On Hostility to Religious Views (for Non-Religious Reasons)

The other day, the Second Circuit in Mid Vermont Christian School v. Saunders ruled in favor of a Christian private school in Vermont which had been suspended from state extracurricular competitions after it refuses to allow its girls basketball team to play against a team with a transgender athlete. The school averred that playing such a game would force it to affirm that transgender girls are girls; the relevant Vermont agency decided this was discriminatory and expelled the school. The court, in turn, concluded that Vermont's actions evinced hostility to the school's religious views and thereby violated the First Amendment.

There are some complex factual issues in this case. But there are aspects of the court's opinion that I think have to be wrong, in terms of how it treats the question of "hostility toward the school’s religious beliefs." To put the matter bluntly: people (and the government) are allowed to have hostility towards a school's (or anybody's) "religious beliefs", and such hostility cannot itself be a First Amendment violation. What they cannot do is have hostility to these beliefs because they're religious, or hostility specifically tied to them being held by a particular religious group. But it cannot be the case that hostility to a given belief, where that hostility has nothing to do with religion and extends to any holder of the belief (religious or not), becomes unconstitutional religious hostility just because this particular holder of the belief believes it for religious reasons.

The court recognized that a "neutral" law or policy of "general applicability" does not become unconstitutional because it happens to impinge upon (even a sincere) religious belief. But it said, following Masterpiece Cakeshop, that a neutral law can still fail if it is not applied "in a manner neutral toward and tolerant of . . . religious beliefs." Fine, as far as it goes. But the way the court identifies what it means to be "intolerant" towards religious beliefs at times verges on suggesting that anytime one defends (as a general, neutral principle) a position that is (in the particular case at hand) antagonistic to a proffered religious belief, one is displaying unconstitutional "hostility" -- and if that's true, then it is functionally impossible for there to be a "neutral" law in the first place.

Let's take some examples. Suppose someone asks for a Kosher meal at a school event to substitute for the planned ham and cheese sandwich. The chef is derisive: "I can understand ethical objections to eating meat or other foods, but I'm not going to cook up a new meal just because your fantasy Sky God says so." That's hostility to religious belief -- the same (basic) belief is viewed disdainfully because it emanates from religion.

Compare a situation where someone explains "at our college, we prohibit interracial dating." You respond and say that is racist and discriminatory. They then say, "it's our religious belief." You respond "I don't care -- it's still racist and discriminatory." At one level, you are of course expressing "hostility toward the school's religious belief." At another level, your hostility has nothing to do with it being a religious belief; an it's a hostility you are entirely entitled to hold. The First Amendment simply cannot mean that this sort of "hostility" is constitutionally problematic. If it were, then it would be impossible to defend a neutral and generally applicable rule against racial discrimination in any circumstance where someone wanted to racially discriminate for religious reasons, since the very act of explaining why the rule against racial discrimination is important would be reclassified as anti-religious antagonism.

So in the present case, the critical question ultimately should be whether the state's antagonism towards the anti-trans beliefs of Mid Vermont are due to those beliefs being religious, or whether the state is equally "intolerant" of those beliefs no matter who holds them, with the fact that Mid Vermont happened to be a religious believer being wholly incidental and irrelevant. As alluded to, there is some evidence in this case that points in the former direction (I think it's weak, but Masterpiece Cakeshop made a mountain out of a molehill of weak evidence of religious hostility that other minorities wish they could access). But my main problem with this opinion is that it strongly suggests that the First Amendment problem would be the same even if we were unambiguously in the latter camp.

Consider one of the critical excerpts, from how the Vermont agency explained why it did not find compelling Mid Vermont's complaint that playing with transgender athletes would "endorse" beliefs about gender it wished to reject:

Participating in an athletic contest does not signify a common belief with the opponent. Brigham Young University athletes do not compromise their Mormon faith—or endorse Catholicism—when they play Notre Dame. The act of playing together on a basketball court does not imply any approval of the values or beliefs of the opponent.

The court analyzed that passage thusly:

That statement did not just question Mid Vermont’s religious sincerity. It also attacked the validity of Mid Vermont’s objection. But “[a]n individual claiming violation of free exercise rights need only demonstrate that the beliefs professed are sincerely held and in the individual’s own scheme of things, religious.” That is because “courts should not inquire into the centrality of a litigant’s religious beliefs.” .... Put simply, the VPA may not impose discipline based on its view that Mid Vermont's religious objection was "wrong."

This is, I'm sorry to say, deeply confused analysis. The sincerity/validity divide goes to whether or not Mid Vermont's claim is actually a religious one, and it's absolutely correct that the state has no business telling Mid Vermont that it's claim is a "wrong" understanding of Christianity. But that's not what the state was doing. The state isn't saying that Mid Vermont's logic is wrong as a religious proposition, it's saying it's wrong as a general proposition. In that circumstance, of course the state is entitled to "impose discipline" because it thinks the objection was wrong. Vermont has a policy, Mid Vermont thinks that policy is wrong, Vermont thinks Mid Vermont's objection doesn't hold water and so continues to apply the policy. That's completely anodyne, and it doesn't change because Mid Vermont's objection stems from its sincere religious beliefs. Under the Court's logic, any time any actor raises any sincere religious objection to any policy, they must win automatically because the act of rejecting the objection would suggest the religious objection was "wrong". Again -- I can't stress this enough -- religious objections can be wrong, so long as the reasons the adjudicating body thinks they're wrong are not themselves based on religion or religious hostility.

One last note: there may be circumstances where a policy is genuinely neutral and generally applicable, and not motivated or applied with religious hostility, but should still contain exceptions for religious objectors. I won't comment on whether this case is one of them. I'll only say that such cases are not, for the most part, religious hostility cases, and the problem in those cases is not one of a lack of neutrality. The outcome of Mid Vermont can, I think, be debated, but the logic of it I think is severely misguided (and, it must be said, I think is primarily traceable to courts giving super-protected status to anti-LGBTQ ideologies in a manner they've very consciously rejected in the racial discrimination context).

How To Expand the NCAA Tournament

It's not breaking news, but apparently the NCAA is considering expanding its college basketball tournament to 72 or 76 teams (from the current 68).

As a certified curmudgeon, I've opposed every tournament expansion since it was at 64 teams. The basic problem is obvious: the expansions are all soulless cash grabs, and the beneficiaries are inevitably the ninth best team in the Big Ten with a barely over-500 record who'll get trounced in one round, two if lucky. Who cares?

The nominal reasons for this expansion (again, skipping past the real one, which remains "cash grab") are (a) that there are more schools in Division I than ever before, and (b) that the small number of "play-in" matches means that most fans don't view the games as "real" parts of the tournament. Expanding the number of play-ins so it more closely approximates a full tournament round means more attention to all of them.

The first reason doesn't move me. The second actually does carry some weight for me, since my absolute favorite sports weekend of the year is the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament when it's just an endless stream of do-or-die basketball and a more robust play-in round might approximate that. But again, I just don't have any real interest in seeing a few more mediocre Power Five conference teams get trotted in as sacrifices.

So here's my proposal: expand the tournament, but all the new at-large bids have to go to conferences who don't have any non-automatic qualifiers.

After all, isn't that why we watch the tournament? It's for random schools from nowhere-ville coming out of the 14 seed slot to knock off Kansas. Give me more opportunities for that! Right now, there are a bunch of conferences whose only representation is the auto-qualifier, and in some of those cases the auto-qualifier is not the best team in the conference (looking at you, 1997 Fairfield). I don't have a problem with that -- it's awesome when an objectively terrible team has a miracle run in their conference tournament to gain the auto-qualifier. But the point is I'd absolutely prefer the actual best team in that conference to get a chance to dance over some big-name school that's already proven they can't hack it.

So sure -- expand the tournament. But this time use the opportunity to spread the wealth. Down with the mediocre big names; up with the obscure mid-majors!

Racist Idiots Continue To Be Mad That Caitlin Clark Is Not Racist

It's an exaggeration to say that conservatives only care about women's sports when it gives them an excuse to be transphobic. Sometimes they care about women's sports in order to be racist too.

For example, every once in a while, idiots try to conscript Caitlin Clark into racism and then get really mad that she doesn't participate.

In college, I remember a blowup some people had over Angel Reese doing some trash talking against Clark when LSU beat Iowa in the national championship. Clark, of course, is no stranger to trash talk herself, and people rightfully understood the pearl-clutching on her behalf as highly racialized in character. But the "controversy" was entirely on the outside; Clark gave absolutely no indication that she couldn't take what she dished out. Her view was always that trash talk and the like is part of the game, whether she's on the giving or the receiving end. Racists wanted to be racist on Clark's behalf, Clark did not bite, and it was pretty clear that the folks who rushed to "defend" her resented her for not obliging.

The other day we witnessed another iteration of this, after Time Magazine mentioned ongoing frustration by some Black WNBA players (h/t: Kevin Drum) who think they're persistently overlooked because of race (and that, in turn, Clark's popularity stems in part from the "great white savior" narrative). Clark was asked about the issue, and gave a perfectly reasonable answer about the importance of celebrating and uplifting the many Black players who have contributed immeasurably to the league's success:

“I want to say I’ve earned every single thing, but as a white person, there is privilege,” says Clark. “A lot of those players in the league that have been really good have been Black players. This league has kind of been built on them. The more we can appreciate that, highlight that, talk about that, and then continue to have brands and companies invest in those players that have made this league incredible, I think it’s very important. I have to continue to try to change that. The more we can elevate Black women, that’s going to be a beautiful thing.”

A good answer, and predictably, some people went ballistic over it:

Well, it happened. Caitlin Clark finally bent the knee to the insufferable, gaslighting, disgusting, race-baiting woke mob.... Anyway, Clark got her roses, and then proceeded to bend the knee to the mob.... Caitlin Clark bends the knee to an invisible mob.... Why did the best player in the WNBA — by a laughably wide margin — crumble like a cheap tent?

Now we can concentrate on how pathetic this whine is. But I want to flag something specific, as someone who actually did follow the WNBA season this year: Caitlin Clark is not, in fact, the best player in the WNBA. The best player in the WNBA, by a laughably wide margin, is A'ja Wilson. This is no knock on Clark, who is an outstanding player and was well-deserving of rookie of the year. But let's look at the stat lines this season (all stats on a per game basis):

• Wilson: 26.9 points, .518 FG%,11.9 rebounds, 2.3 assists, 1.8 steals, 2.6 blocks, 1.3 turnovers
• Clark: 19.2 points, .417 FG%, 5.7 rebounds, 8.4 assists, 1.3 steals, 0.7 blocks, 5.6 turnovers

With all respect to Clark, this is a blowout. Wilson averaged a double-double on the season. She led the league in blocks; she set an all-time league record in points per game. She led Clark in every statistical category but assists (unsurprising, since Clark is a guard and Wilson is a center). That's why Wilson won the MVP by a unanimous vote -- only the second time that's occurred in WNBA history.

Again, this is not at all to dismiss Clark as anything other than an all-star. She had a great rookie season. She did a fantastic job leading the hitherto sad sack Indiana Fever to the playoffs, overcoming a dismal season start (where we saw Clark's own adjustment pains getting used to playing at the highest level of the sport). Her own rookie of the year honors, and fourth place finish in MVP voting, were also very well-deserved. And she plays a exciting style of basketball that's a ton of fun to watch -- I know full well that  a Caitlin Clark game is must-see TV.

Obviously, at one level this only validates the complaint by Wilson and others regarding how they're overlooked for clearly racist reasons. But I also raise this because the sort of racist morons out here demanding Caitlin Clark be racist also, very clearly, pay absolutely zero attention to the WNBA -- Caitlin Clark included -- for any reason other than looking for an excuse to be racist. They know nothing about the game other than that it might provide a vector for various racist and transphobic projections. So it's no surprise that when the game and the players don't indulge them in their bigotry, they throw a tantrum. It's literally the only reason they care about women's sports.

March Badness

A GOP state legislator in Michigan, Rep. Matt Maddock, saw a bus with too many brown people near at the airport and jumped to the obvious conclusion: "Happening right now. Three busses just loaded up with illegal invaders at Detroit Metro. Anyone have any idea where they’re headed with their police escort?"

It was Gonzaga's basketball team, headed to the Sweet 16 round. But don't let facts get in the way of some good racism and red-baiting:

Maddock made his false claim in a month during which false and misleading claims about airplane flights involving migrants have proliferated on the political right.

Hundreds of social media users quickly disputed Maddock’s post on Wednesday, but Maddock refused to concede. He replied to one of the many people who pointed out the plane and buses were likely for NCAA basketball teams: “Sure kommie. Good talking point.”

Maddock continued to dig in on Thursday morning. He wrote a new post saying, “We know this is happening” and that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants are “pouring into our country.” He added: “Since we can’t trust the #FakeNews to investigate, citizens will. The process of investigating these issues takes time.”

Meanwhile, in Idaho the Utah women's basketball team was essentially chased out of the state after they endured repeated racial abuse at the hotel they were staying at in Coeur d'Alene (they switched to a different hotel in Spokane).

It's nothing novel to say that athletics (and college athletics in particular) represent a prominent arena where young men and women of color are placed in the (nominally positive) spotlight of predominantly White institutions, and there are a lot of White people who really can't handle that.

A Speech on Love

 

I spent this past weekend in rural Vermont, attending the wedding of one of my best friends from college. While I don't fully approve of the location (almost two hours from the nearest major airport and with no cell reception), I absolutely approve of the coupledom.

One of the "events" at the wedding was, interestingly enough, a speech competition (the groom is a speech and debate coach at the high school he teaches at). The assigned topic was on "love". Here is the speech I gave which -- brag alert -- won the competition. You can feel free to steal it in your own wedding toast:

* * *

When [the groom] told me that we would have a speech competition on the topic of "love", I was confused. Why love? It's the most boring part of a tennis match! It literally means "nothing"!

But then I realized that obviously, a speech and debate coach wouldn't create a competition around an easy topic. He wanted us to work in rougher grass and harder clay. The true challenge would be to take something as mundane and meaningless as "love" -- the part of a tennis match when nothing has happened yet -- and see if we could nonetheless create a speech that was moving and meaningful and impactful.

So this is my attempt to craft a meaningful, moving speech about love, the part of a tennis match where nobody has scored and nothing has happened yet.  

Love is expectation. 

Love is anticipation.

It is the tingle on the edge of your seat as you await what is to come.

Love can be disappointing, when only one player still has it and the other has moved far beyond. And love can be sad, when the match is over and there is no more love to be had.

But love can also be thrilling. Some of history's greatest rallies have occurred over love -- service and return, athletic lunges and beautiful shots -- the moments that make us feel alive and remind us why we play the game.

And ultimately, love is a constant. No matter what happens, after every game, set, match, we return back to love. Love is the beginning. It is the part where nothing has happened, yet. And so it means that you have everything still in front of you.

Marriage is a great beginning, and so it is only fitting that it starts at love-love. So here's to love-love, and the great match that's been made, and the great match that will continue to be played forward, grounded and returning to that basic and elemental feature -- of a tennis match -- of love.

College Football is Ruining College Sports

[Graphic: Washington Post]

Another huge wave of conference consolidation just hit, as eight schools just departed the PAC-12. Oregon, USC, Washington, and UCLA are headed to the Big Ten, while Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah are moving to the Big 12 (the schools currently remaining in the rump PAC-12 are Stanford, Cal, Washington State, and Oregon State).

These conference realignments and consolidations are entirely being driven by college football. Even men's college basketball -- the other marquee moneymaker -- really doesn't play a role (we saw that when Maryland moved from the ACC to the Big Ten, a clear sacrifice of basketball rivalries for football dollars even though Maryland's outstanding basketball program is far more storied than its pedestrian football team). And all the other sports are complete afterthoughts -- there is no advantage whatsoever to UCLA's baseball team flying all the way across the country to play Rutgers.

The thing is, I don't know of anyone who's defending this on any basis other than the football cash grab.  And given the titanic sums in play, one can even understand that the schools in question feel like they've got no choice but to make the moves. I do feel a twinge -- just a twinge -- of sympathy for Florida State, which is missing out on massive payouts because it's stuck in the comparatively uneconomical ACC.

But the fact is that outside of football these conference realignments are just terrible for college sports. It makes me wonder whether there is a way to spin off the Big Ten and Big 12 as football-only conferences, so that in all other sports universities play in their traditional and more regional home bases. I can't imagine the Big Ten actually cares if they're still Oregon's home for gymnastics, so long as they're getting those big football games. If the NCAA or whomever could step in and basically broker a compromise where these conferences get whatever football teams they want but leave the other sports programs alone, you'd think something could be worked out. 

To be sure, I think even for football these realignments are doing real damage -- but with the money in question I'm dubious there's any way to put up resistance. It might be more feasible to just give up on college football being anything but a soulless cash grab and work to make it so that "what makes sense for football" doesn't end up dragging all the other sports down with it.

Caitlin Clark is a Crossover Sensation

I was watching boxing today -- the Anthony Joshua/Jermaine Franklin card -- and on the boxing blog I follow the fans between fights were just shooting the breeze about just how good Caitlin Clark is. And not that boxing fans can't follow women's basketball, but it was still striking to see that sort of crossover appeal in this particular forum. She really has the potential to be a true breakthrough sensation.

Obviously, Caitlin Clark is very, very good. First ever 40-point triple double in NCAA tournament history. First player to have two consecutive 30-point triple doubles. She's a threat on all angles. She can create off the dribble as well as anyone I've seen. You can't even say "well, a team just has to stop one person", because she's a fantastic passer as well. And on top of that, she's got a bit of menace to her which I love. She's just a ton of a fun to watch play ball. Her performance against the #1 seeded South Carolina was a tour de force.

The Iowa/South Carolina match was a fantastic game of basketball. Indeed, my only sour note about it is the degree to which the post-game coverage has emphasized it as (in the New York Times' words) "the upset of all upsets", something that nobody saw coming, an impossibility made real. No, it wasn't. To be sure -- it absolutely was an upset. South Carolina was the favorite, and deservedly so, given its absolute dominance on the court this year. But going into the game, South Carolina's victory was not treated as a foreordained conclusion, precisely because Caitlin Clark would be on the floor. To the contrary, the game was promoted -- correctly -- as must-see TV, a "clash of the titans" pitting the tournament's clear best team against the tournament's clear best player. This was not Purdue/Farleigh Dickinson, where nobody outside the FDU locker room could have possibly seen the upset coming. This was seen as a very competitive matchup precisely because everyone knew Caitlin Clark really was that good. And she proved that yes, she was that good.

Assorted Olympic Thoughts

Today is the last day of my beach vacation. It's been a blast, though at some level this was a terrible weekend for me to be at the beach, since it's the Olympics. I love the Olympics, and so for much of the past few days I was all too happy to stay inside and watch obscure sporting events rather than do, you know, beach things (don't worry: I got my share of wonderful-horrible boardwalk cuisine).

The coldest hot take around the Olympics is that they should be abolished -- every "hard-bitten" lefty curmudgeon has their version of this essay somewhere on their hard drive. Interestingly, I agree with several of the underlying criticisms of the Olympics, specifically that they're (a) corrupt as all hell and (b) not even close to the economic boon to their host cities they're promised to be (if anything, they're often an economic albatross). I'll spot both of those, but nonetheless I am pro-Olympics on the simple basis that it is a very rare example of a truly global event that brings representatives of all nations together for something fundamentally happy. I think it is essential to have something of that ilk, and there isn't anything else I can think of that fills or could plausibly full the niche. It is a product of our (dare I say it?) neoliberal era that both the pitch for and against the Olympics is fundamentally economic in character -- the promise of economic revitalization in favor, the reality of resource maldistribution against. The Olympics is not and, just as importantly, should not, be anyone's urban renewal program. The sooner we recalibrate expectations -- that hosting the Olympics is, essentially, a favor to the rest of the world (or, more charitably, a pure prestige/pride project) -- the better we'll be.

Oddly, I am pro-Olympics in the same way I'm pro-United Nations. I think the UN also is a fundamentally corrupt and dysfunctional organization that, to say the least, doesn't follow through on the overwhelming majority of its promises. Nonetheless, I think it is important to have something like the UN just because we need some forum where the nations of the world can come together and express -- in however muddled, inchoate, diplomatically garbled form -- their opinions. Even when it turns out those opinions are kind of hypocritical garbage -- well, that's useful information too. So I happily cop to many of the "abolish the UN" criticisms, without having any interest in actually abolishing the UN.

With respect to these Olympics specifically, my favorite storyline so far definitely is the Austrian cyclist who won gold primarily because the rest of the field forgot she existed. Other highlights have included Katie Ledecky smashing the field in the 1500m, Ariarne Titmus gutting out wins against Ledecky in shorter events (and of course, her coach's viral celebration), the random Tunisian swimmer winning gold out of lane eight as his country is embroiled in political chaos, and the Mongolian judoka, who defected from Iran because his country was forcing him to throw matches against Israelis, dedicating his silver medal to Israel.

The biggest story, of course, is Simone Biles withdrawing from the team gymnastics competition. Biles, predictably, is getting heaps of racist abuse from MAGA sorts who get an obvious erotic thrill out of tearing down talented Black people. To some extent, the only thing that needs to be said to this is "how many medals have you won?" When it comes to the GOAT's decision to compete or not, I'd be entirely fine with an exchange rate here: one medal entitles you to one minute of criticizing Biles.

My favorite sport is boxing (albeit not, oddly, Olympic boxing), and there's an interesting parallel to the Biles discourse in the form of boxing fans criticizing boxers for "quitting". Take a ten count, retire on the stool, or don't emphatically declare to the referee that you want to continue, and you've "quit". At one level, of course part of boxing is that you get punched hard in the face and yet you still keep going. Indeed, much of the appeal of boxing, for me, is the superhuman feats of will that are demonstrated in the ring -- you've been punched in the face so hard you actually topple over, and yet you still continue!  So there's a level in which it comes with the sport that we ask people to keep competing even when they're hurt and wobbled. On a deeper level, it is frankly absurd for fans to be judgmental of fighters who decide they're not in a position to keep getting punched in the face. We're not in their shoes, we don't know what they're going through. A bunch of sideline warriors talking about how tough someone else should be -- in terms of literally asking them to spend more time being violently assaulted -- always rubbed me the wrong way.

Boxing is, in many ways, just a more extreme iteration of all athletics. Some of the most iconic moments in sports history have been when the greats overcome tremendous adversity to nonetheless get the job done -- Michael Jordan with the flu, Kerri Strug on the vault, Kirk Gibson's hobbling home run. We're allowed to be in love with those moments. But ultimately, the athletes are the professionals, and they know what their bodies can and can't do. While not as viscerally violent as boxing, gymnastics is an exceptionally dangerous sport -- all the more so when your head isn't in the right spot. Simone Biles knows the difference between the ordinary pressures and pains of competition, and something that threatens her ability to safely and effectively compete at the level she expects of herself.

The thing is, objectively speaking the "problem" solves itself because it regulates itself. Simone Biles is, it should be needless to say, plenty tough, mentally and physically -- if she wasn't, she'd never have won all those medals. She won a world championship with a kidney stone, for crying out loud! So when someone with her talent and track record tells the world "I'm not in a position to compete at the level I need to", it is the height of arrogance for the rest of us to even indulge in the flicker of thinking "eh, I bet she's exaggerating." Again, obviously high level athletics requires participants to make the choice to dig down against adversity and pain and pressure to nonetheless perform. But by definition, someone at Biles' level does not lack the ability to do that; if she actually did lack that ability it wouldn't be an issue because we'd have never heard of Simone Biles in the first place.

All of this is to say, we were right in our initial instinct: the only person who has any right to criticize Simone Biles is Simone Biles. The very history that makes people feel entitled to demand she keep going is the same history that should compel us to defer to Biles' own assessment of her own situation. She knows competition. She knows pain. She knows her body. She became the GOAT because she knows all these things; nobody wins all those medals while being deterred from competing by a pinprick. So if someone with all that history and all those victories and all those medals says "not today", we should have the humility to trust her.

Susan Collins as Marie-Reine Le Gougne

If you're my age or older, the name "Marie-Reine Le Gougne" may ring a faint bell of recognition. Better known as "the French judge", Le Gougne was at the center of 2002 Olympic figure skating scandal which saw a Russian pair win gold over the seemingly far more deserving Canadian duo of Jamie Salé and David Pelletie. Le Gougne voted for the Russians and immediately attracted suspicion for it -- she soon confessed that she had been pressured into her vote by the head of the French federation as part of a trade where a French couple would receive a scoring advantage in the ice dance competition later in the games. Le Gougne was suspended and disgraced; eventually the decision was made to give both pairs a shared gold medal.

Here's the thing though: there were nine judges in the 2002 Olympic figure skating competition. Five voted for the Russian pair. Four went for the Canadian. So why was Le Gougne, "the French judge", singled out?

The answer is simple: everyone knew that the four eastern bloc judges (from Russia, Ukraine, China and Poland) would vote for the Russian pair. And everyone "knew" that the western judges (from the USA, Canada, Germany, and France) would vote for the Canadian. The only real decider was the Japanese judge -- who passed for neutral. He picked the Canadians. But it didn't matter once Le Gougne didn't vote for her "side". A 5-4 vote gave the Russians the victory.

It is a testament to just how deeply this sort of corruption was ingrained in the Olympics that nobody even thought to be aggrieved by the fact that the regional blocs were guaranteed to vote for "their" skater regardless of performance. Indeed, the entire fix was premised on the assumption that they would do just that. And yet, despite the fact that their votes if anything represent a deeper rot inside the body of Olympic figure skating, unlike Le Gougne, these judges received no punishment and no public attention whatsoever. Everything fell on the head of Le Gougne, because her corruption wasn't assumed from the get-go.

And that brings us to Susan Collins. Collins has had a rough year, politically-speaking: she's seen her approvals tank over the course of the Trump administration; and she's now in a statistical dead heat with her 2020 Democratic challenger Sara Gideon. This brings me almost indescribable joy. Time after time, Susan Collins has been a loyal water-carrier for the worst excesses of the Trump administration. She may grumble or pout or furrow her brow in grave concern, but when push comes to shove she has almost unerringly toed the party line. If a "moderate Republican" is someone who "talks about voting differently from other Republicans before voting exactly the same as other Republicans," Susan Collins is indeed Washington's quintessential moderate Republican. And this identity has made her one of the true, great villains of the Trump era.

In a sense, this is unfair. Susan Collins isn't voting any differently from Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz. Indeed, that's the very indictment against her: she votes just like they do. But like the eastern bloc judges, the corruption of Cotton and Hawley and Cruz is assumed. Everyone knows they're in the bag for whatever Trump would have them do. Collins has cultivated a public identity predicated on the idea that we should not "know" this about her. So it is more of a shock (even if by this point it should have ceased to be one) when she inevitably caves.

But still -- if Susan Collins feels that this is all unfair, I do think she has a point. She is not, objectively speaking, any worse than Cotton or Hawley or Cruz.

She has a point, and that point should be reflected in how we see her. And so when Collins loses her seat in 2020 (and I expect she will), and all the columnists race to write their eulogies for her Washington career, this is the only point about her truly worth making: Susan Collins was, at root, no different -- no better, no worse -- than Ted Cruz.

That is her legacy. And it is completely, entirely, deserved

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LVII: The Death of Kobe Bryant

When seeking to attribute a given historical happening that doesn't seem to involve Jews to a Jewish conspiracy, one generally can take one of two routes.

The first is to find a connection between a critical figure in the event and a Jewish person in their social orbit. This isn't hard, since most of the prominent figures one would want to build a conspiracy theory around probably know at least some Jews. This is the angle that gave us classics like "Blaming Jews for a coup in Turkey" or "Blaming Jews for Taylor Swift endorsing Phil Bredesen".

But if the connection can't be found or feels to tenuous (though lord knows what could be "too tenuous" for the people in this series), there's another route: it's a distraction to draw attention away from some other news.

The people who -- surprising no one -- immediately jumped aboard the "Jews killed Kobe Bryant!" train appear to be taking Door #2.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the rest of the child molesting adrenochrome injecting jew rats killed Kobe to distract from the fact THAT THEY ARE STILL LETTING FLIGHTS FROM WUHAN LAND AT LAX, JFK, ATL...

— MicroaggressionMedia ✝️ (@MicroAgMedia) January 26, 2020

More examples of the genre collected here.

My sincere condolences to the Bryant family and all those who died today.

(Not) Rickey on Behalf of Rickey

I was somewhat of a Rickey Henderson fan when he played, but since his retirement his stock has only grown in my estimation. He really is one of the all-time greats to have ever played. Of course, nobody disputes that Henderson is a clear HOFer, but I still feel he's somewhat underrated only because his greatness wasn't a matter of big power (though he had real pop) but rather getting on (and then, obviously, advancing on) bases.

Anyway, I love these quotes from pitchers about the nightmare that it was to face Rickey Henderson at the plate:

"He was, by far, the most dynamic leadoff hitter I've ever seen," former Orioles pitcher Mike Flanagan said. "If you got 2-0 on him, you were fearful of throwing it down the middle because he could hit a home run. But if you threw ball three, he was going to walk, and then he's on second base. We had many, many long discussions on our pitching staff about how we could control this guy. He was irritating, infuriating and great."

"There was no one else like him," former pitcher Tom Candiotti said. "I hated Rickey. Really, I couldn't stand him. He never swung at my knuckleball, he never swung at my curveball. He never swung until he got two strikes. He had the strike zone the size of a coffee can. If you threw him a fastball, he would hit it for a home run. If you walked him, it was a triple. It was ridiculous. It was like, 'Good gosh, what are we going to do with this guy?'"

There wasn't much anyone could do. "We threw the kitchen sink at him to try to keep him close to first, which we couldn't, but once he got to second, forget about it," Flanagan said. "If you paid attention to him there, invariably [Carney] Lansford would hit a double, [Jose] Canseco or [Mark] McGwire would go deep. If you tried to hold him on all the way around the bases, it was so distracting, before you knew it, you were down five runs."

Is Hockey the Hardest Sport To Announce?

One thing I've often suspected, but have no way of verifying, is that ice hockey is the hardest sport to announce (that is, do play-by-play) on television. It's fast, chaotic, and the players are swathed in padding that makes them all look identical. Sometimes watching a hockey game I'm blown away at the ability of the announcers to even keep up with the action, much less give informative commentary.

Am I right? On the one hand, I have absolutely no experience broadcasting anything and thus all of my opinions are ignorant. On the other hand, this is the internet -- so why should lack of experience and utter ignorance stop me?

So, with all that in mind, I've created a four-part rubric to gauge announcing difficulty (each element on a five point scale).

1) Chaos: How fast does the action happen? How ordered or disordered is it? Sports which are highly position-oriented might be fast-paced but you pretty much know where everyone is going to be (i.e., the quarterback will, for the most part, always be doing quarterback-y things). Other sports are more free-for-all.

2) Density: How many "announceable actions per minute" are there? Some sports are densely-packed with "things" that need to be announced (i.e., each time there's a pass, you pretty much need to say who the pass was to and from). Others are more leisurely.

3) Spread: How many different things are happening at the same time? In a boxing match, you can pretty much concentrate on what's going on in one spot -- where the boxers are fighting (note how there might be very dense action in a boxing match that's not at all spread out). In a football game, different announceable things may be happening all across the field simultaneously.

4) Opaqueness: How much of what's going on is pretty much intuitive to anyone with a basic understanding of the game, and how much needs explanation? Are there deep rule interpretations that need to be explained on the fly, or is everything pretty much as it appears on face?

I'm not including in my metric difficulties associated with making the sport interesting. Perhaps it's really hard to craft a gripping narrative about golf, but if that was part of the criteria then the most boring sport would be the hardest. I also assume that the announcer has a solid grasp of the sport he or she is broadcasting, and an audience which has basic familiarity with the rules of the game.

Okay -- without further delay:

Hockey
The reason I think hockey is the most difficult is because the game moves so damn fast. Players are constantly passing and checking and shooting and crashing into each other. And while hockey has positions, outside the goalie any player can pretty much be anywhere at any time. To be able to pick up (underneath layers of padding) that it was Jon Smith who leveled that check in the corner in the approximately .5 seconds you have to react before having to announce who retrieved the loose puck and centered it.... is a task that seems positively titanic.

Chaos: 5, Density: 5, Spread: 3.5, Opaqueness: 2.5. Total: 16

Football
The rules in football are often pretty hard to follow (what makes "holding" different from anything else the defense does?). It's a relatively spread out game, and as the play develops there's a lot to call, but soon the action pretty much converges and it gets a lot simpler. Plus you get lots of long breaks between plays.

Chaos: 2.5, Density: 2.5, Spread: 4, Opaqueness, 3. Total: 12

Soccer
From an announcing standpoint, it's like slower hockey. Plenty of passing and movement, but not done with the rapidity of a hockey game (and you can see everyone's faces, which helps). Hard to truly appraise penalties when everyone is flopping all the time.

Chaos: 2.5, Density: 2.5, Spread: 3.5, Opaqueness: 2.5. Total: 11

Basketball
Very similar to soccer. It's a little faster, but also a bit more compact (the larger field size in soccer means you have to keep an eye on more things).

Chaos: 2.5, Density: 3, Spread: 3, Opaqueness: 2. Total: 10.5

Boxing
One thing to focus on, but that thing can get hectic in a hurry. Boxing also seems to have more than its share of bizarre moments, though for the most part it's pretty intuitive that the person getting beaten up is losing.

Chaos: 2, Density: 3, Spread: 1, Opaqueness: 2. Total: 8

Gymnastics and Figure Skating
I think these have the exact same issues for an announcer. They're pretty slow, you've got time to breathe between announceable actions, but the major problem is that outside blatantly obvious falls and flops no lay person can tell what's intentional and what's a mistake. A figure skating announcer could tell me literally anything about the average routine -- from "it's the most dazzling performance the Olympics has seen in decades" to "most middle schoolers could handle this" -- and I'd believe them.

Chaos: 1, Density: 1.5, Spread: 1, Opaqueness: 4.5. Total: 8

Tennis
Another relatively straight-forward sport, albeit one that moves pretty fast.

Chaos: 2, Density: 2, Spread: 1, Opaqueness: 1.5. Total: 6.5

Baseball
Slow-paced, rigidly position-oriented -- people are always pretty much where you expect them to be -- and only occasional need to pay attention to more than one thing at a time (tagging up runners, stolen bases). Baseball also has a couple truly weird rules that come up more than you'd think (infield fly rule, balks).

Chaos: 1, Density: 1, Spread: 1.5, Opaqueness: 1.5. Total: 5

Golf
One thing happens: a player hits a shot. You talk about it as it soars through the air, until it lands. If it's closer to the hole, that's usually good. Further, bad. Some very obvious traps are also bad. Repeat.

Chaos: 1, Density: 1, Spread: 1, Opaqueness: 1. Total: 4

Not rated: Rugby, Lacrosse. These are two sports that in particular I can imagine being quite difficult to announce, but I don't know enough about them to say for sure.

How the NFL Was Integrated

Apparently, the NFL was integrated a year before Major League Baseball, when the LA Rams signed former UCLA college standouts Kenny Washington and Woodrow Strode. It's never had the same cultural resonance as Jackie Robinson breaking baseball's color barrier -- probably because the NFL wasn't that big a deal in the 1940s.

But there's also a key difference in the narrative. In baseball, Branch Rickey looms large, and he represents White America's favorite civil rights story: White people, more or less out of the goodness of their hearts, deciding of their own initiative to do the right thing.

Yet the story of the Rams is different. The team leadership had no real interest in integration. Rather:

The Rams had just moved to Los Angeles from Cleveland, after smelling dollar signs on the West Coast. They needed a home and wanted to play at the L.A. Coliseum. But the stadium was publicly funded — owned by taxpayers black and white alike — and black sportswriters in Los Angeles successfully hammered local officials into requiring the team to integrate if the Rams were to play there.

This is the story where Black political power and influence moves the needle -- a different story, one with much more in common with the Black Power tradition than the sometimes overly moralized normative civil rights story associated (a bit unfairly) with Martin Luther King. The NFL was integrated because Black people in Los Angeles had sufficient clout to force it to happen. This isn't to say that there were no White players who were receptive audiences -- I have no doubt that the community had at least some allies among White movers and shakers in LA. But the central part of the story isn't White people choosing to the right thing, it's Black people being in a position so that it didn't much matter if White people wanted to do the right thing or not.

Tab Reduction is Stress Reduction Roundup

I've been very stressed these past few days. It's the usual mix of personal issues combined with the persistent fact of the world teetering on the brink of collapse. My appetite has gone, I haven't been sleeping well -- if it wasn't for the escape of Historical Murder Simulator: Greece, I don't know where I'd be.

Of course, none of this has stopped me from reading the internet. And here's a taste of what's been on the browser:

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Shais Rishon (aka MaNishtana) has a new book out -- a semiautobiographical text about a Black Jewish American Rabbi.

Jon Chait on why the rise of non-liberal socialism might be good for liberalism. Not sure I'm convinced, but it was an interesting read.

The Cleveland Indians are retiring the "Chief Wahoo" mascot. Good riddance. Now, the Washington Redskins stand alone and unchallenged for the title of "most obviously racist representation in professional sports". (The article did tell me a bit of trivia I hadn't been aware of: Apparently, the Cleveland Indians were named in honor of Louis Sockalexis, the first American Indian professional ballplayer who played three seasons for the then-Cleveland Spiders from 1897-99).

Top Corbyn ally tries to push head of Jewish Voice for Labour -- a fringe-left Jewish group formed to provide Jewish cover against broad-based Jewish outrage over Corbynista antisemitism -- to run for parliament in one of the most heavily Jewish seats in the country. At a candidate event, prominent Jewish community members (including journalists) banned from attending because they "misrepresent people, events, or facts". Protest outside the event includes someone trying to burn an Israeli flag ... that was being worn around someone's shoulders. Just another day.

Good article, bad title: In the Forward, Moshe Krakowski explores the nuanced and complicated posture Orthodox Jews take towards Israel and Zionism.

ADL explains how Soros-talk can be antisemitic talk. It's good, but certain examples of "left politics are a Soros backed conspiracy" were oddly omitted....

Israeli appellate court upholds ban on entry for Lara Alqasem. Guess my column didn't persuade. She may appeal to to the Supreme Court. Also worth noting: a good piece on the Academe Blog regarding Israeli academia rallying behind Alqasem, and a statement from the Alliance for Academic Freedom (which I signed) urging Israel to reverse this ill-advised and illiberal decision.

In happier news, Congress just passed a bill which would rename the federal courthouse building in Minneapolis after my late judge, Diana Murphy. Judge Murphy was the first women to serve on the Eighth Circuit when she was appointed in 1994 (as of 2018, that number has risen to ... two), and served nearly 40 years on the federal bench.

Why I Feel Bad Roundup

Are you watching "I Feel Bad"? I'm excited for it -- not the least because it features British-Indian-Israeli-Jewish actor Brian George. The conceit of the show is Sarayu Blue's character going through all the things in her daily life that make her feel bad (like "I'm turning into my mother"). So in honor of that, here are some of things in my life making me feel bad!

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If the Ben Wittes who wrote that bracing Atlantic article explaining why, even though he knows and respects Brett Kavanaugh, he couldn't vote to confirm him was possessed by a demon, he'd have written this Eli Steinberg article on why, despite (in the very barest possible sense) "believing" Ford he still thinks the only way to "return to normal" and "get[] politics out of the pursuit of justice" is to vote to confirm.

Iran's Supreme Leader uses clips of Aly Raisman, among others, to argue that if women dressed more modestly (namely, wore a hijab) they wouldn't be sexually assaulted. That sound you hear is Raisman preparing to break another world record, this time for longest and loudest continuous cussing out of a single human being.

The Canary Mission -- the "pro-Israel" blacklisting site of (mostly young) people who are too-associated with BDS or Palestinian solidarity politics (read my extended thoughts on them here) has very closely guarded its funding sources. But the Forward found one of the donors -- and it's the San Francisco Jewish Federation. (Why I feel slightly better: the Federation concluded that it's funding guidelines were violated and promised not to allow such donations in the future)

More Canary! Here's a Zionist professor noting that he appears on the Canary blacklist despite opposing BDS, simply because he's also opposed certain proposed legal anti-BDS countermeasures (I wonder if I'm on there too?).

An American student of Palestinian ancestry was blocked from entering Israel to study at Hebrew University. Shades of the Michigan letter of recommendation case, except obviously 98% of people are scrambling to invert their position 180 degrees. Oh, and the Israeli ministry that excluded the student (who obtained a visa from the American Israeli consulate in Miami)? It apparently relied on reporting from ... you guessed it: Canary!

Jonathan Cohn reports on one of those annoying political realities that makes academics' and wonks' heads hurt: Bernie Sanders' "Stop BEZOS" bill was both utterly idiotic as policy, and yet likely responsible (in substantial part, at least) for Amazon's announced $15 minimum wage. It's not just "bad policy = good politics". It's that "promoting bad policies is good politics that sometimes can grease the path to good policies"! For anyone who cares both about good political and policy outcomes and really doesn't want to be a hack, that's a recipe for a big ol' frown-y face.

The Bachelor's Roundup

Today is a big week.

It is my last week as an unmarried man. This coming Sunday, September 2nd, 2018, I will be married. 9/2/18 -- it's very mathematical, and mathematical around the number "18" too, which is nicely auspicious.

Jill has been out of town since Wednesday -- she says on a work trip, though I think she's just having a second bachelorette party. She gets back late tonight, and then we both fly to Minnesota together on Thursday.

So ... this might be a light posting week. Or not! I'm unpredictable.

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The Washington Post has a long article on the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina and the unique neither-fish-nor-fowl status they have under federal Indian law. I had a case that tangentially connected to the Lumbee when I was at Covington, so I actually was familiar with their situation -- and this article does a good job providing additional depth.

There is little doubt in my mind that, if Trump goes down, his hardcore followers will blame the Jews.

A fascinating -- if chilling -- essay by Cass Sunstein on how ordinary Germans experienced the rise of Nazism. The takeaway is that, for them, things still always felt "ordinary". They went camping, they hung out with friends, they made jokes. We have a very wrong idea of the phenomenology of authoritarianism -- at least for those persons not directly targeted for suppression.

David Hirsh goes into detail to explain what should be obvious: why Jeremy Corbyn dismissing "Zionists" as people who have "lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives," and yet "don’t understand English irony" is antisemitic. It leverages specifically antisemitic tropes, and it does so in a way that's only sensible if one is leveraging those tropes (the idea of "Zionists" retaining status as perpetual aliens who remain unassimilable outsiders no matter how long they live in their "host" countries is incoherent without supervening on "Zionist as Jew").

Who could have guessed that, if the fringe group Jewish Voice for Labour put on a forum on antisemitism, it would become a forum for antisemitism? Everyone, that's who!

Regarding the French Open's ban on Serena Williams wearing a "catsuit", it's simultaneously amazing and not at all amazing that misogynoir so easily trumps the truckloads of money and attention Williams -- one of the biggest stars in global sports -- brings to women's tennis.

Ranking Winter Olympic Sports

I love the Olympics -- Summer and Winter. A few of my favorite activities include rooting for Winter Olympians from countries which have no snow, rooting for formerly colonized nations to defeat their colonial overlords, and being a sucker for any good personal drama story.

Also, the some of the events are interesting. Here's the full ranking:

Short Track Speed Skating

Demolition derby on ice. This is a sport I'd totally watch off-season. I haven't gotten the chance to watch the mass start version yet, but it seems particularly ludicrously dangerous and therefore extra delightful. It makes me wish that Olympic sprinting didn't have lanes. A+

Snowboard/Skiing Cross

If you're the sort of person who thinks "NASCAR would be better if they had speed bumps and jumps" (also: hurtling downhill) -- this is for you. Another event with great demolition derby character. But what I really want is for downhill ice cross skating to make it to the Olympics. That's a sport where at the bottom everyone just looks grateful that they've survived the evening. A

Long Track Speed Skating

Like middle-distance running, but more interesting because it's on blades. Something about watching the skaters criss-cross lanes is deeply hypnotic. A-

Slopestyle

The best of the "trick" events, mostly because it most closely approximates a Tony Hawk game (or, to be technical, a Cool Boarders game). I hate to say it, as a die-hard skier, but the snowboard version is more interesting. B+

Skeleton

"Who's ready for death sledding!" We can't call it that. Okay, we'll call it "skeleton." Seriously, if the Summer Olympics is about pitting the world's greatest athletes against each other in head-to-head competition, the Winter Olympics seems to be about finding ever-more creative ways to get Europeans to kill themselves. B+

Biathlon

Nothing will ever top Robin Williams referring to this sport as "Norwegian Drive-by". But of all the long-distance sports -- Winter or Summer -- this one's the best. Not just because it involves gunfire, but because the shooting segments actually allow the race to get shaken up on a dime, adding interest and variety to what otherwise would (literally) be a marathon. B

Luge

I love the camera shots on Luge, which last for approximately a quarter of a second on each turn as an insane German hurtles ball-first down an ice chute (another steal from Robin Williams). B

Figure Skating (individual and pairs)

The marquee event of the Winter Games. It's not that I dislike it, but it's virtually impossible for me to tell the difference between the tricks, so I'm left rooting for falls just to create some visual distance between the competitors. I do appreciate that the area the skaters sit in to wait for scores is officially called the "kiss and cry" area (seriously: I saw it on an official's nametag). B

Ice Hockey

The only sport I can watch regularly outside of the Olympics, which diminishes its Olympic appeal somewhat. Its ranking would shoot way up if the women's game was full-check (it looks like they're using every fiber of self-restraint to avoid laying each other out for sixty consecutive minutes). B

Aerials/Big Air

"Ski jumping? That's for pussies. Make them do a few tricks while they're in the air and get back to me." This is the only trick event where I think skiing does better than snowboarding. B

Bobsled

The ranking of Skeleton, Luge, and Bobsled depends heavily on what you prioritize. In terms of raw speed, Bobsled is fastest, then Luge, then Skeleton. But in terms of reckless disregard for one's personal safety, it goes Skeleton, then Luge, then Bobsled. You can obviously see what my preferences are. B-

Curling

The breakout hit of Sochi now feels a little overcooked in Pyeongchang. It's perfectly entertaining, and it's the only Olympic sport I could even vaguely conceive of competing in, but it takes a long time to complete and there are apparently 142 games scheduled over the course of the Olympic Games, which take up valuable TV time that could be used for speed skating. B-

Alpine Skiing

As a skier, I should like this, but once again I can't really tell what makes someone fast or slow so there's not a lot to watch here. Now mass start alpine skiing -- that I could get behind. C+

Halfpipe

The marquee snowboard event (and generally-forgotten skiing event) is also the worst of the lot. To the naked eye, at least, it has less speed, less air, and less interesting tricks. C+

Moguls

All Olympic sports are physically punishing, but moguls is the only one I can't actually watch without feeling my knees twitch in sympathetic pain. As my brother observed: "you'll never see a 30-year old Moguls skier." C+

Ski Jump

It says a lot about the reckless disregard for human safety that characterizes the Winter Olympics that you can take a sport where competitors jump the length of a football field from 35 stories in the air and I can be like "but it's kinda boring?"  C

Nordic (Cross-Country) Skiing

The same problem as distance running, or cycling. Not enough happens for too long. More than any other sport in the games though, competitors earn their "collapse in exhaustion at the finish line" moment. C-

Ice Dancing

"Let's start with figure skating, and then remove all of the most interesting parts of it and ensure that at least one competitor always stays firmly planted on the ground, where it's safe." Why? D

Boxing's Not Dying, You're Just "Colorblind"

I, of course, am watching the big fight tonight -- Miguel Cotto vs. Yoshihiro Kamegai. Why, what are you watching?

In all seriousness, I do think Mayweather/McGregor is a sideshow. That didn't stop me from putting money on Mayweather (half on Mayweather to win straight, and half on Mayweather plus the "over" on rounds), but as a boxing match it's only competitive if Mayweather has gotten old since his last fight. And that's not that interesting to me. While Cotto/Kamegai isn't exactly a toss-up fight, it should be exciting and at least it's a match-up of boxers. Plus it won't cost me $100.

But since we have another moment where boxing is in the public eye, I wanted to flag this article in the Washington Post about the future of the sport. For a long time, the conventional wisdom has been that boxing is "dying", now restricted to an older fan base who are not interesting as advertising demographics. The real energy, the line goes, is behind MMA. And certainly, the latter sport has seen explosive growth over the past decade. But the WaPo article reveals that the CW about boxing has been largely misconceived. 18-29 year olds are the most likely to call themselves boxing fans (39%), and at similar rates to MMA (37%). Overall, boxing and MMA have roughly the same proportion of fans (25% for Americans call themselves MMA fans, 28% boxing fans).

So what's driving the narrative on boxing? While the article doesn't harp on this, the big difference is along the dimension of race. Non-whites are far more likely to consider themselves boxing fans than are whites. While just 17% of white people identify as boxing fans, for blacks that jumps to 52% and for Latinos its 61%. Amongst women, just 8% of white women are boxing fans, compared to 40% of nonwhite women (a significantly higher rate than the 25% of white men who characterize themselves as boxing fans).

To be sure, boxing was in some ways shooting itself in the foot by keeping so many of its big fights on premium cable networks or PPV, where younger fans often didn't have access to them. That consideration was a major factor in Top Rank's just-announced four year deal with ESPN, part of a larger shift in recent years of boxing over to basic cable and even network television.

But it's hard not to think that a large part of why people thought "boxing is dead" was because white people were less invested in the sport. Amongst black and Latino communities, boxing is still incredibly popular; it was just that their interest didn't "count" in assessing the vitality of the sport.

Stiff Competition in the Gross Sweepstakes

Which is grosser? Ha'aretz saying the Maccabi Games "make 1936 Berlin Olympics seem liberal"?

Or a Chicago gay pride parade that was specifically presented as being extra-concerned with inclusion kicking out Jewish marchers for having a Rainbow flag adorned with a Star of David?

Man, tough call.

Fortune Favors the (Not So) Bold

This week, we talked about intersectionality in my class (on "Just Political Participation"). I am a fan of intersectionality, which of course puts me squarely in the mainstream of the contemporary campus zeitgeist. Nonetheless, I suggested that intersectionality, far from being a good mechanism for securing collaboration and solidarity across diverse marginalized groups, actually has a deeply problematic relationship with "coalitional" organizing. I suggested that the understanding of intersectionality as the idea that "all oppressions are linked as one", such that they are best tackled by a universal front of "the oppressed" working in tandem elides important points of differentiation and tension among marginalized groups -- both "horizontally" (are the interests of gay Latinos necessarily harmonious with Black women?) and "vertically" (will addressing the marginalization of Black women necessarily redound to the benefit of Black men?). As my examples, I discussed:

1. Sexual violence on campus, and how it interacts with race. Programs and policies which make it easier for administrators to sanction persons accused of sexual misconduct may well be necessary for securing the equal educational status of women (including women of color) on campus. But given the central space "sexual misconduct" occupies as a tool of terrorizing black men, it is also likely that such reformations will exacerbate racist judgments against that community -- particularly when dealing with subpopulations (like black male athletes) who are already racialized as hypersexual and predatory.
2. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the particular salience of the Mizrahi Jewish community which does not fit neatly into standard accounts of either the "Jewish" (coded as Ashkenazi-European) or "Middle Eastern" (coded as Arab-Muslim) narratives. Mizrahi Jews are suspicious of the left (identified as European and associated with significant oppression and marginalization from Israel's establishment to the present), suspicious of Ashkenazi Jewry (identified as self-satisfied and monopolizing valid Jewish identity, dismissing the legitimacy of Mizrahi ways of being), and suspicious of the Arab world (associated with their marginalization and dispossession under anti-Zionist banners). Understanding that is critical to understanding the posture of Israel contemporaneously -- but it does not suggest and indeed undermines too-easy efforts at "solidarity" where Mizrahi Jews are assumed to be easily subsumable into dominant Ashkenazi (Israel is the place where all Jews are respected as Jews) or Middle Eastern (Israel is the colonial interloper that blocks the self-determination rights of Middle Easterners) narratives.

Based on what the popular press tells us about University of California-Berkeley students, I should be dead by now.

We know -- don't we? -- that it is impossible to disturb college shibboleths about the glories of intersectionality and the universal front of oppression we all share against the evil White man. And we know -- don't we? -- that one cannot suggest any potentially unfair or deleterious outcomes associated with reforming college practices vis-a-vis sexual violence. And we all know -- it goes without saying -- that even the slightest hint that Israel might not solely stand as a European colonial imposition that is the height of global imperial evil is enough to get you run out of this college town on rails. Right?

Well, as usual wrong. I've said it before and I'll say it again: The Berkeley kids are alright. Deal with these issues with charity, thoughtfulness, nuance, and respect, and they'll respond in kind. Berkeley students, in my experience, continue to prove themselves to be exactly what you'd hope for from the student body of the greatest public university in the world. They are thoughtful, engaged, curious, and very eager to deal with the complexities and difficulties posed by the subjects put in front of them -- with no "safe harbor" for the supposed campus orthodoxies that shall-not-be-questioned. That was my experience this week, where I presented some very "hot" issues in ways that certainly did not perfectly map onto how they're commonly portrayed on campus ... and the result was nothing more than a good, solid, thought-provoking discussion. As class should be.