GreenBkk.com The Daily | FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 2011

FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 2011

MASS. DESTRUCTION

Junk males

Why some men feel the need to share so much of themselves

BY CLAIRE HOWORTH

As a woman who once received electronically transmitted wiener shots, I can say with certitude that such amateur pictorials are not sexy or aphrodisiacal. Clumsy photos of disembodied penises straining against pants fabric, or lurching, bare, out into the open, maybe with a hairy thigh or a far-away big toe in the background, should never be part of courtship.

My first summer in New York, I met a handsome Argentinian business student, double-studying at Columbia and the London School of Economics. He was a couple years older, and exceedingly charming — the first and only time we met, he recited the first passages of “Lolita” (red flag!) and asked me on a date.

Before the agreed-upon night, my cellphone blinged with a message from Fernando. Expecting to find some adorable missive, I popped it open (the heyday of flip phones), and there was a giant erection staring me in the face, looming out over a black-and-white-tiled kitchen floor.

“Gross! Did someone steal yr phone?” I texted.

“Fire of my loins,” came the immediate response. So! Definitely my Nabokov fan.

I never responded, and needless to say, never made it to the restaurant. Over the course of the next year, his penis would appear intermittently in my inbox, in various kinds of activity and stages of arousal. Eventually, I got a new cellphone number.

What struck me about Fernando wasn’t really the persistent and daring harassment — sure, pretty bad — but why he thought his penis would be enticing, not a turn-off, or a terror.

But Fernando has something in common with the other men, public figures, who we now know to be aficionados of phallic photography (would-be, could-be Anthony Weiner; absolutely Brett Favre), or takers of cheesy beefcake self-portraits in fluorescently lit suburban bathrooms (former Congressman Chris Lee), or even dudes who sprinkle their pubic hair on Coke cans (sorry, Justice Thomas — I was 10 when it happened and am unlikely to forget).

They are cocky, pun unavoidable. They are successful, smart, powerful, or some combination thereof, and in their minds, in a deeply Freudian way, penis/muscles/pubic hair = evidence of that. Thus, “Hey, I wanna show ya just how much!”

The psychological profile of a man who sends—or maybe doesn't send, in the end—ribald pictures of himself can be summed up in two words: egomaniac; creep. Testosterone, for this guy, is demonstrative. (One caveat, and they exist: men who are sure the intended recipients want to see their naughty Steichens.)

It of course remains to be seen who the cotton-clad member’s master is in the photo Weiner tweeted last week, but the representative shows some classic symptoms of a naughty TwitPic-er. As for Fernando, here’s hoping he hasn’t taken to Twitter yet, or found my new area code.

On second thought, maybe this is the perfect way to ferret out these vermin. Hey, ’Nando, give me your best shot — I’ll make you famous: @clairehoworth.

'NSFW,' 'ZOMG,' and 'Twittersphere' added to dictionary

By Rosa Golijan

The Oxford Dictionaries Online, one of the authorities on the English language, has once again taken steps to acknowledge how our obsession with the Internet is gradually altering our vocabularies — by adding things such as "NSFW," "ZOMG," "newb," and "Twittersphere" to its virtual pages.

The folks behind these additions explain that the "world of computers and social networking continues to be a major influence on the English language" and so continual edits of reference texts are necessary.

There is quite a range of words including several initialisms — abbreviations consisting of the initial letters of expressions — in this month's batch, but we've gone ahead and collected our favorite tech-themed additions:

- breadcrumb trail - (on a website) a series of hyperlinks displayed at the top of a web page, indicating the page's position in the overall structure of the site

- Cyber Monday - (in the US) the Monday following Thanksgiving, promoted by online retailers as a day for exceptional bargains

- infographic - a visual image such as a chart or diagram used to represent information or data: a good infographic is worth a thousand words

- insidery - proceeding from or reflecting an insider's knowledge or perspective: an insidery website that is widely read in the capital's political precincts insidery jargon

- lappy - a laptop: I'm going to transfer my CD collection to the lappy

- lifehack - a strategy or technique adopted in order to manage one's time and daily activities in a more efficient way

- meep - a short, high-pitched sound, especially as emitted by an animal or a vehicle's horn: the kitten released a terrified meep

- nekkid- (of a person) naked: some of the oldest photos in existence are of nekkid women

- network neutrality - the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites

- newb - short for newbie it's easy enough for total newbs to pick up and play

- NSFW - not safe (or suitable) for work (used in electronic communication to indicate that a particular web page or website contains explicit sexual material or other adult content): if your friend just sent you something with NSFW in the subject line, don't go there

- paperless - relating to or involving the storage or communication of information in electronic form, rather than on paper: several of the utilities companies have switched to paperless billing

- permalink - a permanent static hyperlink to a particular web page or entry in a blog

- Twittersphere - postings made on the social networking site Twitter, considered collectively: the Twittersphere was abuzz when the story first broke

- unfollow - stop tracking (a person, group, or organization) on a social networking site: never unfollow someone just because they unfollowed you!

- ZOMG - (used especially on electronic message boards as a sarcastic comment on an inexperienced or overenthusiastic poster) oh my God!: ZOMG! ! I finally managed to reformat the file; the airport was hot and big, but there was really nothing that made me stop and think ZOMG FOREIGN COUNTRY!

Accusing the accuser

Why DSK’s alleged victim is being dragged into a media maelstrom

BY JILL FILIPOVIC

The indictment of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sexual assault charges has cued up some tried-and-true media narratives about politics, international affairs and important men and their bad behavior: Powerful men feel awfully entitled to treat women poorly. Americans are prudish (especially about sex). The French are arrogant (about everything). And any woman who says she was raped might be lying and probably did something wrong.

Not long after DSK was arrested, the hunt began for information about the woman he is accused of assaulting. We learned she is a “chambermaid” in the $3,000-per-night suite where DSK stayed; we learned she is an immigrant and a Muslim. She’s a single mom. And ... that’s it. Even after invasive questioning of her friends, neighbors and relatives, reporters haven’t been able to dig up much dirt.

But the press and the public nevertheless remain concerned about the personal details of her life. More progressive media outlets have been careful to note that she wears a headscarf, which is apparently proof positive of her chastity. The New York Post insinuated she has HIV or AIDS (a claim her lawyer denies). French publications printed her name and the name of her daughter. They included quotes about her relative hotness (she either isn’t very seductive or is very pretty, depending on the paper you read) and the size of her breasts and buttocks. French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy, writing in the Daily Beast, suggested that she’s lying because, he says, hotels typically send in a “cleaning brigade” of multiple housekeepers, and the accuser in this case was doing her job alone — an argument that’s a close relative of “Well what was she doing there anyway, and why was she wearing that?” As for the other women who came forward and said DSK tried to rape them or coerced them into sex, Levy dismissed them as “pretend[ing] to have been the victim” and of attempting “to settle old scores or further their own little affairs.”

Writing in the American Spectator, political commentator Ben Stein joined the chorus, saying that DSK is probably innocent because he’s an economist and economists don’t rape people, and after all, these accusations are coming from a maid. Rumors are swirling in France that the woman is a prostitute — prostitutes, apparently, are alternately deserving of and immune from rape. And according to one French poll, 60 percent of the French public believes that she’s part of an elaborate setup to sink DSK’s political career.

But the biggest problem isn’t that the French press and public seem to have taken victim-blaming and conspiracy-theorizing to new levels of unhinged. The problem isn’t that, all evidence aside, she and other accusers are alternately painted as sluts or virgins, because it’s just easier to either jam the facts into the “She’s a whore” narrative, or imply that if she wears a headscarf, she must be sexually conservative. The problem is that we consider any of that relevant.

All kinds of women are the victims of sexual assault. Sex workers. Nuns. College students. Little girls. Old women. Women who have had no sexual partners and women who have had 100. Women who are walking alone at night and women who thought they were safe in their own beds. Women who wear headscarves and women who wear miniskirts.

Very few men, on the other hand, are rapists, but the small number who are tend to sexually assault a lot of women.

So why are we so interested in what a victim did, or what she looks like, or what her sexual history is? None of that makes her more or less likely to be assaulted. The scary truth is that women are raped because they had the bad luck of being stuck in a room with a rapist.

That is not particularly comforting information. It’s nice to imagine that if we just don’t go to particular places or don’t wear particular things, we’ll avoid being assaulted, but that’s not the case. Media focus on an alleged victim’s behavior reinforces the idea that her sexual past is a relevant issue. It’s equivalent to reporting a robbery case by investigating whether the victim ever treated friends to dinner. It doesn’t indicate that he was more likely to hand over his wallet when there was a knife to his throat.

There aren’t many people whose private lives can withstand the kind of intense scrutiny leveled at women who say they were raped. And so it’s not surprising that sexual assault is one of the most underreported crimes in the country.

In American courts of law, the accused is presumed innocent until found guilty, and DSK will be treated according to that standard. The media aren’t required to play by those same rules, but they are ostensibly interested in fairness and accuracy. Focusing on the biography of the accuser belies those interests. It also sends a clear message to rape survivors: If you report the crime, every detail of your life can and will be used against you, if not in a court of law then in every newspaper from here to Paris.

Jill Filipovic is an attorney and the editor of Feministe.

Shrink the prisons

Conservatives are as wrong on jailing as liberals were on welfare reform

BY SHIKHA DALMIA

Sometimes the correct answer is genuinely hard to see. At other times it is obvious, but we are too blinded by our ideological prejudices to see it. That’s what happened to many liberals during the welfare reform debate 15 years ago. And it might be what is happening now to the conservatives protesting Plata vs. Brown, a recent Supreme Court ruling ordering California to relieve the massive overcrowding in its prisons.

Back in 1996, so convinced were liberals that the only thing standing between the poor and utter destitution was their beloved welfare state that they fought their own President’s reform effort like Don Quixote fought for his imaginary damsels. Disregarding years of evidence that doling out welfare checks without any time limit or work requirements perpetuated the very cycle of poverty that they were trying to cure, liberals made one gloomy prediction after another, even warning that the law would throw a million children into poverty.

The opposite turned out to be the case: Not only did President Clinton’s reforms cause welfare rolls to plummet, but the poverty rate dropped too. Single moms’ incomes had gone up by 25 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars six years after reform. And the child-poverty rate among blacks had plunged 11 percentage points by 2005.

But if liberals got it wrong on welfare reform, conservatives have it wrong on prison reform – especially the four dissenting Supremos who claim that the ruling will undermine the Constitution, public safety and California’s fabled blue skies.

California has been stuffing its prisons for decades, at one point packing 160,000 inmates into facilities meant for 80,000. Even now, a decade-and-a-half after inmates won their first lawsuit, California houses 145,000 prisoners in the same facilities, creating living conditions more deplorable than in my son’s college dorm room.

Up to 200 prisoners are sometimes crammed in one gymnasium, 54 to a toilet, triggering regular outbreaks of communicable diseases and violence. And that’s the good part. The worst is the care offered to sick inmates. Because of a shortage of treatment beds, mentally ill patients have been held in telephone-booth-sized cages for hours without toilets. Prisoners with physical illnesses sometimes die waiting for treatment. In 2006, inmate suicide rate reached 80 percent higher than the national average.

In light of this, the court majority concluded that California was violating the Eight Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, giving it two years to cut back about 37,000 inmates.

Justice Antonin Scalia condemned the ruling as a “judicial travesty.” He lambasted the court for violating California’s sovereignty by ordering a broad fix of its prison system rather than offering targeted relief to affected inmates.

It is hard to keep a straight face when Scalia waxes eloquent about states’ rights given that, without any compunction, he overrode the rights of medical marijuana users in California and assisted-suicide patients in Oregon, although state voters approved those measures. But Scalia’s proposal to limit relief to affected inmates means that the court has to wait until prisoners suffer injury or death. Perhaps this is Scalia’s new theory of posthumous constitutional rights.

But if Scalia is being tendentious, Justice Samuel Alito is apocalyptic (and apoplectic). In a separate dissent, he accused the majority of “gambling” with public safety in ordering the release of prisoners. But the majority did no such thing. It asked California to relieve overcrowding. Prisoner release is one way, but transferring inmates to other states or county jails, adding more prison capacity or some combination thereof, are also options.

However, even if California released the equivalent of “three army divisions of prisoners,” as Alito insisted it would have to do, would that result in a “grim roster of victims”?

No. California keeps many nonviolent offenders locked up for too long, thanks to its draconian three-strike laws. Twenty-five states have such laws, but only California gives 25 years to life to repeat offenders for such minor felonies as shoplifting and burglary. They constituted about 43,000 of California’s inmate population (or four Army divisions) in 2004. Many of their sentences could be commuted without endangering public safety given that these laws have had little impact on crime rates.

Alito pointed to Philadelphia’s experience with a court-imposed prison cap in the 1990s to support his gloom and doom. But that cap was poorly implemented. Once it was reached, it barred the city from imprisoning literally anyone except hardcore murderers and rapists. The upshot was that many violent offenders were released and commited crimes again. Since then, Wisconsin, Illinois, Texas and others have reduced their prison populations without any adverse effect.

We knew in 1996 that welfare reform would work because there was a vast body of literature gathered over years of painstaking experimentation by 45 states demonstrating that it would. But hardline liberals refused to recognize this because they cared more about the welfare state than the human beings trapped in it. Likewise, we have strong evidence showing that California can reform its sentencing laws without going to hell, but tough-on-crime conservatives refuse to see it.

Sadly, the triumph of ideology over humanity is the one thing that unites both sides.

This guy had his MacBook

Picturesque Proposal

Jeff Gurwin's unconventional proposal — consisting of a mural painted on Manhattan's Lower East Side — has made him a hit on YouTube, with the 28-year-old's big moment drawing 150,000 views so far.

Edwards admits doing wrong: Former Senator John Edwards delivered this very short statement outside the federal courthouse Friday afternoon after his indictment by a grand jury on felony criminal charges. [ABC News video via ABC7News.com]

Edwards was indicted for allegedly using more than $900,000 in campaign funds to hide his mistress during the 2008 Democratic presidential race. —ABC News

RUNNING MAN

Romney scolds Obama, defines his health-care agenda in 2012 kickoff

BY DAVID KNOWLES

Mitt Romney, declaring that President Obama had “failed America,” joined the 2012 presidential race yesterday.

During a rally with few hundred supporters at a private farm in Stratham, N.H., Romney largely ignored his Republican competition and focused solely on the president.

“A few years ago, Americans did something that was, actually, very much the sort of thing Americans like to do. We gave someone new a chance to lead the country, someone we hadn’t known for very long, someone who didn’t have a long record, but someone who promised to lead us to a better place,” Romney said.

“At the time, we didn’t know what sort of a president he would make. It was a moment of crisis for our economy. And when Barack Obama came to office we wished him well and hoped for the best. Now, in the third year of his four-year term, we have more than promises and slogans to go by. Barack Obama has failed America.”

Arguing that Obama’s policies have made the recession worse, Romney went on to blast Obama on a range of issues, including his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and what Romney saw as the administration’s affinity for European-style socialism.

“This president’s first answer to every problem is to take power from you and from your local government and from your state, so that his so-called experts in Washington can make decisions for you,” Romney said. “And with each of those decisions, we lose more of our freedom.”

But Romney did praise the president on ordering the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and instituting a U.S. troop surge into Afghanistan shortly after taking office.

Walking a careful line, Romney also pledged to repeal the president’s health-care legislation, even though it is largely modeled on the Massachusetts mandate that Romney himself signed into law.

Saying that he had taken a “bad situation and made it better,” Romney echoed his earlier argument that the Massachusetts law differed from what convservatives term “Obamacare” because it as a “state solution” rather than a federal one.

Distracting from Romney’s big rollout, potential contenders Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani both arrived in New Hampshire, each taking shots at the former governor’s state versus federal distinction.

“In my opinion, any mandate coming from government is not a good thing,” Palin said yesterday.

Changing Color

$41 million mobile startup pledges to go beyond widely panned app

BY CARL FRANZEN

Color spent millions of dollars and countlesshours developing its first, much-hyped app. By all accounts it failed. Now the company has gone back to the drawing board.

“Our first building block was proximity, which is different than location because it focused on defining who was together rather than where they were,” Color co-founder and CEO Bill Nguyen told The Daily.

“Next we will focus on applying a social graph onto proximity. Think of it as implementing the open graph in real-time. We’re building meaningful infrastructure and not just an app so it will take time and iteration.”

What that means exactly is anyone’s guess. But Nguyen says they aren’t ready to say exactly what they’re working on, much less show it off, and won’t be until the fall.

Color was initially compared hyperbolically to Google and Facebook in terms of promise and historical importance.

“Imagine what Color might have revealed during the Kennedy assassination, or the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, or hell, the Rodney King beating?” wrote John Battelle at Searchblog.

But soon came a torrent of criticism: Namely,that Color wasn’t qualitatively different than other photo-sharing apps and that it had a difficult-to-understand user interface. It was eventually updated, but users were still irked.

Worst of all, the app was deemed decidedly unsocial. Since nobody could figure out how to use it, few did, and the app only really works as intended among groups.

Mix in a healthy dose of hubris, inflated privacy concerns, infamously bad reviews, a compromised royal wedding photo gallery, and the press around Color soon became the anathema of the mobile app market. To date, it only has a 2-star average rating on the App Store.

Last month, the Color team even pulled their Android app from the Android Market, seriously confusing and aggravating users. They still haven’t provided a precise date for when an updated version will be released, only that it will come “soon.”

And the initial $41 million in venture capital funding and loans secured by the parent company, “Color Labs Ltd,” was deemed as decisive proof that another tech bubble was on the verge of bursting.

The investors behind that sum — including such big names as Sequoia Capital (which reportedly pitched in $25 million), Bain Capital ($9 million) and Silicon Valley Bank ($7 million) — declined to say what, if any, return they hoped to see in their expensive gambit.

Still, Silicon Valley Bank’s director of public relations, Carrie Merritt, was able to confirm that the money her company gave to Color was actually a loan, not pure venture capital financing, as had been previously misreported.

“The loan was a small amount of the total capital they raised,” she said. “That’s pretty standard.”

She said that SVB generally hedges its bets big time in the case of costly start-ups like Color, taking the position of senior secured lender. That means that if Color were to fail and go bankrupt, SVB could still make back its investment.

“We’d work with a company to sell some of its assets,” Merritt said, pointing out that this was the absolute worst case-scenario for any of the thousands of startups it currently counts as customers. It has deferred payment plans ready to go well before that point.

Ironically, perhaps the most vivid account of what Color is up to now comes from the very business across the street from their headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. A manager at the downtown Palo AltoCreamery told The Daily, under condition of anonymity, that Color founder Bill Nguyen and many of the 30-something employees at Color come into the restaurant for food and to conduct work meetings.

Bill’s always upbeat,” he said, “He wants to work with the community in Palo Alto, get them in on the app and have them test out new things and really make it work for our businesses.”

When asked if Nguyen or any other Color employees had specifically reached out or asked the creamery’s employees to download the app on their iPhones, the manager said, “No, not yet.”

Teddy rides like that

President Theodore Roosevelt (left) on a camel in the desert near Khartoum (the capital of Sudan), accompanied by Baron Sir Rudolf von Slatin Pasha. (ca. 1910 / Nationaal Archief)

President Roosevelt op kameel /American President Roosevelt on a camel in the desert

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Nationaal Archief/Spaarnestad Photo/Het Leven

Nederlands: De Amerikaanse president Theodore Roosevelt (links) op een kameel in de woestijn in de omgeving van Khartoum (hoofdstad van Soedan) in gezelschap van Baron Sir Rudolf von Slatin Pasha, een tot de Islam bekeerde Engelse baron. Foto uit 1910.

English: American President Theodore Roosevelt (to the left) on a camel in the desert in the neighbourhood of Khartoum (Capital of Sudan), accompanied by Baron Sir Rudolf von Slatin Pasha, an English baron converted to Islam. Photo out of 1910.

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