Saturday, June 23, 2012

Sports and Sexual Assault of Young Players

In this CNN opinion piece, ESPN Magazine's Roxanne Jones says something that needs to be said, but she says it all wrong. We have to draw back the curtain on youth sports and sexual assault and molestation of children, but her approach will just place this common occurrence further in the shadows.

Jones suggests that we educated middle-school children about "inappropriate behavior and how predators operate." I'm not sure where Jones went to school, but I had this message far younger than middle school, and that's a good thing.

The problem is not the predatory culture of sports, but a weird variation on machismo and a complete misunderstanding of pedophilia and homosexuality. Sports are a playground for pedophiles, it's true, but it's because the very existence of these pedophiles is denied. Everything in the following paragraph is wrong, and everything in the following paragraph is believed.

Sports are for macho, strong boys who will grow up to be macho, strong men. Machismo helps keep these boys from turning into teh gay. Gay and sports don't mix, so obviously coaches can't be pedophiles.


Let's consider this point-by-point:

  1. Sports are for macho, strong boys - sports are for everyone. More people would be involved in sports if we dumped the stupid notions. I'm not saying that sports shouldn't be about excelling and winning; they should be about that (at least in part). However, if we only have winners in sports, we're excluding a lot of people who will then not learn sport's lessons about healthy lifestyles, activity, competitiveness, striving, and teamwork. That's a sad thought. Seeing a strong man take the field at a sporting event is not particularly compelling, but when the Bad News Bears come out, we should be cheering. 
  2. Machismo helps keep these boys from turning into teh gay - machismo has nothing to do with sexuality. Kids in sports are just as likely to be gay; sometimes they are quieter about their sexuality for fear of being denied access to their sport. Jeff Sheng did an amazing project photographing young LGBT athletes.
  3. ...so obviously coaches can't be pedophiles - this old saw has long ago disintegrated to rust. Gay does not equal pedophile, and pedophile doesn't mean gay, even if the pedophile is attracted to children of the same sex. Pedophiles are not interested in the sexuality of their prey; they are interested in the lack of sexuality.
I'll be honest, I stopped being interested in sports when I was a scrawny kid. I'm sure I was taunted as being gay, but I don't think that bugged me so much as the general indication that, since I wasn't tall and strong, I shouldn't be on the field. Now, I'm a less-than-gifted athlete, so it's not a loss for the world, but it was a loss for me. As an adult I've gotten into physical fitness, but sports are still haunted with bad memories.

Anytime you have a group of young children supervised by an individual (or small number of individuals), the possibility of pedophilia and molestation rears its ugly head. It can be school, after-school programs, camps, church groups, or yes, even sports. Sports often add some common ways in which kids can be confused; was that horseplay in the locker room or shower, or was it inappropriate touching? Since of course complaining about or refusing to participate in these kinds of activities will cause a player to lose status and be taunted, it's accepted. I'm not sure that it shouldn't be accepted, and while it can create confusion, it's not the source or cause of the problems. Had Sandusky not showered with the boys he molested, he still would have molested them.

When we finally get over this bizarre fear of homosexuality in sports (as we have or are doing in every other area of life) and accept that homosexuality is in no way linked to pedophilia, we can start to have honest discussions about how pedophiles manipulate situations and children. Until that point, sending a child into a sport is putting that child at risk. If I had kids, I would rather have them coached by someone openly part of the LGBT community; someone who has faced his sexuality head-on in a world of bigotry and fear is someone to be admired and trusted.

To sum up, the complex myth of sports being "free from teh gay" and therefore "free from pedophiles" is based entirely on lies connecting homosexuality and pedophilia, as well as bigotry against LGBT. It's this very sequence of lies that is creating risk for kids by hiding and protecting those who would harm them.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

First Take on MacBook Pro w/ Retina

A short review of my new MacBook Pro.

I bought the MBP on Monday, June 11, with priority shipping, and I received in Monday, June 18. I've had a few days to get used to it and I'm impressed. I'm moving from a first-gen MacBook (not pro, the white plastic one), which had 2GB of RAM and a Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo), so I was stuck on Snow Leopard. It was a great computer for most of that time, but at six years it was getting long in the tooth (slow and prone to crash).

My first impression was not the screen, but the SSD. Unfortunately, I couldn't upgrade from 256 to 512 (I would have had to spend on extra $600 on the next model up). I unwrapped it, plugged it into power and my backup drive, and was off and running within five minutes. I had about 150GB backed up, and that restored to the new MBP in less time than it took to watch an episode of Game of Thrones (I'm waaaay behind).

Out-of-box experience (OOBE) was interesting; the box is gift-style, with a lift-off lid rather than a swing-up lid. Inside were the MBP, a small document packet with a screen cloth, my optional USB-ethernet adapter, and the power cord. The new magsafe is actually not that great; my current on snaps on without looking, but this one takes a small amount of effort (yeah, I know, having to look when you plug in the computer, how awful). No CDs, of course, since the new model has no optical drive.

OK, the Retina display. I have a third-gen iPad, but this screen is enormous and extraordinarily bright, and it was the brightness, the sheer density of light, that hit me first. Lots of little things look wonky or pixellated because they have been designed for current density screens, so fonts in Firefox look bad (not awful), but images and video are more crisp and clear than I've ever seen them. While other computer and monitor manufacturers are going to have to play a painful game of catch-up, I think this display is going to do more damage to the TV industry than anything else. Just when we got comfortable with 1080p, Apple has upped their standards. It's stunningly obvious why they skipped BluRay; they can do much, much better. The minor visual issues are being addressed with new builds, but anticipate that you will have to upgrade to new software across the board.

As I've aged, my eyesight has slowly worsened (welcome to getting older), and I have problems with eye strain after a day of computing. Between the brightness and sharpness of the new screen, those issues have been lessened. It wasn't obvious to me that more pixels would mean less eye strain, but it makes sense on reflection; my eyes and brain no longer have to try to make sense of incomplete information.

Speed is a huge improvement over anything I've worked with, a combination of the CPU, memory, and blazing video architecture. I haven't done anything computationally intensive yet, but I can explain the performance this way: the only prior time I felt I truly "had enough computer" was when I had a Sun desktop workstation and 21" monitor (back in the 90's, 'afore the turn of the millenium; you young'uns won't remember). My work has migrated slowly to the web (along with everyone else's), but the JavaScript lag is no longer present. I'll be honest, I was worried that the 4X number of pixels would lead to new lag, but Apple put serious thought into the video hardware and software backing up this dense new display.

The case is so whole that there isn't even a power button on the metal anymore; it's now back on the top row of the keyboard. Apple has improved the membrane keypad, and the trackpad is smooth and adjustable. I'm having a bit of a problem with accidental left-right scrolling, but I suspect that's just a behavior issue on my part; my old MB did not have horizontal scrolling. The new soft, gray, disappearing scroll bars are a little disconcerting because I'm no longer sure if I'm looking at a whole page or not. All minor stuff.

If you have the money, go for it. The Retina display isn't going to change your life or make you happy and whole, but you'll enjoy the the full saturation of your retinas. If you do video or photo, you may find the pixel density helpful in additional ways, but that's not what it's about. Apple has once again proven themselves to make the best and most innovative product in the market. It won't take long before others catch up, but I have to admit that seeing Apple release this after Steve's death shows that they have NOT lost their innovation edge.

In the near future I'll be adding Parallels or VMWare Fusion and linux and Windows, and I may be doing some data crunching (I need to figure out if my SPSS license extends this far), so I'll have more thoughts, but for now I'm very, very pleased.