Zephyr Dear

Women scientists less likely to receive funding, study finds

It was “cannabis” throughout the 19th century. Then came the Mexican Revolution:

Following the upheaval of the war, scores of Mexican peasants migrated to US border states, bringing with them their popular form of intoxication, what they termed “mariguana.” Upon arrival, they encountered anti-immigrant fears throughout the U.S. Southwest – prejudices that intensified after the Great Depression. Analysts say this bigotry played a key role in instituting the first marijuana laws – aimed at placing social controls on the immigrant population. 

In an effort to marginalize the new migrant population, the first anti-cannabis laws were targeted at the term “marijuana,” says Amanda Reiman, a policy manager at the Drug Policy Alliance. Scholars say it’s no coincidence that the first U.S. cities to outlaw pot were located in border states. It is widely believed that El Paso, Texas, was the first US city to ban cannabis, when in approved a measure in 1914 prohibiting the sale or possession of the drug. …

But nobody played a larger role in cementing the word in the national consciousness than Harry Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. An outspoken critic of the drug, Anslinger set out in the 1930s to place a federal ban on cannabis, embarking on a series of public appearances across the country. Anslinger is often referred to as the great racist of the war on drugs, says John Collins, coordinator of the LSE IDEAS International Drug Policy Project in London.

Collins is not certain if Anslinger himself was a bigot. “But he knew that he had to play up people’s fears in order to get federal legislation passed,” Collins said. “So when talking to senators with large immigrant populations, it very much helped to portray drugs as something external, something that is invading the U.S. He would use the term ‘marijuana’ knowing that it sounds Hispanic, it sounds foreign.”

(Image: Poster for Marihuana [The Marijuana Story], 1950)

Apple just posted their holiday iPhone commercial:

This is what I’m talking about. It’s not about specs, it’s not about thinness, it’s about what those physical properties make possible for real people.

Now please do the same for the iPad (which has always been harder to advertise).

Previously:

• Whither Liberal Arts link
• The Magical iPad link
• Whose iPad Life link

---

UPDATE: While reaction around the web is largely positive, I’ve also seen a fair bit of snark along the lines of “Apple is promoting recording your family over actually spending time with your family”, or something to that effect. And, I suppose it is true that it’s advantageous from Apple’s perspective for incessant iPhone use to be seen as a good thing.

But I think that’s a touch too cynical, and misses the impact of this ad. What make this ad so powerful is that it is so, so real. Oh sure, the perfection of the recording and the happy coincidence of the grandparents having an AppleTV is perhaps not so plausible, but the idea of a teenage son being disconnected, yet ultimately, deep down inside, still caring, will touch the soul of parents – and young adults – in a way few ads ever will. This shot captures it:

There are countless moms and dads out there who desperately want to connect with their children, who fear the best days are already past, and worry about the kind of person they are becoming.

On the flipside, how many young people – including, I’d wager, many reading this blog – have parents who just don’t get us, who see technology as a threat, best represented by that “can-you-put-that-damn-thing-down-and-join-us-in-the-real-world!?” smartphone in our hands, without any appreciation that it’s that phone and the world it represents that has allowed us to find ourselves and become the person we know they wanted us to be? And that we do care, just in a way that makes sense to us and can’t they see that?

By letting go of tangible product features – and, by exploiting a brand promise developed over the last decade¹ – Apple is associating its flagship product with the happy resolution of that deep-seated longing on both sides, resulting in an emotion far more real than any possible articulation of a feature or spec.

This is advertising at its finest.

1. This is the necessary precondition that makes it impossible for most companies to pull off an ad like this

The post Misunderstood appeared first on stratēchery by Ben Thompson.

My Lord, a few days ago we reported how Tea Partier and Texas Crazy Congressman Steve Stockman had the city Fire Marshal condemn his campaign headquarters as an unsafe workplace last month. This came out just after Stockman announced he was challenging John Cornyn for Senate - and I guess gives some insight into why Stockman is so against government regulations. But I didn't realize it was this bad. We just got hold of the photos of the condemned property. And they've got to be seen to be believed. Particularly check out the bathroom, the second photo in the list.

Kudos to the Episcopal Church for honoring a (sort of) secular (sort of) saint by celebrating today as the feast day of William Lloyd Garrison.

Garrison seems to have been a difficult person to like, but an easy person to hate. That’s partly because he was a prickly, vituperative writer and speaker who did things like burn copies of the Constitution, condemning it as “a Covenant with Death, an Agreement with Hell.” He wasn’t wrong about that. He wasn’t wrong about much of anything.

And that’s why he cannot be forgiven. He committed the unpardonable sin of being right when most others were wrong (and the even more unpardonable sin of pointing that out, repeatedly).

That’s the problem with Garrison — he was right. The prickly bastard was right. Would he have been more effective if he’d been more winsome, less confrontational, more savvy as a politician? Maybe. Maybe not. We can’t be sure about that either way. But we can be sure of this: he was right, while those he fought against were utterly, horribly, monstrously wrong.

The following is from The Liberator, Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, which he published from 1831 until the end of slavery. It’s from the “Declaration of the National Anti-Slavery Convention of 1933.” Garrison wrote many such declarations, and most of them said much the same thing. He begins this one by contrasting this convention in Philadelphia with the convention that met there a generation earlier, in 1776:

Their grievances, great as they were, were trifling in comparison with the wrongs and sufferings of those for whom we plead. Our fathers were never slaves — never bought and sold like cattle — never shut out from the light of knowledge and religion — never subjected to the last of brutal taskmasters.

But those, for whose emancipation we are striving, — constituting at the present time at least one-sixth part of our countrymen, — are recognized by the laws, and treated by their fellow beings, as marketable commodities — as goods and chattels — as brute beasts; — are plundered daily of the fruits of their toil without redress; — really enjoy no constitutional nor legal protection from licentious and murderous outrages upon their persons; — are ruthlessly torn asunder — the tender babe from the arms of its frantic mother — the heart-broken wife from her weeping husband — at the caprice or pleasure of irresponsible tyrants; — and, for the crime of having a dark complexion, suffer the pangs of hunger, the infliction of stripes, and the ignominy of brutal servitude. They are kept in heathenish darkness by laws expressly enacted to make their instruction a criminal offence.

These are the prominent circumstances in the condition of more than TWO MILLIONS of our people, the proof of which may be found in thousands of indisputable facts, and in the laws of the slaveholding States.

Hence we maintain –

That in view of the civil and religious privileges of this nation, the guilt of oppression is unequaled by any other on the face of the earth; — and, therefore,

That it is bound to repent instantly, to undo the heavy burden, to break every yoke, and to let the oppressed go free.

It is still today, in some circles, considered rude and confrontational to characterize American slavery as “the guilt of oppression … unequaled by any other on the face of the earth.” But that’s the only thing that matters about Garrison — he was right.

O'Reilly: "Megyn Kelly is Correct: Santa was a white person." Watch.

Here’s the premise of the Hyrule: Total War mod for Medieval II: Total War Kingdoms. Link, the hero of Hyrule, has tooted some somber notes on his Ocarina and vanished into the past, presumably on a mission to assassinate Navi’s grandfather. The rest of Hyrule, comprised of 20 different factions, is competing to fill the Link-shaped void. The result is like something out of fevered fanfic, where the Deku can battle Darknuts, where the Ghoma can invade the Gerudo, and where someone with a long-standing Zelda-based grudge can finally settle the score.
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Video game publisher Electronic Arts might have the rights to make real Star Wars games, but Disney is still milking that social/mobile/free-to-play online cow. Today they officially announced Star Wars: Attack Squadrons, an online space game set in the iconic sci-fi universe.

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he sure was a dragon

Fashion comes at a price. But who knew that it would claim our entire system of money?

Since American money was consolidated into a single system of currency in the late 1800s, U.S. dollars have been printed on a unique cotton blend paper. That paper has been supplied by a single company, Crane, for more than a century. And Crane relied on scraps of denim sold in bulk by the garment industry for its cotton.

The company bleached and processed the unwanted fabric, then rewove the fibers into the George Washingtons and Benjamins that graced our wallets. About 30 percent of Crane's cotton came from leftover denim, making it one of the largest single source of the fibers, according to Jerry Rudd, managing director of global sourcing. The rest of the cotton came from a hodgepodge of other textile wastes.

But something strange began to happen in the 1990s: Denim became tainted.

The stretchy fabric commonly known as spandex (and trademarked as Lycra) had been invented in the 1960s for use in women's lingerie. By the 1990s, the fashion world had discovered that blending it with denim created a curve-hugging -- and yet still forgiving -- fit. It never looked back.

"Everybody's into it. Denim and Lycra are all over," Rudd said. "It's just incredible what's happened to the industry."

The trend was bad news for Crane. Even a single fiber of spandex can ruin a batch of currency paper, degrading the strength of the material. But separating the spandex from the cotton would be a Herculean task, Rudd said. By the early 2000s, almost every pair of jeans contained at least a hint of stretch -- rendering them useless to Crane.

"There's no denim products out there that we can find that's basically not contaminated," Rudd said.

Crane had to adapt. Instead of using cotton from denim, the company now looks "beyond the waste stream," Rudd said, to "the natural fiber itself." In other words, they buy cotton straight from the source and leave the world of fashion to its own devices.

"It's a sign of the times," Rudd said.

Pope: I'm not a Marxist ... not that there's anything wrong with Marxists.

Paul Ryan: No GOP Civil War, Boehner just got a little emotional.

“When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.”

– Neil Gaiman

Not from a parody account, it would appear:

f-e-f-e-t-a-c-a-k-e-s:

youphoric:

humans are so cute, when we say goodbye we put our arms around each other and to show we love someone we bring them flowers. we say hello by holding each other’s hand, and sometimes tiny little dewdrops form in our eyes. for pleasure we listen to arrangements of sounds, press our lips together, smoke dried leaves, get drunk off of old fruit. we’re all just little animals, falling in love and having breakfast beneath billions of stars

this is my favorite post

Hemant Mehta spots this passage from the just-released Conversations with Carlin, in which the late comedian looks back at the childhood religious experiences that helped lead him to atheism:

When you’re seven years old and preparing for your first communion, they tell you a lot of things about how the host is gonna be in your mouth, and it’s the body of Jesus, the body of God, and this will sanctify you, and you’ll feel different. You’ll feel the presence of God. Well, I did my first communion, and I went back to my pew, and I didn’t notice any of that. I noticed this wafer and I’m trying to be reverent, but it wasn’t transformative. So I noticed that. I think in retrospect, it began to make me a little less willing to just jump on everything they said and take the ride. I think I thought that there was an awful lot of exaggeration going on — an awful lot of fanciful talk and magic that they were trying to evoke. And they were always talking about pain and punishment and penance and suffering, and to me, that just didn’t fit. Somehow – and I said this on an early album — they were pushing for pain, and I was pulling for pleasure.

There were times when I still did what some people do who don’t believe well. You find some comfort in it. I would pray for something I wanted, and I would pray if I was scared, because it was a reflex. It was something I had learned, and it made me feel better. I think what that is when we do that is, we’re praying to ourselves — to our better selves. Some call it a higher self. I think the universe is all of us, and when we externalize this thing and call it God, it’s really a way of projecting ourselves onto another identity — onto our better, higher selves that pretty much know everything they need to know, and everything that’s good. So I think praying is all about finding that part of yourself. They call it God. It’s easier to organize people politically, and get them to believe a lot of other things, if you have them believing in an invisible man.

Yo, these people are so invested in being racist they will abandon their so-called fiscal responsibility to keep that shit going.

Last day for Christmas shipping. Thanks for another wonderful year entertaining all you geeks.

terribaeddel-magpie:

mrscriss2012:

This is my son, Chester, who is nearly 4. He was invited to his friend Chloe’s birthday party today, the theme was prince and princesses. He asked if he could go as Sleeping Beauty, so I bought him a dress and put a cute little clip in his hair.

We arrived at the party to the following comments from the adults present:
“Oh that is just cruel.”

"Why did you make him wear a dress?"

"Poor little man, what’s your mummy playing at?"

"He’s going to hate you when he grows up."

"No way I’d let my son dress like a girl."

The fact is, Chester is almost completely gender neutral. I let him wear what he wants, be it boys or girls clothes, and he plays with whatever toys he likes. This usually involves him holding tea parties while wearing his pink Minnie Mouse top, jeans and a tiara. The guests are more often than not a mixture of Winnie The Pooh characters, dinosaurs, Barbie, Dora and solders, and they’re usually transported in his favorite fire engine.

When my husband arrived at the party later on, he was subjected to endless ridicule from the other dad’s present about how I must keep his balls in my back pocket because otherwise he would have put his foot down and not allowed Chester out like that. Oh, and by the way, our other son dressed as Ariel. When my husband pointed out that the boys were happy, and the mother of the birthday child made a point of saying how wonderful she thought it was that we allowed them freedom of choice and expression, they then stopped talking about it to our faces and started muttering about us behind our backs.

Interestingly enough, not a single child said a word about their choice of costumes, other than to compliment Chester on his new dress.

Reminder that cisgender people accuse you of child abuse if you refuse to abuse your child like they do.

^^^^^^ for real

Feminism and Programming Languages:

actually a decent discussion thread, incredible

Say hi to the original Bond girl:

When James Bond author Ian Fleming retired to Jamaica to write, it is widely believed that he turned to a Polish-born spy as the inspiration for his first Bond girl.  This muse, born Krystyna Skarbek and later known as Christine Granville, was simply put, captivating.

She had the distinction of being Winston Churchill’s favorite spy; some of her jilted exes actually banded together to form “The Panel to Protect the Memory of Christine Granville”; and even Nazi guard dogs would instantaneously bend to her will. Granville volunteered for the British Secret Intelligence Services at the outbreak of World War II.  While carrying out missions across Europe and the Middle East, she managed to escape capture, certain death and yes, even avalanches on several occasions.

Her life was truly more daring than one that could be imagined for the screen. For example, Cairo, 1941. That summer, the city was lousy with warring factions of secret agents. Granville had just uncovered a Nazi plan to invade Russia, the largest military operation in history. Her urgent reports were quietly ignored, and much to her shock she was accused of being a double-agent (due to escalating tensions between Britain and her native Poland). She had been summoned to Cairo with her partner and lover (and I say lover, because she was married to another Polish agent for Her Majesty’s Secret Service).

Once there, they were simply ordered to await their fate at the hands of British authorities. As they languished in the Cairo summer’s heat, Axis troops were campaigning across the desert towards Egypt with alarming force. Elsewhere, nearly four million enemy soldiers surrounded the Soviet border, poised to invade.  Christine was stripped of her power as an agent.  To make matters somehow worse, her husband arrived in Cairo at her defense, setting off a potent romantic rivalry with her partner (her husband ultimately left, disgraced).

It was only after realizing their horrible mistake in ignoring Christine’s discoveries that British authorities reinstated her as an agent.  Deeply dedicated to the cause, she promptly began espionage in Syria.  For the remainder of the war, her fearless bombast, resourcefulness and undeniable charm would be legendary.

More photos of Granville here.

From privacy concerns to monopolies, some people have been growing increasingly concerned over some of Google's business practices for years now. Wonder what those types think now the search giant owns a company that makes military robots.

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Paul Krugman yesterday:

I’ve been getting a fair bit of correspondence wondering why I haven’t written about the negotiations for a Trans Pacific Partnership, which many of my correspondents and commenters regard as something both immense and sinister. The answer is that I’ve been having a hard time figuring out why this deal is especially important. … The big talk about TPP isn’t that silly. But my starting point for things like this is that most conventional barriers to trade — tariffs, import quotas, and so on — are already quite low, so that it’s hard to get big effects out of lowering them still further. The deal currently being negotiated involves only 12 countries, several of which already have free trade agreements with each other. It’s roughly, though not exactly, the TPP11 scenario analyzed by Petri et al (pdf). They’re pro-TPP, and in general pro-liberalization, yet even so they can’t get big estimates of gains from that scenario — only around 0.1 percent of GDP. And that’s with a model that includes a lot of non-standard effects.

The answer to why TPP counts is sort-of buried in Paul’s argument about why it doesn’t. He’s absolutely right that TPP doesn’t do much to liberalize trade. But the dirty secret about most trade negotiations today is that they aren’t really about “conventional barriers to trade” any more. ‘Non-tariff barriers,’ which get most of the attention in trade talks these days are a euphemism for differing national approaches to regulation. ‘Eliminating’ these non-tariff barriers involves regulatory changes that are often (a) highly politically controversial, and (b) devoid of obvious trade liberalization payoffs. Trade agreements also provide an opportunity for various business interest groups to get provisions that have nothing to do with trade onto the negotiation bandwagon.

One excellent example of this is the obscure seeming question of data exclusivity (I owe nearly everything I know on this topic to Gabriel Michael, who is working on this and other intellectual property issues for his Ph.D. dissertation, while doing great data visualization work on TPP in his spare time). The aim of data exclusivity is to give pharmaceutical companies exclusive control over test data that they have used to persuade regulators of the safety of particular drugs. This in turn makes it much easier for them to keep on fending off competition from manufacturers of generic drugs in countries with different approaches to patents.

There are no obvious trade benefits to data exclusivity. Yet this hasn’t stopped Senator Orrin Hatch from effectively threatening the deal if the US doesn’t shove it down the throats of other states.

The US should consider dropping countries from Trans Pacific Partnership trade talks if they fail to accept its demands on data protections for drugs and unrestricted cross-border data flows, a senior Republican senator has warned. Orrin Hatch, a veteran lawmaker from Utah and the top Republican on the Senate finance committee, sent a letter to Michael Froman, the US trade representative, urging the Obama administration to hold firm on tough intellectual property provisions in the negotiations, which are entering their final stage. Mr Hatch said he was “increasingly concerned” that some of the 12 countries in the negotiations – spanning Asia, Latin America and North America – may not be willing to “undertake the high level of ambition to conclude a high-standard agreement” and urged Mr Froman to only “move forward” with the countries that were on board.

“It is possible – and preferable – to conclude a strong agreement, rather than allowing a small number of countries to weaken the agreement for all,” Mr Hatch said. Mr Hatch has long insisted that the US pushes for 12 years of data exclusivity for biologic drugs, a position supported by pharmaceutical manufacturers but opposed by groups such as Médecins Sans Frontières who say it would restrict access to affordable medicine around the world.

More generally, as Gabe’s visualization work demonstrates, the US negotiating position on intellectual property issues is a relatively extreme one.

So, in one sense, Paul is absolutely right – the TPP’s actual effects on trade liberalization are likely to be very modest. But trade liberalization rhetoric is the packaging of the TPP, not the content. This hasn’t stopped the usual crowd of multilateralism zombies from arguing that TPP is teh awesome – but their support is a programmed reflex buried somewhere deep within the ruins of their cortexes; it certainly isn’t the result of serious analysis of the putative trade benefits.

Update: Looks like I’m inadvertently recapitulating Dean Baker.

Anyhow, Krugman is on the money in his assessment of the impact of the TPP on trade. But the point is that the TPP is not really about trade, it’s about changing the regulatory process in ways that would almost certainly be opposed by the people in most of the countries included in the deal.

monetizeyourcat:

of course, this belies my private conviction - which i have to say i have had both as someone who identified (which is to say: lived and acted) as a straight man, as a bisexual man, as a bisexual woman, and as a gay woman: freud was more or less right that “sexuality” is a social construct and people’s libido isn’t structured in any meaningful way by biology or nature or anything other than society. the pat way people say this - “everyone’s at least a little bisexual” - is crude but imo accurate. the way people structure their inevitable attraction to a wide range of other people - consciously, semiconsciously, and unconsciously - is what we think of as the wholly unconscious and involuntary (and in the “born this way” narrative so popular among allies, intrinsic) process of sexuality

i think we live under patriarchy, heterosexual intimacy is one of its driving instruments, and consequently i don’t think heterosexual intimacy has intrinsic value or deserves respect. i’m certainly comfortable calling heteosexuality a choice, and a bad one. it can have instrumental value for a variety of reasons though (straight women experience a lot of carrot-and-stick bullshit to deal with straight men for instance, and Family Values are a pretty easy thing to shit on from a height when you’re in a class situation that favors and legitimates the sort of family you’re inclined by upbringing to form and see as valid) and definitely some people are shit on more than others when you talk shit about The Straights so i don’t indulge that perverse whim too often

hairandglasses said:thats a slammin team of rad powerful ladies but also i feel like samurai jack would be more valuable than carmen sandiego

Excuse you CARMEN SANDIEGO CAN TRAVEL THROUGH TIME

I’M PRETTY SURE SHE STOLE THE MASON-DIXON LINE ONCE

CAN SAMURAI JACK DO THAT

Since 2007, ABC News and the New York Times have known that ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson, missing in Iran, was spying there for the CIA. Since then, however, they've repeatedly lied about the purpose of his trip. J.K. Trotter tallies the misleading stories:

It’s one thing for a news outlet to keep secrets at the request of the government, or in order to keep someone safe. It’s another thing to affirmatively and knowingly spread lies. And this isn’t the first time the Times has knowingly repeated false information at the request of the CIA. The paper was criticized in 2011 after it revealed that it had known that Ray Davis, an American accused of murder in Pakistan, had been a CIA contractor, even as it repeated false statements from Barack Obama claiming he was a diplomat.

To avoid endangering Levinson, they could have simply said that he had disappeared in Iran. Instead, knowing otherwise, they repeated specific details ("on a business trip") that they knew were untrue, until the AP found out and exposed him yesterday:

In an extraordinary breach of the most basic CIA rules, a team of analysts — with no authority to run spy operations — paid Levinson to gather intelligence from some of the world's darkest corners. He vanished while investigating the Iranian government for the U.S.

As I observed in my write-up of humans-and-fish-can-never-be-friends simulator FarSky, games rarely wade into the sea past their belly buttons, let alone delve 20,000 leagues under it. To be fair, there are good reasons for this: it’s wet and cold down there; also, 3D cameras go haywire, controls suffer, and drowning isn’t a lot of fun (by most definitions of the word). That’s not stopping We Need To Go Deeper, though. It’s a randomized, FTL-inspired submarine survivor about colossal creepy crawlies that lurk beneath the sea instead of the malevolent forces that go bump in space’s eternal night. Also, it’s co-op. First trailer below.

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@sullydish NEVER again!? so it’s only in the untimely event of Tom Daley’s death that one of us can cash in?

— ann friedman (@annfriedman) December 10, 2013

A reader quotes me:

Let me place a bet with Friedman: Daley will never have a sexual relationship with a woman again, because his assertion that he still fancies girls is a classic bridging mechanism to ease the transition to his real sexual identity. I know this because I did it too.

Wow, Andrew, that’s strikingly arrogant of you. After all the conversations you’ve hosted on bisexuality, I’m amazed you would be so black-and-white and presumptuous about it. There’s no call to be so instantly dismissive of others’ own declarations of their sexual preferences. If and when Daley admits he’s in it for the cock only, then you can trumpet your own theories about bridges and men’s simpler sexuality.

Let me rephrase my bet with Friedman. Check in in ten years’ time. As for airing discussions in which male bisexuality is regarded as widespread as female bisexuality, of course we air such threads. Part of the point of this blog is to push back against my own views with those of readers and other writers, studies and stories and the irreplaceable role of human narrative. But it doesn’t mean I am totally persuaded. I absolutely believe in male bisexuality, its integrity as an identity, its total validity as a sexual orientation. I just believe it’s much less common than female bisexuality, for reasons to do with nature, rather than nurture. I know this enrages some liberals, just as other views of mine enrage conservatives. I didn’t mean to constrain Tom Daley’s future life in any way, and perhaps I was too glib in writing what I wrote. But it remains what I think. Another reader:

“I know this because I did it too.” That’s precisely the problem, Andrew. What you think of as a point of argumentative strength is actually analytical weakness. You’re extrapolating from your own experience, with no actual ability to live Tom Daley’s experience. Now I think that is a very natural response, as you came of age in a time when homosexuality was something to be ashamed of. The pain and frustration of that, I’m sure, colors your perception of any man who claims to have sexual attraction to both sexes. I have no doubt there have been many men who have claimed to be bisexual out of a desire to avoid the stigma of being gay. But insisting that any individual must necessarily be an example of that is a cruel thing – even if you turn out to be right.

I don’t think my overall response to Tom Daley could be fairly called cruel. Another:

You snappily respond to Ann Friedman: ”Not much evidence of fluid sexuality among men there, is there?” Hmmm, why would that be?  After all, it’s not as if there’s any real COST to men admitting to fluid sexuality, is there?

And another:

Let me say first off that I appreciate the amount of coverage you’re giving to bisexuality, and that I’ve really enjoyed reading the “What’s A Bisexual Anyway?” thread. I know you get this a lot, but your willingness to have an ongoing discussion about a subject like bisexuality is why I’m a subscriber. But your latest post on Daley made me see red! In response, I’d like to quote from the chapter on bisexuality in Dan Savage’s most recent book, American Savage.

Savage has long been accused of biphobia because of his past statements that male bisexuality doesn’t exist, a belief he admits was based on a now-discredited study. (Discredited, I should add, by the same researcher who led the initial study). In a chapter called “Mistakes Were Made,” Savage makes the point that yes, “many gay men briefly identify as bisexual during their coming-out processes” but that “bisexuality is not a phase for bisexuals” (emphasis in original):

I can see now why this is all so enormously frustrating for bisexual men. Many gay men think all bisexual guys are lying because a lot of men who claim to be bisexual are lying. But it’s not bisexual guys who lie about being bisexual. It’s gay men like me … who lie about being bi. And what do we do after we stop lying about being bi? We insist that all bisexual guys are liars because we were liars.

I know you’re not accusing Daley of lying; I’m sure you think that he genuinely believes that he still fancies girls. But if you add “to themselves” to “lying,” the point still stands.

By the way, the reason that new study got different results? They made the participation criteria more stringent by restricting the sample only to men who actually exhibited bisexual behavior, i.e. excluding gay men, like you and Dan Savage, who were in a “transitional” phase.

Lastly, I’d like to add my perspective as an out bisexual woman in the LGBT community: I’ve encountered so much prejudice and disbelief surrounding bisexuality that I’m not surprised when bisexuals who are actually in same-sex relationships don’t feel safe identifying as bi, and prefer to allow everyone to assume they’re gay. Although this contributes to our invisibility, for some it might seem a better option than being rejected by the very community that is supposed to support us, especially if you’ve already been rejected by your family and straight friends. Also, I think this situation is probably worse for bisexual men, because while bi women may be accused of “experimenting,” bi men are actually accused of being cowards or liars.

By the way, Dan discussed that study and bisexuality in general for one of our Ask Anything videos. Another reader:

I love you, Andrew, but: bullshit. Daley is in love with this man, and there is a chance – a small chance, but a chance nonetheless – that he will spend the rest of his life with him. If that happens, and he does not ever have sex with another woman, and he still says he is bi, he is still bi. Likewise if he just never meets another woman he wants to have sex with before he finds the right person (who happens to be a man) to settle down with, which is also possible. Likewise if he is sexually bi but romantically oriented towards men and doesn’t enjoy casual sex outside of a committed relationship.

I could keep going, but my point is this: sexual orientation is not defined by behavior. There are straight men who have the occasional homosexual or even homoromantic experience. Those men aren’t straight, but they aren’t gay either. There are gay men who remain closeted their whole lives and sleep with and even marry women. Those men are still gay. There are straight and gay and bi men who remain celibate for whatever reasons. They are still who they are.

One more:

I’m a 37-year-old man, and in the past year, I’ve come out to many family members and friends as bisexual. I started incorporating men into my fantasies when I was 12 or 13, and they’ve been present there ever since. And sometimes, indeed, I feel such a strong desire for sex with another man that I do wonder if I’m just fooling myself; I’ve certainly still got some latent shame and self-directed homophobia. But other times, the urge to be with a man recedes considerably.

On the other hand, I almost always want to have sex with women, and my fantasies usually specifically focus on me going down on them. My sense is that eating pussy is about the least gay thing I could be jerking off about.

Of course, that’s just me. What’s more interesting to me is that in the past couple months, I’ve had conversations with two different guys around my age who are openly gay. Both expressed interest in having sex with a woman, especially as part of a three-way with another guy. One said most of the porn he watches is of straight sex. These are not men who are figuring out their orientation; these are guys who’ve been dating and in relationships consistently with other men for years. So their sexuality seems kinda surprisingly fluid to me.

I’m betting against your confident prediction. I think homophobia has done a far more pervasive and pernicious job of repressing a lot of men’s desires than even you give it credit for. In fact, I think that because male sexuality is, as you put it, “much cruder, simpler and more binary,” we could see a small explosion in the popularity of same-sex hookups among men in the not-that-far-out future. Not all men, of course. But dudes wanna get off, and as it increasingly becomes OK for them to get each other off, I think they’ll take advantage of that.

Finally, I’d be interested in seeing whether women’s reported reactions to man-on-man sex have changed at all. Whereas twenty years ago it seemed like women had no interest in such a thing, I’ve met a number of them lately with “watch two dudes getting it on” on their sexual bucket list. And I think for a lot of bi or curious guys, that sort of “permission” is also a big deal.

I’ll be as fascinated as my reader in seeing how things shake out. Or don’t.

It is one thing not to prosecute war crimes – even though failure to do so violates the core of the Geneva Conventions. It is another not even to allow the public airing of what actually happened in America during the Bush-Cheney era, even though the findings have been reached exhaustively, at vast public expense and under bipartisan auspices. What on earth is Obama afraid of? That the CIA will revolt and refuse to do its job? That John Brennan’s friends will squirm uncomfortably in the face of their own complicity in barbarism? W. Paul Smith calls on the administration to release the damn report already:

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s adoption of a sweeping 6,300-page study detailing the CIA’s post-9/11 detention, rendition, torture and interrogation program. But the public has yet to see one word of it. That’s because, even though it deals with some of the most important and contentious issues this country has grappled with in recent years, the entire report remains classified.

Here’s what we do know about the report:

First, it is almost certainly the most exhaustive, detailed investigation of the CIA torture program to date. The committee spent more than three years researching the program, including reviewing six million pages of documents.

Second, according to senators who have seen it, the report includes a damning indictment and repudiation of the longstanding claims that torture and ill treatment led to accurate and actionable intelligence.

Conor chimes in:

[T]he Obama Administration, which promised voters that it would be the most transparent in history, has bowed to pressure from a faction within the CIA to keep secret the most thorough accounting we have of the agency’s lawless, immoral behavior during the Bush years. In doing so, Team Obama makes it less likely that we learn the lessons of CIA torture, and more likely that America tortures again one day.