Ronda Rousey might not be very good for MMA's image

For my own part, I don't care if she's good for MMA's image.  For crying out loud, it's a semi-legal fistfight in a cage.  Pretending that sports in general and MMA in particular encourage good, upstanding people is an exercise in futility.  They are people looking for a legal way to beat the shit out of other human beings.

That said, the UFC is pretty interested in creating a good image for MMA.  Which is why they are forced, against their personal preferences, to support a fighter like Georges St-Pierre.  He's so wholesome, amirite?  They initially tried to pitch John Jones like that, a good Christian family man, but he turned out to be too weird.

I think they're making a slightly different, but related, mistake with Rousey.  Unlike Jones, who is hard to like because he's weird, Rousey is hard to like because she's so petty and mean.

So, recently, she said she would love to "beat the shit" out of Brian Caraway, Miesha Tate's boyfriend, because of stuff he said on Twitter.  She won't because she thinks he's the kind of "bitch" who would "sue". (Perhaps she doesn't understand that assault is generally charged under criminal statues and the real risk is prison.)

She is hardly, of course, the first fighter to hate another fighter.  (Though it is, perhaps, the first time a championship fighter has had such a public fight with two other fighters who are a couple.)  And it's interesting to see such an aggressive woman (though, let's be fair, she's doing something I find pretty chickenshit - she's the one hiding, saying she'd beat up so-and-so if not for the law . . . . I mean, I feel the same way, I'd totally beat the shit out of John Jones except it's against the law; that's what's stopping me, the law, really, I swear) but the more she opens her mouth, the more shallow, petty and mean she comes off.

Seriously, you'd beat a guy up because of what he says on Twitter?  Ronda, grow up.  It's fucking Twitter.  You don't want to get bent out of shape?  Stop going on Twitter.  Or use some sort of filter so you never see or hear what Tate and Caraway say.  It's not that hard.

But, no, she's the kind of person who gets bent out of shape over Twitter and then says she'd beat someone up if the law didn't stop her.  Ugh.  That's so . . . thirteen year old asshole on the Internet.  The faux bravery ("I'd beat them up IF . . .") combined with the juvenile rationale for the problem.  Rousey ends up looking, to me, like a twerp, a childish Internet bully who just happens to know how to armbar people.

I suspect there's going to be a Frank Shamrock thing going on.  Sure, she's the baddest woman in the world - well, except when she dodges fights with Cris Cyborg, so the second baddest woman in the world, let's be honest - but, like Shamrock, she's a not-too-bright bullying asshole.  She is going to remind people that MMA is a sport of brutal jerks.  For a bit, little girls will go, "I want to be like her!"  But, like Shamrock, as time goes on and she becomes absurd, those same people will sigh and shake their heads, reminding themselves that they were children when they admired her.

Reporting sucks today - the BBC editors and writers should be fired

I read two fairly horrible articles on BBC.com.  The first was "Big rise in new 'legal highs' - UN Drug Report" and the second was "Did our brains evolve to foolish follow celebrities?"

In the first about legal highs, the article is about the spread of designer drugs for whom no legislation exists and how the chemistry of drug designers works faster than law enforcement in criminalizing them.  The article goes on to say that this is bad because the new designer drugs are dangerous.  This is stupid in at least two ways.  One: it takes as a given that getting high, in any fashion at all, should be illegal.  Two: the facts are wrong.

Now, why should it be taken that getting high should be illegal?  It is untrue, of course.  We are allowed to get high, legally, with alchohol and nicotine (I should, perhaps, add caffiene to that list).  These things are legal and regulated and they get you high.  Alcohol, in particular, has the power to get you as fucked up as any illegal drug -- the characteristic of the high is different than, say, LSD, but you can get yourself totally wasted by alcohol to a similar extent as LSD.  While nicotine lacks that kind of potential in the way the industrialized world generally uses it (though if you're fond of a hookah, you can get pretty goddamn smashed, I should add), clearly we are not systematically opposed to intoxication.  So why should we presume all other forms of intoxication are bad?  Yet, in a totally unspoken way, the article does exactly that.

Afterward, it just says that designer drugs are unsafe.  Really?  Let's think this through.

(One of the unsafe drugs mentioned is "bath salts", which is just sloppy journalism.  Almost no one takes bath salts because the high isn't very good and the crash is quite bad.  But after that guy freaked out here in Miami had started eating a dude's face, there was a bath salts scare.  Bath salts had nothing to do with the attack, but once a good scare is started it's good for sensationalism to bring it up.  Who cares if people don't actually use bath salts?  Bath salts are bad!)

Alcohol and nicotine can kill you.  In the US, alone, the CDC says that 60,000 die every year because they drink too much.  The CDC says that cigarette smoking causes twenty percent of deaths in America, 443,000.  Fifty thousand of those deaths are from second hand smoke -- fifty thousand non-smokers die every year because of cigarettes.

In 2010, a study by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs ranked how dangerous various drugs were on a scale of 1 to 100, taking into account personal harm, harm to others, costs to society.  Alcohol got a 72, the highest score - this is above heroin at 55 and crack cocaine at 54.  Tobacco was right under cocaine at 25.  Cannabis rated a 21.  Mephedrone - one of the "dangeorus" designer drugs - rated a 12.  Ecstasy rates a 9.  LSD is down at around 7 and magic mushrooms a 5.

So, most illegal drugs are safer than most legal ones.  The dangerous mephedrone, meow meow in the article, is . . . pretty goddamn safe.  Safer than cannabis.  Ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms?  Single digits.

I question the report in several serious ways.  There is no real indication that cannabis harms the user.  So why does it rate above, y'know, in the same ballpark as cocaine and amphetamines?  And how does nicotine, causing so many deaths, rate lower than alcohol?  So, far from perfect.

Yet, many of the drugs we thing are dangerous - mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy - are very . . . well, safe compared to things that are already legal.  And mephedrone, one of the drugs the reporter specifically mentions, is much safe than the legal drugs of tobacco and alcohol. 

In short: there is no reason to presume designer drugs are dangerous.  That's just pure sensationalism created out of a fairly bizarre idea that being high on anything other than booze or cigarettes is somehow worse than being high on booze and cigarettes.  It's also just plain wrong and clearly no one fact-checked the article, so it's a failure on the editorial level, too, for a newspaper that is supposed to report facts.

The second bad article is about the effects of prestige on society.  The article opines that we should not care what underwear David Beckham wears - that Beckham's social prestige makes us care more than we "should" for extraneous things like his fashion choices.

What the article fails to really address is that this isn't happenstance.  We care what underwear David Beckham wears because someone make a multimillion dollar advertising campaign to sell us Calvin Klein briefs.  Left to our own devices, most of us would never, ever learn, or care to learn, what briefs Beckham wears and care about his prestige in his area of legitimate expertise - soccer.

The use of the prestige of celebrity to sell us things is not a maladaptation to the modern world.  It is an adaptation that is being consciously, actively subverted by advertisers to sell us crap we do not need.  Without the influence of advertisers, would the prestige of celebrity be so odious?  Is it bad to hold up David Beckham in considerable prestige due to his really incredible athletic skills?  Or to hold up Beyonce for her skill as an entertainer?  But what happens is this prestige, this false authority, is being repackaged by advertisers as a means to manipulate us.  It isn't just happenstance.  Someone is doing it.

When you fail to mention something so important in an article about how prestige is used to influence us - that there are a group of people consciously manipulating this psychological reality - then you've failed as a journalist.

Then I stopped reading the news because I remembered how horrible it is, generally.

"Friends of Syria"

A bunch of countries, the US among them, have representatives in Qatar to decide how much aid to give to the rebels.  This baffles me.  I know that they're using chemical weapons as the fig leaf to rationalize the intervention, even though reports of chemical weapons use seem to be equally leveled against both sides.  Not to mention that the rebels aren't a peach, they're frequently crazy religious fundie nutjobs of the sort we've seen take over other Middle Eastern countries . . . in part because they get funding from the US.

So, over in Syria we have two political groups, both detestable.  It is baffling to me why the US would involve itself in so ugly a conflict, support religious fundamentalists, once again.  Power makes people stupid, I think.

Thoughts on WSOF 3's main card

In the wake of Josh Burkman avenging his loss against Jon Fitch, I have a few thoughts.


First and foremost, get Mazzagatti out of the goddamn cage. He's a menace to fighters. I understand that reffing MMA is harder than reffing boxing – there are more judgment calls. I get that. But Mazzagatti is terrible. Fire him before someone gets hurt.

Second, John! This just validates Dana White's assholery! It elevates his bad decisions to the realms of oracle! Now he can just smugly say that he knew that this was going to happen, which is why he fired you!

Third, well, yeah, I also saw it coming so it's possible White, with his greater access to information, knew it, too. Fitch came off of a year-long rehab of a separated shoulder to get kneed in the face by Johny Hendricks. Then he got outwrestled by BJ Penn for two rounds before pulling off a draw more due to Penn's lack of stamina than anything in particular he did. Then he narrowly beat Erick Silva and was dominated in a positional battle by Demian Maia before getting submitted by Burkman. There is a word for this and the word is “shot”. He's getting to be in his mid-thirties and more than one athlete has failed to recover from a separated shoulder. I'm sure Fitch works real hard, but since he's utterly opposed to the kind of therapies that would allow a 34-year old dude to recover from a bad separated shoulder, his inability to beat anyone of stature in his past four fights indicated to me he should start looking for a job with less physical trauma involved. Fitch has shown greatly diminished ability to win the positional battles upon which his style depends and it isn't like he's radically improved his striking to make up for it. Also, his chin seems to be going. There are only so many head blows a dude can take, after all.

I know, this seems to disrespect Josh Burkman, diminish the significance of his victory. Well, yeah. This is not the same John Fitch as before his shoulder separation. Maybe it's the shoulder, maybe his love of fighting has waned, maybe it's something else or some combination, but regardless of the cause, the effect is that if John Fitch can't beat Josh Burkman, he's no longer a force in MMA. The fight was, I think, far more a referendum on Fitch's diminished performance than a demonstration that Burkman is now a top welterweight.


But, really, the takeaway message from all of this is that Steve Mazzagatti is a terrible referee and need to be taken out of the game before someone gets seriously hurt.

Regulation of weight cutting in MMA

There was an article, recently, in MMA Underground, http://www.mixedmartialarts.com/news/437035/Call-for-weight-cutting-to-be-regulated/”>that calls on MMA to regulate weight cutting. I very much agree.

Unlike the dudes at MMA Underground, for me, it isn't even that weight cutting is dangerous. Mind you, it is dangerous, but people do all kinds of dangerous things. They jump out of airplanes and get into bobsleds. Sometimes, they even get into cage fights. That's the upshot of the MMA Underground article, though, that we have to wring our hands over the safety of grown adults who choose to cut weight. To me, that regulating weight cutting would save lives is merely a bonus.

What bothers me, as a fight fan, is three-fold.

First, it makes the idea of a fighter's weight to be notional. Before every fight, they tell us what the fighter weighed at weigh-in. It is generally a bad approximation, containing no more information that the fighter could cut down to that weight. What their actual weight is at the time of the fight is a mystery and often vastly different. And since different fighters cut different amounts of weight, the information provided by a weigh-in is merely tangential to the actual weights of the fighters.

Second, and more importantly, part of the appeal of MMA – and I daresay any combat sport – is to figure out who really is the toughest sonofabitch out there. On the street, you don't cut weight. You can't massage the rules to fight a smaller guy. I think it's contrary to the ideals of combat sports that the fighters should attempt to manipulate themselves to fight smaller people. It's playing the system, it's making a non-combat relevant skill (weight cutting) to be at least as important as the combat relevant training we expect fighters to excel at.

Thirdly, because weight-cutting is debilitating, we're not seeing the best physical performance we can get from the fighters. We see them slower and weaker than they would normally be because they're engaging in the taxing enterprise of cutting weight.

To give you an idea of how bad this is . . .

Jose Aldo fights at 145 pounds but he weighs around 175 pounds. He cuts THIRTY pounds of weight, right through the top of welterweight, through lightweight, down to featherweight. Gray Maynard, when he fought Frankie Edgar, weighed somewhere between 185 and 200 pounds – he had a thirty to fifty pound advantage against Edgar! Ben Henderson weights around 185 and fights at 155 – he is the size of many welterweights, including the welterweight champion, Georges St-Pierre. Anderson Silva weighs around 220 and fights at 185 – he weighs as much as many light heavyweights, including the champ, Jon Jones. At almost every weight class, the champion is there, in part, because they are simply bigger. Guys like Aldo, Henderson and Anderson are almost always substantially bigger than their opponents – the weigh more than the average fighter of a weight class (or more) above them. To me, that just seems a kind of, well, cheating. It's presenting yourself as smaller than you are in order to gain an advantage over your opponents.

Not only is this weight cutting tolerated, it is encouraged. As the MMA Underground said, the UFC doesn't regulate it at all. Granted, you can mess yourself up with weight cuts, but to me that's also the problem. So you have bizarre situations like Anthony Johnson cutting down from 220 pounds to fight, weakened and slow, at 170 pounds. Not to mention that weight cutting on that scale is very dangerous. (Current UFC heavyweight Daniel Cormier, a small heavyweight at 230 pounds, doesn't fight at light-heavyweight – where he would be even more devastating – due to kidney damage he received cutting weight for wrestling while in college.)

It also presents great advantages to sports that teach weight cutting. European fighters, for instance, generally don't cut weight because wrestling isn't very popular in Western Europe. They, more or less, come into the cage at their normal weight – and time and again you can see them get manhandled not because of their inferior talent but simply because they are outweighed by thirty pounds. So it damages the entrance of international talent into MMA as well as magnifies the significance of wrestling – not only is it the premier defensive martial art of MMA, it teaches the skills of weight cutting in a way that even other grappling arts, like judo, do not.

I just don't like it that a non-combat skill set is so dominant and important in what is supposed to be a combat sport.

The crazy thing, it's a real easy problem to fix. Just set weigh-ins for three hours before the start of the card. Instead of giving the fighters somewhere between thirty-four and forty hours to rehydrate, give them between three and nine. You'd still see a little weight cutting in fighters just beyond the threshold of a given weight class, but it would entirely dispense with guys losing thirty pounds in the two days before a fight. It would give us far more realistic assessment of their physical size, no one would game the system to fight smaller opponents and the fighters would come in with more energy than they would, otherwise. Additionally, it would open the doors of talent to more international fighters who do not have a history of weight cutting. The only down side is it would play havoc with the current rankings, but a few fights would sort that right out.

Alternately, you could do what the guys at MMA Underground suggest and make a bunch of rules that would be difficult to enforce . . . and at which they would likely be as successful as combating steroid use. The best way to fix the problem is to make it physically impossible for them to engage in it, not excessive, difficult to enforce regulation.

Depression, Hyperbole and a Half recommendation, the problems of psychiatry

A post in Hyperbole and a Half does a really good job of talking about depression in a way that is both amusing and sensitive. As a person has suffered clinical depression and who has been suicidal, I have felt pretty much everything that Allie talks about. It is incredibly difficult to talk about depression when people don't realize that it really is a kind of disease, serious and debilitating – that your ability to feel is crippled, so merely asking or hoping for a clinically depressed person to “get better” is like asking a person with no legs to get up and run. It's not possible. That part of your brain is just too broken.

Part of me got angry, though. Not at Allie but, rather, for her and everyone out there who has suffered long spells of treatment with partial and intermittent success. As I've said before I think psychiatry is totally fucked up.

Whether out of cowardice or ignorance, psychiatry makes people suffer. They have a ton of options that they simply fail to use, both medication that is commonly used for physical pain and illness (opiates and hormones, for instance) as well as drugs that are irrationally illegal but are of known psychiatric value (LSD and MDMA, for instance).

I wanted to bring this up on Allie's blog, but I couldn't because the comment maximum had been reached. Drat.

Psychiatry has a huge problem: their inability to prescribe drugs outside of a narrow band that society and politicians have deemed acceptable for treating mental illness. Drugs that have study after study done that demonstrate their value as medicine. This is a problem, I feel, of sufficient magnitude to discredit psychiatry altogether. Allowing popular opinion and ignorant politicians shape medical practice into a limited and crippling form that does damage to the most vulnerable of patients when many alternate methods of treatment are available is not scientific medicine. It is not too far different from snake oil salesmen, really, when psychiatrists prescribe yet another dopamine or serotonin effecting drug when the last several did no good, as if all SSRIs or dopamine agonists don't do basically the same thing.

That's a huge problem. It isn't Scientologists jumping up on couches and casting psychiatry into the role of demonic pawns of body thetans. These are real medical issues and they are enormous, it is a huge confluence of events that delegitimatizes all of psychiatry. People should be jumping up on couches and saying, “They have drugs that can treat serious depression and anxiety and fall to even attempt to use them! They allow specious judgments of the FDA stop them from using drugs whose usefulness to medicine is demonstrated in many hundreds of studies! They allow malevolent public policy by conservative politicians and the fears of traditional religion drive medical practice and they roll over and take it! It needs to stop so we can help millions of Americans who suffer serious mental illnesses!”

It's what I want to do. I want to jump and point the finger. They are failing both as scientists and as ethical beings. They are creating untold suffering. They need to be stopped.

We need a new word for people who work against the public trust within the boundaries of law; criticism of dismissing conspiracy theorists

To me, conspiracy theorizing is pretty weird because when you look at the definition of a conspiracy it's obvious we're surrounded by them once you strip out the risible language.  But it's hard to do because the risible language is built in.

A conspiracy is, according to thefreedictionary.com, 1. an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful or subversive act, 2. a group of conspirators, 3. Law an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action and 4. a joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.

That's . . . a pretty loaded definition because it leaves out of the realms of conspiracy anything that isn't illegal and even by the fourth definition, “as if by sinister design”. Conspiracy is, by a common dictionary, by definition at least sinister and usually illegal.

Going to thesaurus.com, I tried to find a word that was like conspiracy but accounted for things that were not illegal – like the word whose definition is “people working together inside the law but against the public welfare”. In a note to the entry “collusion”, they note that “cooperation is always positive, collaboration is positive except in wartime (working with the enemy) and collusion is always negative (working together in secret for a dishonest purpose)”. Conspiracy is a synonym with collude.  There didn't seem to be anything like I was looking for.

Yet, I find that unsatisfying, too, because there are all kinds of behaviors that are legal but nevertheless highly manipulative, such as advertising and propaganda (which is just advertising with a political message we don't like, really – how is the manipulations of North Korea propaganda but what comes out of our smear-happy, negative campaigning, lie-athon that we call an electoral process NOT propaganda?). There just seems to be no word, other than conspiracy, to describe when a group of people, often totally legally and with legal ends, nevertheless engage in unethical behavior to achieve their ends.

So what do we call a group of people who legally lie (and often their lies form the very basis of law) to achieve their ends that are destructive and terrible yet totally legal?

To take a fairly extreme example, how does one talk about the lies and distortions used to start the Crusades. A letter from the Byzantine Emperor asking for mercenaries was turned into a lurid account of Turks murdering Christians and desecrating the tomb of Jesus. None of it was illegal. One could argue that the Catholic Church and various governments that supported the narrative of the Crusades were simply interpreting a complex political situation in terms that could be understood by their illiterate and uncultured knights and peasants.  Sure, it's specious reasoning, but you could make it and just barely not be laughably wrong.

Yet, somehow, the lies spread by Pope Urban II and the kings of Europe do not fit the definition of “conspiracy” because it wasn't illegal or subversive. What was it, then? Just religion?

But a lot of politics and business is like that. What they do is not technically illegal and, honest, there was no malice of intent. Even with the credit default swap stuff that tanked the economy in 2008. Not a conspiracy. Sure, there was a coordinated effort by every top bank in the world to sell as many credit default swaps as possible all to increase their own personal fortunes, but that's not a conspiracy! That's just business.

But it happens again and again. Every bubble in the history of the modern world has been engineered to benefit a few. Every war has it's winners, usually the guys who sell guns. Yet when a military contractor uses political influence to shape an aggressive foreign policy, it's not a conspiracy. Nothing either illegal nor subversive is going on. It's just politics.

There is a lacuna in our language then. If we use the word conspiracy to talk about political, religious and economic manipulation, we're called paranoid because the events we describe aren't illegal or subversive. There is no well-round word with which we can describe the legal forms of manipulation of our culture, business and politics that also describes the profundity with which the system is controlled by small cabals of like-minded individuals. Legally. Openly.

This really benefits the, oh, let's call them special interest groups that control our government. We can't really refer to their multifaceted, yet legal, manipulations of the public trust in language that does justice to the seriousness of their actions. And we can't talk about something unless we have words that substantially describe what it is we're talking about. In this lacuna of words, a lot of manipulation is not discussed. Worse, when people dare call it conspiracy – because the behavior resembles a conspiracy save for it's legality – the very idea that this kind of collusion occurs at all is attacked. People who bring up the concentration of power in a tiny group of people's hands are just crazy conspiracy theorists.

We need a word to describe the legal manipulations of the system against the public trust, one that conveys the seriousness of the issue but does not bring to mind the specter of conspiracy. Until we have such a word, the people out there who are acting together, within the system, but against the public trust will have an easy go at it because we can't even TALK about them.