Arthur@AmeriNZ Archives - Page 43 of 49

To boycott or not to boycott; that is the question

The traditional idea that international sports events should be a place to create cooperation through competition is damaged by boycotts, as are the athletes that have trained for years for the opportunity to participate.

There is a movement to have the United States and other nations boycott the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia in 2014, and I’m a bit conflicted about it.

One group wants to boycott because of the country’s highly repressive new law banning any speech that equates the social status of same-sex relationships with heterosexual ones. I agree with the intent of the boycott in this case. But we’ve had Olympics in repressive regimes before; the dissidents in Beijing were just locked away for the Summer Olympics in 2008, and let’s not even talk about Tibet.

Another group wants to boycott because Russia has given sanctuary to Edward Snowden, the leaker of all that NSA classified information that showed the United States has all this “metadata” on its own citizens. I heard Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) float that one while Snowden was still living in the Moscow airport, which was reason enough for me to be inclined to oppose it.

I’m also reminded that there was a boycott by African nations at the Summer Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976, having to do with New Zealand competing athletically with South Africa, which had been banned from the Olympics since 1964 because of its apartheid policies.

Then the United States and some of its allies boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow because of the USSR invasion of Afghanistan; the irony still resonates. In response, many of the Soviet bloc nations stayed away from the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles.

On the fourth hand, I think we’re at here, the traditional idea that international sports events should be a place to create cooperation through competition is damaged by boycotts, as are the athletes that have trained for years for the opportunity to participate. All the Games were diminished, even if the boycott rationales were worthy.

Right now, I’m leaning against the boycott. Circumstances could change that. And perhaps I can be persuaded. Lessee, Arthur’s ambivalent, too…

July Rambling: privilege, and 12-tone music

Roger Green was told that he cannot greet pupils from Sandy Lane Primary School in Bracknell, Berkshire, with the gesture because a driver said it slowed down traffic.

Watch the important documentary, Two American Families, online at Bill Moyers’ website. In the same vein, To Rescue Local Economies, Cities Seize Underwater Mortgages Through Eminent Domain.

From Meryl, the graphic novel expert: The Armageddon Letters and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also, Zahra – from Paradise to President. Published in 2011, its story takes place in Iran, June 2009.

Brief Thoughts on Shelby County v. Holder by Mark S. Mishler. (But the actual title is TOO long!)

Daniel Nester writes about privilege. I found it interesting, in part, because it reminded me of certain white sociology students, in undergraduate school and subsequently, who insisted on informing me about the sources of my oppression. They also insisted I spell “black people” as “Black people.” Meh. Dan also gives cheeky advice for aspiring writers.

Thom’s apology to the GLBT people he knows, and the ones he doesn’t.

6 Things That Will Happen Now That The Sanctity Of Marriage Is Destroyed, presented by George Takei.

Eddie and Keith do a road trip.

Dustbury found this video, which is about Arnold Schoenberg and 12-tone music but is as much about the stifling US copyright law, the creative mind, the boundaries of art, and how we communicate with each other. He “learned more from this half-hour of unconventional pedagogy than from a whole semester of theory.”

It was the first line in Jaquandor’s novel, it was a reflection of first lines of novels generally.

Mark Evanier writes: “My father was a very honest man. Absolutely, utterly honest. Once, he found a wallet in the street with a few hundred dollars in it. He took it home, looked up the number of the person it belonged to and arranged to return it to them…with every buck still in it. He did things like that all the time. All the time.”

Melanie deals with the death of a close family member. “With it comes a closure of sorts. Unfortunately, this is one of those deaths that bring feelings of sadness, but also of relief- a lengthy ordeal over at last.”

Daniel Nester’s dad died, and those “pesky abandonment issues” pop up. He is processing his Notes on Grief, parts I and II and III and IV and V.

Related: 936 opportunities, which made me melancholy thinking about MY dad.

Chris quits smoking! YAY!, despite duress. And she has a new blog! BTW, she also made and sent me yummy cookies!

‘Friendly atheist’ speaks to thousands at megachurch.

How do we pray for a friend in need or a stranger who might be sick or lonely in the hospital or at home?

NOT a Get Out Of Hell Free card.

Arthur answers my questions about music and identity and the roots of his political self and political philosophy & friends and boycotts and some other stuff. He also responded to my slow audience post.

Simplified blogging.

The Mom From ‘The Cat in the Hat’ Finally Speaks.

The secret of the Floating Cork.

I’m egotistical enough to be pleased that Chuck Miller put me in his Best of our Times Union Community Blogs for July 25 and July 18 I also appreciate that he’s trying to promote the TU bloggers the way he wishes the TU would. As noted before, I never know what to write for that audience, until I do, such as when I wrote: The Census site with Congressional district data is cool. Really.

I noted that my friend Lynne tried to walk from Albany to Binghamton, but I didn’t mention that walking on the side of the road is NOT like sidewalk walking.

GOOGLE ALERTS (not me)

Daily Mail: Lollipop man banned from high-fiving children because it ‘confuses drivers. “Roger Green was told that he cannot greet pupils from Sandy Lane Primary School in Bracknell, Berkshire, with the gesture because a driver said it slowed down traffic. Hundreds of parents have reacted angrily to the ban by Bracknell Forest Council.”
Followup: “High-five” lollipop man given the green light to give “thumbs up” instead.

The Guardian: Notes from Overground by Tiresias (the pen name of Roger Green) was published in 1984. It became a minor cult, and though it never sold very well, it still gets into the occasional blog today. We admirers occasionally meet and share favourite moments.

June Rambling: an atheist’s prayers, and stillness of the soul

101 Ways to Say “Died” that appeared in early American epitaphs

Useful phrases for the surveillance state.

Long-lost diary of Nazi racial theorist and Hitler confidant recovered.

George Takei remembers the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, which included himself.

Why three states dumped major private prison company in one month. I’ve long been suspicious of private prisons with them “extracting guarantees of 100 percent occupancy.”

Cereal bigotry, Arthur’s response to the Cheerios ad controversy.

SamuraiFrog feels this is the most eloquent and exact statement about fat-shaming ever. And Lefty’s wanting to shake his disease.

Gay Men, Male Privilege, Women, And Consent.

In the literally OMG category: Christian Domestic Discipline… is a movement that seeks to carry out God’s will. “Which specific plan of God’s? Oh, you know, just that all women obey their husbands fastidiously — a dynamic that CDD thinks is best maintained through doling out corporal punishments.”

An atheist’s prayers.

Awkwardneϟϟ, Ken Jennings at his son’s elementary school for the annual “Festival of the Famous.”

Astronomy Picture of the Day: June 18 – A Supercell Thunderstorm Over Texas.

Steve Bissette Working On A Book About Alan Moore, Asks People To Publish His 1963 Stories Online For Free.

Meryl expands on the New York Times Magazine, “Who Made That?” article.

American and British pronunciation of Spanish (loan) words.

How Bugs Bunny saved Mel Blanc’s life.

Shooting Parrots likes to write about roguish folks you’ve never heard of – I’VE never heard of – such as Eugène François Vidocq and Ignáz Trebitsch-Lincoln. Interesting stuff.

To Parents of Small Children: Let Me Be the One Who Says It Out Loud.

Mark Evanier on the wealthy Zukors, the sweet but terrified Stearns, and his compassionate father, who worked for the IRS, part 1 and part 2.

My buddy and former neighbor Diana’s Lean In story.

Melanie: harp lessons, Italian rain, and traveling the world from home. Also, how stillness is a quality of the soul.

I wrote Love and cheating, and what I don’t understand.

Little by little things are disappearing from my house.

According to IMDB, Richard Matheson wrote 16 episodes of the TV show Twilight Zone, which included the “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” segment that was also used in the Twilight Zone movie.

101 Ways to Say “Died” that appeared in early American epitaphs.
to me

There’s a great new documentary out called 20 FEET FROM STARDOM. The movie is about backup singers – those incredibly talented musicians who you rarely hear about but are on all your favorite records. Coming to the Spectrum in Albany on July 5 – I WILL see it.

How a maudlin song became a children’s classic.

Great Coverville podcast honoring Cyndi Lauper, who won a Tony AND turned 60 this month; oh, I might have suggested it. Dustbury celebrates as well.

I’ve been ear wormed by Our State Fair, the opening song from the 1962 film ‘State Fair’, not a great movie, but the first non-kiddie film I ever saw.

In honor of summer, a visual representation of The Rite of Spring.

Tom Lehrer singing about The Elements, then and THEN.

K-Chuck radio: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and cover songs and songs about Superman.

And speaking of the guy from Krypton: Superman was promoted at the 1940 New York World’s Fair. But who played him? It is a mystery! Also, Original ‘Superman’ Co-Star Interrupts ‘Man of Steel’ Conversation in Movie Theater Restroom.

That purported gay/black antipathy thing

There DOES seem that there is a certain hostility by some black leaders towards what certain goofy people call “the gay agenda.”

Arthur at AmeriNZ asked a question earlier in the month:

Here’s something that worries me…: Racism. The spokesperson for the leading radical rightwing religious-political anti-gay hate group seemed to go WAY out of his way to praise black Democratic legislators in Illinois for not supporting the freedom to marry. That same hate group, of course, famously said that one way to defeat marriage equality was to deliberately create divisions between the LGBT and Black communities. All too often, LGBT people buy the racist propaganda hook, line, and sinker. And, it seems to me, some Blacks are too willing to buy the propaganda of mainly (or exclusively) white anti-gay groups.

So, I’m wondering two things. First, what do you think can be done to expose the racist lie of division for what it is, and second, how do you think we can persuade the two sides to ignore the (white) man behind the curtain who’s trying so hard to sow racial division?

One of the things that I’ve long believed is that “justice for all” ought not to be a meaningless slogan, but rather the reason people who don’t SEEM to be affected should support the rights of, for lack of a better phrase, the “other.” Whites should support black civil rights; men, women’s equality; straights, LGBTQ justice. (That’s one of the reasons I didn’t much like NYC mayor Ed Koch; he seemed to stir up hostility between blacks and Jews, when they had been traditional allies.)

Yet, in my freshman year at college, my next-door neighbor was astonishingly hostile to me, from the get-go. He was gay, and I always wondered if he had heard what I had heard somewhere or other, that black people did not like gay people, and therefore dismissed me out of hand.

To the specific point, there DOES seem that there is a certain hostility by some black leaders towards what certain goofy people call “the gay agenda.” I think some of it clearly comes from religious leadership. You saw this in the Prop 8 vote in California a few years back. All that so-called down-low behavior of some black men so closeted, they even hide it from themselves, comes from some cultural/religious disconnect.

I knew one openly gay black man – worked with him, actually – who was supposed to be coming home for Thanksgiving when he was about 21, but he felt his family wouldn’t understand his sexual orientation and would be unforgiving. They never knew where he was for decades. When they discovered that he died, 26 years later – from something I blogged about – they were devastated. Perhaps in the intervening years, their position on homosexuality had changed and having been in contact with his sister after his death, I believe it had.

Mostly though, and the video you linked to after the Illinois defeat of marriage equality actually touches on this, it’s a bit of an oppression competition. The gay rights movement has appropriated some of the language of the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and later, rightly so, I believe, but some black folks of a certain age just don’t like it. I kid you not, it sounds a little like “hey, they can pass for straight, but I can’t pass for white; we were enslaved, they weren’t.” And so on. It’s less an antipathy towards gays per se, as much as it’s a “make them wait their turn, keep them in their place, until WE achieve full civil rights” thing. This is incredibly parochial, and dare I say, stupid; “a high tide raises all boats,” and all that.

That said, I also do believe other nefarious forces are at work, quite possibly poised to embarrass one person: Barack Obama. The President comes out for marriage equality a year ago, and it passes, in one form or another, in a half dozen states, including in the Midwest. Where does it fail? In the state from which he was elected, Illinois. Can this be a coincidence? (Cough – Koch Brothers – cough.) Maybe, but I’m too cynical to believe it.

What to do about it? Oh, probably nothing. Let them just die off.

But you know what random thought flashed through my mind? That ad you pointed to with this back-and-forth:

“[Attractive young man] clicks to buy [a Kindle Paperwhite] and suggests [he and attractive woman sitting next to him] celebrate with a drink.

“‘My husband’s bringing me a drink right now,’ chirps she.

“‘So is mine,'” smiles he as they turn and wave at their male loved ones sitting together at a tiki bar.”

I’ve since seen the ad on the TV show Modern Family. Now if any of the participants were BLACK, you KNOW that would give the thing a whole ‘nother spin.

Opps – I mean, oops

Some people want to have corrections noted so that they may fix them.

One of the inevitable things about writing a daily blog edited by no one is that, now and then, I’ll get something wrong. (I know you are shocked, from that gnashing of teeth I’m hearing.)

Occasionally, it’s something that is substantial. I wrote about the Electoral College recently and said that Maine and Missouri were the two states that had a proportional allocation of EC votes when it was Maine and Nebraska; obviously, I had the Missouri Compromise of 1820 stuck in my mind, in which Maine joined the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.

More common, though, are typos. Not typos, per se, but a word or a letter left out so that the spellcheck wouldn’t catch it. One time Arthur, who had also caught the previous mistake, found THREE errors in one of my pieces. I was SO angry, not at him, but at me. I was only mildly comforted when I could find a mistake of his.

I have discovered out is that some people like being corrected. Let me say that a better way: some people want to have corrections noted, so that they may fix them. I don’t LIKE being corrected, but I NEED the blog to be as write as it can – wait, as RIGHT as it reasonably can be. So do Arthur and Lisa.

I’ve made it a practice to e-mail folks with corrections whenever possible, rather than leaving it on the page, though it depends on the circumstances. Brian Ibbott has the podcast Coverville, and Arthur a couple of podcasts. If they write something in the description that’s incorrect, I’m going to e-mail them. But if they SAY something that’s incorrect on the podcast itself, I’m more likely to write something in the comments section.

Then there are those people who I NEVER correct. They may write well content-wise, but they make the same spelling errors over and over again; I won’t name names. Pointing out their mistakes, only to see them there the next time is too Sisyphean.