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You are viewing the most recent 14 entries September 30th, 200902:03 pm: Reasons people may prefer pseudonyms or limited personal disclosure on the Internet
From RaceFail: Once More, with Misdirection* Because it is a standard identity- and privacy-protection precaution * Because they have experienced online or offline stalking, harassment, or political or domestic violence * Because they wish to discuss sexual abuse, sexuality, domestic abuse, assault, politics, health, or mental illness, and do not wish some subset of family, friends, strangers, aquaintances, employers, or potential employers to know about it * Because they wish to keep their private lives, activities, and tastes separate from their professional lives, employers, or potential employers * Because they fear threats to their employment or the custody of their children * Because it's the custom among their Internet cohort * Because it's no one else's businessI really, really don't want anyone to be able to google on my real name and find Yonmei, or vice versa. I've been very honestly impressed over the last seven months with how decent most people have been - friends, enemies, and random acquaintances - about honouring this preference. Because we only realise how decency ought to be honoured, when we see its absence. Current Mood:  calm , ;l, racefail 09
August 16th, 200910:34 am: This is why I wouldn't travel to Canada via the US
Shahrukh Khan detained at Newark for travelling while brown: India has asked the US to explain why a leading Bollywood film star was allegedly detained for two hours at Newark airport, which serves New York.
Shah Rukh Khan, who was released after India's embassy in the US intervened, said he felt angry and humiliated.
The actor, who is promoting a film on racial profiling, said he was stopped because he had a Muslim name.
But US customs officials denied that Mr Khan had been detained, saying he was questioned for 66 minutes.
Elmer Camacho, a spokesman for the US Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, said the questioning was part of the agency's routine process to screen foreign travellers, the Associated Press news agency reports. BBC It's not that Shahrukh Khan was detained for a couple of hours because some shmuck in Immigrations thought he might be a terrorist because his surname was wrong and he was travelling while brown: racists show up everywhere but are particularly obvious at airports. (There was an incident at Heathrow ten years ago where the British Ambassador to Jamaica was told that as he was travelling on a one-way ticket he would have to show evidence from his employer that he was going to a job in Jamaica before he could be allowed out of the UK: the British Airways employee tasked with making trouble for people travelling while black evidently couldn't believe a black man really was in possession of a diplomatic passport.) It's that the US government defends this as a "routine process". That's why I won't go to the US: where racist treatment at immigration is defended as "routine", even when it means former Presidents trying to travel via US airlines get "routinely" searched. Shahrukh Khan was able to contact the Indian Embassy and ask them to intervene. But an ordinary guy traveling while brown surnamed Khan would just have had to put up with it, for as long as the "routine" process of harassment and discrimination happened to last. (At Heathrow, my bag was searched right after a guy going to India's bag was searched: mine because, once through the security check at Glasgow, I'd bought a bottle of water at Boots - which was taken away from me because I might make a bomb with it - his because he'd packed a tin of Coffeemate. He was more worried than I was, and with good reason - he repeated several times "I haven't done anything wrong" to which the white woman searching his carry-on bag would say "no, I just have to do this" - while I looked away at the wall after realising that he'd packed a basic short-stay carry-on bag and I was sure he didn't want a total stranger watching as his underwear got unfolded...) As has been noted in the Globe and Mail, Canada also has racist harassment at airports of people travelling while brown - and serious issues with how the Canadian government treats Muslim citizens arriving or departing: Abousfian Abdelrazik is still trying to reclaim full Canadian citizenship after being arrested and exported for torture. I do believe, though, that the US government is the only power simply saying "Yes, we do these things, and it's legal for us to do so." Barack Obama's administration has made no change to George W. Bush's claims that the US has the legal right to kidnap, send to indefinite extrajudicial detention, and torture prisoners: in fact, Obama has plans to expand the prison camp for US kidnap victims at Bagram Airbase, which has sections where even the Red Cross are not allowed admittance, and from which no legal appeal is permitted, not even habeus corpus: the writ which requires a person detained by the authorities to be brought before a court of law so that the legality of the detention may be examined. Current Mood: angry , evil american politics, evil british politics
May 2nd, 200908:14 am: Please let the Dreamwidth ads on my f-list stop soon...
My friends, acquaintances, and readers: I have nothing against you for moving to Dreamwidth, it's just that I know all of you normally write much more interesting posts: I am so looking forward to the day when you start writing those posts again, and thank you to those who continue to want to receive my comments. ( DW cynics only )Current Mood: bored October 28th, 200808:03 pm: Am *sizzling*
Some toerag on Bebo downloaded a pic from my photoblog and uploaded it to their webpage on bebo. They did not comment on the post on which it appeared or ask my permission: they just bloody well took it, and I found out because it had been recommended to the toerag by some other toerag who did link to it. I wouldn't have minded giving permission at all if they'd asked. I wouldn't have minded as much if they'd left a comment on the blog post when they took it - if this had been a confused kind of social interaction. But, as the toerag had just treated my photograph as a kind of natural resource for grazing on, I was annoyed, but figured that Bebo would take it down for me - I clicked on the "Report Abuse" button for the photo... and discovered that Bebo is not interested in handling copyright violations. My two options (once I'd dismissed "Wanted to flag it/it's cool") were to tell Bebo it had "sexually explicit imagery" or "Depicts violence". Neither of which were true. No explanation anywhere on the FAQ or the Help pages of what you do if someone just took your copyrighted material and used it on their Bebo page. Now I'm sizzling. So I wrote Bebo a basic "This photo is mine, I did not give my permission for you to use it, take it down" message ...and sent it to them under both headings. So I wrote an e-mail to the support team expanding on the copyright violation notice, and adding a suggestion that they provide a means of reporting copyright violation. The Bebo page was a collection of photo albums all depicting scenes from Portobello, a part of Edinburgh where I've recently been taking quite a lot of photos. I doubt I'm the only person whose photo was nicked for it. And I'm still irritated with the silly person who never thought to ask, because if they'd asked, I'd have said yes. Maybe once Bebo remove the photo I'll point that out to the idiot. Current Mood: angry , photos
July 16th, 200811:47 am: Stupid Things To Say
Senator Linda Gray of Arizona, after explaining why she thinks her religion justifies legally preventing her colleague Senator Paula Aboud from marrying her partner of 8 years: "I don't see it as divisive ... I don't think it has to be hateful at all." Arizona RepublicLillian Ladele of Islington, after explaining why she thinks her religion justifies her refusal to perform civil partnership ceremonies for same-sex couples: "As a Christian, I loved being able to help people, to talk to them when they needed advice – it’s what my religion is all about and I think I have a lot of empathy." Pink NewsAs it happens (I've read the tribunal's judgement) I now think Ladele was treated very badly - even considering her behaviour. She could show the tribunal that her manager was hostile to her before she refused to perform civil partnership ceremonies, and her manager did nothing to prevent or discourage the open discussion of her refusal and may even have abetted it. But the kind of ignorant arrogance that says "Hey, I want to deny you basic civil rights, but don't you dare act hostile towards me!" comes through in that comment from her, just as the blithe arrogance of blind privilege comes through in Gray's comment. Of course the other difference between them is that Linda Gray is a powerful white woman actively working to ensure that the LGBT people whom she's paid to represent have fewer civil rights than straight people in Arizona. And Lillian Ladele is a black, Nigerian-born civil servant who just wanted to avoid having to treat LGBT people like anyone else when it became part of her job to do so. Both inspired by a particular homophobic interpretation of Christianity, both actively supported by the Christian right. You don't know how much it sickens me to guess that the Ladele case probably got as far as it did because (I think) Ladele's manager was a racist asshole who treated her badly from the word go and was glad to have an excuse to harass her. Current Mood: angry , evil american politics, howls of rage
June 30th, 200812:56 pm: Heinz homo haters
With reference to the news of last week: total signatures on the reinstate Heinz Mayo ad is now 11595. "I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a tin of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Now, now... Here's looking at you, kid." Heinz is one of those homespun blue-collar brands that is a staple of our national diet. Its ketchup has just been voted by consumers as the brand with the most "equity", for goodness sake, after scoring highest against measures such as familiarity and quality. So how did Heinz get it so wrong with this ad?
Having been bold enough (or naive enough ... you choose) to sign-off a script in which two men's lips meet, Heinz was careful to make the whole gay thing a "joke": it's not as though either of the men in the ad is obviously meant to be gay, they both look so straight you could draw a line with them.
But adland knows full well that any suggestion of homosexuality in ads will hit some pressure points (reason enough, you might think, to challenge prejudices). Controversy will have been fully anticipated, and this ad will have been thought through thoroughly before the play button was pushed.
Which makes it all the more astounding, and disappointing, that Heinz was so easily cowed when the inevitable complaints tumbled in. The company wasted no time in sheepishly withdrawing the commercial. Which naturally sparked another row, this time with gay groups: Stonewall and the radio station Gaydar called for a global boycott of Heinz brands in protest.
Really, Heinz couldn't have stirred up more controversy if they'd tried – and a few cynics out there think maybe they did try, that the whole gay saga that dominated marketing headlines last week was a massive PR stunt. If it was, it backfired big time.
What's certainly true is that Heinz has proved itself to be too easily swayed, spineless even. Of course, for all its careful and sensitive self-regulation, sometimes adland gets it wrong and misjudges the nation's mood; advertising that causes genuine and understandable offence should be swiftly withdrawn.
But really, Heinz had an opportunity here to take an enlightened position, to defend the inoffensiveness of a (pretty dispassionate) kiss between two men. If we believe that advertising not only reflects society and its culture but helps shape it, then there are times when advertisers have to take responsibility for the influence they wield.
Heinz may argue that in responding to the complaints and withdrawing the ad it is doing exactly that. But it doesn't seem to have thought carefully enough about the wider message its actions might have sent out: that tacit endorsement of a gay relationship is something to be embarrassed about, to regret. And that's a very dangerous position for one of the nation's favourite brands to find itself in. Claire Beale And: . A global brand introduced a new television commercial in which two men were seen (briefly) to kiss on screen, owing to the transformational power of mayonnaise. See, the Book of Revelation just isn't specific enough on the seven signs of the Apocalypse. If only the four horsemen weren't so easily confused with fictional characters in condiments commercials then we wouldn't be in this mess. As it is, the religious right and heathen left are locked in an utterly futile and bombastic ideological row involving countless online petitions about whether Armageddon is signified by the fact of the ad or the pulling of the ad. Which was not banned and neither will it be, if the regulator ever bothers even to look at it.
It turns out that many of the complaints were organised by religious groups in the US, where the ad has never been broadcast. Offence is now apparently a global currency and officially a unit of measurement. I blame the internet. Given that, the BBC board should be rereading the key end-of-the-world signs just to double-check that there's no paragraph suggesting that if a head of marketing shall replace a longstanding head of radio, the bells shall ring and man shall be wiped out. Janine Gibson I know, I know; it was just an ad. An ad which American news stories have mentioned "it wasn't to be broadcast to children" without specifying that this was because Heinz Mayo contains way too much fat and sugar, not because two men kissed. But there was something about the way Heinz pulled it so fast, so apologetically, as if they should have realised that showing two men kiss is offensive to right-minded people. Tell Heinz. Pass it on.Current Mood: annoyed , angry queer, food politics, i watch tv, writing complaining letters
June 25th, 200804:10 pm: Heinz means bigot
Nigel Dickie: "Heinz is a global company and we respect all universal rights. The advertisement was intended to be humorous, not designed to cause offence to anyone. Clearly it failed in its intent to amuse and that is why we took the decision to withdraw it." You know what "respect all universal rights" means? It means not sexual orientation and not gender identity. Those aren't "universal" rights. Last Monday, Heinz started running a new advertising campaign for Heinz Mayo. (A fat-filled, sugary product that it would take an ad this cute and funny to sell, truly.) The ad was supposed to run for five weeks. The ad opens with a stereotype-family - a boy and a girl going to school, a father going to the office. The young boy and girl go to the kitchen to get their sandwiches, which are being prepared by a man with a New York accent, dressed in a deli serving outfit, who they refer to as "mum". When their father goes to get his sandwich he says to the man in the kitchen: "See you tonight love." However, the man barks back "Hey, ain't you forgetting something?", at which point the two men share a kiss. The man then sends the father off with the words: "Love you. Straight home from work, sweet cheeks." It isn't exactly a gay ad: it isn't exactly a straight ad. This isn't a same-sex couple bringing up kids together: it's a half-uneasy joke, "the concept behind the campaign is that the product tastes so good, 'It's as if you have your own New York deli man in your kitchen'." But on Friday, Heinz pulled the ad. Apparently the advertising watchdog got over 200 "complaints" that the ad was offensive and that two men kissing were "inappropriate". (Bill O'Reilly apparently said on air on Friday "So why are they doing that? Why -- it was. It was obviously a gay thing. Now I don't know what the message is, other than gay people like mayonnaise. ... I'm confused. This whole gender blending thing. It's confusing to me. ... I just want mayonnaise. I don't want guys kissing.") Nigel Dickie, Director of Corporate Affairs for Heinz UK, said the reason for pulling it was: “It is our policy to listen to consumers. We recognize that some consumers raised concerns over the content of the ad and this prompted our decision to withdraw it. The advertisement, part of a short-run campaign, was intended to be humorous and we apologize to anyone who felt offended.” Heinz.com1. Sign the Re-instate the Heinz Deli Mayo TV ad. 2. Contact Nigel Dickie: 020 8848 2726, Nigel.Dickie@uk.hjheinz.com (from their press release) Tell Dickie you weren't offended. (You can view it here or here.) 3. Contact Heinz direct: www.heinz.com, click on the Contact Us link. Tell them you won't buy a Heinz product until the ad's being broadcast again. 4. If you normally buy Heinz, don't. 5. Pass it on! I know, I know: it's just a TV ad. And however cute the ad, it's an appalling product. But Heinz's instant capitulation to homophobic bigots was so naked. Dress it up with a squirt of organic tomato ketchup and make your own baked beans. Current Mood: annoyed , angry queer, food politics, i watch tv, writing complaining letters
April 7th, 200810:41 am: Snark is *not* a valid way to begin a discussion
(And I apologise to ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) bethbethbeth and elke_tanzer for snarking on their journals, and hereby commit not to snark about OTW on any other OTWsquee posts on anyone else's journal...) But nevertheless, I could wish that the reaction of OTWers to the point that if you are not on livejournal, you are excluded from OTW, was rather more constructive than blank denial. If you do not have a livejournal, you cannot participate in the Organisation of Transformative Works. It's set up that way. While this makes me feel snarky whenever I see someone squeeing about OTW, for a number of reasons including the fact that just about the last thing fandom needs is yet another organisation exclusively for livejournal fans, what makes me really cranky is that OTW fans will not acknowledge that their organisation is exclusively for livejournal fans. Signed, Cranky Platypus. Current Mood: cranky , fannish snark, i write fanfic, let's all be outcasts together, venting
September 19th, 200708:57 am: Catholic church decides they'd rather stand on the left
Church says: don't worry, Jesus didn't mean it!: "Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'
"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'
"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.' (Matthew 25,42-45) Amnesty International decided in April this year to to support access to abortion for women in cases of rape, incest or violence, or where the pregnancy jeopardises a mother's life or health. The Catholic church decided that the doctrine of forcing women through pregnancy and childbirth against their will and regardless of the damage done to a woman's life and health as a result, was more central to Christianity than providing help and support to prisoners. Catholic bishops have been running away to stand on the left since April, making pontifical noises about how their conscience as Catholics obliges them to support forced pregnancy rather than aid prisoners. The latest news story is about Northern Ireland bishops banning schoolchildren from writing to prisoners because Amnesty International supports the right of raped women to have access to abortion, and the right of a woman to decide to protect her own life rather than die in pregnancy. The reason the Catholic church gives for believing prisoners shouldn't be written to, and women should die in pregnancy, is "The sacredness and protection of all human life." Not that Catholics are alone in believing that women are not human, nor are they the only Christians to argue that Jesus didn't really mean it when he said that denying help to those sick or in prison was the same as denying help to him. And I don't doubt that a good many grassroots Catholics will do what they do when faced with the Church's claim that using contraception regularly is worse than having an abortion every few months: they'll shrug this idiocy off and do the right thing regardless of what the Church says. www.amnesty.org--- Update: Zoe Williams on Why faith schools should not be tax-funded. Current Mood: pissed off , feminism
September 6th, 200709:46 am: I wish that everyone who supported the war with Iraq could be made to do this
I'll meet you round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...: Two months ago, the suitcases were packed. My lone, large suitcase sat in my bedroom for nearly six weeks, so full of clothes and personal items, that it took me, E. and our six year old neighbor to zip it closed.
Packing that suitcase was one of the more difficult things I’ve had to do. It was Mission Impossible: Your mission, R., should you choose to accept it is to go through the items you’ve accumulated over nearly three decades and decide which ones you cannot do without. The difficulty of your mission, R., is that you must contain these items in a space totaling 1 m by 0.7 m by 0.4 m. This, of course, includes the clothes you will be wearing for the next months, as well as any personal memorabilia- photos, diaries, stuffed animals, CDs and the like.
I packed and unpacked it four times. Each time I unpacked it, I swore I’d eliminate some of the items that were not absolutely necessary. Each time I packed it again, I would add more ‘stuff’ than the time before. E. finally came in a month and a half later and insisted we zip up the bag so I wouldn’t be tempted to update its contents constantly.
The decision that we would each take one suitcase was made by my father. He took one look at the box of assorted memories we were beginning to prepare and it was final: Four large identical suitcases were purchased- one for each member of the family... I especially wish Tony Blair could be forced to do this: one suitcase for himself and one for each of his family, pack everything, lose the rest. Hard on his children, yes: but at least they wouldn't then have to run for their lives. (Bush? Bush is beyond saving and always was. What bugs me about Blair is that I'm certain he Meant Well.) Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan, evil american politics, war
February 1st, 200710:58 am: OMG it is the End Times
Google is dead. I can't remember the names of any other search engines. Ordinarily if I wanted to use another search engine than google for some reason, I'd, er, google it. I don't think I can cope, frankly. My home page is www.google.co.uk. I use google umpteen times a day. What's happened? Are the seas now going to boil, and the sky fall? I kept thinking it must be a connection problem with my computer, but it's not: google really is down. omg omg omg *flails* Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan
October 8th, 200612:20 am: I hate the "pro-life" movement
The woman whose experience trying to get emergency contraception I linked to here and wrote about here has announced on her blog that - unsurprisingly, with the delay forced on her by various misogynistic doctors who think pregnancy is punishment for sex - Plan B didn't work, and she's going to have to get an abortion. Which her health insurance will not cover, because in the US, health insurance companies are permitted to refuse women full health care coverage by misogynistic legislators who think pregnancy is punishment for sex. Remember, this is what the movement that calls itself "pro-life" is all about. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise, at best, they're deluding themselves. (Oh, and she's right: this is funny.) And... remember the waffles. Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan, howls of rage, i am an angry feminist
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