yonmei

10:17 am: Why are people so cynical? Well...
mercurychaos asked this in context of the passing into law of the Matthew Shepard Memorial Act (yes, I know that's not it's real name) and I responded:

The thing is (from my own experience as an LGBT activist and lesbian) the two big steps in any movement towards equality are equal access to marriage (or even separate-and-almost-equal, blast it, but civil partnership is so damn close it was blissful even when it missed) and equal right to serve in the military.

And I say this as a militant pacifist.

Because both are public statements of equality made by the national (or in US, the federal) government. Protection against discrimination and harassment at work and in access to services, etc, that's useful but it's at least partially dependent on the person being discriminated against having the mojo to react, to say no, this is illegal, you're not getting away with this. But the freedom to marry (or at least get civil-unioned if it's recognised by the government as if it were marriage) and the freedom to serve openly in the military - those two are pro-active door-opening statements made by the government both to queers and to straights, to closet-cases and to bigots.

And I don't believe it's at all coincidental that those are the two steps which Obama is absolutely declining to do anything about but talk. Okay, talk is good, it means it's still on the agenda and he hasn't entirely forgotten that once upon a time he made a committment to LGBT equality and civil rights.

But Obama made the same committment to the Constitution with regard to warrantless wiretapping - and broke it: he made the same committment to international human rights with regard to torturing prisoners and locking them up in extra-judicial prison camps - and broke it: and he never once made a committment to seeing the criminals responsible for torture, extra-judicial imprisonment, and aggressive war investigated or tried, which is just as well because he's done nothing else with regard to that but focus on the cover-up to ensure they can never be prosecuted, since he took office. "Better than Bush" is not a particularly high bar to get over, and Obama clears it with ease, but there's no denying he's a conservative with a track record of broken committments on civil and human rights issues that I actually consider more important than his failure to follow through on his campaign promises about marriage and the military.

Significant though those are. Obama's been a disappointment - hugely better than Bush, but so much less than he could be. I don't have a problem with people continuing to hold him to a significantly higher standard than he's managed to reach.



Tags: angry queer, evil american politics, religious politics

10:09 pm: I stopped reading Savage Love because of the racism, but...
I used to find Dan Savage fairly entertaining. And probably still would, when he's got his dander up and is spilling vitrolic abuse all over straight men with massive cases of entitlement.

Then after Prop 8 passed in California he joined the whiter-than-white brigade of gay people blaming "African-Americans" for the success of Prop 8, and I drifted away because who needs the aggro?

Echidne of the Snakes, I think, linked me to a post he made yesterday - not a Savage Love column, which I haven't read in months, but one of his blog posts. Title, "Gay People Can Quote The Bible Too".

The pic is of (a man, I think) someone holding a white placard, on which is the text

"A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed" (Deuteronomy 22:13-21) cite

It's hard to number how many ways that sign fails.

(My favourite example of Mosaic law to quote back at people who tell me that being gay is a sin because "it says so in the Bible!" is the part about not eating bacon and not eating "milk and meat". Eating at McDonalds is an abomination - it says so in the Bible, what with all the cheeseburgers and bacon - and yet how often do you see conservative Christians standing around outside a McDonalds waving placards and demanding that the law act to stop people from going to hell by eating there?)

Also, it appears that not content with campaigning to deny healthcare to people with no money and/or expensive things gone wrong with them, right-wing Christians in the US now propose a sustained attack on healthcare clinics for women - from Wednesday 23rd September to 1st November, a campaign called "40 Days For Life", the plan is to try and organise mobs of anti-choice activists to visit 122 clinics across the US and harass the staff and the patients. All this only a few months after an anti-choice activist murdered Doctor George Tiller:

Anti-choicers harassed his patients, day in and day out. They bombed his clinic. They shot him once before. They filed lawsuit after lawsuit and even convinced local prosecutors to launch criminal investigations and trials (none were successful). They published his home address and the full names of his family members on their websites. They posted information about anyone who did business with him, from where he got his coffee to where he did his dry cleaning.

They had him and his staff wearing bullet-proof vests to work every day. Tiller drove an armoured car and protected his home with a state-of-the-art security system. And, to better enable stalking and harassment, they posted his daily comings and goings – including the fact that he attended services every Sunday at Reformation Lutheran Church, the place where he was ultimately shot and killed. cite

Since 1977, pro-lifers have murdered 10 people - mostly doctors - have attempted to murder at least 17 more; there have been at least 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, three kidnappings, 654 anthrax letters (none of which actually contained anthrax - yet), 41 clinic bombings, 175 arson attacks... latest figures. This represents only the crimes reported to the police that were identified as pro-lifer anti-clinic violence.

Against this announcement of an organised terrorist campaign, there seems to be... a Facebook group.

But Dan Savage likes him a placard about killing women for not being virgins. Well, let me remember not to go to his site for any reason any more...



Tags: angry queer, bible, evil american politics, food politics, religious politics

07:33 pm: Eight years ago today...
I left work at about four o'clock, realising at last that I would get nothing more done.

That was a Tuesday. I took the next eight working days off, dazed, shocked, confused, tired, unable to sleep, thinking, about almost everything "What does it matter now?"

Not because of the attack itself: because I was afraid, mortally, horribly afraid of what Americans would do in response to the attack. When the missiles began to fall on Afghanistan, not even a month later, in an odd and horrible kind of way it was almost a relief: you know how you feel when you realise that, do what you might, you have missed the train, or you have broken the crystal bowl: you must deal now with the world as it is. I knew the US response to this attack could destroy the world. It still might. Uncounted thousands have been killed in Afghanistan because of the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon - people who barely had a notion there was a country called America, who had no idea what the WTC looked like. Over a million people have been killed in Iraq. Hundreds of people have been kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured. The US government openly endorses kidnapping, extra-judicial imprisonment, torture, and murder: has openly claimed the right to aggressive war. A distinction without a difference, I might have said, ten years ago, since nothing the US has done in the past eight years was new: but it makes and made a difference that, once, the US tried to present itself as a country with standards. Once upon a time: before Mahar Arar was kidnapped and sent to Syria to be tortured, an act the US then and still defends as legal because a citizen of another country who is in a US airport but has not yet legally entered the country, has no rights in the US. Before the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay was built. Before the first prisoners were brought to Bagram Airbase to be tortured. Before the massacre in Dasht-i-Leili. Before the US, in a wave of bloodthirsty anger that seemed all but universal, began to make war on Afghanistan in revenge for an attack that no Afghan took part in and no Afghan could have stopped.

tzikeh just tweeted links to two things she reads every 9/11: I hadn't read For Thou Art With Us before - a first-hand account of downtown New York on the morning of September 11. (Related: Operation Find Don.) I had read the metafilter as-it-happens thread, or part of it, though not all of it.

I can't say there's any one thing I read every September 11. But there is one thing I do read often, from The Onion, September 26, 2001:

Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.

"Look, I don't know, maybe I haven't made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again," said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. "Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don't. And to be honest, I'm really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand."

.....

"I don't care what faith you are, everybody's been making this same mistake since the dawn of time," God said. "The Muslims massacre the Hindus, the Hindus massacre the Muslims. The Buddhists, everybody massacres the Buddhists. The Jews, don't even get me started on the hardline, right-wing, Meir Kahane-loving Israeli nationalists, man. And the Christians? You people believe in a Messiah who says, 'Turn the other cheek,' but you've been killing everybody you can get your hands on since the Crusades."

Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: "Can't you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism... every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you're supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It's not that hard a concept to grasp."

"Why would you think I'd want anything else? Humans don't need religion or God as an excuse to kill each other—you've been doing that without any help from Me since you were freaking apes!" God said. "The whole point of believing in God is to have a higher standard of behavior. How obvious can you get?"

"I'm talking to all of you, here!" continued God, His voice rising to a shout. "Do you hear Me? I don't want you to kill anybody. I'm against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don't kill each other anymore—ever! I'm fucking serious!"

Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God's shoulders began to shake, and He wept.

Whereas in July four years ago, though all day I was checking to make sure everyone I knew and cared about in London was alive and well, I wasn't panicking. Not just because you can't step in the same river once, but because... well, this was Britain: this was my country. Make tea not war. I posted this on Metaquote from jslayeruk's journal (and of course a year later it was vanished because I was banned, but by that time it had gone global)

“When the news reporter said "Shopkeepers are opening their doors bringing out blankets and cups of tea" I just smiled. It's like yes. That's Britain for you. Tea solves everything. You're a bit cold? Tea. Your boyfriend has just left you? Tea. You've just been told you've got cancer? Tea. Coordinated terrorist attack on the transport network bringing the city to a grinding halt? Tea dammit! And if it's really serious, they may bring out the coffee. The Americans have their alert raised to red, we break out the coffee. That's for situations more serious than this of course. Like another England penalty shoot-out.”

Not that we're nicer people than the Americans. But we're not an Empire. Not any more.



Tags: evil american politics, evil british politics, guantanamo bay, iraq, lj abuse did what???, september 11

12:22 am: Shouldn't need to be said
via muninnhuginn

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick.

If you agree, please post this in all your social networking accounts.

Tags: evil american politics, nhs

12:11 pm: UK to US: The Truth About the NHS!
Signed the petition, added a comment:

My grandfather lived long enough for me to remember him because an NHS surgeon performed a quadruple bypass on his heart when I was two. My dad is still alive and well (and able to see and to bake his own bread) at the age of 82 because NHS surgeons performed operations on his wrist, his eyes, and his heart, in the past five years. I've had regular visits to my GP and to consultants over the past two or three years to establish why I felt like I had a perpetual cold in the head: turned out to be a dust allergy, for which I get regular medication and pay £104 a year for all my prescriptions. I would have been functionally blind since I was 7 if not for NHS eye-tests and free NHS specs till I was 16: I pay for my lenses now I'm working full-time, but when I was a student or looking for work I could get free lenses when I needed a replacement prescription. The NHS keeps me healthy, keeps me sighted, keeps me free: the US corporate control of healthcare is not only evil, it's inefficient and stupid.

Update: Wow. I think the petition went up this morning and there were over 10,000 signatures by the time I signed it: at 17:11 today there are
29,740 30,369 signatures.



Tags: evil american politics, evil americans advertising against nhs, family stuff, my health, nose of a nose

10:34 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.

Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan, evil american politics, evil british politics

05:13 pm: Am HOME!
Priority Actions:
1. Hug Bob, because she's acting awfully unloved.
2. Open windows! 'cause the place smells awfully stuffy
3. Feed cats.
4. Pet Wolf's nose, because it's the longest I've ever been away in his LIFE and he had his 2nd birthday while I was gone and he's acting like he's not sure who I am any more
5. Change litter in litter trays, light incense and oilburner in bathroom
6. ...check e-mail! E-mail solo to tell her I'd love to go bungee jumping with her and another slash fan in a couple of weeks.
7. Also, need to e-mail catsitter to tell her I'm home and catsitter's employer to ask her to bill me.
8. While hoping it will stop raining before I walk over to Tattie Shaw's, get involved with the retweet game on #welovetheNHS.
9. Realise it is Scotland, after all, and the rain is not going to stop, so go out anyway to buy fresh fruit and milk

Tags: bob, everybody lies, evil american politics, evil americans advertising against nhs, health, lists, weather, wolf

09:34 am: MPs expenses
I just looked up the expenses claims for my MP, for 2004-2008, and pretty much (a) I don't think he has anything to worry about (b) Whatever my feelings about the expenses claims system*, the claims he turned in look like he was operating within the rules: he claimed for his second home in London, including the TV licence, the utilities, a cleaner, and various undetailed claims for repairs and decoration (that I think add up to less than £2K over a 4 year period, but no single item looks outright unreasonable: plus there's a "legal fees" expense claim which he already paid back part of), he claimed for a laptop computer (paying the going rate for a decent model), he buys all the local magazines/newspapers and has an account with a Stockbridge newsagent that looks like all the national newspapers - and he routinely claimed between £10 and £40 a month for food**. (Which suggests to me that he claimed for tea/coffee when meeting with constituents - which if so, seems absolutely reasonable.)

Certainly what he claimed could all readily be justified under the incredibly vague rule of "I confirm that I incurred these costs wholly, exclusively and necessarily to enable me to stay overnight away from my only or main home for the purpose of performing my duties as a Member of Parliament". The problem here is the vagueness of it - most companies, when you claim for travel expenses, have very detailed and pretty stringent rules about what you can claim and what you can't.

When staying in a hotel on Compaq expenses, I found - looking up the rules - that Compaq regarded it as reasonable that I should have wine (or beer/cider) with my evening meal, plus an aperitif if I wanted one, but had a given limit - expressed as a percentage of the total cost of the meal - on the cost of the wine/aperitif. I remember as well that they were clear about travel expenses: if Compaq were paying for a transatlantic flight, they'd pay for their employee to travel business class: if employee wanted spouse to go with (same-sex partners not mentioned, but this was 1999) then they could switch their tickets to tourist class and both travel tourist on Compaq, if that cost the same as a business-class ticket: if it cost more, the couple paid the extra, unless the trip was going to last more than x weeks, in which case see spouse travelling allowance. I read through the rules the first time I stayed in France on expenses: I looked things up whenever I had a query: and discovered, when I was staying with a couple of friends in London to attend a course Compaq were paying for, that because I was saving Compaq the expense of a daily ticket to London at peak time, I could take my hosts out for a meal and charge it to expenses, limit being up to the amount I was saving Compaq. I never had any trouble working out what I could claim for and what I couldn't: the chief trouble with the expenses was always getting the receipts back to admin in time to have them paid before the credit card bill came due, because while you could claim for interest due on unpaid expenses as an additional expense, it was (we all agreed) just adding an extra layer of complication.

*Complicated. It's certainly been used as a salary top-up. And it's not as if MPs are underpaid: a backbench MP gets £64,766. I feel that if taxpayers are paying all the damn expenses of a second home in London, when it's sold the money should go back to the state, or the flat should fall into the possession of Parliament (and could then be rented out to future MPs) but: he was claiming, from the expenses sheets, for the basic running costs.

**Alex Salmond, First Minister for Scotland and extremely-part time MP for Banff and Buchan, claims his food expenses each month are frequently as much as £400 - up to £400, MPs don't have to show receipts or justify it in any way, just write £400 on the form and get the cheque. Meh.




Tags: evil american politics, evil british politics, london, scottish politics

09:36 pm: Power corrupts.
Barack Obama, 11th February 2004:

Today, I am a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Unlike any of my opponents, I have a legislative track record. No one has to guess about what I will do in Washington. My record makes it very clear. I will be an unapologetic voice for civil rights in the U.S. Senate.

For the record, I opposed DOMA [ the Defense of Marriage Act ] in 1996. It should be repealed and I will vote for its repeal on the Senate floor. I will also oppose any proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gays and lesbians from marrying. This is an effort to demonize people for political advantage, and should be resisted ... .

When Members of Congress passed DOMA, they were not interested in strengthening family values or protecting civil liberties. They were only interested in perpetuating division and affirming a wedge issue. ...

Political Radar, August 2007:

"He supports the complete repeal of D.O.M.A. which is the same position he has held since early 2004," Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told ABC News.

Glenn Greenwald, 6th November 2008:

"Barack Obama has, on numerous occasions, emphatically expressed his support for repealing DOMA. When he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he wrote a letter to Chicago's Windy City Times, calling DOMA "abhorrent" and its repeal "essential," and vowing: "I opposed DOMA in 1996. It should be repealed and I will vote for its repeal on the Senate floor." But he went on to cite what he called the "the realities of modern politics" in order to proclaim (accurately) that DOMA's repeal at that time -- 2004 -- was "unlikely with Mr. Bush in the White House and Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress." After Tuesday, that excuse is no longer availing."

Barack Obama's Justice Department, 11th May 2009:

The constitutional propriety of Congress's decision to decline to extend federal benefits immediately to newly recognized types of marriages is bolstered by Congress's articulated interest in preserving the scarce resources of both the federal and State governments. DOMA ensures that evolving understandings of the institution of marriage at the State level do not place greater financial and administrative obligations on federal and state benefits programs. Preserving scarce government resources — and deciding to extend benefits incrementally — are well-recognized legitimate interests under rational-basis review. See Butler, 144 F.3d at 625 ("There is nothing irrational about Congress's stated goal of conserving social security resources, and Congress can incrementally pursue that goal."); Hassan v. Wright, 45 F.3d 1063, 1069 (7th Cir. 1995) ("[P]rotecting the fisc provides a rational basis for Congress' line drawing in this instance."). Congress expressly relied on these interests in enacting DOMA: Government currently provides an array of material and other benefits to married couples in an effort to promote, protect, and prefer the institution of marriage. . . . If [a State] were to permit homosexuals to marry, these marital benefits would, absent some legislative response, presumably have to be made available to homosexual couples and surviving spouses of homosexual marriages on the same terms as they are now available to opposite-sex married couples and spouses. To deny federal recognition to same-sex marriages will thus preserve scarce government resources, surely a legitimate government purpose.

Update:

The brief was written by a Bush administration appointee, W. Scott Simpson, honoured in 2005 by Alberto Gonzales for his work defending the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act against multiple constitutional challenges.

darkrose, on whose journal I first read the quote from the brief, has written a letter to the President.





Tags: angry queer, evil american politics

02:42 pm: Plockton is pretty
We had a long trip up by car, with stops in Perth (to collect wedding favours), in Dalwhinnie (which is twinned with Las Vegas, according to the sign at the pub where we stopped - where we had a very nice lunch, but saw no gamblers or white tigers), and in someplace I don't remember the name of because for two hours of winding hilly road I was feeling increasingly carsick and I didn't care where we were, or indeed appreciate how lovely the castle was, until I had breathed some fresh air and had a cup of tea and a cheese scone. But on the way out of the castle tea shop, I looked out over the sea loch at the castle and the hills and said in a bemused voice to the woman next to me, "It really is lovely, isn't it?" feeling a bit like Tommy Lee Jones in MiB where he confesses to Will Smith that the stars are beautiful, though he hasn't looked at them in years. Anyway. We got to Plockton and checked in and I found I had a room to myself (which I hadn't been sure about, because when they were booking us in January, I'd been asked if I minded sharing and of course I'd said No) and a nice bathroom just a few steps away, and a complimentary towelling dressing-gown to take those few steps.

So I wandered around Plockton, which is tiny and pretty, for an hour or so, and then came back to our hotel and we all had dinner*, which was lovely. My friends' friends are also lovely: it's very nice to meet them all. (I admitted to two separate people who asked, since everyone else present was thespian to some degree or another, that my sole connection with the stage was the O-Level Drama I did back when I was 15, and the drama group I belonged to for a year after that: I had met RiK when we were both in the same gay youth group, in 1984. Nobody seems to be prejudiced against non-thespians, though, which is nice.)

A sound night's sleep, followed by a lovely breakfast** - the food here is glorious, a focus on seafood, but there are enough vegetarian options to keep me happy for a longer stay! - and another wander round Plockton in the rain. I'd discovered this morning I could get online via the Plockton Inn's wifi, though T-Mobile has let me down. Then I went back to my room, packed up the half-bottle of wine I'd bought last night and not nearly finished, went down to the fish bar and ordered a vegeburger and chips, and took this and my wine up to a bench overlooking the sea and the houses, and ate and drank wine and admired the view and read The Guardian, and it was really very perfect. (The friends are lovely, but one can have too much togetherness, you know.) It's five past three. Time for another half hour or so wandering Plockton and taking more photos, then I need to come back here and dress for the ceremony.

I am very disappointed to hear that the Californian Supreme Court has decided that a majority vote in California can take a civil right away from the minority - I mean of course the freedom to marry, which has been established in the US as a civil right necessary to the orderly pursuit of happiness since 1967. I'm very glad and relieved, though, that they didn't decide to forcibly divorce the thousands of couples who had got married - and hope things will change for the better by 2010, if not before.

But I'd like to promote to your attention a petition to the UK Government (and ask you to sign it, if you're a UK citizen) to amend the Civil Partnership Act so that same-sex couples who want to register their partnership at a religious ceremony can do so.

*Grilled vegetables in pitta bread, followed by vegetarian haggis with clapshot (mashed neeps and tatties) and followed by Crannachan ice-cream. I'd ordered a bottle of very nice Merlot, thinking I'd share, but everyone else at my table was on gin-and-tonics or beer.

**Muesli with dried fruit salad, orange juice, coffee, brown toast, scrambled eggs which tasted like the eggs had been laid this morning, baked beans and a grilled tomato, more coffee, oatcakes.




Tags: being queer, breakfast is a good meal, eating some delicious food, evil american politics, ice-cream, just my life really, seeing friends, travel, wine

09:36 am: "My job as an artist is to make you squirm"
Via dragovianknight, E. Bear writes:

My job as an artist is to tell you what I see, not what I wish I saw. My job is to tell as much of the truth about the world as my tiny flawed inadequate little brain and art can encompass. And the truth--even the tiny, fragmentary, self-contradictory truths that are all I have to offer--the truth will make you squirm.

From Elizabeth Bear, Chapter 3, Blood and Iron:

( cut for length )

This is enough to make me squirm, but not because it's "the truth": it makes me squirm because it's embarrassingly untrue. If it's what Elizabeth Bear "sees", she was at the movies or watching TV when she "saw" it - the romantic depiction of "the young Master returning home to be greeted by the middle-aged female servant". (It also makes me sure, and sad, that Bear has never been a P. G. Wodehouse fan: even Bertie Wooster understood that the phrase "young Master" can be employed only for comic or teasing effect.)

Later in this essay asserting what kind of Artist she is, Bear says:

If you want somebody to tell you what you want to hear, to hew to a party line, or to spread some kind of gospel, you probably want some other kind of artist. If you want somebody to proselytize an ideology, you definitely want some other kind of artist.

I am not here to comfort you.

Well, Blood and Iron is certainly not comforting - it's irritating and discomfiting to realise that there are still people in the world who think that it's appropriate to pull out "Stout grey-haired McCliche" when they think need arises, complete with obsequious dialogue. (Unless, later in the novel, we discover part of being a werewolf is keeping the local village in terrified submission, and the reason for Morag's obsequiousness was that she knew if she failed to address Keith as "young Master" or if he complained about her service, villagers would die. That doesn't quite make sense either with the way she behaves, but maybe she's suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.)

But Bear's notion that in promoting this kind of character, depicting this kind of relationship, she is not "hewing to a party line", just tells me: she's never tried to think politically about what she writes. About how, for example, a pack of incoming werewolves who buy and restore a Scottish 16th-century manor house near a village, and set about raising cattle and sheep, would fit in with the community. (Are they Catholic werewolves or Protestant werewolves? If Protestants, are they Presbyterian or Episcopalian? If Presbyterian, which branch of the church have they followed?) How would the locals react to the new family at the big house? (And they could be "the new family" for fifty years or more...) If Bear thinks that they could simply move in and be princes of the fiefdom without any backtalk from the locals, she is proselytising an ideology - a very conservative, very comforting kind of ideology to a certain kind of person - the sort of person who believes absolutely in the rightness of the class system, in everyone "knowing their place", and the lower orders showing proper respect to the landowner.

That isn't the kind of artist I want. But it is the kind of artist who would write Morag that way and never notice that she had her own thoughts about Eoghan and Keith MacNeill.

(See also: What is a writer's job? at feministsf.)



Tags: books are what i read, evil american politics, racefail 09, scottish politics, venting

01:20 pm: Atheist Toast, Satire, Elephants

Because Toast is Truth.

Binyam Mohamed's statement on release:

I have been through an experience that I never thought to encounter in my darkest nightmares. Before this ordeal, "torture" was an abstract word to me. I could never have imagined that I would be its victim. It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways – all orchestrated by the United States government.

While I want to recover, and put it all as far in my past as I can, I also know I have an obligation to the people who still remain in those torture chambers. My own despair was greatest when I thought that everyone had abandoned me. I have a duty to make sure that nobody else is forgotten.

Also, Barbara Ehrenrich on Binyam Mohamed:

I am not histrionic enough to imagine myself in any way responsible for the torments suffered by Mohamed and Padilla - at least no more responsible than any other American who failed to rise up in revolutionary anger against the Bush terror regime. No, I'm too busy seething over another irony: Whenever I've complained about my country's torturings, renderings, detentions, etc., there's always been some smug bastard ready to respond that these measures are what guarantee smart-alecky writers like myself our freedom of speech. Well, we had a government so vicious and impenetrably stupid that it managed to take my freedom of speech and turn it into someone else's living hell.

If the Great British Circus comes to where you live, please boycott it. Elephants do not belong in circuses.

Tell me five things you associate with me.

Tags: atheistical, elephants, evil american politics, evil british politics

10:04 pm: Ann Robinson for the win!
"So George said 'Goodbye, God bless, God speed!' and Barack said 'George, you are the weakest link, goodbye!'"

Tags: evil american politics, lol!

11:11 am: Cute little water dragon!


(plus four little dragons with less than 2 days before they turn into cute little headstones...)

Having the weirdest period ever, by the way. Also, George W. Bush isn't President of the US any more! And the show trials at Guantanamo Bay have been shut down for 120 days - hopefully forever. And there's a section on civil rights on the new WhiteHouse.gov website which is more than half about LGBT issues.

...on the other hand, Global Gag Rule, still gaggy.

Tags: dragon eggs need clicky, evil american politics, my health

07:12 pm: Whee!
Eight years ago, 20th January 2001, I logged on to discover that the new President George W. Bush, appointed by judicial fiat after losing the election - even losing the election in the state of Florida after his brother had tried to rig the electoral rolls in his favour - had reinstated the Global Gag Rule. Somehow, that, beyond anything else, had become symbolic for me of the whole Bush administration - the meanness, ignorance, and stupidity: the callousness with other people's lives: the willingness to pander to the Christian Right. All of it.



I want Obama to repeal the Global Gag Rule. I want him to close down Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Airbase and all the other gulags the US runs. I want him to end DOMA and DADT, to finally do some justice for LGBT Americans, to show that his invitation to Rick Warren was the token sop to the bigots, that his invitation to Gene Robinson was the real, meaningful honour. I want him to instigate and support an investigation of the Bush administration's crimes, from former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney downward, including the criminal attack on Iraq in 2003. I want all that.



I want to believe that there will be intelligent, sane people in the White House, making decisions for thoughtful reasons, not just following an ideological idea outside reality, not just pandering to the very rich and the powerful who got him into office.



I want to believe that President Obama won't be the kind of person who governs a country with one eye on what the press are saying, following every whipped-up campaign.



I want to be able to visit the US again without being treated like a criminal as I go through Customs, without fearing harassment, and in the knowledge that Muslims and people who have what the US government's thugs for hire think of as "Muslim names" are getting harassed and questioned and treated like terrorists for having the wrong religion, the wrong name, the wong language, the wrong clothing. (I want, very much, to be able to walk down into the Grand Canyon again, to see the space from South Rim to North Rim.) I want Americans to have a government that doesn't seek to put them in fear, that doesn't whip them into loyalty with terror threats.



I want my friends and acquaintances and strangers and people I don't know but I admire and even people I loathe, to live a better life, with a government that cares for more than just making the poor poorer and the rich wealthier.



I lost hope after 11th September 2001. I want hope back.

Tags: evil american politics

08:23 pm: You know what...?
( I have one very overwhelming feeling after watching this to the end )

Tags: dragon eggs need clicky, everybody lies, evil american politics

12:11 pm: Well, it's about time...
America's premier news source:

In an unexpected judicial turnaround, the Supreme Court this week reversed its 2000 ruling in the landmark case of Bush v. Gore, stripping George W. Bush of his earlier political victory, and declaring Albert Arnold Gore the 43rd president of the United States of America.

Tags: evil american politics

11:03 am: All alone at work...
( makes coffee )

Tags: coffee, evil american politics, evil awful mondays, imagine better, work, write write write

12:07 pm: Mislaid Camera
I had not noticed/used my camera for um, some time - two or three days, I think, which is a long time in my terms! - but I had also been very sleepy and tired and only occasionally thinking that "Ooh, want to take that photo!"

But today when I really wanted to find my camera so I could take it with me to the Close Guantanamo Bay demo and take some pics... I couldn't find it.

I even walked down to work just in case what had happened was I'd left it behind on my desk at work (and it had got covered in papers, as happens - they breed on my desk). I'm there right now, contemplating the fact that I appear to have lost my camera. Well, temporarily mislaid it, I'm sure it's still somewhere, I just can't figure out where.

So if any of you can suggest any new places to look... that would be terribly much appreciated. *is sad*

I'll go to the demo anyway. Closing down Guantanamo Bay is not on Obama's list of Things To Do, but it bloody well better get there.

Tags: camera disaster, evil american politics, nonphotos

07:20 am: Until this post my entire f-list consisted of posts about Obama
Who am I to break a record?

1. Electoral commission to reform the US elections

2. Close down Guantanamo Bay and other gulags, releasing prisoners with compensation and apologies where necessary, fair trial for prisoners where there is actual evidence not obtained by torture

3. Withdraw US troops from Iraq

4. Begin the process of investigating the crimes of the Bush administration over the past 8 years

5. Purge the Pentagon and the Defense Department and the Justice Department of everyone who approved of torture/extraordinary rendition, prosecuting as necessary but certainly ensuring they are now out of a job and the reason why published.

Plus of course there's the job of actually running the country, working to fix the economy, etc.

Wishing you eight years of President Obama. He may be a conservative but at least come January you won't have a fascist running the country.

Followed by eight years of President Cynthia McKinney. Go on.

Tags: evil american politics