Trump at Game 5: Live by the theatrical gesture, die by the theatrical gesture.

Reminiscent of John 3:16?

I'll remember the World Series as the first time in a long while that I rooted for a National League team. New York Yankees appearances are an exception, and in cases of a Dodgers-Yankees series, I wouldn't watch at all.

I've nothing whatever against the players, but I couldn't abide the Houston front office's tone-deaf response to assistant general manager Brandon Taubman's outbursts aimed at female reporters, which took place following the league championship series.

Seems Taubman outed himself as a douche bag -- albeit it explainable behavior for him given a former career on Wall Street -- and his superiors arrogantly flailed for days before belatedly mouthing platitudes absent sincerity about their comprehension of a changing world.

Around the game, shots of schadenfreude have been chased by I-told-you-so's. Contempt for the Astros runs deep -- and has well before this incident. Jealousy breeds some of it. The organization's arrogance accounts for the rest. The Astros painted themselves as a disrupter and reveled in the commotion. They lived with the perception that they didn't understand people. They fed their process, followed it with fealty, doubled down. They believed in it, and they never had much of a reason not to, not until a week ago, when the assistant GM high on the feeling of winning the pennant opened his mouth, and two days later, when Luhnow and the Astros forgot to abide by that essential principle that has guided them for so long: Bad information leads to bad decisions.

Spare the tears for Taubman. Before we know it he'll be back at an investment firm, screwing taxpayers.

 And the Trump scene at Game 5? Spew feces for a living, and you'd best expect to get feces spewed back at you.

I'm happy the Washington Nationals won; again, nothing against the Astros as players. Even apart from the Houston front office fiasco, witnessing a seven-game pro sports series in which the visiting team won all the games is something we're not likely to see repeated.

Take me out of this ball game at The Economist

Donald Trump’s embarrassing reception at the World Series was a defining moment of his presidency

As a rule of thumb, the more an American president is loved, the more baseball stories there are about him.

Although not Donald Trump.

He had not been to watch the Washington Nationals (the Senators’ successors) before this week. And though he was persuaded to go because the “Nats” were appearing in their first World Series, he was not invited to throw the first pitch. On what he might have expected to be his best day as commander-in-chief (he revealed the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hours earlier), he was hidden away in an executive suite. The Lerner family that owns the Nats did not want him sitting with them. And the one time he flashed up on the big screen the jeering of the crowd was thunderous. A chant of “Lock him up!” rippled round the stadium long after Mr Trump’s image was replaced by footage of smiling servicemen. “Veterans for impeachment” read a banner behind home plate.

The usual battle lines were drawn.

Mr Trump’s Republican defenders dismissed this indignity as mere swamp gurgling. “You can either be loved in dc and hated in America. Or you can be loved in America and hated in dc,” tweeted Congressman Jody Hice. But it signified much worse for the president and his party than a few thousand hostile bureaucrats.

The newspaper concludes ...

He is not the first president to be booed at a sporting event. Bill Clinton was jeered by a nascar crowd, George W. Bush and Barack Obama at baseball games. But veterans of those occasions (and there were several watching the Nats that night) considered the hatefulness of the response to Mr Trump qualitatively different. This should make conservatives even more worried. For years they have exaggerated the vindictiveness and radicalism of the left to mask the contradictions in their own camp. Yet Mr Trump’s divisiveness has turned this into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Charged with partisan grievance, many on the left want to scrap the electoral college, pack the courts—do whatever it takes to never again be tyrannised by an antediluvian minority. Conservatives may soon have more than the odd gay wedding cake to contend with.

And it already seems certain that the one baseball event Mr Trump will be associated with occurred at Nationals Park this week. Sport lifts people with a feeling of vicarious striving for perfection even when their team loses. And when it wins, as the Nationals ultimately did, bringing Washington its first World Series in almost a century, the memory never fades. This is why sport is so much more loved than politics. Immortalised in baseball history, Mr Trump’s humiliation this week will be remembered long after most of his administration’s scandals have faded into oblivion.

Anti-Semitism always mutates to survive, forever feeding on raw stupidity.

We live in times where there is a surplus of facts, information and knowledge, all of it at our fingertips, more bountiful and readily available than at any point in human history.

Perhaps it is a reflection of our inability (unwillingness?) to sort, collate and quantify all this knowledge that every day it's possible to pluck an item or 200 from the news feed and reach the inescapable conclusion that people have nonetheless become as stunted and dense as medieval peasants.

And yes, I know ... I'm insulting the medieval peasants by making this comparison.

I'm far from perfect as a human being, but these variants of hatred make no sense to me, whether they're anti-Semitism, racism, misogyny or homophobia. If anything, I can come close to understanding the impulse to hate the haters; while abstract discussions of "love" haven't ever ranked high on my personal hit parade, it seems obvious that hating hate isn't enough.

But at least medieval peasants knew how to cook their own meals, while contemporary white supremacists are doomed to the dollar menu at a fast food chain. If logic can't cripple them, perhaps coagulated arteries will.

Jew-hatred keeps mutating to survive (The Economist)

Lessons from the Pittsburgh massacre

... Most Jews in Europe do not cower. Nor have American Jews been as safe as they presumed. That became tragically apparent on October 27th, when a white-supremacist gunman, named as Robert Bowers, shot dead 11 Sabbath worshippers in Pittsburgh (see article). “I never thought that the kind of terrorism that we have seen in France and in other places in Europe would be raising its ugly head in America,” says Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish group. And he thinks “it’s only the opening round.” Suddenly, it is American Jews who have started talking about whether, when and how to leave.

It is futile to try to assess the true extent of Jew-hatred from the deeds of a lone gunman. The Anti-Defamation League (adl), which fights bigotry, says there was a sharp rise last year in anti-Semitic incidents, such as vandalism of Jewish sites and harassment (including bomb threats). But the number of assaults on Jews was small and fell. Worldwide, violence against Jews has declined sharply since 2014, according to an annual study by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Centre (see chart).

Beyond such violence, defining anti-Semitism is harder because it is so protean. Historically, notes Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s former chief rabbi, “Jews were hated because they were poor and because they were rich; because they were communists and because they were capitalists; because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they clung to ancient religious beliefs and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing.” These days, overt Jew-hatred is comparatively rare in the West, largely because of its association with the Nazi Holocaust. Often it is disguised. Rants about “globalists” on the far-right and “Zionists” on the far-left can be euphemisms for “Jews”. Yet both words have straightforward meanings, too, and not all who use them are bigots.

Michal Bilewicz of the University of Warsaw outlines three categories of anti-Semitism. The “traditional” kind is based on Catholic teaching (since abandoned) that Jews killed Christ, and on medieval blood-libels (accusations that Jews killed children to mix their blood with Passover flatbread). The second, “modern”, sort is based on a belief in conspiracies by powerful Jews. The last kind, “secondary” anti-Semitism, holds that Jews abuse the history of the Holocaust. Others seek to categorise the miasma differently: eg, as racist, economic, cultural and religious; or explicit and coded; or soft and violent ...

Your Sunday must-read: "Relax, Ladies. Don’t Be So Uptight. You Know You Want It."

As a male of the species, one acknowledging his fair share of missteps and imperfections, it's unclear to me how best to introduce this essay apart from stating that it makes perfect sense.

What has NOT made perfect sense to me over the years are lingering and idiotic notions like male chauvinism, toxic masculinity and the doctrine of women as inferior beings, particularly those attached to some manner of supernatural sanction.

Pfui. That's plain rubbish.

Yes, there were times in my youth when I displayed overt symptoms of misogyny. I have no glib excuses for any of it, and I won't cop a plea. I'd dearly love to forget those times, but cannot, because it simply wouldn't be honest of me; besides, I learned from it. Eventually it dawned on me that I was dead wrong.

Being male is one thing, and being a dick is something else entirely.

Ever since then, I've tried my best to learn and improve. It's a work in progress, and a process of awareness, one that never ends. Who wants to be remembered as a sexist, racist, or homophobic turd? Not me. People are people: full stop. We may disagree, but it won't be because of your sex, race, or sexuality.

Your beer, on the other hand ...

Relax, Ladies. Don’t Be So Uptight. You Know You Want It, by Anastasia Basil (Medium)

Remember the ’80s, when men preferred Hanes and could legally rape their wives?

... Movies, ads, and TV shows of the ’80s were tailored to give your dad a testosterone boost and teach your brothers to be men. Strong, no-bullshit men, the kind who say what they think and take what they want. Grab ’em by the pussy kind of men. No way was your brother gay. Or you. Unless you were into threesomes. A girl could be into another girl, but only to feed the male gaze, then it was hot. If two women truly loved each other they were going to hell. Read your Leviticus, but first, let me ask you a little something. You’ve got pretty red hair. Is it naturally red? Why don’t you let me see if the carpet matches the drapes? Relax. Don’t be so uptight. You know you want it.

snip

We are all byproducts of a collective mindset. Those who question the mindset of their time and shine light on its moral defects are considered malcontents. And yet, it is malcontents like MLK who are (later) lauded as heroes — not for upholding America’s values, for shaping them. Here’s a fun game. Ask yourself: What strongly held opinion of mine will my grandchildren one day struggle to understand?

The 23 percent of Americans who supported civil rights in 1963 knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t accidentally do the right thing. They weren’t accidentally on the right side of history. Instead of bullheaded allegiance, they questioned, examined, and took a knee to the moral defects of their time.

snip

Have you ever known someone who hasn’t changed their hair style in decades? They still have the bangs they had in seventh grade? There are people who haven’t changed their views since seventh grade, either. We shouldn’t use our present-day ideas and perspectives to judge the distant past (the Parthenon was built by slaves), but if someone drags an antiquated moral norm into the present, they should expect to be held in account.

final snip

I wonder… would today’s anti-feminists be yesterday’s anti-suffragettes? #WomenAgainstSusanBAnthony

Want to know what a feminist is? A feminist is a person who, instead of being the docile pet of their generation, rears back and bares their teeth. The idea that we no longer need feminism is absurd — it’s the equivalent of technology stopping at the floppy disc.

THE BEER BEAT: How "Ambitious Brew" prefaced "I Know What Boyz Like" -- and "The Misogynist Within."

From Bryan Roth's article at Good Beer Hunting.

Maureen Ogle's Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer was published in 2006, and I've finally gotten around to reading it.

When the Beer Was Bitter, and Its Future Cloudy, by William Grimes (New York Times; October 27, 2006)

In the annals of immigrant success stories, lager beer deserves its own chapter. Before 1840, Americans drank English ales and porter or, more commonly, whiskey and rum. But as Germans by the thousands poured into New York and moved onward to Midwestern towns like Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago and Milwaukee, they presented a new beverage to the American palate, a different kind of beer that Americans took to with such, shall we say, gusto that it soon became the national drink.

The rise of lager beer, and the great names associated with it — names like Busch, Pabst, Blatz, Schlitz and Miller — is the subject of Maureen Ogle’s effervescent, occasionally frothy “Ambitious Brew,” a fairly standard history with a provocative thesis attached. Ms. Ogle, in telling the story of the great beer families, takes the air out of a few myths, chief among them the standard narrative used to explain beer’s sad decline in quality to the pale, tasteless, mass-market drink advertised these days on televised sports.

The twice-told tale of beer’s fall from grace goes something like this. In olden days, thousands of craft brewers turned out a pure, flavorful product made from nothing more than hops, barley, water and yeast. After Prohibition, however, the big beer companies started manufacturing beer with cheap ingredients like rice and corn, duped the public into buying it through lavish advertising campaigns and forced their smaller competitors out of business, making the world safe for Bud Light.

The real story, as Ms. Ogle tells it, is a little more complicated.

Maybe it actually was a "little more complicated," but one of the author's own anecdotes confirms that the industrial beer barons of old weren't exactly exemplars of vision or social consciousness.

Ogle tells of the run-up to Prohibition, with the "Drys" an early example of a well-funded, highly-motivated single-issue lobby group. The teetotalers began putting points on the scoreboard in the late 1800s, but it took the brewers until 1913 to so much as begin organizing in response, and unity was elusive among them.

Perhaps the most effective argument coming from the prohibitionist camp pertained to the sinfulness of the average saloon. Most were tied to a brewery, and the breweries feared giving up this lucrative distribution arrangement even when the saloons were functioning as cesspools, gambling dens and whorehouses.

The ensuing xenophobia and patriotism (almost to a man, the beer barons were of German ancestry, albeit American-born) greeting America's inexorable march toward entry into WWI effectively did the rest. The brewers didn't know what hit them, primarily because they refused to pay attention until it was too late.

Ever since Leg Spreader first oozed to the surface three years ago (really -- it was January, 2015), much has been accomplished with respect to sexism in "craft" beer.

Quite a bit is left to be done, judging by another excellent piece by Bryan Roth, who is one of the most thoughtful beer writers around -- perhaps the Dave Zirin of good beer?

In the immediate aftermath of Roth's essay, just about every brewery mentioned belatedly recalled those long ago words of Phil Collins: "There must be some misunderstanding/There must be some kind of mistake."

Coming amid the overdue tsunami of #MeToo, I'm afraid to ask this question, but can the "craft" brewers of today really be as blind as those pre-Prohibition beer barons?

I Know What Boyz Like — A Grassroots Industry Struggles to Find Leadership on Social Issues, by Bryan Roth (Good Beer Hunting)

 ... “It’s a microcosm of the cultural zeitgeist right now,” says (Craig) Smith, the brewer and consultant from Florida. “We couldn’t be more divided in everything.”

In the macro sense, the sentiment feels true, especially for anyone who scrolls through news feeds or turns on the nightly news. But, as shown from a variety of viewpoints across many entries to the beer industry, there has also never been as much cohesiveness around this one topic. If anything, now may be the most ideal time to push the hardest toward change. The Brewers Association struck a decades-long victory recently when tax reform passed, lowering federal costs for selling beer. It’s making a significant investment in a public hop-breeding program. The organization even launched an initiative to address an ongoing problem of lost kegs, which can be a significant financial burden to breweries.

Battles have been won. If ever there was a time to jump into the fray for other causes, now would be it. In fact, others have already done so.

At the end of December, the UK's Campaign for Real Ale consumer advocacy group released its first executive statement on discrimination, condemning "any behaviour that discriminates against individuals because of their gender, race, ethnic origin, disability, age, nationality, national origin, sexuality, religion or belief, marital status and social class.” Any use of sexist images or slogans would bar placement at the group's festivals, competitions, and publications.

Currently, no state guild in the U.S. lists any similar language on its website. The Brewers Association has its marketing code, and won’t announce inappropriate names of award-winning beers at events, but nothing as definitive as what the UK organization issued.

“It's important that CAMRA's stance is as public as possible in order to ensure that all our members are aware of the organization's policy when it comes to discrimination, and that they understand the standards of behaviour and value that we expect any member of CAMRA to follow,” says Tom Stainer, the organization’s head of communications. “It's also important that we make it clear to the rest of the industry where we stand on issues of discrimination.”

Similarly, the UK’s Society of Independent Brewers followed suit, issuing a statement that “SIBA members who promote their beers with sexist, offensive advertising have no place in our membership of responsible, professional brewing businesses.” The group goes a step farther than its U.S. counterpart in regard to offensive names or labels, holding the right to disqualify competition entries out right instead of simply not saying a beer's name during award announcements.

Change is happening in many sectors of society, but across the U.S., an attempt at incremental steps continues to be led by those with the least at stake ...

This would be an excellent juncture to turn to a more palatable topic, like Maibock or NEIPA. But I'm not finished yet. I recommend reading the whole article, although only the conclusion is here.

The Misogynist Within, by Kai Wright (The Nation)

Sexual harassment expresses power dynamics from which all men benefit.

... And so now we face a reckoning. Let it be more than a coming to terms with sexual harassment. Yes, let’s bring the abusers to justice. But let us also consider the many ways in which we’ve organized ourselves around misogyny—in our workplaces, in our families, and as individuals. Maybe then we can mount a movement larger than Democrats and Republicans, and start talking seriously instead about things like peace, justice, and equity.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Of misogyny, misandry, and misanthropy.

They're Greek to me -- to all of us, in fact.

mi-soj-uh-nee
mis-an-dree
mis-an-thruh-pee

But first, a shout out to LT for reminding me about misandry, which I don't recall seeing mentioned in the "Collected Spasms of Herr Trump," although misogyny is another story.

Predictably, a book already has been written about all three of Shane's words for today: Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy. It's a collection of essays published in 1989 by the University of California Press.

Digging further, it seems that misandry has become a veritable cottage industry for authors Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young.

• Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture (2006)
• Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men (2006)
• Sanctifying Misandry: Goddess Ideology and the Fall of Man (2011)
• Replacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History of Men (2015)

(As an aside, Nathanson also is the author of a groundbreaking exploration of Jeff Gahan's Floyd County Democratic Party: Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz As a Secular Myth of America.)

For most casual observers, misogyny is the best known of these words.

The (Etymological) Roots of misogyny

Misogyny may be distinguished from the closely related word sexism, which signifies discrimination based on sex (although it most frequently refers to discrimination against women) and also carries the meaning “behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex.”

Misogyny refers specifically to a hatred of women. The word is formed from the Greek roots misein (“to hate”) and gynē (“woman”). Each of these roots can be found in other English words, both common and obscure. Gynē helped to form gynecologist and androgynous, and misein can be found in such words as misoneism (“a hatred, fear, or intolerance of innovation or change”) and misandry (“a hatred of men”).

Knowing that "mis(o)-" refers to hate, and the Greek ανδρειος (andreios) means "manly, masculine" (deriving from ανηρ (aner) "man"), misandry quickly defines itself. According to Merriam-Webster, the first known use of misandry among English speakers came during the late 19th century, while misogyny dates all the way back to 1656. This in itself seems significant, as though hating women was something so common as to be taken for granted.

And misanthropy?

The word "anthropo-" is borrowed from the Greek for "human," and so misanthropy is the "hatred, dislike, or distrust of humankind."

Perhaps this column's namesake can help us with a question: Is there a word for "hatred of public housing residents?"

Or did you have to attend New Albany High School (as opposed to Floyd Central) to answer such a query?

Zirin on "Louisville Basketball and the NCAA’s Political Economy of Misogyny."

Former University of Michigan and NBA star Jalen Rose, as quoted in the Detroit Free Press on the topic of college athletic recruitment:

"Yes, there is drinking. Yes, there is members of the opposite sex that are present. Remember, they're trying to woo me to the campus ... and as a 17-year-old kid, first off, if I'm not getting laid, I'm not coming. I'm not signing. I'm not coming."

At times like this, as the fanatics rush to decry and defend the coach, I take a deep breath and remind myself that we're about the only country in the world to confuse sports with education.

In this, it's helpful to know that Dave Zirin is out there somewhere, writing about sports and those aspects of it embracing genuine significance. Zirin warns against moralizing and cynicism, and hits the center of the target.

Louisville Basketball and the NCAA’s Political Economy of Misogyny, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

 ... both of these reactions miss the most urgent issue—the NCAA’s political economy of misogyny. There’s a lesson in this scandal if we’re willing to learn it. It starts with Louisville Basketball, whose use of transactional sex as a method of recruitment produced results and made a small number of people very rich. Louisville has now been at the top of Forbes Magazine’s list of most valuable NCAA hoops programs for four consecutive years. Pitino won an NCAA title in 2013 alongside a new contract that pays him well in excess of four million dollars a year. The connective tissue before us between the political economy of amateurism and misogyny has been written in a neon script. It also shines a harsh light on how the use of women as currency links many of the public relations crises that plague sports and the psychological pain that plagues ex-athletes.

Misogyny's meaning is fairly clear.

There's no place for it, in any event. Etymology speaks clearly in this instance, and it seems obvious that bias grows where hatred already fertilizes. However, it is a joyful development when we discuss what words meaning, because words have meaning ... and ideas matter, even in Truck Through City.

online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140530-711175.html">Misogyny: Does It Mean Hate or Bias?, by Ben Zimmer (WSJ)

... Those who looked up "misogyny" in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary would find a terse definition: "a hatred of women." Etymologically speaking, that is right on the money, as the word combines the Greek root for "woman" with the prefix "miso-" meaning "hatred" (also found in "misandry," a hatred of men, and "misanthropy," a hatred of humankind).

Zirin: "Oscar Pistorius and the Global System of Deadly Misogyny."

The Nation's Dave Zirin rapidly is becoming the only writer about sports (I refrain from the more conventional moniker) who I can can stand reading. That's because he insists on refusing to view sports apart from a broader societal context. In Zirin's coverage, the dog is considered, not merely the tail. The hypocrisies are considered absent the worshipful delusions. Twitterers, you can follow Zirin at @EdgeofSports.

Oscar Pistorius and the Global System of Deadly Misogyny

... Just as with Belcher and Perkins, we will learn more than we ever wanted or needed to know in the weeks to come about the nature of Pistorius and Steenkamp’s relationship. We will learn about the “allegations of a domestic nature” that had brought police to his home in the past. We will learn about Pistorius’s previous allegedly violent relationships with women. We will learn about the variety of guns he kept at close hand. We will surely discuss male athletes and violence against women: the sort of all-too-common story that can create commonality between a football player from Long Island and a sprinter from Johannesburg. We might even ponder the way these gated communities, one of which was also the site of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin’s murder a year ago, become throbbing pods of paranoia and parabellums. We will learn about everything except what actually matters: there is a global epidemic of violence against women, and South Africa is at its epicenter.