Tag: Premium

The End Of Gamer Culture?

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Many readers have warned me not to dip a toe into the gamergate debate, which, so far, we’ve been covering through aggregation and reader-input. And I’m not going to dive headlong into an extremely complex series of events, which have generated huge amounts of intense emotion on all sides, in a gamer culture which Dish readers know far, far better than I. But part of my job is to write and think about burning current web discussions – and add maybe two cents, even as an outsider.

So let me make a few limited points. The tactics of harassment, threats of violence, foul misogyny, and stalking have absolutely no legitimate place in any discourse. Having read about what has happened to several women, who have merely dared to exercise their First Amendment rights, I can only say it’s been one of those rare stories that still has the capacity to shock me. I know it isn’t fair to tarnish an entire tendency with this kind of extremism, but the fact that this tactic seemed to be the first thing that some gamergate advocates deployed should send off some red flashing lights as to the culture it is defending.

Second, there’s a missing piece of logic, so far as I have managed to discern, in the gamergate campaign. The argument seems to be that some feminists are attempting to police or control a hyper-male culture of violence, speed, competition and boobage. And in so far as that might be the case, my sympathies do indeed lie with the gamers. The creeping misandry in a lot of current debates – see “Affirmative Consent” and “Check Your Privilege” – and the easy prejudices that define white and male and young as suspect identities (because sexism!) rightly offend many men (and women).

There’s an atmosphere in which it has somehow become problematic to have a classic white, straight male identity, and a lot that goes with it. I’m not really a part of that general culture – indifferent to boobage, as I am, and bored by violence. But I don’t see why it cannot have a place in the world. I believe in the flourishing of all sorts of cultures and subcultures and have long been repulsed by the nannies and busybodies who want to police them – whether from the social right or the feminist left.

But – and here’s where the logic escapes me – if the core gamers really do dominate the market for these games, why do they think the market will stop catering to them? The great (and not-so-great) thing about markets is that they are indifferent to content as such. If “hardcore gamers” skew 7 -1 male, and if corporations want to make lots of money, then this strain of the culture is hardly under threat. It may be supplemented by lots of other, newer varieties, but it won’t die. Will it be diluted? Almost certainly. Does that feel like an assault for a group of people whose identity is deeply bound up in this culture? Absolutely. Is it something anyone should really do anything about? Nah. Let a thousand variety of nerds and post-nerds bloom. And leave Kenny McCormick alone. This doesn’t have to be zero-sum.

The analogy a reader made this morning between the end of gamer culture and the end of gay culture was really helpful to me. I’ve written and blogged a lot about the end of gay culture; and I’ve always tried to present both sides of the argument. Yes, I wouldn’t trade our freedom for the closeted, marginalized past; at the same time, it’s impossible not to feel some regret at the close-knit, marginalized, very distinctive solidarity gays have lost as a group, and some affection for a world, built defiantly to defend itself against outsiders, that is dissipating before our eyes and on our apps. I’m for integration and against identity politics. But do I miss what, say, leather bars once were – and feel very conflicted now that bachelorette parties come and go as they please in some of them? Do I harbor some traces of resentment at those who treat gay culture as some kind of straight playground, or at the mob of straight folks who will swamp any gay presence at next week’s once-very gay high heel race in Dupont Circle? Guilty as charged.

And look, many gamers were the bullied in high school; this was their safe space; it was a place they could call home. They now feel it slipping away, and it has unhinged some and disconcerted many, as a lot of mainstream culture has heaped scorn and ridicule on them at the same time. And I’m sorry, but I feel some sympathy here. That sympathy has, alas, been swamped by revulsion at the rhetoric and tactics that have come to define this amorphous movement. I haven’t, to continue the analogy, gone stalking bachelorettes or yelling obscenities at them. I just sigh and move on. But these people do have a point; they have long been ostracized and marginalized; their defensiveness exists for a reason; and, in the last couple of months, they have also been the target of truly out-there dismissals and vitriolic abuse – often from other men, and often from those who were not bullied in high school at all.

Am I wrong to detect in this pile-on another round of bullying of these people, of treating them as scum, of dismissing anything they might have to say? Here are Gawker’s Sam Biddle’s tweets last week:

Just to make sure his point wasn’t lost, he then facetiously tweeted:

This was meant ironically, of course – a debating flourish. But the joke only works when you’re re-visiting those high school wars, only to dismiss the losers of them. It was a piece of condescending ridicule, designed to rub the losers’ faces in their own demise, from a prominent perch. Biddle is not alone. Here’s a now-infamous piece by Leigh Alexander:

‘Game culture’ as we know it is kind of embarrassing — it’s not even culture. It’s buying things, spackling over memes and in-jokes repeatedly, and it’s getting mad on the internet.

It’s young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They don’t know how to dress or behave… “Gamer” isn’t just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That’s why they’re so mad.

These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers — they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had.

This last meme – that these people are not even worthy of a hearing – is pretty endemic among the college-educated cool kids running online media operations. Here’s one Kyle Wagner:

What’s made [gamergate] effective, though, is that it’s exploited the same basic loophole in the system that generations of social reactionaries have: the press’s genuine and deep-seated belief that you gotta hear both sides…. Tomorrow’s Lee Atwater will work through sock puppets on IRC. Tomorrow’s Sister Souljah will get shouted down with rape threats. Tomorrow’s Tipper Gore will make an inexplicably popular YouTube video. Tomorrow’s Willie Horton ad will be an image macro, tomorrow’s Borking a doxing, tomorrow’s Moral Majority a loose coalition of DoSers and robo-petitioners and scat-GIF trolls—all of them working feverishly in service of the old idea that nothing should ever really change.

This is Deadspin’s spin on this. It’s pure vitriol, resting on an unspoken, hard left view of culture that is more disturbing because it presents itself as snark and analysis, rather than tired, easy agit-prop. It’s a classic piece that asks all the cool kids today to smear and dismiss all the bullied of yesterday – and give them one last shove into the locker. Gawker’s Joel Johnson actually cites the piece thus:

Gawker Media has been covering the often-confounding phenomenon of Gamergate in detail, and will keep on covering it.

That piece was not so much “covering the phenomenon” as viciously skewing it. And yes, its tone smacked of bullying and dismissal. When you’re telling people they don’t even deserve to be in a debate, and associate them with segregationists and every other entity good liberals have been taught to despise, “dismissive” is the least of it.

Look: whatever case the gamergate peeps have, they have botched it with their tactics. Those tactics have been repellent in every sense of the word. But bullying has occurred on both sides, and only one side was bullied before.

From my update, regarding that last sentence:

The two sides I am describing are the journalists whose work I was just criticizing and the gamergate supporters. Not the whole two sides of gamer culture; not men and women; just the journalists I’ve been citing, and the people they’ve been lambasting.

What The Hell Just Happened In Ottawa? Ctd

James West celebrates the CBC’s coverage of Wednesday’s attack on the Canadian Parliament building, especially this segment:

Canadian authorities have released more details about the gunman, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. Apparently, Zehaf-Bibeau had a criminal record in three cities and planned to travel to Syria, but he was not flagged as a security threat:

Commissioner Bob Paulson of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said the gunman’s motives remained largely unknown, but the commissioner said he was confident that Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau had acted alone and had no strong ties to other extremists. The commissioner, the head of Canada’s national police, said that much remained a mystery about the shooting frenzy that led to Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau’s death, trapped thousands of people in downtown Ottawa and, at one point, left Prime Minister Stephen Harper without bodyguards and separated only by a wooden door from a gunfight.

“The R.C.M.P. did not even know Mr. Zehaf was in Ottawa,” Commissioner Paulson said during the lengthy news conference.

“We need to look at all operations to deal with this difficult and hard-to-understand threat.” The police, he said, had only learned about Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau’s Syrian travel plans from his mother after his death. Nor was he among the 93 people that the national police forces monitor as being likely to travel abroad to join organizations recognized as terror groups under Canadian law.

The RCMP has not found any links between Wednesday’s shooting spree and the other attack on Monday by Martin Couture-Rouleau, another convert to Islam who ran over two Canadian soldiers with his car near a base south of Montreal before being shot dead. Both men are currently believed to have acted alone. Keating notes that this is the kind of attack ISIS has been urging its supporters in the West to carry out:

Even if the attacks were ISIS-inspired, that probably doesn’t mean ISIS commanders in Syria or Iraq actually ordered them. ISIS has specifically called for “lone-wolf” attacks against Western countries, and it seems entirely possible that Zehaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau, both reportedly active in jihadist web forums, could have hatched these not-particularly-sophisticated plots on their own. This certainly isn’t cause for comfort, though. Self-starting terrorists are a lot more difficult to track than those with direct ties to international networks. The incidents will also raise questions about the seriousness of Canada’s radicalization problem.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells remarks on what these incidents say about the changing nature of jihadist terrorism:

This strain of radicalism, more fury than politics, has always been strong among the Western converts to Islam, but in the ISIS era it has become the movement’s singular face. Alongside its manias, Al Qaeda always had a pedantic, textual side, the Zawahiri influence — at times, as when it excommunicated the group that would become ISIS, it took its own interpretation of the Qu’ran seriously. There was an anti-colonial strain to its politics. ISIS has none of this finickiness, and the stories of its Western recruits that have emerged have looked quite similar to those of Zehaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau. In their lives, Islam can seem almost an opportunistic label, a way to channel and articulate a more basic rage and alienation. ISIS’s genius, in recruiting, has been not to overcomplicate things, to happily play the role of maniac and murderer, of piratic social disease, of simple uncivilized Other. … The alienation and manias of Zehaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau seem more elemental than politics.

Jeremy Keehn considers how these events are likely to influence Canadian politics:

With a federal election slated for November, 2015, political discussion in Canada has focussed on the Conservatives’ economic record and the corruption trial of a Conservative senator that is scheduled for the spring. Suddenly, security is at the fore.

Given my fellow Canadians’ generally deserved reputation for level-headedness, and the fact that the Conservatives won their 2011 mandate with under forty per cent of the popular vote, this seems unlikely to lead to a rally beneath the party’s banner. The federal Liberals, decimated in the 2011 election under Michael Ignatieff, are now led by Pierre Trudeau’s son, Justin, which will, as 2015 approaches, inevitably place the father’s vision of the country in a certain relief. But in the short term, as questions are put to the government about the attacks and what Canada will become in response, it may be Thomas Mulcair, the leader of the social-democratic New Democratic Party, the country’s Official Opposition, who takes the lead role in arguing for an alternative. Mulcair has a temper, but his finest moments on the floor of Parliament, interrogating the prime minister during Question Period, have been, at their best, awesome displays of focus and restraint. These are the very qualities that Canadians might hope for their government to exhibit in response to two terrible crimes.

Adam Taylor highlights the gun-control angle:

For some Americans, the fact that the relatively gun-free Canada had a gun-related incident is a sign that gun control doesn’t work. In Canada, however, the debate may be more nuanced: Many of the country’s gun laws are shaped by another public shooting, the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique massacre, in which a 25-year-old man shot dead 14 women with a legally purchased semi-automatic rifle. It’s possible that in the coming days the focus on gun-control legislation will return.

A representative of Canada’s Coalition for Gun Control was hesitant to speak about how the gun-control debate might change after the Ottawa shooting until more information came out. However, the representative did note that gun control laws had been weakened since 2012 and that the Canadian Parliament had been due to debate another law that would liberalize gun control in the country when the shooting occurred.

Meanwhile, Shane Harris and Reid Standish wonder if the shooting will prompt Canada to adopt NSA-style surveillance:

On Thursday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper addressed members in Canada’s House of Commons, mere yards from where the gunman was shot dead by authorities the day before, and promised to push even harder for previously proposed enhancements to Canada’s surveillance and detention laws for suspected terrorists.

The amendments would make it easier for Canada to monitor its citizens abroad and to share information with other countries’ spy agencies, particularly the U.S. National Security Agency, which runs a vastly larger and more sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus than its counterpart to the north. The proposals have been hotly debated in Canada for the past week, and passage isn’t a foregone conclusion. But the shooting may have given Harper’s conservative government, which holds a majority of seats in parliament, the final push it needs to get them turned into law.

Moms For Marijuana Reform

Emily Badger talks to mothers supporting Oregon’s legalization initiative:

Yes On 91If Oregon sufficiently undermines the black market, marijuana wouldn’t be sold, as [stay-at-home mom and Yes on 91 supporter Leah] Maurer puts it, “everywhere.” And where it is sold, government would control access the same way it does to age-restricted alcohol. Teens of course still get their hands on beer, as they will no doubt still get their get their hands on marijuana — a point the moms opposed to Measure 91 make. If you don’t want your kid to smoke marijuana, the question is whether you think a regulated world — one that comes with tighter control but greater public acceptance of pot — will create the lesser of two evils.

“Think about the repeal of prohibition of alcohol,” [Anthony Johnson, the chief petitioner for the measure] says. “Voters and concerned citizens still wanted to know there’s somebody checking IDs, that alcohol’s being tested, labeled properly, sold in properly zoned areas. When you repeal, you didn’t have it legal so anybody could brew as much as they want and sell it.”

Mark Kleiman has misgivings about Oregon’s initiative. He worries that, as written, the law will lead to more teen use:

Unless the legislature decided to raise it, the $35-per-ounce tax in Measure 91 would lead, within a couple of years, to prices way below current illicit prices and way below legal prices in Washington State. That in turn would mean big increases in use by minors and in the number of Oregonians with diagnosable cannabis problems. It would also mean substantial diversion of cannabis products legally sold under Oregon’s low taxes to Washington, where taxes are much higher. (Currently the flow goes the other way, with the two biggest-selling legal cannabis stores in Washington being the two closest to Portland.)

But, were he an Oregon voter, he would still vote yes. One reason why:

Given the balance of political forces, it seems more reasonable to trust the legislature to rein in a too-lax legalization scheme than to expect it to do what no legislature in the nation has been willing to do yet: pass a full cannabis-legalization law.

By the way, Oregon Dishheads may be interested in our new “Know Dope” shirt:

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The Obamacare Attack Ads Return

Republicans are once again hammering Democrats over the law:

Charlie Cook discusses at the ebb and flow of these attacks:

“The ACA is back to being a top issue in these closing weeks, and it probably was never realistic to expect it to remain as dominant as Republicans made it last winter and spring, when they had the extra incentives of undermining enrollment and lousy headlines,” says Kantar Media/CMAG chief Elizabeth Wilner, who is also a contributing editor for The Cook Political Report. Earlier this year, GOP strategists began advising their candidates and campaigns to diversify their message, saying that Republicans had milked the Obamacare cow to the point where there was no milk—that is, new support—to be gained. Strategists suggested that Republicans continue to talk about and advertise on the issue to a certain extent, to keep their base energized, but not to come across like a one-trick pony by talking solely about the ACA and the GOP’s issues with it.

Margaret Talev sees advantages and disadvantages for the GOP:

A Gallup Poll  in early October found deep partisan divisions on Obamacare, with 80 percent of Republicans saying the law will make U.S. healthcare worse in the long run and 66 percent of Democrats saying it will make the system better. Independents were divided, with 42 percent predicting worse results, 32 percent predicting things would get better and 20 percent saying it would make no difference. Meanwhile, a Kaiser Health Tracking Poll out this week says voters still don’t like the law, but consider it a second-tier issue. They would rather improve the law than repeal it, and think congressional candidates should just move on.

But Byron York claims that Obamacare is a priority for voters “in states with closely contested Senate races, who regularly place it among the top issues of the campaign”:

In Arkansas, Republican challenger Tom Cotton is pulling ahead of incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor partly on the strength of a relentless focus on Obamacare. Cotton’s newest ad [above] attacks Pryor over the law, as did two of Cotton’s four previous ads.

“In our polling, [Obamacare] continues to be just as hot as it’s been all year long,” says a source in the Cotton campaign. “If you look at a word cloud of voters’ biggest hesitation in voting for Mark Pryor, the two biggest words are ‘Obama’ and ‘Obamacare.’ Everything after that is almost an afterthought.”

Regardless, Sargent bets that Republicans won’t make major changes to the ACA:

Yes, Republicans are running a lot of attack ads about the law, and yes, those are probably hurting Democrats. But at the same time, Republicans are retreating from, and dissembling madly about, their repeal stance. …

I’m not claiming the law was a plus for Democrats. It’s probably still a net negative. Democrats did not campaign on it as a major achievement, as some urged. But they have grown a bit more confident in defending the actual policy accomplishments the Affordable Care Act represents. Meanwhile, Republicans have retreated to a place where the word “Obamacare” has essentially become a catch-all to represent everything the GOP base knows they hate about Obama and everything independents find disappointing about the economy and overall course of the country. All of which is to say that while “Obamacare” will remain unpopular for the foreseeable future, whoever wins these races, the outcomes probably won’t have much to do with the actual real-world impact of the law either way.

Along the same lines, Jonathan Bernstein checks in “the governor’s races in nine states where Republican candidates have a decent chance of replacing Democratic incumbents”:

All of these states have carried out Medicaid expansions, a major part of the Affordable Care Act. But no matter how strongly these Republican candidates claim to hate Obamacare, check out their websites: Not a single one of the nine reveals any plans to roll back Medicaid expansion.

Most of them pretty much duck health care altogether, or duck it after ritual denunciations of the health-care law. It gets very murky. Bob Beauprez in Colorado, for example, promises to “partner with other governors to form a pro-active coalition to stand up for Colorado and fight for healthcare policies that are centered on patients and doctors, not bureaucrats in Washington or Colorado.” That’s close to promising to do nothing, isn’t it? It certainly isn’t any pledge of action.

How Did The Ferguson Shooting Really Go Down? Ctd

After new reporting on Michael Brown’s death, Ambinder asks, “did the media get Ferguson wrong?”

Police militarization and an unequal justice system are real problems that deserve sustained scrutiny. These problems are more insidious than a rush to judgment against one particular officer, presumption of innocence be damned. So maybe the best thing to do would be to say, well, in this particular case, it turns out that the police officer might not have acted as wantonly as we thought. But it really doesn’t matter, because the response to the shooting called attention to police abuse and discrimination in a way that resonated across the world. They had tanks! They threatened to killed reporters! The truth here is less important than Truth.

For the news media, though, the “injustice is the story, not Darren Wilson” story won’t wash.

… The journey for racial justice rejects the notion that truth is an effect of power. It is based on the notion that truth transcends power. The media wants to be on the right side of history when it comes to race. Accepting truth wherever we find it, no matter how painful it is to our sensibilities, is even more important when fundamental issues of justice are at stake.

Alex Altman, on the other hand, focuses on what the leaks don’t say:

They don’t explain the origin of the skirmish, which seems to have escalated abruptly. In describing the toxicology report, the Post’s sources say “the levels in Brown’s body may have been high enough to trigger hallucinations,” but there is no scientific link between marijuana and violent behavior.

Most importantly, the leaks do not provide new forensic information about the sequence of fatal shots. “What we want to know is why Officer Wilson shot Michael Brown multiple times and killed him even though he was more than 20 feet away from his patrol car,” Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Brown’s family, said in a statement. “This is the crux of the matter!” The autopsy does not offer any answers.

Bouie makes related points:

[W]e’re stuck with the facts we’ve had since August, none of which gives a conclusive answer to the key question in the case: Who started it? And even if it did—and even if Brown was at fault for the whole encounter—we’re still left with the other important question: Why did Wilson keep firing after Brown moved away?

At this point, any answer is tied tightly to your sympathies. Side with Michael Brown and the Ferguson protesters, and you’re likely to think Wilson overreacted or—at worst—actively abused his power. And if you support Darren Wilson, you’re just as likely to see an honest cop just defending himself from a dangerous aggressor.

“Being A Nerd Is Not Supposed To Be A Good Thing” Ctd

The owner of the above title-quote follows up:

Hey, I’m the guy who wrote the thing that pissed a bunch of women off. In my defense, I didn’t mean to suggest that women CAN’T be nerds, and when I said I tend to be skeptical of the idea, I actually meant it as a compliment. I understand the over-reaction, as the misogynistic argument many people seem to think I’m making (that only men can be nerds and women must be faking) is far too common, and largely a translation of male nerd insecurity. Then again, if they weren’t insecure, they probably wouldn’t be nerds. I tend to assume women are more confident, well adjusted, and psychologically centered – all things nerds lack in the real world, and only claim when we create our own insular ones.

Again, the point is that being a nerd isn’t just about what one likes or even being ostracized for liking it, but about how one reacts to that ostracism. There are many healthy ways of doing this, either by attempting to acclimate to the group or attempting to forge one’s own identity independent of it. Recoiling into your own obsession until it consumes you to the point where you can’t fit into normal society even if you wanted to (i.e. devolving from an enthusiast into a nerd) isn’t one of them. Most of the women I’ve known in my life, even the avid D&D players and Whovians, were better than that. They can divorce their identity from their passions when the need arises. Being a nerd means you can’t.

A few others defend that reader:

It’s a shame to see people so adamantly reject an opportunity to practice some empathy. Not that there should be empathy for people making death threats, but they (the threateners) are enabled by people who might actually have some lived experience that is worth listening to. There is a market for what Gamergate is selling and we should be asking why.

Look, girl nerds didn’t have it great. But I’m going to venture a guess that they weren’t physically abused over it to the extent that boy nerds were.

The stereotypical jokes – pantsings, wedgies, being chased home by the jocks, getting your stuff stolen, all because you didn’t ascribe to a specific identify type – these things were real, Andrew. Boy nerds actually got the shit kicked out of them for what they liked and watched. I remember it decades later.

Does that mean it’s ok to treat Sarkesian the way she’s being treated? It’s a fucking insult to feminism to suggest your reader said it was, not to mention an insult to intellectual honesty and honest discussion.

Here you have a reader who says, “Hey, you know what? Gender roles were a problem for me too. And they really messed up a lot of people like me, and this Gamergate business is an outgrowth of how we were marginalized, and some people see it as a harmful extension – but an extension nonetheless – of the community that formed out of getting beat the fuck up for liking Star Trek.” And how do people respond? By saying that experience isn’t legitimate.

Please. Haven’t we told enough people that their experiences aren’t worthy of being listened to already? I mean, for fuck’s sake.

Another is roughly on the same page:

I think that boy nerdiness vs girl nerdiness comes down to the differences between systemic male and female bullying.  Boy bullying starts younger because policing gender roles is so critical to male identity.  Many boys, once they identify as nerds, seek to claim the label for their own acceptance and delayed revenge of being ‘smarter’ than the other boys. Looking around they don’t see girls with the same outlook, instead seeing girls who mostly run with groups of other girls and who wouldn’t risk their social capital on an outcast.  Boys suffer much cruelty from both genders and physical abuse from other boys at this age.

Girls, meanwhile, act nasty toward each other later.  Middle school becomes a grapple for power for girls that simply doesn’t exist in the same way for boys whose roles are much the same as earlier.  Girls will take lifelong friends and make them into enemies in middle high.  It is at this point that girl nerds become an identity (not that they weren’t nerds before, just that they begin to identify that way).  Meanwhile, boy nerds who have put up with this ostracism for long enough, see these girls as trying to invade and claim the identity they have had and have had to live with for years.  Plus, constant peer rejection especially from girls has led them to be suspicious of all outsiders as possible turncoats.

Personally, I think the girls have it harder because their rejection is sudden and senseless.  But from the boys’ perspective, the girls have always been complicit in their ongoing rejection and, since cold revenge was always their only solace, they take sick delight in the rejections that they can issue.

I say all of this as a man who thought this way many times growing up and who still must stifle his superiority impulses, especially over women.  It seems to me, though, that the solution is to remove the bullying of all stripes and at all levels of childhood.  Hard work, but if there had not been complicit adults in my childhood persecution, I wonder if it would have been so damaging.

Read the whole discussion on Gamergate and nerdom more generally here.

Why Do Americans Go Out Sick?

Howard Markel tries to understand why NYC’s first Ebola patient went out on the town the day before going to the hospital:

I cannot presume to know what Dr. Spencer was thinking when he went out bowling the other night. He might have just been bored. He might have just not been thinking at all about the potential risks to himself or others. But if he is like me when I was a bold, young physician out to conquer illness as if I were a soldier in a good war, I bet he just thought Ebola could not happen to him.

Julia Ioffe confesses that this was “something my Soviet family and I could never get used to in the States, the stubbornness with which Americans trudge to work or school with triple-digit fevers or noses like spigots”:

Just look at this survey by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, published at the height of flu season in 2011, that shows that a full two-thirds of Americans don’t stay home—as the CDC advises them to do—despite having symptoms of the flu and therefore being highly contagious. Forty percent said that the stuff they needed to do outside the home—work, school, trying my beverage—was more important than the risk of spreading the flu.

She attributes this to more than simply the Protestant work ethic:

From where I sit, it often looks like the other side of American individualism, which becomes selfishness when you lay it on thick. It’s the belief that you and your needs are acutely exceptional and important, and take precedence over those of the people around you. It’s the unspoken belief that your day radiating sickness at the office is worth a couple of your colleagues being bedridden with your flu for a week.

The Other Failed State In The Middle East

Ishaan Tharoor calls attention to Yemen, which remains embroiled in a civil conflict with a dangerous sectarian dimension after Houthi rebels took over the capital Sanaa last month:

The Houthis are alleged to be Iranian-backed; their traditional slogan (“Death to America! Death to Israel!”) echoes that of Hezbollah, Iran’s Shiite proxy in Lebanon. Al-Qaeda and its Sunni allies have energetically taken the fight to the Houthis, giving the conflict a worrisome sectarian edge — one that is similar to the awful bloodshed wracking Syria and Iraq.

But like in Syria and Iraq, the situation is not that simple. The Houthis are from the Zaydi branch, a distinct sect of Shiite Islam that is closer to Sunni Islam than most. … There are also suggestions that Sunni regimes in the Gulf have tacitly backed the Houthi surge, seeing it as the best bet for stability in perennially fractious Yemen. Whatever the case, a narrative of sectarian violence plays into al-Qaeda’s hands. Some elements of the Yemeni branch also declared support for the Islamic State, extremists who butcher all those they consider heretics or apostates. Things could very well get worse before they get any better.

Indeed, the crisis has re-invigorated southern Yemeni separatists, and fighting is ongoing in several parts of the country:

Fighting continues in Yemen between the Houthi rebels and al-Qaeda-backed Sunni tribesmen, leaving at least 68 Houthi fighters dead in the province of Bayda. The news came as protesters in Yemen’s capital Sanaa called on the Houthi fighters to leave after a deadline to form a new government passed on Tuesday without an agreement.

Sporadic clashes erupted between the Houthis and tribesmen in Radaa after the Houthis killed an army officer belonging to the Qaifa tribe, Al Jazeera has learned. In retaliation, tribesmen reportedly attacked Houthi armed rebels in the northeast of Radaa. Al-Qaeda fighters are also reportedly in control of the four main areas of Odain district, with the goal of preventing Houthi fighters from advancing in Ibb province in central Yemen.

Looking back at the history of the Houthi movement earlier this month, Peter Salisbury examined the conditions that enabled their sudden rise to power:

Conditions were ripe for the group to enter the capital. Sanaa is home to a number of traditionally Zaydi families, plenty of intellectuals and liberals fed up with the remnants of the Saleh regime, and many of others who do not approve of the way the country is being run. Living standards have scarcely improved in Yemen in the three years since the uprising and elite infighting of 2011. Half the population is out of work and a similar proportion under the poverty line. A roster of names familiar from the Saleh era occupied the top jobs in government as part of a power-sharing agreement. Corruption is endemic — worse, even, than it was under Saleh. Yemenis who supported the 2011 uprising have become dejected, realizing that they are unlikely to see tangible improvements in the way the country is run.

Ebola Reaches NYC

New York's Bellevue Hospital Prepares For Possible Ebola Cases

Last night, New York’s first case of Ebola was confirmed. Margaret Hartmann has a helpful primer on what we know about the situation:

On Thursday, Dr. Craig Spencer, who had been working with Doctors Without Borders treating Ebola patients in Guinea, was rushed to New York’s Bellevue Hospital with a high fever. A few hours later, tests confirmed the worst: Spencer has Ebola, making him the fourth person diagnosed with the disease in the United States, and the first diagnosed outside of Texas. So far, the situation appears to be under control: Bellevue has been preparing for weeks, Spencer was hospitalized shortly after becoming symptomatic, and officials are already tracking down anyone he may have come into contact with. However, the fact that he went to a bowling alley, took a taxi, and rode the subway on Wednesday night is not likely to calm those already on edge about the virus.

Alexandra Sifferlin examines the city’s preparations:

New York City has been prepping and drilling its hospitals for the possibility of an Ebola patient since July 28, when it was confirmed that Americans Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol had contracted Ebola in Liberia. “I wanted to know that our staff was able to handle [a possible Ebola patient],” says Dr. Marc Napp, senior vice president of medical affairs at Mount Sinai Health System.

“We’ve prepared for a variety of different things in the past: anthrax, H1N1, small pox, 9/11, Hurricane Sandy,” Kenneth Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) told TIME. “This preparation is not unusual.”

Cohn compares NYC’s Ebola response to the one in Dallas:

CDC has dispatched a “go” team of advisers and clinicians, although some were already in New York anyway. They will not simply track down possible contacts, as they did in Dallas. They will also help health care workers avoid infection, which they did not do in Dallas. That’s important, because the biggest threat right now almost surely isn’t to subway riders or bowlers. It’s the public health workers who will be taking care of Spencer.

Cohn also remarks that the response “looks and feels a lot different than what took place a few weeks ago, when the first American diagnosis took place in Dallas, Texas, and neither the hospital nor public health officials seemed quite certain what to do”:

The tragic horror of Ebola is that the people most at risk of getting the disease are those caring for the sick. That’s likely how Spencer got it, after all, and as a worker with Doctors Without Borders he presumably knew what he was doing. But what was true yesterday is true today. Experts expect isolated cases of Ebola to show up here and there, but they don’t expect outbreaks, because the U.S. has the resources and infrastructure to contain the spread and treat those who get it.

However, Ed Morrissey thinks this case “raises a whole lot of questions about the CDC’s latest approach to dealing with travelers from western Africa”:

They expect to control the potential spread of the disease by asking them to take their temperatures for 21 days and keep from being in public too much. If a health professional who’s had experience with Ebola can’t follow those guidelines, why should we expect anyone else to follow them?

Now we have a fresh case in the most populous city in the nation, and the potential for hundreds of contacts thanks to the subway ride, the cab, and the use of the bowling alley. Did he have a drink at the bowling alley? Eat food? Did wait staff handle any glasses or dishes? Did he use rental shoes and house bowling balls?

But Matthew Herper talks to infectious disease expert William Schaffner, who isn’t worried about New Yorkers getting Ebola from the subway:

“I think the risk is close to zero. I would even say it’s zero because none of those people had any contact with his body fluids,” Schaffner says. “I would feel no concern had I been standing next to him on the subway.”

The reason, Schaffner says, is because when patients first become sick with Ebola, there simply isn’t that much virus in their bodies. “It’s very hard to transmit the virus in those first days of illness,” he says. “As the illness progresses, for sure the viral load in the body increases. It can get into the skin cells or onto the surface of your skin. That’s when people are near death.”

The risk of transmission is not constant, he says. It gets worse and worse as patients get sicker and sicker. When they are very sick, Ebola is very much like cholera, with large volumes of fluid flooding out of the body as diarrhea or vomit. Those fluids are teeming with virus, and that is what health care workers are exposed to.

Sarah Kliff wants us to remember that Spencer “a doctor who decided, voluntarily, to go to Guinea to treat Ebola patients”:

This is a country that desperately needs more doctors to fight back an epidemic. The United States has 245.2 doctors per 100,000 people. Guinea has 10. Spencer is not part of the problem. From what we know, he did not put New Yorkers at risk for Ebola. He’s part of the solution, one of a small handful of doctors who worked to combat a deadly, overwhelming disease.

And Abby Haglage worries that Spencer getting sick will stop other doctors from following his example:

His brave mission, followed by a devastating diagnosis, complicates an already nightmarish scenario for health-care workers fighting against Ebola: It may be deterring doctors from helping—right when they’re needed most. The news of Spencer’s positive test for the virus, announced Thursday night in New York City, might achieve the exact opposite of his stated goal.

(Photo: A member of Bellevue’s Hospital staff wears protective clothing during a demonstration on how they would receive a suspected Ebola patient on October 8, 2014 in New York City. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The Constant Self-Reinvention Of Susan Sontag

Reviewing Daniel Schreiber’s Susan Sontag: A Biography, Carl Rollyson attributes the late critic and novelist’s decades-long prominence to “the time-tested American trick of self reinvention” – and he doesn’t mean that entirely as a compliment:

When the argument of Against Interpretation that art is a matter of form, not content—that conveying messages is not the purpose of art, but that art in itself is the message—got stale and became a staple of too many critics, Sontag switched sides. In “Fascinating Fascism,” she declared that the content of Leni Riefenstahl’s films and photographs is irretrievably fascist and cannot be countermanded by considerations of form and style. At every stage of her career, Sontag performed a similar volte face, saying, for example, that communism is fascism with a human face—although earlier she had shouted “Viva Fidel!” The capper on this career-long repudiation of her own ideas came when she said she never really believed what she wrote in Against Interpretation.

And, she added, she never really liked the nouveau roman that her some of her own work—The Benefactor, for example—was said to emulate. In fact, when her novel The Volcano Lover became a bestseller, she even claimed that she would not be upset if posterity favored her novels and forgot her essays. Her last works of fiction were essentially conventional historical novels, as Schreiber admits, so all her pretensions about subverting conventional narrative became . . . well, just pretensions.

But Sontag, so expert at marketing herself, always proclaimed her recantations as discoveries, bold revisions by an intellectual who was always ready to reconsider and deepen her understanding of art and politics. And in some cases—as with her best books, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor—she did succeed in exploring the play of ideas that have made these works classics. Similarly, her literary portraits in Under the Sign of Saturn display an inquiring intellect that remains beguiling and provocative. All these works show her arguing with herself, revealing a powerful mind at work. They constitute the core of what will probably remain as her legacy.