books

Well I'm about 200 pages from the end of 2666 and I'm not really sure what to think yet. It's very big in a lot of different ways, not just because it's 900 pages long, and there's just a huge amount to take in. This is the second very large book I've read in the past few months (along with Infinite Jest) and it's interesting to think about them both in terms of sheer volume. I like it a lot, is all I'll say for now.

The next two books on my list I bought myself last week after hemming and hawing for a while. First is Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt. Professor Markovits talked a lot about Arendt and the whole fallout from the post-WW2 Nazi trials. Eichmann's trial came way after Nuremberg, but it's still a question of being tried in one country for crimes committed in another. Given present circumstances and the hope that, if our leaders are too weak to prosecute their predecessors for the war crimes that were obviously, unquestionably, committed, then maybe some other country will have the guts to demand extradition like Israel did. Not to say that Donald Rumsfeld is as bad as the Nazis, or even Slobodan Milosevic and Omar El Bashir, but it's a matter of degree. They're all war criminals, but Rummy's just weren't nearly as bad as theirs. Anyhow I can't wait to see what the whole Eichmann thing was about, and why everyone is STILL up in arms about Arendt's book.

The other is Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I guess he's one of those guys that doesn't need his first name anymore, because I feel a bit silly or self-congratulatory or something putting it there. But I've been meaning for a while to start reading some more classics, and why not start with that? My sense of its context is a lot less developed than my sense of Eichmann, but I can't wait to read it, either.

But they both have to wait until I'm done with the last part of 2666.

this just in: steroids are technology, just like glasses -- UPDATE

H/t to Dad for sending me a link to this article in Salon about why steroids (and, by obvious extension, other performance enhancers) aren't cheating anymore than are wearing contact lenses or using some new training technology.

I feel pretty strongly about my view that taking performance-enhancing drugs is not cheating and have been making the arguments that the author of the above article makes for years. Not to say that they're original to me, obviously; I'm sure I read them somewhere else. But still, it's nice to have some validation from a highfalutin' philosophy professor at Berkeley that my own personal logic regarding this issue holds water.

Preach, Alva Noe. Preach.

UPDATE From an interview with Lyle McDonald, of Body Recomposition, well, not really fame, but whatever.

TTT: What is your opinion about steroids in general?

LM: In general, I think used in reasonable doses intelligently, they are exceedingly safe and provide an enormous amount of benefits under certain situations (such as muscle loss with aging and various wasting diseases). I think used in absurd doses unintelligently, they can cause problems but not nearly the types of problems that the scare-mongering media tends to ascribe to them.

I’d tend to say the same thing about almost any drug you care to name. People always want to blame a drug for something or other but it’s more about how a drug is used than the drug itself that is the issue. Used intelligently, many drugs are completely safe; used unintelligently they are not. Is it the drug or the use that’s at fault.

TTT: What is your opinion on steroids in professional sports?

LM: I think they are a reality of modern day sport and have been for a solid 30-40 years. I think that anybody who thinks we can ever clean up sport and get drugs out of the equation is naïve as hell. Humans are creatures of opportunity and people will always look for an advantage so even if you get 99 out of 100 people to stop using drugs, that 100th will just see it as a chance to get an advantage over the others.

Frankly, I think people should get over it, legalize everything, let the athletes get proper medical advice without having to source drugs from unreliable sources so that they can protect their health. I think that’s better than the current model where most use but have to lie about it. I know the public wants to believe that performances in modern day sport can be accomplished without drugs but, in general, that’s simply not the case.

Any time they have managed to ‘clean up’ a sport (Olympic weightlifting comes to mind), nobody can even get close to the old world records. Drugs simply provide too much of a benefit to performance (and in being able to handle the training loads required at that level) for anyone to come close doing it clean. So either people get used to mediocre, non-world record performances or they accept that drugs are here to stay.

Again, damn right.