Lies, Damn Lies, and Congressional Hearings

(((Roger Clemens; Brian McNamee; Chris Shays; Steroids are drugs, they are even illegal drugs, but insisting on calling McNamee a "drug dealer" is at best stupid and at worst an insidious category confusion)))

Gotta love congressional hearings, where two people sit virtually next to each other at a table (see this great photo) and call each other liars, even though they never once address each other, and elected officials take turns calling one, the other, or both liars. For some reason, it seemed to be the Republicans defending Clemens and going after McNamee, but I really don't get why that would be.

The best, though, was watching Chris Shays, dork extraordinaire, insisting that McNamee is "a drug dealer":

[Mr. Shays. . . . ] For you, Mr. McNamee, I believe some of what you say. But you know, it depends when. I view you as a police officer who is a drug dealer. [ . . . ] I read that comment and I think maybe [being or having been] a police officer would have made you not want to be a drug dealer. But instead it made you be wary of [Clemens].

Mr. McNamee. I understand your concerns. But as far as your comment about a drug dealer, I only did what players asked and it was wrong.

Mr. Shays. Mr. McNamee, you are a drug dealer. You may --

Mr. McNamee. That's your opinion.

Mr. Shays. No, it's not in my opinion. You were dealing with drugs.

Mr. McNamee. Okay.

Mr. Shays. You were dealing with illegal drugs. Tell me as a police officer how that is not being a drug dealer.

Mr. McNamee. That's your opinion.

Mr. Shays. No, it's not my opinion. I'm asking you to tell me. Tell me how it's legal to do illegal things and you not call it what you were. You were dealing in drugs, weren't you?

Mr. McNamee. Dealing in them, yes.

Mr. Shays. Were they legal drugs?

Mr. McNamee. No, they weren't.

Mr. Shays. Thank you.

This is a version of the classic pedant's two-step. It is often a good way to get people to stop being wishy-washy and to dump euphemisms. But it has its Orwellian uses, too.

Imagine the following conversation:

Mr. Shays. As for you, Mr. Fisher, I would think that as an American you would not want to be a godless commie terrorist-sympathizer.

Mr. Fisher. Sir, I object to that characterization.

Mr. Shays. But you are a godless commie terrorist-sympathizer.

Mr. Fisher. That's your opinion. [Okay, this is a stupid argument, too, but let's keep things simple.]

Mr. Shays. Do you believe in God?

Mr. Fisher. What do you mean by "god"? And while we're at it, what do you mean by "believe in"?

Mr. Shays. Right. And do you not argue that communism is preferable to capitalism?

Mr. Fisher. Isn't it obvious?

Mr. Shays. And do you not oppose the War on Terror?

Mr. Fisher. I sure do.

Mr. Shays. Then how are you not a godless commie terrorist sympathizer?

Mr. Fisher. Fuck. You got me. Pretty sneaky, Shays.

In the case at hand, Shays's use of this utterly transparent—but often very difficult to counter—maneuver is merely meant to tarnish McNamee. After all, who can believe a "drug dealer"? Why he wanted to do this in the first place remains a mystery to me.

Yes, yes, technically McNamee could be called a drug dealer . . . he made money administering illegal pharmaceuticals (aka, "drugs"). But let's be honest that this is bullshit. It's as if the guy were standing on street corners selling dime bags of cream and clear, or ran a run-down HGH house where people come to shoot up and stay there for days lying around on soiled mattresses.

The businesses of elite performance enhancing drugs, on the one hand, and recreational drugs, on the other, are totally different businesses, the only commonality being that both involve illegal pharmaceuticals. People don't prostitute themselves or take their child's baby-food-money for a hit of HGH. Brian McNamee doesn't have an army of street dealers or ties to Colombian cartels. Conversely, there isn't pressure from sports teams on players to do lines of coke the way there is pressure to take a shot of HGH on the sly in order to heal up for a game. How stupid does Shays think we are? Or does he just think he's that clever?

Shays's grandstanding is not just an affront to language and logic, but to the police he professes to respect, the narcotics officers who risk their lives undercover to bust up crack dealers. Busting Brian McNamee, "drug dealer," just doesn't have the same, I don't know, oomph.

But maybe he'll get a Law & Order spot out of it.

Doping: It's not Just for Cyclists Any More

(((Steroids in major sports; naming names; test for real or drop the pretense)))

So George Mitchell released his report, counting 89 drugged players. That's really all? Wouldn't it be interesting to see the trends? But that would take real testing, wouldn't it, to really know the extent of the situation and the way it's changed over time. It's pretty obvious, too, that we can only expect more of it in the future, since high school and college athletes are doping like never before.

The FT notes:

Several players were angered that Mr Mitchell opted to disclose names in his report even though the evidence was based on limited sources.

Of course, there's one easy way to fix that thing about sources, if the players really care about this: genuine, effective testing. Like the way cycling actually busts people and bans them from the sport. Of course, a lot of people would say that doping has destroyed cycling's potential for growth, and that they would be better off if they were more like MLB and just pretended to test. Or gave up on banning performance enhancement altogether. There's that.

But if people are going to talk the talk about how awful steroids are, then they need to walk the walk. I frankly don't believe the athletes are worried about false positives with WADA/UCI-type testing. I believe they're worried about genuine positives.

On the other hand, it's also clearly an arms race: testing vs. advances both in the performance enhancing techniques and in masking their use. One wonders if fighting it like this is really worth the effort.

tags technorati : steroids, Mitchell Report, baseball, politics, sports, cycling

CoffeeT00lz.com

I can't possibly be the only person who's had it with the "Coffee Exposed" sponsored Google link that keeps showing up in my Gmail "Web Clips" box. A snap to illustrate, or to jog your memory, depending:



Apparently, there's some "shocking secret" coffee companies don't want me to know, but is it SFW?

There's a not-so-secret I want the makers of coffeefool.com to know: you don't entice me to read your exposé by forcing me to acknowledge in the very link I click that I am a "coffee fool" who's been conned by coffee companies. Thanks for trying to remove the scales from my eyes, but might I suggest a less condescending approach? You sound like all those self-appointed enlighteners of the masses who are more worried about what's allegedly wrong with Kansas than what's wrong with their own message or organizing.

And we all know that allegedly "shocking" secrets almost never deliver, anyway, so I'm doubly put off. And then there's the fact that I've ignored it a million times already, and resent having to ignore it again. But since, like good capitalists, you've purchased a sponsored link, you've taken that choice away from me.

Go the fuck away, already.

tags technorati : coffee, coffeefool.com

The Religions of the Cultural Elites

Interesting review (entitled, "Mystics of a Materialist Age) of what appears to be a very interesting book on the role of drugs in the historical development of European-American literature: Marcus Boon's The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs. It is particularly timely in the context of recent scuffles over Richard Dawkins's and Sam Harris's attacks on religion (which I admit I have yet to read, but which I plan to comment on here, when I get to them).

In his review of Harris, Alexander Saxton quotes the author: "At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition: [that] it is possible to have one's experience of the world radically transformed." Sure, but religion is hardly unique in this respect. Justus Nieland's review quotes Boon: "Psychedelics point out in a very direct and dramatic way that radical, rapid shifts in consciousness are possible."

Shocking! Religion and drugs share an element of consciousness-alteration. Who doesn't know this already? And why do we still need either religion or psychedelics to know this about consciousness? Haven't any of these people ever fallen in love?

Leaving aside for now the question of whether one (of drugs and religion . . . or love, for that matter) is more pernicious than the other, and in what way(s), a summary question for Boon from Nieland:

Finally, given Boon's sympathy for the quintessentially modern desire for transcendence, and his explicit "call for a proliferation of alternative methods of obtaining gnosis," more attention might have been paid to the specific political horizons that have historically given rise to and constrained the moderns various attempts to imagine its transcendent outsides (86). How might the position of drugs and other transcendent "hybrids" on the map of Latour's modern constitution be shifting in our post-9/11 climate; put another way, who needs opium when you've got Jesus or Allah?

Dawkins would, I suspect, put it in reverse: who needs Jesus or Allah when you've got opium? But in such tracts as Dawkins's, "more attention might [be] paid to the specific political horizons that have historically given rise to and constrained the modern's various attempts to imagine its transcendent outsides," or to its various attempts to imagine the world without transcendent outsides . . . also, dare we say, a historically situated perspective. Or is science itself the transcendent?

Eagleton notes in his review of Dawkins,

It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase [i.e., that religion is the opium of the masses]; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.