Quotulatiousness

May 13, 2014

The NFL’s first openly gay player

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Michael Sam was drafted this weekend by the St. Louis Rams. He’s the first openly gay player to be drafted by an NFL team. Back in February, I wrote:

In addition to the questions about whether Sam’s collegiate talents will be enough to allow him to flourish in the NFL, and whether a given team would welcome an openly gay team-mate in the locker room, there’s also the “Tim Tebow” problem … the team that drafts Sam will be in the unrelenting focus of the media’s publicity floodlights. Just drafting Sam would only be the start of the media’s attention. Everything to do with Sam will draw TV cameras, paparazzi, and the team’s beat writers for local media outlets.

Perhaps I misjudged the degree of ongoing interest by media outlets, as after the initial flurry of coverage, I heard very little about Michael Sam until he was actually drafted, as a photo of him kissing his boyfriend hit Twitter (and the knuckle-dragging idiots came out in droves). In February, I didn’t think Sam would be drafted, but I was wrong. However, as David Boaz points out, he was drafted far later than he would likely have been if he wasn’t “out”:

… this past weekend has reminded us that we haven’t quite achieved “opportunity to the talented.” Michael Sam was the Co-Defensive Player of the Year in the country’s strongest football conference, yet many people wondered if any NFL team would draft the league’s first openly gay player. Turns out they were right to wonder. Here’s a revealing chart published in yesterday’s Washington Post (based on data from pro-football-reference.com and published alongside this article in the print edition but apparently not online).

2014 NFL draft and Michael Sam

Every other SEC Defensive Player of the Year in the past decade, including the athlete who shared the award this year with Michael Sam, was among the top 33 picks in the draft, and only one was below number 17. Does that mean that being gay cost Michael Sam 232 places in the draft, compared to his Co-Defensive Player of the Year? Maybe not. There are doubts about Sam’s abilities at the professional level. But there are doubts about many of the players who were drafted ahead of him, in the first 248 picks this year. Looking at this chart, I think it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Sam paid a price for being openly gay. That’s why classical liberals – which in this broad sense should encompass most American libertarians, liberals, and conservatives – should continue to press for a society in which the careers are truly open to the talents. That doesn’t mean we need laws, regulations, or mandates. It means that we want to live in a society that is open to talent wherever it appears. As Scott Shackford writes at Reason, Sam’s drafting is “a significant cultural development toward a country that actually doesn’t care about individual sexual orientation. The apathetic should celebrate this development, as it is a harbinger of a future where such revelations become less and less of a big deal.” Let’s continue to look forward to a society in which it’s not news that a Jewish, Catholic, African-American, Mormon, redneck, or gay person achieves a personal goal.

Update: Draw Play Dave gets it exactly right.

H.R. Giger, RIP

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:18

Another unexpected obituary notice today for artist H.R. Giger:

Artist H.R. Geiger sits for an April 1994 portrait in New York City, New York. (Photo by Bob Berg/Getty Images)

In Scientific American, Glendon Mellow talks about Giger’s impact in art:

Hans Ruedi Giger gave us machines moving like flesh. His airbrush compositions are strongly considered to be descendants of Dalí though I have always felt the unease, the dark mirror of the 1890 Symbolists behind his work. If you cracked open the biomechanoid shell, I always assumed the devastating mythologies of Khnopff, Böcklin and Delville would come pouring out. His paintings were the work of sperm, bullet casings, grotty stone and soft cheekbones. It was not made to be beautiful, it was made to unsettle.

ELP - Brain Salad Surgery cover by HR Giger

Giger’s work unsettled me as a painter and drove me like it did so many others. Are you another painter who paints, in some small way, because of Giger? Share your stories and links to your art in the comments below. Perhaps we will follow-up with a post of art inspired by Giger here on Symbiartic.

Giger is dead. His shadow remains cast over our future. The shadow moves.

I’ve always thought his name was spelled “Geiger”, yet most of the obituaries spell it as “Giger” … but the 1994 image at Getty has it as “Geiger”. I’ve edited this post to use the more common spelling.

Climate change policies – “a massive conservative blind spot … matched by liberals’ tunnel vision”

Filed under: Environment, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

Shikha Dalmia on the real reason the right fights against massive government action to fight climate change:

The decibel level in our national debate about global temperature went up several notches this week. The White House noisily released a report full of dire claims about the havoc manmade global warming is causing in America — and Republicans, equally noisily, denounced this as “liberal gloom and doom.”

The left has a deep ideological need to hype this issue, and the right to minimize it. And despite the deafening political noise on what ought to be a scientific matter, Americans must not be tempted to reach for their earplugs in disgust. After all, these ideological wars are how democracies sort out their differences.

[…]

The right’s chief commitment (which I share) is to free enterprise, property rights, and limited government that it sees as core to human progress. So when the market or other activities of individuals harm third parties or the environment, they look for solutions in these principles.

If overgrazing threatens a pasture, to use a classic example, the right’s answer is not top-down government diktats to ban or ration use. Rather, it is to divvy up the pasture, giving ownership to farmers — or privatizing the commons. The idea is that what individuals own, they protect; what they don’t, they abuse.

But there is no pure free market or property rights solution to global warming. There is no practical way to privatize the Earth’s atmosphere or divvy up pollution rights among the world’s seven billion inhabitants in 193 countries. This creates a planet-sized opening for the expansion of the regulatory state. Hence, right-wingers have an inherent need to resist the gloomy global warming narrative.

This is a massive conservative blind spot. But it is, in many ways, matched by liberals’ tunnel vision.

It is no secret that liberal commitment is less to promoting individual liberty and more to curbing capitalistic greed, which the left views as the great enemy of social justice and equality. At first blush, environmentalism and egalitarianism appear in conflict given that the environment is something of a luxury good that rich folks generally care about more than the poor.

Indeed, this conflict is why the 1960s New Left, driven primarily by humanistic concerns such as eradicating poverty and eliminating racism, shunned the emerging environmental movement for over a decade, according to University of Wisconsin’s Keith M. Woodhouse. Many in the New Left condemned the first Earth Day in 1970 as “the white liberal’s cop out” and believed that a preoccupation with overpopulation, for example, was “racist hysteria.”

The global 1% includes almost all North Americans

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:14

Peter Jaworski explains that as with so many other issues, where you sit on the issue of economic inequality determines what you see:

When people talk about the “1%”, I think they think that they are talking about a specific group of individuals, who have been and remain in that category over time.

When they say “We are the 99%” I think they think that that’s a static category, designating a group of people who persist as members over their lifetime.

Would people be so upset if it turned out that the individuals who made up the 1% were different people over time? That those who are in the 1% spend most of their lives in the 99%, and will go back to being 99%ers after a few years of being 1%ers?

I’m not sure. I am sure that if those categories represented a permanent group of specific individuals, we would be justified in lamenting the state of the economy.

But at any rate, if you’re someone who worries a great deal about the 1 and 99 %ers, would you be as worried if the following were true?:

Suppose just over one-in-ten (or 12%) would be in the 1% for at least a year of their lives.
Suppose further, to expand our view a bit, that just over one-in-three (or 39%) would hit top 5%, just over one-in-two (or 56%) would hit top 10%, and two-in-three (or 73%) would hit top 20%, each for at least a year of their lives.

And now suppose that less than one-in-150 (or a mere 0.6%) remained in the top 1% for 10 consecutive years.

If all of that were true — if the income distribution were that fluid — would you still be so upset?

All of that isn’t a hypothetical: “it’s a description of the income distribution over time in the U.S.” (and Canadians are probably similarly distributed).

For people in India, I bet they think the heated discussion about top 1%ers and 99%ers in Canada and the U.S. is a great big joke. The very same kind of joke that we would laugh about if the Tremblays in the Westmount area of Montreal were to bitterly complain about the Jones’ living in the Bridal Path area of Toronto. Sure, the Tremblays with their average $8 million net worth have half what the Jones’ and their $16 million net worth have, but it would take a comic to suggest we should lament and despair about the Tremblays’ attempts to keep up with the Jones’.

But it’s not a joke. Or, maybe, the people who occupied Bay Street and Wall Street didn’t get it.

Us Canadian 99%ers are not just rich, which we are. By global standards, we’re filthy, stinking rich. It takes roughly an annual net income of $41,600 to be in the global 1%.

If that’s you, then take a deep breath, find a mirror, and repeat these words, “I am the 1%.”

Coravin – a new technique for sampling wine in the bottle

Filed under: Business, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 06:59

Brendan linked to this article about an innovative wine sampling device:

Five years later and news of another device with even more exciting ramifications for the wine trade began to ripple across from the US. Nuclear engineer and, crucially, wine lover Greg Lambrecht turned his mind to exploring whether it might be possible to sample the contents of a cellar without having to pull the cork.

Fourteen years and 23 prototypes later, Coravin was born. The portable apparatus allows a needle to be inserted through the foil capsule and cork; it then extracts the wine, fills in the gap with inert argon and withdraws, leaving the flexible cork to reseal itself.

Having initially launched in the US, Coravin is now available to be shipped to 22 countries and made its first UK appearance last October, priced at £300.

Although vice-president for marketing Howard Leyda says “the primary target market for Coravin is wine enthusiasts first for personal use”, it is the UK restaurant scene that has been generating the biggest buzz around what many believe is a real game changer.

[…]

Until Coravin becomes more easily available, a number of restaurants that have managed to get their hands on one can be seen drumming up excitement among their clientele by promoting this gadget’s most obvious application: the chance to taste some serious old wines.

At one early adopter, D&D London restaurant Avenue, the French- and American-focused wine list now reaches its apogee in the form of vertical flights of Mouton Rothschild and the first growth’s Californian sister venture Opus One.

Other options include Cheval Blanc 1999 at £91 for a 125ml glass or, for those looking to treat themselves on a tighter budget, a 75ml sample of Clerc Milon 2004 for £13.

“It’s really interesting for us to be able to offer these wine flights,” enthuses Avenue restaurant manager Robert Kihlstrom.

Nash the Slash, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:51

CBC News reports that Nash the Slash has died:

Nash the SlashHe started the independent record label Cut-Throat Records, which he used to release his own music. Among his albums was Decomposing, which he claimed could be listened to at any speed, and Bedside Companion, which he said was the first record out of Toronto to use a drum machine.

His biggest hit was Dead Man’s Curve, a cover of a Jan and Dean song.

More recently, he played at Toronto’s Pride Festival and toured up until 2012. In 1997 Cut-Throat released a CD compilation of Nash the Slash’s first two recordings entitled Blind Windows. In 1999 he released Thrash. In April 2001, Nash released his score to the silent film classic Nosferatu.

Plewman retired in 2012, bemoaning file-sharing online and encouraging artists to be more independent. “It’s time to roll up the bandages,” he wrote.

In the last few years, Plewman also became a vocal supporter of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

He will be remembered for his experimental ethos as well as his unusual stage presence.

“I refused to be slick and artificial,” Plewman wrote of his own career.

There has not been word on how the musician died.

H/T to Victor for the link.

Update: Kathy Shaidle has more.

Powered by WordPress