The Dish – Page 171

The Culture Wars And … Manners

We really are back to the 1990s when I find myself agreeing with Jonah Goldberg:

We live in an age of diversity, defined not merely by gender and race, but by lifestyles and values. That’s mostly a good thing — mostly. Like all other good things in life, diversity comes at a cost. And a big part of the tab is a lost consensus about what constitutes good manners and propriety. So instead of knowing how to behave, we spend vast amounts of our time worrying and arguing about it, with combatants on every side insisting it’s “Live and let live” for me but “Shut up! How dare you!” for thee.

In this age of unprecedented cultural liberty, we’ve lost sight of the fact that common standards of decency and decorum can be liberating. They inconvenience everyone — a little — but they also free us from worrying about who we might offend or why. School uniforms, remember, constrain the wealthy kids for the benefit of the poor ones.

For millennia, good manners were understood as the means by which strangers showed each other respect. Now, too many people demand respect but have lost the ability, or desire, to show it in return.

One way to defuse the issue of, say, cat-calling is to insist on decent manners, rather than to turn the question into a bloody fist-fight over patriarchy. One way to have avoided “shirtgate,” for example, would have been to parse that micro-aggression as a failure of appropriate taste in the context of a public appearance, rather than seeing it as another micro-aggression against an entire gender. Of course, this can obscure deeper issues. And I’m sure not advocating that we constrain robust feminist critiques of clueless or sexist boorishness. But a question of manners can be neutral and less emotive grounds for actually achieving what we want to achieve in creating a culture more aware of what the world feels like for many women. Demand that men be gentlemen, rather than something other than men.

I wonder also if our digital life hasn’t made all this far worse. Conor has a typically smart and nuanced take on this in its particulars. When you sit in a room with a laptop and write about other people and their flaws, and you don’t have to look them in the eyes, you lose all incentive for manners.

You want to make a point. You may be full to the brim with righteous indignation or shock or anger. It is only human nature to flame at abstractions, just as the awkwardness of physical interaction is one of the few things constraining our rhetorical excess. When you combine this easy anonymity with the mass impulses of a Twitterstorm, you can see why manners have evaporated and civil conversations turned into culture war.

I’m as guilty of this as many. There have been times – far too many – when my passion for an idea or revulsion at a news story can, in its broadness of aim, impugn the integrity or good faith of other individuals. If I had to speak my words to the faces of those I am painting with too broad and crude a brush, my language would be far more temperate (and probably more persuasive). And so restoring manners to online discourse is a hard task – especially in an era of instant mass communication and anonymity. It’s hard for a blogger or writer not least because you don’t want to sink into torpor or dullness or vapidity. You want to keep the debate fresh and real.

But all this means, of course, is that we actually need a set of manners for this age more urgently than in many others. Our web silos – from the Jihadists to the left-blogosphere to the right-media complex – make it easy to thrive and succeed without manners, and even easier to fail in the marketplace by upholding them. But manners matter. They create the climate in which free debate is possible. They are the lubrication that can make a liberal polity actually work.

Update from a reader, for the record:

Jonah Goldberg sighs about society’s lack of manners and decency:

(Sidebar photo by Flickr user Butupa. This image was cropped by the Dish.)

The View From Your Window

Seattle, Washington, 4.18 pm

How Much Does Keystone Matter? Ctd

A reader writes:

This is an issue that chafes me to the core. I’m an oil and gas attorney in Houston (although I’m moving in-house with a Dallas-based midstream pipeline company next week). The political parties are strangely upside-down on this issue. Not only are Republican claims of job-creation largely false, but Democrats and environmental activists in particular have not grasped that alternatives to pipeline transportation of production – oil trains and tanker trucks – are inherently more dangerous.

Not like, I-forgot-to-wear-my-seatbelt-to-the-grocery-store more dangerous. I’m talking about a failure/spill incidence close to 5,000x greater than most pipelines.

Google the Lac Megantic disaster in Quebec in July 2013, or the oil train explosion in Aliceville, Alabama last November, or the James River derailment in Lynchburg, Virginia this past August. Oil trains literally explode into fireballs about once every six months! In each case, the damage and contamination is mind-bending.

This is not to say that pipelines are perfectly safe; they are not. But if you’re trying to protect the environment and you know that fossil fuels will be around for at least another generation, you should advocate for more pipelines and tighter safety and inspection standards. This isn’t a hard or unrealistic political goal for the environmental movement: interstate pipelines are already under the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the bulk of whose regulations are determined by the executive branch, not Congress.

But another reader emphasizes the risks of a pipeline:

How much does Keystone matter? Potentially quite a bit. You quoted Rebecca Leber as saying, “In the end, most Americans wouldn’t notice Keystone’s impact – both good and bad.” The people who do have a good chance of noticing its impact would be those who depend upon the soil and water along its path. They are the classic case of people having to socialize risk while others privatize the reward.

A publication out of Cornell University (pdf) found that TransCanada and the first stage of the Keystone pipeline, completed in 2010, have a pretty poor track record when it comes to spills:

TransCanada has claimed that Keystone XL will be the “safest pipeline in the U.S.” However, since the initial Keystone 1 pipeline began operation in June 2010, at least 35 spills have occurred in the U.S. and Canada. In its first year, the U.S. section of Keystone 1 had a spill frequency 100 times greater than TransCanada forecast. In June 2011, federal pipeline safety regulators determined Keystone 1 was a hazard to public safety and issued TransCanada a Corrective Action Order.

To make matters worse, the type of heavy tar sand oil they transport is more corrosive and appears to be the cause of more frequent spills that result in more difficult cleanups:

There is evidence that pipelines transporting diluted bitumen tar sands oil have a higher frequency of spills than pipelines carrying conventional crude. Between 2007 and 2010, pipelines transporting diluted bitumen tar sands oil in the northern Midwest spilled three times more oil per mile than the national average for conventional crude oil. The relatively high spill record of pipelines transporting diluted bitumen has raised concerns about the spill potential of Keystone XL and other proposed tar sands pipelines. Diluted bitumen is heavier, more corrosive, and contains more toxic chemicals and compounds than conventional crude oil. There is also evidence that tar sands pipeline spills inflict more damage than spills from conventional crude pipelines. Tar sands oil spills are more difficult to clean up, and the diluted bitumen’s toxic and corrosive qualities may increase the overall negative impacts to the economy and public health.

More generally, Elizabeth Kolbert argues that Keystone is important because “it illustrates a basic point,” that the “U.S.—and the world more generally—cannot reduce carbon emissions while at the same time continuing to exploit every fossil-fuel source that presents itself”:

Even as it has been tightening fuel-efficiency standards and regulating power plants, the Obama Administration has presided over a dramatic expansion of U.S. fuel production, which has included a sixty per cent increase in domestic oil output. The Administration doesn’t deserve all of the blame—or, depending on your outlook, the credit—for this development; many of the relevant leases were issued under the Bush Administration. Still, the result has been an energy policy that’s really no energy policy at all—a one-from-Column-A, one-from-Column-B approach that may have marginally reduced domestic emissions, but probably has helped to increase them abroad. Since 2008, coal exports from the U.S. have nearly doubled.

Along the same lines, opposition to Keystone has served a purpose insofar as it has slowed down development of Canada’s tar sands. Earlier this month, Jeff Spross passed along a report to that effect:

The report — Material Risk: How Public Accountability Is Slowing Tar Sands Development — looked into the delays and project cancellations that have been caused by public opposition to the development of the tar sands. The ongoing battle over the Keystone XL pipeline is the most prominent example. But what it all adds up to is transportation bottlenecks, and falling profits for the industry even as crude oil has kept flooding in from Canada’s tar sands fields.

That difference between what oil companies have sold and what they could have sold in the absence of the bottlenecks amounts to $30.9 billion from 2010 through 2013, according to the analysis. A good portion of that is from the inevitable changes and risks that come along with any marketplace. But after going through the various circumstances of the last few years, and teasing out various signals in the data, the researchers concluded that $17.1 billion (or 55 percent) of that “can be credibly attributed to the impact of public accountability campaigns.”

Chewing Over Executive Action On Immigration, Ctd

Obama is scheduled to announce his executive action on immigration tonight at 8 pm ET. Like Mark Krikorian, Frum rejects the comparison of Obama’s amnesty to Reagan’s and George HW Bush’s:

Reagan and Bush acted in conjunction with Congress and in furtherance of a congressional purpose. In 1986, Congress passed a full-blown amnesty, the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, conferring residency rights on some 3 million people. Simpson-Mazzoli was sold as a “once and for all” solution to the illegal immigration problem: amnesty now, to be followed by strict enforcement in future. Precisely because of their ambition, the statute’s authors were confounded when their broad law generated some unanticipated hard cases. The hardest were those in which some members of a single family qualified for amnesty, while others did not. Nobody wanted to deport the still-illegal husband of a newly legalized wife. Reagan’s (relatively small) and Bush’s (rather larger) executive actions tidied up these anomalies. Although Simpson-Mazzoli itself had been controversial, neither of these follow-ups was.

Executive action by President Obama, however, would follow not an act of Congress but a prior executive action of his own: his suspension of enforcement against so-called Dreamers in June 2012. A new order would not further a congressional purpose. It is intended to overpower and overmaster a recalcitrant Congress.

Vinik counters:

What both Frum and Krikorian’s analyses fail to explain is how Obama’s planned action is not a faithful attempt at executing the law. You can’t argue that Obama’s “order would not further a congressional purpose” without explaining what Congress’s purposes are in passing immigration laws. This error isn’t unique to Frum or Krikorian: Conservatives often fail to use a legal framework in analyzing Obama’s action. … Bush and Reagan’s actions were legally acceptable for the same reason Obama’s would be: ensuring that our immigration policy is fair.

Gabriel Malor pushes back on Vinik:

Obama, in contrast to Reagan and Bush 41, is not trying to implement a lawfully created amnesty. There has been no congressional amnesty. In fact, there has been no immigration action from Congress in the past few years except the post-9/11 REAL ID Act of 2005, which made it harder, not easier, for aliens to qualify for immigration relief. More than that, Congress declined to pass a legalization of the type Obama is issuing during both Obama’s term and in a hotly-contested bill during President Bush 43′s term.

Thus, Obama is clearly contravening both ordinary practice and the wishes of Congress—as expressed in statute—by declaring an amnesty himself. This is nothing like Reagan’s or Bush’s attempts to implement Congress’ amnesty.

Beutler is unimpressed by such arguments:

Republican presidents can, and will again, avoid enforcing environmental regulations. If Republicans identified a serious legal basis for selectively enforcing the estate tax, they could go ahead and do it. It would infuriate liberals just as weak environmental enforcement infuriates liberals. And it would be incumbent on the norms police to show that the discretion that exists in immigration law also exists in tax law. But it wouldn’t add up to a new method of politics.

Carl Hampe points out that “Congress has significant powers as well in this situation”:

It could pass legislation terminating the grant of work authorization to this population. It could use its power of the purse to prevent the Department of Homeland Security from expending funds to give the beneficiary class employment authorization documents. Ultimately, only Congress can decide the permanent legal fate of undocumented immigrants receiving the temporary immigration benefits that Obama is considering now. This happened, for example, when President Jimmy Carter in 1980 blessed the legal entry of certain Cubans and Haitians who arrived during the Mariel Boatlift. But these individuals did not obtain the right to permanently stay in the country until Congress acted to recognize these rights for those in this group without disqualifying criminal records.

In short, the immigration debate is primarily a question of politics and policy, not law. The president must act within certain legal parameters, but he apparently will do so. Congress has many legal tools to respond to his actions.

Norm Ornstein sympathizes with the president:

I understand the president’s need to act on immigration; I hope he will issue his EO and delay its effective date until the end of January or mid-February, giving the House one last chance to do something on the issue. But put into context, including the history of the last six years, the renunciation of the comprehensive Senate bill by its chief sponsor, Marco Rubio, in the face of grassroots conservative opposition, and the history of actions by previous presidents, it is not nearly as explosive as the rhetoric or editorials would suggest. Will it be separated from other issues where there is an opportunity for constructive action, or will it be the excuse for another meltdown into gridlock in the 114th Congress? We will have an answer in the lame duck.

And Francis Wilkinson fears DC will only get more dysfunctional:

If Obama is not departing from norms in this case, he certainly looks to be pushing the line. With a functioning Congress, large changes to immigration would rightly be the legislature’s prerogative. Of course, we don’t have a functioning Congress, and we do have millions of people living in limbo. It’s not hard to understand why Obama is doing this, and perhaps party relations in Washington really can’t get much worse. But I think they will.

(Photo: A man walks next to the U.S. – Mexico border wall on November 19, 2014 in Calexico, California. By Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)

Being Conscious Of Your Own Circumcision, Ctd

Readers continue to provide the best MGM conversation out there:

This is in response to this reader. The condition that worries the dads is called phimosis. Until my mid-twenties, I couldn’t see more than a dime-sized area of my glans when I pulled back my foreskin. I didn’t even realize my foreskin was supposed to retract until I stumbled upon information about the condition online.

I recommend the dads look at the archives of this forum. It contains many first-hand accounts of successfully overcoming phimosis with stretching exercises. After stretching my foreskin twice per day for a year, I was able to fully retract my foreskin when flaccid. My sensitivity decreased, but that was necessary. I was overly-sensitive, and now I’m able to retract to wash my glans every shower with soap and water, which any healthy uncircumcised man will tell you is simple and necessary. I don’t stretch now, years later, and my frenulum is still a bit tight when erect, but I was amazed by the improvement.

The forum is sometimes antagonistic to doctors, with the allegation that American doctors are too willing to circumcise in phimosis cases because they don’t know any better. Some extreme phimosis cases may need circumcision, but I recommend the dads do extensive research of their own before subjecting their son to a scalpel.

Another reader is pretty antagonistic toward American doctors:

America just doesn’t know how to deal with foreskins. We didn’t circumcise my son and his foreskin didn’t retract by age 5. We were told that it should by age 3, and the cure for a non-retracting foreskin was circumcision. No other advice was offered in England or America.

Then we moved to Bulgaria.

The doctor said we should pull the foreskin back to the point of gentle tension every day in the bath. Now, it’s a bit awkward for a mother to be handling her son’s penis, so I tried to get my son to do this himself, with so-so results. Not many months later, my son got an infection in his foreskin, from sloughed off skin cells trapped under the foreskin. He didn’t tell me in time, because he was an accident-prone kid and his solution to avoiding the doctor was to ignore the infection until he had a fever and was walking funny.

I checked on the web, consulted my home medical books, and called my American insurance company’s hotline. All the advice was to lop off that useless (and, it was hinted, disgusting) foreskin. But we were in Bulgaria, so we went to a Bulgarian hospital. The doctor was built like a weight lifter and had odd English. I explained my husband’s preference was to try to save the foreskin, if possible, expecting to be told it wasn’t. The doctor was absolutely horrified at the barbaric notion that anyone would consider removing a part of a man’s or a boy’s penis, especially for a trivial problem like a nonretracting foreskin with a treatable infection.

He forced the foreskin back, disinfected the infection, slathered antibiotic cream and told us to keep putting the cream on and that the foreskin now retracted. The procedure took under 5 minutes, cost $60 (10$ fee, 50$ tip) and solved the problem. That was years ago. My son remains intact.

I think it’s the cultural value that foreskins are useless at best and otherwise potential for disgusting reservoirs for grunge that makes the American and English solution to be lop it off at the slightest hint of any problem – and better yet, before there’s a problem.

And back Stateside:

I have been reading your circumcision thread and thought your readers may want a perspective from a female pediatrician who actually performs circumcisions on a regular basis.

My patient base is semi-rural, mostly white, blue collar, in the heart of Appalachia. They feel that their newborn sons are not “normal” if they are not clipped, and in fact that is sometimes the only question they ask when their son is just born – “Will he be circumcised?” Typically my partners and I will do a circumcision before the child leaves the hospital, but it can be done with local anesthesia up to two months of age in an office setting. There are different types of circumcision procedures that can be done and different doctors are trained on different procedures, but the basic principle is the same: the foreskin is loosened from the glans, a dorsal slit is performed and the foreskin is either placed in a clamp, or tied off around a plastic ring. There are pluses and minuses to each procedure, but it is mostly doctor preference regarding which one is done. And as I said, local anesthesia is given.

As part of my practice, I want my patients’ parents to make the right decision, and so I typically perform a thorough explanation of the risks and benefits of the procedure. But I do get frustrated that despite letting them know they don’t need the procedure, the parents feel it must be done.

Reading your readers stories, I am sad and a little disappointed because although I was not involved in these cases, I feel like the medical field have let them down. And I think the reason is because the majority of males in the US are circumcised, and that creates a bias and a misunderstanding of the true nature of the foreskin and the male sex organs. If you only see circumcised boys, you may not really know when the foreskin should protract, and you would view something that is completely normal as abnormal just because it is different.

First off, ALL males are born with a natural phimosis. With time the phimosis loosens. This can vary, but there is a key ingredient needed and that is TESTOSTERONE. That is why the doctors of the various readers gave them steroid cream, but that is just not as effective as your own production of testosterone. Now some mothers with uncircumcised boys are aggressive with “cleaning” and that traction will loosen the foreskin. Some boys are more playful, and that too will loosen foreskin, but a boy of age 3, 5, 7, 8 – even sometimes 14 – has very little testosterone flowing, so it is needed to mature the the male sex organ to function like it should. (As a side note, we recommend not pulling the foreskin down to clean, as that may cause it to rip from the glans but stick, swell and potentially cause loss of blood to the glans, which is bad.) Once the testosterone is flowing, the adolescent maleusually provides enough friction that any minor tightness will also loosen.

Obviously there are some exceptions to this rule, and a circumcision may need to be performed for medical reasons, but that is the exception. I would highly question any physician who tells you a prepubertal boy needs a circumcision if they are urinating with no problems. I also feel very sorry for the man that had a circumcision as an adult with just a local anesthetic that is cruel. No child or adolescent would get a circumcision out of the newborn period without general anesthesia, so why would we do that to an adult?

One more thing: I am surprised that nobody has mentioned circumcisions that had complications. Commonly I see penile adhesions where the foreskin has reattached itself to the glans of the penis, sometimes making it appear as though the child has never been circumcised. Unfortunately I actually had a mother re-circumcise her son due to this very issue, despite my explaining that this was completely unnecessary, as the boy was two and thus had no testosterone, and that it will get better with time. Unfortunately she became obsessed with it and insisted it be done. I will never forget that boy. (Interestingly enough, prepubertal girls have a similar condition in which the labia minor fuse together, because there is no estrogen blocking the opening of the vagina and even the urethra, but of course we would never perform procedures to separate that.)

So that’s my two cents, for what it’s worth. I found you a few years ago and have thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog.

And we never cease to enjoy these incredible contributions from readers. Update from another:

(Interestingly enough, prepubertal girls have a similar condition in which the labia minor fuse together, because there is no estrogen blocking the opening of the vagina and even the urethra, but of course we would never perform procedures to separate that.)

Actually, this is exactly what my daughter’s pediatrician recommended when she was less than a year old; we were told to put estrogen cream on it (don’t worry if your infant develops breasts, that’ll be temporary … never mind the people freaking out about exposing their children to tiny amounts of estrogenic compounds in BPA plastics and possible links to the obesity epidemic). And if that didn’t work, we were told surgery might be necessary. Thank god for the Internet. The problem went away on its own at about 18 months. Never caused any trouble.

Ethically-Sourced Junk Food Still Junk Food

Alice Robb flags a new paper in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing:

A team of researchers led by John Pedoza, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Kentucky, found that we assume that food made by a socially conscious company is also healthy.

Pedoza and colleagues asked 144 students to evaluate a new brand of granola bar after reading a fictitious newspaper article about the company behind the product. Half the participants read an article describing a company that had won awards for its corporate social responsibility; the other half read about a company whose charitable activities were more modest. (This company had only recently begun donating to a charity.) The newspaper articles also portrayed the companies as having either selfish or altruistic motives for their charitable activities: “selfish” managers admitted that they were hoping their philanthropy would enhance their company’s reputation; “altruistic” managers were motivated primarily by a desire to help the community.

After reading the articles, the students were shown a fact sheet about the granola bars, with details on proposed flavors, launch date, and suggested price, but nothing on nutrition. Then they had to indicate—on a scale of 1 to 7—how much they agreed with statements like, “I expect this product will contain few preservatives,” “I expect this product will be made with natural ingredients,” and “I expect this product will be very healthy.” They also ranked their expectations of its “deliciousness” on a 7-point scale.

As Pedoza expected, students assumed that the more socially responsible companies were also producing a healthier snack food: The average composite score of the granola bar produced by these companies was 4.58, compared to 3.9 for the less socially responsible brand.

(Photo by David Berkowitz)

The Costs Of Fighting Climate Change

Elizabeth Kolbert takes to task Naomi Klein’s latest book for downplaying those costs:

The need to reduce carbon emissions is, ostensibly, what This Changes Everything is all about. Yet apart from applauding the solar installations of the Northern Cheyenne, Klein avoids looking at all closely at what this would entail. She vaguely tells us that we’ll have to consume less, but not how much less, or what we’ll have to give up. …

To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the “warmists” do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.

Previous Dish on Klein’s book here.

Signed By An Algorithm

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Derek Thompson highlights a remarkable tool that “may soon further diminish the importance of actually hearing artists perform”:

Next Big Sound, a five-year-old music-analytics company based in New York, scours the Web for Spotify listens, Instagram mentions, and other traces of digital fandom to forecast breakouts. It funnels half a million new acts through an algorithm to create a list of 100 stars likely to break out within the next year. “If you signed our top 100 artists, 20 of them would make the Billboard 200,” Victor Hu, a data scientist with Next Big Sound, told me. …

The company has discovered that some metrics, such as Facebook likes, are unreliable indicators of a band’s trajectory, while others have uncanny forecasting power. “Radio exposure, unsurprisingly, is the most important thing,” Hu says. It remains the best way to introduce listeners to a new song; once they’ve heard it a few times on the radio, they tend to like it more. “But we discovered that hits to a band’s Wikipedia page are the second-best predictor.” Wikipedia searches are revealing for the same reason Shazam searches are. While getting a song on the radio ensures that people have heard it, Culbertson says, “Shazam tells you that people wanted to know more.”

What To Think Of Bill Cosby? Ctd

Whoopi Goldberg, a diehard Polanski defender, is skeptical of the allegations against Bill Cosby:

Readers react to the disturbing story:

I certainly understand Barbara Bowman’s anger. I think the answer to her question, of course, has more than a little to do with race. In this country, accusing a black man of raping a white woman comes with the burden of our racism and history of oppression. And when that man is a beloved entertainer and symbol of American fatherhood? You are right that his accusers had and have absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose. I just can’t imagine what these women have gone through emotionally.

Hannibal Buress, by virtue of his gender and race, made it possible for us to have this conversation at long last. That it took a man to legitimize their stories is most unfair. We owe Buress our gratitude nonetheless.

Another wonders why Cosby didn’t get his comeuppance sooner:

Ten years ago we still had more of a top-down media structure. “Going viral” was not a thing yet. YouTube hadn’t even started. Instead, shocking things generally had to pass through gatekeepers, whose incentives were basically not to piss off the wrong people. Rape accusations at the time were considered not appropriate for polite company unless it reinforced an existing narrative. I’m sure many media outlets heard of these accusations, but dismissed them because they weren’t “truthy” enough.

How another reader on our Facebook page views the story:

He said / she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said.

But a couple readers share Whoopi’s skepticism:

You wrote, “Believing Bill Cosby does not require you to take one person’s word over another – it requires you take one person’s word over 15 others.”

I have no idea what Cosby did back in the day. It would seem highly risky for a black man in the ’60s and ’70s to force himself on a white woman, but people have done risky things before. It was a long time ago, however, and it seems like too long a time to determine the truth of his or any other case without any real evidence.

The reason I’m writing this email however is to point out the problem with the “15 others” claim. The longer the time period, the more numerous the false claims/false memories. Did they get drunk and have sex with Cosby and regret it later and they have now over the years convinced themselves he must have slipped something into their drink 30 years ago? Did Cosby just hit on them years ago and grabbed a boob and they story grew in their mind? (Still bad, still inappropriate, but not as bad as rape). Did they have a sleazy experience with Cosby, believe that he could have raped somebody and embellish their story to help other victims?

Another:

If Bowman really wanted her story to come to light, she should not have settled and allowed the other assaulted women to testify in a trial. She accepted a settlement, and the reason to settle something like this is so the perpetrator can keep it as quiet as possible. She had a hand in keeping this quiet, and was financially rewarded for doing so. To complain about it now is disingenuous.

Update from a reader:

Cosby’s settlement was with Andrea Constand, not Barbara Bowman. She came forward to testify on behalf of Constand in a potential trial. That trial never took place because of the settlement, but Bowman has every right to speak up and is under no obligation to keep anything quiet.

Another adds:

As Bowman states in her Washington Post op-ed, “I have never received any money from Bill Cosby and have not asked for it.”

A torn reader rightfully falls on the side of the many female accusers:

I’ve been having a hard time dealing with the evidence that Bill Cosby is a rapist, but at the very minimum its helping me to understand why people sometimes defend and even excuse celebrities that are caught doing horrible things. Cosby was a fixture of my childhood. His public persona wasn’t just a source of humor for me, growing up, but also of comfort. I didn’t have an admirable father, so having someone like him as an example of what a father could be was meaningful to me. It’s not an exaggeration to say that he helped me through some hard periods.

Realizing that the real Cosby isn’t the same as the person I admired is hard. I’m feeling a profound sense of loss because that man I admired isn’t an admirable man. So what do I do with all of the positive experiences and, yes, values that I got from him? Is it still possible to admire the message while being disgusted with the messenger? Does the hypocrisy and evil negate the virtue?

Ultimately, I must side with the victims. If he hurt people (and I think he did), then he’s scum. And he’s a worse sort of scum for pretending to be a friendly, fatherly figure. I won’t make excuses and I won’t try to seek out some sort of false balance. But I also can’t do that without feeling hurt and without having to fight an urge to defend the man that I thought he was, even though that man was just an illusion.

Another update from a reader, who spreads the blame around:

I think NBC – who had a show in development with Cosby – is getting off awful lightly.

Yes, the accusations against Cosby slipped out of mainstream consciousness – but it was certainly no secret at NBC! For years, women have alleged that he used his position at the network in the 1980s to host private counseling sessions in which he drugged and raped them. These claims must’ve made at least some impression when they were aired in court just eight years ago.

Consider also that the claims against Cosby stretch into 2004(!) when Andrea Constand, a young employee at Cosby’s doting alma mater, says she was drugged and assaulted in his Philly mansion. Is it any mystery what Cosby had in store for the young female professionals that NBC was prepared to hand over to him? Do 67-year-old rapists not become 77-year-old rapists? Is this how cataract-eyed octogenarians find new verve for a career comeback?

The shameful truth is this: the only thing that stopped NBC from furnishing a serial rapist with a new crop of eager young professional women was a 90 second cell phone video of a stand-up routine. And that’s a scandal.

In the renaissance age of feminist, woman-focused journalism, how was that allowed to happen? Why did spaces like Vox, Gawker Inc. and Slate XX devote coverage to the sexism of The Amazing Spiderwoman, but let NBC announce a deal with a prolific rapist without a peep? Why was gamergate covered like the modern triangle shirtwaist fire, but the new Cosby show ignored entirely? Why dig so obsessively into nerdy, off-the-beaten-path subcultures when fucking NBC is setting Bill Cosby loose on a new group of subservient girls?

NBC, for their part, announced the cancellation of the Cosby project in the protective wake of Netflix’s announcement. They’re now attempting to quietly tip-toe away from this mess as the public descends on Cosby. They should not be allowed to.

The Best Of The Dish Today

America isn’t the only place where immigration is now an extremely hot issue. In Britain, it’s threatening to destroy the Tory party. On Thursday another parliamentary defector to the UK Independence Party, which is anti-immigration and anti-EU, is fighting for a very safe Tory seat. The Tory candidate is busy pandering to the worst xenophobic impulses in the electorate … and could still lose. Massie despairs of the pandering:

Consider these extracts from her own election leaflets: “I wanted to bring the prime minister to this constituency to show him that uncontrolled immigration has hurt this area. I told him we need action, not just talk.”

And: “Most people I know here have worked hard their lives, played by the rules and paid their fair share, but we sometimes struggle to access the services we need because of uncontrolled immigration. Others don’t feel safe walking down the high street of our town.

I suppose this is just another example of no-one ever being allowed to talk about immigration. I don’t know if it counts as progress that we’ve moved on from Oh My God, Muslims! to Oh My God, Roman Catholics from Eastern Europe! but there you have it.

The president is taking a huge gamble tomorrow night.

Today, we tackled the gender debate again – here and here. Whatever my own position, we hope we’re airing plenty of points of view from all sides. On marriage equality, I bemoaned increasing polarization and incivility. A deeper dive on the foul murders in Jerusalem yesterday is here. Why vaping is now as cool as blogging was in, well, 2007. And why drilling has indeed brought gas prices down, whatever some liberals say. Plus: the strange phenomenon of the Welsh Jihadist.

The most popular post of the day was Lumbersexuals: The Triumph Of The Bears; followed by What To Think Of Bill Cosby?

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 16 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. A newbie writes:

For first time I can recall, I can’t get to the “Read On” content without subscribing. So I will subscribe. Is this a new policy? I hadn’t encountered it until today (and I was on the Dish yesterday). I was completely surprised. One thought is that it forces my lazy ass to sign up. The second is that you are confident in your business model and you’re upping the ante requiring us voyeur readers to pay if we want to see anything beyond the “Read On” button. Sneaky, but effective.

I guess we need to tighten up the meter a bit.

See you in the morning.