, like sprinters, should be segregated by degrees of testosterone. The tournaments’ director, pHaRSiDE, wasn’t buying it. “Transgender girls have been competing in Iron Lady since the start of the tournament series,” he wrote. “No one seemed to care until Scarlett started winning. So it’s kinda funny how people only want to ban transgender girls who are incredibly good.”
From the Everything Is Terrible department:
The Onion’s Clickhole associate editor Daniel Kibblesmith will join BuzzFeed as a staff writer for its Buzz vertical, the publication told staffers Monday … BuzzFeed was among the sites Clickhole was founded to lampoon.
“I’m extremely excited to join the BuzzFeed team,” Kibblesmith told Poynter. “I’ve never felt closer to my ultimate goal of living directly inside of the internet.”
The best thing you’ll see on the Internet today:
Massie sees the upcoming British elections as “a win-win proposition for nationalists and a lose-lose calamity for unionists”:
First, it is entirely possible that the SNP will win the Scottish part of the election — if their performance matched the latest polls, they would take 50 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster constituencies. (Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown’s belated decisions not to run for Parliament again need to be understood against this backdrop.)
Second, and just as disturbingly, David Cameron may yet win a second term. Scots Tories, more than 90 per cent of whom backed the Union, would face a lose-lose proposition. The SNP’s popularity in Scotland might cost Labour the election but only at the price of further weakening the Union. A Tory government with little support in Scotland would encourage the nationalist narrative that Scotland and England are countries of such divergent character that divorce is inevitable. No wonder the SNP secretly pines for the very thing it professes to hate most: Tory supremacy at Westminster.
The Dish 