Why still have hockey?

I was watching this game in a bottle bar on the West side yesterday. To call it “hockey” would be generous. What it was would be better defined as “ice boxing.”

Now, in a sense, both basketball and football can be considered bloodsports – in that there’s a lot of contact play and tempers flaring – but they’re also largely self-policing. You tend not to chop a player’s ankles because they’ll do the same to yours. You tend not to bean batters in baseball because they’ll knock out the first of yours who steps to the plate.

But hockey? Pah! It’s been allowed so long it’s part of the game! It’s funny counting the scars on the commentators, all of whom former players. Nobody was especially surprised about this particular game – apparently, Philly’s called the “Broad Street Bullies” and Pitts’ captain is known as “crybaby Crosby,” but, watching it, I was rather concerned that they wouldn’t have players left by the third period.

I suppose I can’t resent my compatriots when they go on about how disappointing Obama’s vacillations are when it comes to the economy and health care and our foreign wars and blah de blah when all it takes to win them back is saying exactly what needs to be said when it needs to be said.

Quote Obama, “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Trayvon Martin, a unarmed Black teenager, was walking to his father’s girlfriend’s house from a nearby convenience store when he was shot dead on the street by George Zimmerman, a white volunteer for the neighborhood watch. Zimmerman claimed self defense, and police did not charge him because of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which establishes that, in any public area, the person claiming self defense in his use of lethal force need not try to escape the confrontation first.

According to the 911 transcript, Zimmerman said that the kid “looked like he was up to no good, or on drugs” and described his activity as “walking about, looking at houses.” Just about the only description of Trayvon’s appearance offered was that he had his hoodie up, as it was raining. The 911 operator told him to stay in his car, which he ignored to accost him, chase him down when Trayvon ran, and shoot him.

Trayvon was on his cell phone with his girlfriend when Zimmerman accosted him, and according to those transcripts, Trayvon stated he was being followed, and his girlfriend advised him to run. Later, he asked Zimmerman, “Why are you following me?” to which Zimmerman said, “What are you doing around here?” At that point the cell phone was dropped, which implies the Zimmerman had initiated a physical altercation.

Florida passed the Stand Your Ground law in 2005 and had noted that the number of “justified killings” have increased by 36 every year since. Effectively, beyond the license to vigilantism it grants, it also grants the right to escalate any altercation to deadly force, with the ‘victor,’ so to speak, able to claim self defense without counterclaim. State Attorney Willie Meggs pointed out that gang members, for instance, call 911 after shootings with other gang members to claim self defense.

To call the event ‘racially charged’ is patently obvious, and the parallels I’m immediately reminded of are the situation that eventually led to the 1992 Crown Heights riot, where-in posses of Jewish vigilantes under the organization ‘Shmira’ would accost and often beat the Black denizens of the neighborhood as proactive ‘defense’ of their neighborhood. It helped fostered a culture of distrust that allowed a single event to light the tinderbox, and speaks to why vigilantism is and should be viewed with suspicion.

I’m currently in a… spirited discussion with a self-declared asexual on a college paper she’s writing on the subject. More or less, it’s about how the rest of the world – and more notably the third wave feminist movement – gave asexuals short shrift. She asked me to critique it.

I asked why women self-declared as asexuals more than men, and if their numbers weren’t being over-reported due to a general aversion and social conditioning. She said she just knew, and in her case it wasn’t aversion so much as indifference: That she still wanted to get involved with emotional relationships – and, indeed, has a husband who isn’t himself asexual – but experienced no sexual attraction nor desire to do more than masturbate.

I want to say but haven’t yet said – beyond an observation as to her humorously ironic attempt at normative behavior in that she chose a guy to marry, since the sex didn’t matter – that I feel that’s doing him a disservice. One of the biggest destroyers of marriages is sexual incompatibility. So maybe she’s giving him short shrift.

The thing is, noted columnist Dan Savage made this argument before, in several columns, but each time he did he got pilloried by bloggers who identify as part of the asexual community. Now, I’m entirely on his side – after all, if we’re going by hyphenated-sexual disclosure, I’d kinda wanna know if you were, say, gay at least by the third date – but I’m wondering if the very asexuality of his detractors renders them least capable of understanding the importance of sexual compatibility.

The NYTimes wrote an entire article on Egypt’s legal crackdowns on nine American NGOs working in their country without actually mentioning what it is those American NGOs do. It uses phrasing like “the prosecution relies on laws left over from the authoritarian government of former President Hosni Mubarak” as a way of influencing opinion over the incident before actually explaining the incident.

So let me: Those NGOs, like the National Democratic Institute, International Republican Institute, and Freedom House, are proxies of American political interests and are attempting to influence Egyptian politics. One would think there’s a sovereignty issue there, considering that just about every nation has laws against foreign financing of campaigns. This is especially damning considering that the US government’s reaction to these trials has been to threaten cuts to development aid to Egypt, which will do little but draw criticism as it can hardly be interpreted as anything but strong-arm imperialism.

I’m reminded of how news reports where “X number of civilians, Y of which are American, were killed in Z warzone,” were propagated because they fed support for direct (military) intervention in those areas. The only problem was, hardly any of those civilians were travelers or tourists. Dollars to donuts, if you get a news story like that, the civilians in question were likely mercenaries or missionaries. I wouldn’t be so cynical, but I honestly expected that our foremost paper of record might actually have shed some light on this ongoing situation instead of whatever euphemistic hackjob that article was.

Super Bowl: A clever enterprise where-in people pay thousands of dollars to descend upon a ridiculously overcapacity arena in the middle of nowhere to witness a gleeful smorgasbord of commercialism bookended by celebrities of yesteryear, swaddled in a cloak of unfounded patriotism. In it, players who represent cities they’ve never been citizens of compete for the entertainment of fans who don’t play the sport.

All in all, a fantastic American tradition, because Boston loses again!

The Entertainment Software Association, which is the video gaming industry’s version of the Record Industry Association of America, is similarly finding itself, with its support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, on the wrong side of business.

So what’s SOPA? In short, it’s an internet censor machine: Any streaming of any protected creative work – for promotion, for reviewing, for satire or parody – is a felony, and any site that is suspected of doing so or merely ‘harboring’ users (as part of its business model, like Facebook, or even on ancillary user forums) can be shut down pre-emptively – by DNS filtering enforced through ISPs – until it can prove its innocence. What this means is that file-sharing sites like Pirate Bay will move webhosting offshore and periodicals and content hosting sites like the Escapist and Flickr will suffer as collateral damage. It means that the advertising dollars that the internet relies on may dry up due to the Sword of Damocles looming over so many legitimate websites and many internet-based companies will be forced to drop employees – if they don’t just shutter altogether.

Suffice it to say, this is like stopping burglary by demolishing homes. Through the proceedings, congressmen admitted ignorance of the very things they were debating, and dismissed actual experts on the field, but this isn’t surprising because it’s at heart the last gasp of economic dinosaurs watching their model destroyed by a new dynamic. They’re lashing out at piracy in the most draconian ways possible when their original business model’s simply outdated, like the RIAA and MPAA did before them. In fact, they’re lashing out at it similarly to how the RIAA did, and with similar incompetency – which is to say, like current DRM, the bill will affect everybody except pirates, as previous attempts to block the Pirate Bay through the proposed measures have proved laughably easy to bypass.

Further, their arguments are, like the RIAA, for people they don’t actually represent: They claim that it will hurt artists overall, but artists aren’t hurting, their publishers are. Another way of saying that is if the artists are hurting, it’s by the publishers – publishers like Electronic Arts, Sony and Nintendo – just like musicians were being summarily screwed by Sony and Universal (…hey, I just mentioned Sony twice). Indeed, your average programmer for a game nowadays is likely to be laid off directly after release, no matter how successful the game proves to be, the games industry is one of the most exploitative industries today, and one of the ironies of the new internet business model is that the much greater ease and ability for self-publication in all fields of art and entertainment actually empowers artists.

In effect, it’s as if we learned nothing when the RIAA and MPAA fought this fight a decade ago: Piracy is just people fixing what is a fundamentally broken system by themselves, and piracy can be solved by giving people what they want: If piracy really destroyed movies and music, Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and Rhapsody wouldn’t be printing money right now. E. D. Kain of Forbes says this much, and Forbes had an interview with Gabe Newell of Valve doing the same for computer gaming with Steam. That said, despite Forbes’ generally progressive views, I’d like to go one further than Kain:

The entertainment industry is held aloft by piracy.

It always was. You think people become movie buffs, music fans or video gamers out of the blue? No. They ingest lots and lots of examples of the medium before that happens. Nobody buys collector’s editions without first becoming collectors, and starting such is prohibitively expensive. Drug dealers know the golden rule: The first hit is free. Every year in the gaming industry hold record profits, despite rampant, widespread piracy, because the people who swapped disks and cracked copies and exploited shareware twenty years ago got bit by the bug and are hooked for life. (Indeed, the median age of the PC gamer is 37, a number which rises by one year every year. That would place the average gamer in the current sales boom as somebody who was a teenager just when file-sharing took off. Funny that.)

As such, when senators like Roy Blunt (R-MO) argue that “business have lost $135 billion in revenue annually as a result of these rogue sites,” not only are they using the same specious “counting chickens before they’re hatched” arguments that the RIAA and MPAA did before, but are ignoring that the only reason people are aware of these products in the first place is due to that same apparatus, and fans wouldn’t exist to be exploited as customers were it not for such ‘rogue sites.’

The gaming industry will shrink overall if it’s allowed to shoot itself (and the whole internet) in the foot with its support for the bill. The irony is that, again, the gaming industry is having yearly record profits – despite the economic downturn – and is growing faster than any other entertainment industry today, so kill that goose, why don’t you.