middle east

→ November 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/4/23.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and we’re updating it as options and other news (e.g., Clayton Kershaw’s shoulder surgery) affects the list, since it ran the day after the World Series ended. I’ll be breaking down any major signings where a player changes teams as well as any significant trades this offseason.

After a four-month hiatus, I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter today, with some scattered thoughts on this World Series as well as a more thorough rundown of things I wrote in October.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic column by Simon Sebag Montefiore on the decolonization narrative around Gaza and Israel has been shared, critiqued, attacked, and so on more than anything else I’ve seen on the conflict. I don’t think it’s perfect, and I don’t agree with every point the author makes, but it is thoughtful and does make some very good points. The twenty minutes it took me to read it was time well spent, and I can’t say that about many things I read in general, certainly not on a topic as fraught as this one. Adam Serwer, also in the Atlantic, wrote a shorter piece arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. By the way, the staid Financial Times’ editorial board called for a humanitarian cease-fire this week.
This harassment case at UC Berkeley is absolutely bonkers, yet there are students protesting in favor of the professor who harassed a colleague so extensively that she’s been banned from campus – apparently because she’s a person of color and her victim is not?
The Verge’s Amanda Chicago Lewis does a deep dive on “the people who ruined the internet,” search engine optimization (SEO) consultants, asking if they ruined search or if search is even ruined at all.
When LibsofTikTok, the anti-LGBTQ+ Twitter account run by former realtor Chaya Raichik, tweets about a hospital, a school, a library, or a private individual, threats of violence follow. USA Today built off research from the liberal group Media Matters to find over two dozen incidents where bomb or death threats followed a LibsofTikTok tweet. She’s particularly targeting public schools, with USA Today identifying at least twelve incidents where a school received threats after she tweeted about it.
The New York Times has the story of a French case where a 15-year-old girl falsely accused a 17-year-old boy, the son of Moroccan immigrants, of raping her, only to recant 23 years later. This very humanist retelling looks at the toll the false accusation took on Farid El Haïry’s life even though he only spent a year or so in prison, and how difficult it still is for him to move on.
JAMA has yet another study showing that masks work in limiting the spread of SARS-CoV-2. I do still wear one when traveling, at least, since it’s the one time I’m in proximity to a lot of strangers. Very few others do, even on airplanes.
There’s a rising trend of hidden MLMs on TikTok, pushed by self-styled ‘experts’ selling detoxification products for kids. Just a reminder that for almost every human, the liver handles detox responsibilities. You don’t need anything else.
Increased belief in false health information is driving vaccine acceptance down. Looking forward to the return of preventable childhood diseases!
STIs are on the rise as states found out they’re not getting the last two years’ worth of a $1 billion federal program to fight these infections as the program was cut during the debt ceiling deal.
A new preprint (meaning it’s not peer-reviewed yet) available on the SocArXiv server argues that merely platforming extreme right-wing actors normalizes their viewpoints even in the face of critical interviewing or coverage. In other words, sunshine may not always be the best disinfectant.
Related: Stew Peters, who hosts a program on Rumble and has a sizable following on Twitter, called for shooting Catholic Charities workers who help would-be immigrants to the United States. Peters has had some prominent figures as guests on his show, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Arizona Republicans Kari Lake, Andy Biggs, and Paul Gosar.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams is now under investigation for possible illegal campaign donations from the Turkish government.
Mayor Adams and new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have something in common – both believe, and say, that they were put in their positions by God. God is, as the article says, unavailable for comment.
Several House Republicans introduced a bill to expel Palestinians from the United States, because it’s 1933.
WIRED covers some myths and truths about smartphone batteries.
Littleton, New Hampshire, is considering banning public art because some folks didn’t like a diversity mural that was partly organized by a local Pride group. One of the town’s three council members makes no bones about bringing her religion into her government job, saying that the Bible says that “homosexuality is an abomination.”
Speaking of bans, Republicans are trying to Newspeak their way out of their abortion-banning policies – the word “ban” appears at least six times in relation to abortion in the Republican Party platform – by pushing back on the use of the word “ban” at all. They’re testing this out in Virginia, which has legislative elections on Tuesday, and if they succeed there, they’ll roll this out nationwide for next November.
A lawsuit in Texas, filed there by an anti-abortion activist to try to get the most favorable court possible, could bankrupt Planned Parenthood by making specious claims that the nonprofit needs to return reimbursements to Medicaid.
An Alabama mayor and pastor killed himself after he was outed as LGBTQ+. A right-wing news site posted photos of F.L. “Bubba” Copeland in women’s clothing and claimed he referred to himself as a trans woman.
HBO CEO Corey Bloys used sockpuppet and burner accounts to try to troll and deride critics of the channel’s programming or of him personally.
There’s a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe caused by a lack of access to clean water.
The BBC examines the dark side of touch-screen tipping, and some of the psychology involved in why we tip more on these platforms.
Over at Field of Schemes, Neil deMause exposes how Jackson County, Missouri, might actually give the Royals over $6 billion in funding for a new stadium the team doesn’t need.
I linked a few weeks ago to the dubious reason that Target was giving for the closure of some Seattle stores, citing rising crime. Popular.info found data showing those stores were affected less by crime than those in surrounding areas. Do not just take corporations’ words as gospel.
The wonderful, quirky Weckerly’s Ice Cream in Fishtown, Philadelphia, is closing in December.
Here’s a nice palate cleanser: GQ interviewed Danny DeVito.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, coronavirus, health, links, longreads, middle east, misinformation, new hampshire, new york, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ February 8, 2019
→ By keith

Of Fathers and Sons.

This year’s slate of nominees for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature might have had the biggest surprise of all in its omission of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the rare documentary to cross over into popular success, earning over $22 million at the U.S. box office, putting it 12th all time in the category on BoxOfficeMojo. (The categorization there is itself debatable; three films in the top 11 are concert films, another is a Dinesh D’Souza propaganda piece, and two are Michael Moore propaganda pieces.)

One of the five films that did make the Oscar cut this year was the little-known Of Fathers and Sons, an Arabic-language film by the Syrian-Kurdish director Talal Derki, who was previously honored for his film Return to Homs. For Of Fathers and Sons, Derki spent over two years with a jihadist family in Syria, watching the Islamist father radicalize his sons and speak of the inevitability of a world war that leaves his particular brand of fundamentalist Sunni Islam triumphant across the world, in fulfillment of prophecy. It is harrowing and defeating, yet deeply personal, even intimate, as we watch two of the sons in particular react differently to their father’s exhortations.

Abu Osama is the father, apparently one of the founders of al-Qaida in Syria, and Derki spent those two years watching Abu Osama and his eight sons, most all of whom are named after jihadists, including his eldest, Osama Osama, and another son, Ayman Osama, named for current al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. The documentary has no narration, other than Derki occasionally posing questions to Abu Osama, and the only narrative arc is a natural one – the father’s indoctrination of his sons into the rhetoric and mania of a holy war against the enemies of their very specific branch of Salafi jihadist Islam (which includes pretty much everybody else, although Americans, Jews, and Shi’ites all get their turn as targets of derision). This process is set against domestic scenes, including more ordinary interactions between father and sons, as well as scenes of the boys by themselves, mostly just being boys, a strange reminder that jihadists are made, not born, and that even the father, who comes across as inhuman almost every time he speaks to the camera or to other adults, has a human side when it comes to his family. Eventually, however, the time comes for Osama to head off to training camp to become an al-Qaida fighter, while Ayman balks at the brutality of the training, and Abu Osama suffers an injury that shifts the story without deterring him from raising an army of jihadist children.

The marvel of Of Fathers and Sons is its access, apparently unfettered where the males are concerned, but with virtually no women or girls appearing on camera – the only women of any age on screen are shown at a distance in public spaces, such as outside the local school. Abu’s niece is outside at one point, never shown, when we hear the boys yelling at her that she shouldn’t be outside without her burqa, and Abu then jokes about punishing her or worse. Then we find out she’s two.

And that’s where Of Fathers and Sons becomes very uncomfortable to watch, which cuts both ways. Derki has ceded his voice to maintain access (and, perhaps, stay alive?) among men who would gladly commit murder for the sake of their very narrow beliefs. Abu has a sniper’s hideout near his house, and at one point, he and Derki are in it, when Abu seems someone on a motorbike and shoots him, gloating that the man fell off but asking someone off-camera for another gun so he can kill the man, which he doesn’t appear to do. Does Derki have any moral responsibility to say something there? Could he, without compromising his life and those of whatever crew he had? Less strident but just as disturbing is the sequence where he shows Osama, who is about 12 but whose age Abu doesn’t even know, how to shoot a pistol; with all of the kids looking younger than their stated ages, probably due to their diets, seeing a child who isn’t old enough to shave holding a pistol and shooting with an adult’s confidence while talking about God’s will and, eventually, training to fight with al-Qaida is even more disturbing to watch than the on-screen slaughter of a sheep towards the end of the movie.

I know it might sound contrarian to say this, but I’m completely fine with this getting a nomination over Won’t You Be My Neighbor?. Of Fathers and Sons has something important to say, and Derki lets the subjects say it for him. His direction feels totally hands-off, which means there are some scenes in here that might be superfluous, but do serve to fill out the picture of Abu Osama and his sons as a family who still have some bonds in common with any other family, but who live in a war zone, in dangerous conditions, and preach hate as a regular way of life. It is a story without hope, at least not for these boys, but perhaps a warning to the rest of us if we want to prevent the next generation from growing up to be jihadists too.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 best documentary feature nominees, 2018 movies, documentaries, middle east, movies

→ August 26, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/26/17.

The big piece from me this week was about GenCon, the massive annual boardgaming convention held in Indianapolis; I went from Thursday to Sunday and my wrapup post covers every game I saw or tried, with a ranking of my top 20. I even slipped in a mention of some upcoming boardgame apps of note.

My latest piece for Insiders was a minor league scouting notebook covering prospects from Pittsburgh (Mitch Keller), Baltimore (Austin Hays), Philadelphia, and Colorado’s systems. I also did my annual rankings of the top tools in the majors: the top hit, run, and power tools, the best pitches of each type, and the
top gloves and arms for catchers, infielders, and outfielders. I don’t particularly love writing these pieces, but readers seem to enjoy them. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I gave a Talk at Google last month, discussing my book Smart Baseball, which you should definitely buy if you haven’t already.

And now, the links…

My friend Will Leitch speaks sense when he says the ESPN/Robert Lee flap was “much ado about nothing.”
Sam Miller described a trick play in a Rhode Island high school baseball game called skunk in the outfield. The play took 2:32 to complete and includes former Red Sox prospect Ryan Westmoreland.
Texas’ Republican Party believes so much in suppressing the vote that they’ve been wasting taxpayer money for six years fighting the courts and repeatedly losing. If the current Administration gets to pick some more federal judges, however, such efforts may end up succeeding.
The Interior Department has killed a study into the effects of coal mining on the miners. Trump’s Administration is obsessed with coal, which is dirty, exhaustible, and not a part of our energy future.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience site GOOP has been hit with formal complaints of deceptive advertising, mostly because they claim their bullshit actually works.
Stephan Neidenbach, a middle school teacher in Maryland and operator of the @welovegv (GMOs and Vaccines) twitter account, has used FOIA requests to find conflicts of interest and malfeasance from anti-GMO academics. Genetically modified organisms are safe, and academics who attack them do so in contravention of the evidence on the topic to date.
“Poland Spring … coming to you straight from the water main.” A lawsuit says it’s just tap water, not spring water as the company claims.
Former Google engineer James Damore claims he was “fired for telling the truth,” but the truth is that his now infamous memo was based on some seriously flawed beliefs about science.
Jess Luther exposes the deep ignorance of deposed University of Minnesota football coach Tracy Claeys, who still doesn’t think he or his players did anything wrong.
The Washington Post looks at what actual anti-fascist protestors, dubbed “antifa,” do and believe. You’ll hear the alt-right/neo-Nazi camp use “antifa” to try to draw some false equivalence between racist shitheads and those who oppose them. Don’t fall for it.
A British prisoner is now in year 11 of what was supposed to be a 10-month jail term under the bogus claim that it’s for his own protection, as he has a history of self-harm. Family members are trying to get him released before he kills himself in custody.
VICE’s Tonic has a first-person account from someone who got a staph infection from a hospital visit.
The civil war in Yemen has been going on for 29 months, but is rarely in our news because there’s little oil there. A Saudi-led airstrike in the capital of Sana’a killed at least 14 civilians, including children, but nobody seems to care.
Angola, another country you never think about – John Oliver would do a map joke here – just elected its first new leader in 38 yeras. It’s expected to be someone from the outgoing dictator’s party, and the elections have been anything but free. Still, it’s their first change in leadership since 1979, and given their atrocious economy and widespread poverty, any change has to seem like a chance for optimism.
TIME looks at how youth sports became a $15 billion industry. If your kid has talent, s/he doesn’t need to go pay to play at events for scouts or coaches. Save the cash and put it in a tax-deferred account for his/her tuition instead.
I’ll end with one feel-good story: The cloakroom girl at a British opera house had to step in when the soprano fell ill – and wowed the audience.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, gender issues, gmo, links, middle east, pseudoscience, Sports, stick to baseball, voter suppression

Stick to baseball, 11/4/23.

Of Fathers and Sons.

Stick to baseball, 8/26/17.

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