I've loved reading for as long as I can remember. I write fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and nonfiction. For more than 20 years I edited and published an anthropomorphic sci-fi/space opera literary fanzine. I attend and work on the staff for several anthropormorphics, anime, and science fiction conventions. I live near Seattle with my wonderful husband, still completely amazed that he puts up with me at all.
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I’ve written before about dumb arguments people make for why there shouldn’t be legal protections for transgender people. And here’s one I haven’t tackled:
The Bible says it’s a sin!
You might want to read the whole book before you make that claim:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
—Galatians 3:28
The usual Biblical arguments about transgenderism ignore this verse, or try to claim that it’s being metaphorical about how god judges people. And then they point to verses in the Bible about how god created each person, or the verses about women covering their hair and so on to infer a definitive statement from god. But they’re wrong, as I’ll explain below…Continue reading Dumb arguments against legal protections for transgender people, part 4→
One of the counter-protesters from the story below. Nice to find out Thor’s feelings about figs.It’s already the third Friday of 2015! Have you stopped typing “2014” yet? I’ve been sick most of the week. Almost all of my time has gone to either sleeping or working. So you’ll notice that this week’s list of links is a bit shorter than usual.
Anyway, here is a collection of news and other things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared:
weboffunny.comI have about a dozen half-written blog posts that are, ultimately, all about the same thing: people come up with really dumb arguments to justify discriminating against or otherwise being awful to other people. Then I have a couple of partially-written posts explaining some fallacies in some supposed-science memes being passed around on social media—not being passed around by the usually anti-science folks, but by the people who are usually ridiculing the cluelessness of the science challenged.
A couple weeks ago there was a rash of op-ed pieces and blog posts debating whether it is the job of various people to constantly educate other people about the realities of oppression, unwitting misogyny, institutional homophobia and racism, and the ways that people unintentionally perpetuate those things. And I understand. Some days I’m just too tired to deal with yet another clueless person….Continue reading Do I have to explain everything?→
The not-terribly detailed sketch local police released of the possible suspect.Last week someone set off some kind of explosive device outside the office of the Colorado Springs branch of the NAACP. This happened the day before news broke of the shootings in Paris, which completely overshadowed any reporting on the bombing, so you may not have heard of it. A week later, we still know very little about what happened. The FBI is investigating. Local law enforcement is searching for a person seen fleeing the scene.
At least some people are arguing that the NAACP bombing doesn’t deserve more extensive coverage because no one died. But the firebomb didn’t kill anyone only because the main gas can didn’t ignite. Yes, that means the attempted terrorist is incompetent at bomb making (or at least at deploying the bomb), but incompetence can still kill. The incompetent often kill more people than the competent, they’re just more likely to kill unintended targets.
The effort to which some rightwing groups are going to in an attempt to claim that the bombing didn’t actually happen doesn’t jibe with claims that the story isn’t being covered merely because no one died. When known racists start claiming that the people of color are making it up, that’s a pretty good indication that a lot of less obvious racist forces are also at work trying to sweep things under the rug.
Not to say that there is a vast conspiracy. There are several reasons this story doesn’t lend itself to the circus-like atmosphere of a good 24-hour news cycle story.
No one died. Because no one died, the networks can’t show you pictures of the victims. There are no images of grieving relatives to exploit. There are no images of bodies in body bags they can show you. There are no images of ambulances gathered around the site of the attack.
The amount of damage done was minimal. There are no dramatic images of a burnt-down building, or smashed windows, or collapsed walls that they can plaster on the screen again and again.
Authorities don’t have a specific suspect, yet. They especially don’t have any images of a suspect that falls into any of the usual categories we like to trot out as the perpetrators of such a crime. No mug shot-esque photos of swarthy-skinned men with middle eastern-sounding names that the talking heads can repeat over and over.
No hate groups have taken credit. There is no dramatic footage of protestors on the streets. They can’t dig up old stories of past incidents involving the group to repeat again and again to fill up time on their broadcast.
The media has certain narratives it knows how to exploit, and at the moment this one doesn’t neatly fit into their favorite terrorism narrative. While there are reasons to believe it is a race-motivated hate crime, we don’t yet have the details that fall into the media’s typical narratives for those, either.
Those things all contribute to the lack of coverage, but they aren’t the only reasons. Race-motivated crimes against people of color, when the perpetrator is believed to be a white guy, are always dismissed as the actions of a single, disturbed individual. Even when a bunch of people die. So in case like this, when, thankfully, there are no casualties, hardly anyone is going to give it a second thought.
But if we don’t give it a second thought, we’re just enabling the next incident.
The 12th Man Logo. Many years ago the Seahawks retired Jersey #12 in honor of the teams fans, since a team is allowed 11 players on the field at a time, while the cheering and support of the fans help as much as an extra player.While I’ve written a few times before about my own ambivalent relationship with the game of football, this is not one of those times. Because my team played an incredible game on Saturday, and I’m still bouncing around with joy over the many amazing feats of skill and athleticism that I got to watch (sometimes multiple times–and not always because of replay!).
I grew up in the Central Rocky Mountain region, where most people were fans of the Denver Broncos, Denver being the closest city with an NFL team to most of those places. There were always some people who were fans of other teams for various reasons. After my parents divorced, Mom, my oldest sister, and I moved from the Central Rockies to southwest Washington state. We moved in August of 1976. The same month that a brand new NFL expansion team called the Seahawks started playing their first pre-season games. I came to Washington the same time that the Seahawks came into existence as the state’s NFL team, so I’ve been here from the beginning.
Although I had rooted for the Broncos in the past, I hadn’t been a real fan, because I didn’t understand the game. My dad got extremely angry when I, as a kid, asked what was going on on the field. So I stopped asking. And at school, the correlation between whether a guy was a football player and whether he was someone who bullied me was very high. So it was new friends I met after moving to Washington who explained the game to me as they watched Seahawks games on Sunday afternoons.
I became a Seahawks fan during the team’s first season. And for most of the subsequent 38 seasons, our guys kept finding new and excruciating ways to give us hope, and then snatch it away from us. Which is why up until almost the end of last year’s Superbowl, even when we were so far ahead of the Broncos it was almost embarrassing, I couldn’t let myself believe we were actually going to win it.
So it’s still more than a little bit unbelievable, as we prepare to play the Conference Championship game next week, that we’ve not only managed to put together a really good team and win the whole thing last year, but that we have a reasonable chance of repeating it this year. And some of our guys are unbelievable. Such as Kam Chancellor, who plays Strong Safety on the Seahawks, who usually delivers an astounding performance was especially unbelievable this last weekend.
Anyone who has watched much track and field or a good Parkour athlete knows that the leap itself isn’t unbelievable. What is amazing is the circumstance. In order to do that, you have to correctly guess the moment that the Center on the other team is going to snap the ball. Which they are actively trying to surprise you about the timing of it. If he starts running too soon, he crosses the line of scrimmage before the ball is snapped and gets a penalty. If if starts too late, the ball gets snapped a fraction of a second before he gets there, and the lineman will surge up to their feet.
He has to hit his leap in that fraction of a second between when the ball is snapped and when the other players react to the snap. He pulled it off, but because of a penalty elsewhere on the play, the referees stopped the game. The ball was moved five yards, everyone got in position again… and even though they were expected it, he did it again!
And that wasn’t even his most amazing play. That was when he intercepted one of their passes at the ten-yard line and ran the ball 90-yards to score a touchdown.
Kam was not the only Seahawk doing incredible things on the field that day. And to be fair, a number of the Panthers did some amazing things. Just not enough.
One of the things I enjoy about the playoffs is that, because it’s only the teams that did best during the year that are playing, and everyone is trying their hardest, you see a lot of good hard playing on every team in every game. So I watched Sunday’s playoff games. Since I used to be a Bronco’s fan, I try to catch their games when I can. I wanted to root for them, not because I want a re-match in the Superbowl, but just for old times’ sake. But the Colts were playing really well. The Packers/Cowboys game turned out how I hoped, since I’ve never liked the Cowboys (for reasons that are no less silly than rooting for the team that just happens to play in your city), but it was also fun to watch.
Humans are able to do some amazing things. Particularly working together. And playing a good game of football requires skills, strength, and endurance, but also quick thinking, strategy, and the willingness to work as a team. So part of the enjoyment is watching people do some amazing, and sometimes breath-taking things. And it can be just as inspiring to watch someone try and almost succeed, only failing because on that play, at that moment, one or more of the players on the other team was just a little bit faster, or a little bit luckier.
Then there are moments, like one time I was watching one of my favorite players, Marshawn Lynch, run one of his impossible carries, where four or five or more of the other guys had tackled him, but they hadn’t managed to knock him down, and he just kept moving, dragging them along. The camera had caught the grim and frightening determined expression on his face earlier in the play. And then at the end, once it was over, Marshawn climbed to his feet, grinning and laughing. He reached down, offering a hand up to one of the guys who had just tackled him. And they gave each other congratulatory slaps on the back before heading to their opposite sidelines.
The fact that we humans can do that, is pretty awesome, too.
In response to the gunmen shooting up the offices of a Paris satirical magazine and killing twelve people, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League has come forward with an editorial saying that the terrorists have a right to be angry. It’s a brilliant example of the religious right’s usual tactic of claiming that they don’t condone violence once or twice, and then spewing out several hundred words explains just how much the victims deserved what they got.
Meanwhile, Erick Erickson over on RedState radio is using the deaths in Paris as a cheap ploy to talk about an Atlanta fire department chief who was terminated recently for forcing his subordinates to read an anti-gay book that the fire chief wrote. According to Erickson, us gays have done just as heinous a crime as the Paris terrorists, because this guy was fired simply for publishing his beliefs. Um, no. He was fired for requiring other public employees under his command to read his book and for making numerous public statements about the suitability of queers to serve. Thus fostering a hostile work environment for any gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans employees, or any employee who didn’t share his views. That is not the same thing as merely publishing something. Particularly when, after he was suspended while an investigation when on, the fire chief went on a speaking tour of Atlanta churches, where he declared again and again when he got back to work he would keep proselytizing at work.
But the most insidious and dangerous of these is definitely people like Donohue who argue that what the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo did was so offensive, that it is immoral or unethical for us to defend them (and by implication, immoral to harshly punish the terrorists if caught). Neil Gaiman wrote the answer to this some time back on his journal (in answer to a rather long letter from a fan), Why defend the freedom of icky speech?
You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you’re going to have to stand up for stuff you don’t believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don’t, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person’s obscenity is another person’s art.
Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.
(I’ve excerpted only a small part. Neil’s answer includes the story of how a piece Neil co-created, consisted of a long passage from the Bible with accurate illustrations, almost got a publisher thrown in jail in Sweden. The full journal entry is worth the read.)
Yesterday I explained roughly what age kids are expected to be at different grade levels, along with why it can vary a lot, and why just knowing what grade a kid is in tells you nothing about what he or she has studied by this time. Today, let’s talk about how American schools group those grades, and answer the blogger’s question about what we mean by “high school.”Continue reading Stuck in the middle with you→
I grew up in U.S. public schools (the term “public schools” in the U.S. refers to the taxpayer-funded schools that are administered by the government and are free to attend for all children), and it was confusing to me. I hang out on enough writing forums, follow enough writer blogs, and so forth to also attest that lots of other people who grew up in this system who are now trying to write books that involve characters who are either students or teachers feel compelled to ask questions about the ages of kids in certain grades, or what subjects they should be studying and so forth.
To understand the U.S. school system the very first thing you must understand is: there is NO U.S. school system. Americans, particularly Um-merr-uh-kins, are deeply suspicious of central authority (yes, most especially the ones who wave American flags all the time), and insist that schools must be subject primarily to local control. Even when a good ol’ boy Republican President like George W. Bush proposes something as harmless-sounding as “no child left behind” conservative Americans rise up foaming-at-the-mouth angry about the federal government sticking its nose in and telling us how to educate our children.Continue reading It ought to be elementary, but…→
One wonders how I hit 105 wpm with these paws.There will be no reports of any of my breakfasts in this post. A friend uses the phrase “what I had for breakfast” to describe a certain style of blogging that many of us fall into from time-to-time (and some seem to do always). Today’s post is a mish-mash that hits lots of topics, such as: my specific writing goals for the rest of the month, me getting tangentially caught in a blow-by from an anti-gay activist, and a few other oddments in my life. If none of those trivial details sounds of interest, don’t click…Continue reading …and what I had for breakfast→
Font Folly 