J, Robot writes: Do you want a) an anti-war whistleblower, or b) a pro-war, bomb-promoting, racist, rape-inciting float in your Parade? After careful consideration, I'm going with choice "a".

Isn't the actual issue whether Manning should be made an honorary grand marshal of the parade not whether a pro-Manning float is allowed?

God that's depressing.

The fact that a Celtic is being shown as an example of social progress or the be-missiled Iranian leader or the Manning honor?

You pays your money and you takes your choice, but I was thinking of the float.

3 - Take it up with Thomas Cahill, Mr. Orange.

I know it's supposed to be a big deal, but I find I just can't bring myself to care about X or Y public figure announcing their sexual orientation any longer.

I care when it breaks a frontier. I think Collins was rather courageous, although also well-placed to be the first.

It'll also be an important milestone when an NFL player comes out. Then, when a baseball player eventually comes out an embarrassingly long time later, nobody will care.

Which is to say, I care because I'll be pleased to no longer care pretty soon.

I don't know about baseball players, but the Pirates have proven that a gay man can run a baseball team provided he doesn't tell anyone and does a really bad job of it.

Maybe if they changed the team name to The Gay Pirates they'd play better, or at least with a bit more flair.

I have definitely enjoyed the 400,000,000 liberals I follow on twitter who don't care about sports pointing out that the real hero is Martina Navratilova and everyone has forgotten about the extremely obscure athlete that nobody realized was homosexual, Martina Navratilova.

They can also marry Michele Bachmann.

6: You don't need to care. You're not the target demo. Please feel free to continue not caring, not that I am on the Committee to Determine What Apostropher Cares About. The point, such as it is: it still matters, whether you or I care or not.

The thing I'm reading this morning a lot is people pointing out that female pro athletes have been out for a while and now the media is dickishly ignoring this. Though, really, I guess the point there may be that people aren't threatened by gay women nearly as much as by gay men. Well, and the point behind the point is that a lot of this is about money and men's sports are what's on prime time.

12: She tweeted a hilariously humblebraggy/passive aggressive thing along the lines of "Congrats! I did this in 1983."

11 sounds like it should star Douglas Fairbanks and Nigel De Brulier.

11: Butt Pirates, I think you mean. What, you didn't go to middle school or something?

14.last: Right, that and the "OMG the *team* can never function with a homo on it!" bit that people perseverate about. Athletes in individual sports have/have had an easier time of it, probably.

There is a wee bit of stereotype difference to overcome as well, between lesbians excelling at sports and gay men excelling at sports.

19: Yep!

Does anyone remember the days of last week, when there were these think pieces coming out about how Brittney Griner is matter-of-fact about gayness and what this new development means for society, etc. etc.? What was the deal with that? Haven't there been multiple lesbian stars in the WNBA for at least a decade?

Here is an overview of US sports revenues:
http://www.plunkettresearch.com/sports-recreation-leisure-market-research/industry-statistics

NBA revenue 2012 was 7.7B USD.

The single highest grossing film of 2012 (Avengers) took in 1.4 B. The orientation-tolerant but imbecile profit-maximizing US film industry makes about as much as all of pro sports.

So I guess although the agonist is an intelligent, young black guy, the conversation to have is actually about the hidden opinions of old white men? Probably the team owners and bureaucrats rather than the actual viewing audience.

There is Gareth Thomas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Thomas_%28rugby_player%29

Although he came out towards the end of his career, he was still playing (league, rather than union). There's also an out hurling player. It seems like there are more out players in seriously tough sports than in soccer.

12. They only go on about Navratilova because they're too young to remember Billie Jean King.

12: I wish I had your Facebook feed. On mine, I learn that Jason Collins is no Jackie Robinson.

25: Shaquille O'Neal would have flattened Jackie Robinson in the paint.

Bradley Manning is not a whistleblower, he's a mentally ill young man who lashed out at authority the hardest he could. Julian Assange isn't a noble crusader for truth and openness, he's a viciously anti-American activist who has explicitly stated that if US soldiers or people who cooperated with the US in Iraq and Afghanistan are killed he doesn't give a fuck and they had it coming. Also, a rapist.

Manning may well have gotten people killed, and he certainly hurt the ability of the US to go after some horrible people. This isn't the Pentagon Papers. Making Manning a marshal of the pride parade would be a slap in the face to US military personnel, gay and straight.

It's true nobody could ever come up with any plausible ways to smear Daniel Ellsberg.

Manning may well have gotten people killed

And he may have saved countless lives. Or he may have shot JR. Or been the first-round draft pick for the Kansas City Chiefs. Take your pick.

What we actually know is that US government - which has quite a lot of resources - worked very hard to find a victim from the disclosure, and failed utterly.

She tweeted a hilariously humblebraggy/passive aggressive thing along the lines of "Congrats! I did this in 1983."

Yeah, that cracked me up too:

Well done Jason Collins- you are a brave man. And a big man at that:) 1981 was the year for me- 2013 is the year for you:)

First openly gay Rugby League player was Ian Roberts, seriously terrifying prop forward for Australia and (wonderfully) Manly. I think the response was something like "Congratulations...sir."

That's No.10 in the green and gold in this clip.

Thumbs up to 29. And 27 seems to be, on the face of it, a pack of lies - there is at least nothing in it which I know to be true and much which I know to be false.

The point, such as it is: it still matters, whether you or I care or not.

I liked Frank Bruni's piece this morning that essentially said it'll stop mattering when the poster boy doesn't have to be a manly, god-fearing, well-liked paragon. Obvious, perhaps, but Bruni lays it out well; it's a good piece for the right-wing, homophobic friends and relatives y'all seem to have to/choose to interact with.

21: I'll push back on that a little and say that her coming out was a non-event, not a special announcement, not seen as anything out of the ordinary. I've been curious for a long time how she'd play it since she was semi-public about her sexual orientation (like, facebook relationship status, etc.) while in HS and then had to hide everything at Baylor, and so I'd assumed she wouldn't actually come out until after graduation and it's pretty cool that she did it anyway. She's managed these four years of people saying horrible things about her sexual orientation and gender identity with an amazing amount of grace, as I see it, and her comments on being a lesbian were in keeping with that.

I'm trying to think about the other public WNBA coming-out moments of the last few years and I think Seimone Augustus was able to do it very matter-of-factly but is much less high-profile than Griner. Chamique Holdsclaw is well-known but was farther in her career when she came out, with the added twist of connection to a reality tv show and then a scary-sounding domestic violence incident as well as an autobiography. Meanwhile Sheryl Swoopes kind of disavowed her lesbian years and apparently currently identifies as straight. I don't know any white lesbian WNBA players, but presumably there are some.

I don't actually follow the WNBA. I do think race matters a lot when talking about sexual orientation in sports, though, and although the way Collins mentioned it was a bit awkward, I'm glad he brought it up as part of his message.

I may have told this story before, but I was talking to a gay friend of mine about the prevalence of gay athletes in pro sports (I was guessing it was less than the general population) and he stopped me and said, "PGD, you're talking to someone who has fucked two members of the Washington Redskins". Conversation-stopper right there.

Re Wikileaks, as I understand it they gave the U.S. the chance to check out document dumps and delete anything that would implicate individuals in a way that would risk their lives, and the Pentagon turned down the opportunity -- no doubt so they could preserve the chance for false talking points like those in 27.

Also, everybody always forgets the 70s in our rush to congratulate ourselves as progressive. The 70s were such a progressive time -- the first NFL player to come out as gay was Dave Kopay in 1975. True that he had retired a few years before, but Jason Collins is really on the tail, tail end of his career...may not be in the league next year.

32: I'd be interested to hear particulars.

18 and others: this is a pretty smart piece (though it totally busts open the analogy ban like a piñata), with some good links, about the rhetoric of what it might mean to have a gay teammate.

I thought that the deal with Griner was that it was interesting that she never 'came out' -- she just wasn't closeted ever. But I'd only heard of her a couple of weeks ago for the first time, so I might have that confused.

I'm sort of wondering if there are four more guys going to show up next week, who were waiting for someone else to be first out and not fired. You have to think that anyone closeted in pro sports at this point is at least thinking about whether now is the time to do it.

27: he's a mentally ill young man who lashed out

If you're really worried about mentally ill vets, you should consider how many future cases of PTSD are being created every single day by the continuation of the various wars in which the US is currently a belligerent. Get ready for 60 years of murders, rapes, suicides, domestic violence, permanent unemployment, homelessness and death from exposure for thousands and thousands of young people who were just trying to get some money for college. Anything that might reasonably be supposed to undermine the ability of the US to launch or continue its aggressive wars is probably a good thing.

[John Brown] said that few persons had any conception of the cost, even the pecuniary cost, of firing a single bullet in war.

That was me, obviously.

It's certainly possible that Bradley Manning suffers from mental illness -- no sane person is ever a whistleblower because the costs are so high -- and Assange may be a rapist, but the rest of 27 is bullshit.

The most startling thing about the Wikileaks revelations is that they were well within the range of things that I would have taken for granted as true.

An interesting thing about Collins is that he wasn't precisely closeted for most of his career -- he was just desperately convincing himself he was straight, and seemed to have believed it internally for a while. I'll bet there are many more pro athletes in that position -- gay but with a deep internal mental image of themselves as straight -- then there are players who have self-acknowledged that they're gay but are trying to hide it from the world. It will be interesting to see if the announcement causes some players to re-assess.

Manning may well have gotten people killed, and he certainly hurt the ability of the US to go after some horrible people.

Which people, and which people? We're dealing with small enough sets here that it ought to be possible to name names.

I'm not a Manning fan, but it's hard to find anyone not paid to say it who will tell you that the classification system isn't totally out of hand. Which is and has to be a big damn deal in a democracy. On the same subject this just popped up in my twitter.

42: Were there any Wikileak revelations that were considered to be startling? Did I miss something?

The alien corpses at Wright-Patterson were startling, if you didn't follow the literature.

45: What, my comments have to make sense now? I meant that it was startling that they were not startling.

47: I wasn't intending to criticize your 42 -- I just wondered if there was something in the Wikileaks that was considered to be shocking by the MSM and people less informed and cynical than Walt Someguy.

I still struggle over what I would do in Manning's position, or in Ellsberg's. Whoever said that no sane people are whistleblowers upthread is probably correct.

Re: Collins, I highly recommend Navratilova's response on SI.com.

McClatchy:

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell has said previously that there was no evidence that anyone had been killed because of the leaks. Sunday, another Pentagon official told McClatchy that the military still has no evidence that the leaks have led to any deaths. The official didn't want to be named because of the issue's sensitivity.

"We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents," Morrell told the Washington Post on Aug 11. But "there is in all likelihood a lag between exposure of these documents and jeopardy in the field."

Some discussion of specifics in 2012.

Were there any Wikileak revelations that were considered to be startling?

The collateral murder video was rather unnerving.

The Tunisians found some of the Wikileaks information useful.

Personally, I think the Wikileaks affair demonstrates that the New York Times isn't a whistleblower, it's a mentally ill Grey Lady who lashed out at authority the hardest she could. The newspaper isn't a noble crusader for truth and openness, it's a viciously anti-American activist that published secret material, accepting the possibility of blame if US soldiers or people who cooperated with the US in Iraq and Afghanistan were killed.

I dunno if the newspaper is a rapist, but it certainly has been accused of some terrible things.

The Times may well have gotten people killed, and it certainly hurt the ability of the US to go after some horrible people. This isn't the Pentagon Papers. Making the Times a trusted, respected daily newspaper would be a slap in the face to US military personnel.

51: That video is the thing that turned me firmly against wikileaks and Assange in particular. The raw video shows that there were people armed with at least one RPG, and every reason to believe that an ambush was in preparation. To expect the helicopter pilot to have done nothing is to demand that US forces err on the side of allowing their own troops to be killed. The whole thing is ugly and sad, but turning it into an anti-US propaganda piece was shitty.

54: Damn, I wish I could find where I talked about that video at the time. My reaction to it was that while the people were clearly carrying weapons, I didn't see anything that was unambiguously anything other than an automatic rifle (is that the right generic term?), which I understand are like pocketknives in Iraq, they looked like they were picking up casualties to me. But I also know that that's an area where I don't know how to interpret what I'm looking at.

You sound as if you had a strong sense that what was going on was perfectly clear -- is this something where you have some kind of expertise, or do you think it should have been clear to anyone?

What the video showed me was that US forces were too far away from the target to even be able to make a call about weather it was an RPG or a camera, or weather civilians and children were evacuating wounded from the battlefield, and they fired anyway. And if shooting from a great distance at stuff you can't really see clearly is within the rules of engagement, then whatever system authorized those rules of engagement is severely broken.

54 So are you saying that Wikileaks may have gotten people killed by giving Iraqis the idea that the US military was killing Iraqis without sufficient justification? Getting a rooster who can make the sun rise by crowing is over in the locavore thread.

The part I'm mortally offenders by is when non-Americans are opposed to the foreign policy atrocities of the United States.

55.last: In the unedited video there is something that is hard to interpret as anything other than an RPG (which was picked up after the fact). Certainly I assume that the people directly involved have a more finely honed ability to pick these things up than I thanks to much greater experience (not to mention better resolution images to work from), and it seemed really clear to me that there was a guy swinging an RPG around.

The whole thing is ugly and horrible, but it was not the cold blooded murder it was portrayed as. It was killing combatants in a war zone, and some innocent people were killed long with.

The whole thing is ugly and horrible, but it was not the cold blooded murder it was portrayed as. It was killing combatants in a war zone, and some innocent people were killed long with.

I am still living and dying in a fucking nightmare.

It was an invasion, a conquest, an illegal war crime in part and whole.

When you can look at that video as if it were the SS taking out the French resistance, you are merely starting to get a clue. Yeah yeah, the SS had families and friends and little dogs who loved them too.

I watch that video and I too have problems in pointing to where the evil dwells. Bush and Republicans and the rest of us are so nice? Whatever, the evil does not fucking dwell in the Iraqis on the ground, not in Assange who leaked the video.

We are watching our complicity and trying to blame the messenger.

I want Manning and Assange to share a Nobel Peace Prize.

Then Obama can grab them in Sweden, and act like a Stark, and behead them himself in the White House portico. Or maybe crush their heads with his fucking Peace Prize.

"Yes! Yes! We are the motherfucking good guys, you traitorous scum."

Bash! Brains flying.

"We are the good guys."

I thought everything I read (didn't we have a thread here? and there was an epically long Crooked Timber thread, IIRC) pointed toward the thing identified as an RPG being a telephoto lens? Weren't the people killed identified as reporters? It's possible my memory is fuzzy and I really don't feel like going back over it, so maybe you're right.

. It seems that there were both real RPGs in the crowd and a camera mistaken as an RPG, and that simultaneously the Wikileaks thing was manipulative and propaganda-y and the attack itself was very brutal. But I've just skimmed the page and don't claim any authoritative knowledge whatsoever.

It doesn't lessen my support for Wikileaks even a little bit, but I will say that Ja/co/b A/pple/bau/m is an absolute hysterical twit over email, if not in person. Narcissistic, self-important, and prone to Alex Jones-level hair-trigger freakouts over the activities of the government.

It was an invasion, a conquest, an illegal war crime in part and whole.

Bob is right that this is the point (even if I don't agree with the SS analogy). The video depicts what happens when you unleash an invading army to fight a war in the cities of the occupied nation. Numerous innocent civilians died in that incident, and trying to get legalistic over whether someone had an RPG is really beside the point and a distraction. It's relevant if you're in the military trying to decide if a soldier violated protocol and should be punished (hey, maybe not if someone had an RPG), but it's irrelevant to understanding the death and destruction of innocents unleashed by an illegal invasion, for which we are culpable as a nation. The video properly illuminates that well and is not propaganda. Indeed, it's more educational if someone *did* have a weapon in that crowd, since it illuminates how hard it can be to separate 'atrocities' from the ordinary course of business in war.

I basically agree with your overall point -- war is brutal and horrible deaths of innocent people are inevitable, which is why we should have fewer wars, and people should be aware of that fact -- but the claim is that Wikileaks selectively edited the video to make it look like the attack wasn't just ordinarily brutal, but was in fact an atrocity and a war crime, and then released that version for purposes of showing not just that the war was "ordinarily" brutal but that a war crime was committed.

If its true that this is what Wikileaks did (I don't know) that is relevant for a discussion of the overall veracity of the Wikileaks project, even if we can all still agree that war is not a good idea.

65:

The video depicts what happens when you unleash an invading army to fight a war in the cities of the occupied nation. [...] The video properly illuminates that well and is not propaganda.

Huh? Isn't that the definition of antiwar propaganda?

66: I'm trying to question your distinction between 'ordinarily' brutal and a war crime/atrocity. (Or to put it another way: this is why international war defines unjustified and aggressive war in general as a war crime, without waiting for My Lai to happen). Somebody at some point saw something that either might have been an RPG or was an RPG, and then a whole bunch of basically indiscriminate killing started. They fired on innocent people, inhabited buildings, etc. that were not firing on them or acting aggressively, simply because of the possibility that there was an association with armed enemies. That may be natural behavior for soldiers in a combat zone and it is difficult to ask them to do differently because of self-protection, but it quite naturally produces atrocities of various kinds. The video was not selectively edited; it was selectively captioned and commented on but the entire incident is there to see (and in fact opponents of Wikileaks used elements of the video to argue against Wikileaks' interpretation).

67: not sure of your point, the depiction of war is anti-war propaganda?

whoops, I meant 'this is why international law defines...'

68: Yes. Depiction of the horrors of war is the type of propaganda that has the added advantage of being true. That doesn't make it somehow not-propaganda, though.

Yeah, that's just not convincing at all as a defense of Wikileaks, although again I agree with your basic poit that war is bad and innocent people die in it. I mean, sure, war is bad. Claiming an attack is one thing when it's something else (if that's what happened) is not the most effective way of making that point. If Wikileaks wanted to engage in anti-war efforts, that probably was t the best way of doing it.

(As a pure aside, I also don't think your grasp of international law is particularly great. Would any of the points you made be justified in a more "legal" war? If there had been an additional Security Council resolution (and the Iraq war was arguably "legal" without that, whatever that means) would the video of the attack be any less horrible? The "legality" of a war isn't based upon its capacity to be brutal, it's whether or not the war serves the interest of the state system as established by current international law.)

71 -- I don't think much of the argument for the legality of the Iraq war.

The initial shooting may have been according g to protocol, but didnt they follow it by firing on a makeshift ambulance that was clearly collecting the wounded? I remember some voice over of the gunner hoping someone would pick up what he believed was a weapon dropped by one of his previous targets so he would have his cause, but when that failed to happen he got clearance anyway.

71: the attack *was* an atrocity -- if someone came along and blew up your house or your minivan with your kids in it because someone walked through your yard with an AK-47 you wouldn't be too happy about it. The point isn't some generalized thing about 'war is bad', it's that urban warfare leads to soldiers indiscriminately blowing up civilians for what by any human standard are extremely flimsy reasons. That's what the video shows and it's a reasonable thing to show.

(And the attack would be no less brutal in a justified war, but it might be more excusable).

73: You are correct, IIRC. The shooting of the van was clearly sketchy.

72

I don't think much of the argument for the legality of the Iraq war.

I don't think much of the argument for the illegality of the Iraq war.