“Happy Fall, y’all!”I started to write up my thoughts on a few news developments that either happened or I found out about after posting this week’s round up of news and other things of interest, but I think I’ll wait on that. Yesterday was the autumnal equinox, and therefore the first day of autumn, and fall is possibly my favorite season.
There are a few things to note about this particular transition of the seasons at least where I live. First, we officially can enter summer 2017 into the weather record books for a couple of different things. It was officially the driest summer (going by solar summer: June 21-Sept 21). Seattle summers are usually relatively dry, particularly compared to our Novembers, but this year was exceptional. Only 0.52″ of rain total, and it is worth noting that 0.50″ of that rain came in the last six days! Which certainly contributed to many days that the city was blanketed in smoke from various wild fires in British Columbia, Eastern Washington, and Central Oregon.
Summer 2017 also tied for the hottest summer ever recorded (1967). Though it is worth noting that 2014 and 2013 are tied at second hottest only one-tenth of a degree cooler (and 2015 was two-tenths of a degree cooler, so we definitely have a trend going).
But that nightmare is over, at least until next year. The jet stream has shifted. We got light rain last weekend, the daytime highs have been in the high 50s to mid 60s all week. We may break 70 again late in the week, but that’s a considerable improvement over the temps just two weeks ago.
So, autumn is here! Time to start thinking about Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations. Time to break out the pumpkin spice (I actually started experimenting with pumpkin spick cocktail recipes the day we got the first rain last week).
Click to embiggenIt’s the fourth Friday in September. The last Friday that I will be my current age. September, that blesséd month, which brings us extraordinary babies.
I’m not sure whether we haven’t quite recovered from last week’s illnesses, or if all the rain has made plants go extra crazy with the pollen and just making my hay fever worse, but we have both been a bit out of it all week.
Anyway, here are the links I gathered this week, sorted into categories as accurately as I could.
“Practice saying the word ‘bisexual.’ Say it again: bisexual. Paint it on the walls. Wear it on a t-shirt. Write it in toothpaste on your bathroom mirror. Notice is as you stare at your beautiful self. Bisexual. Say it louder, say it in public. Say it to someone who might not be comfortable hearing it. Let them begin to get over thir discomfort. Begin to get over your own. Ask yourself: what is it about that word that is so frightening to people?” (Click to embiggen)It is Bisexual Visibility Week, so this post shouldn’t be about me. Because I’m not bisexual. But I happen to be married to a bisexual man and our social circle includes a lot of bisexual people. Bi-erasure is a real thing that I am at least adjacent to (and sometimes find myself really irritated about). But it is also something which I am guilty of contributing to. Let’s get that part out of the way: I was once one of those queer kids who—full of internalized homophobia and surrounded by everyone else’s homophobia—was so scared that I would never find love and never live the kind of life that I had been told was the only way to be happy, that I tried to convince myself I was bisexual. Because if I was bi, see, I could fall in love with a woman, and I could marry her, and I could become a father and maybe when I died I would get to go to heaven. Maybe. But only if I was bi.
Not every person who identifies as bisexual is experimenting. Nor are they in denial of their real orientation. Because a certain number of gay people who are struggling with accepting themselves take shelter in a lie (a lie we were trying to sell to ourselves even harder than to anyone else), we give other people anecdotes that get weaponized and used against people who actually are bisexual. So, for my contribution to that misperception, I must apologize. I’m sorry.
So, to be clear:
A bisexual person who settles into a long term committed relationships with a member of the opposite sex is still bisexual. They just happened to fall in love with this person.
Also, a bisexual person who enters a long term committed relationship with a member of the same sex is still bisexual. They just happened to fall in love with that person.
A bisexual person who isn’t dating anyone at all is still bisexual. They’re just not seeing anyone right now (or ever). A person’s sexuality isn’t determined by their current relationship status.
A bisexual person who has never been (or you have never seen) in relationships with members of both sexes is still bisexual. Again, relationship status is different than sexual orientation.
Bi erasure is a real problem. Bisexual people often don’t feel welcome in queer spaces. They also often don’t feel welcome in non-queer spaces. People assume that they are straight of gay based on their current relationship. Other people dismiss them as confused or in denial. Sometimes they don’t just feel unwelcome, but unsafe.
Studies have shown that the stress of enduring homophobia affects the health and nervous system exactly the same as PTSD. It’s traumatic and physically damaging. That’s true whether you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or any other orientation outside the heteronormative. And its true in all the forms it takes, including biphobic attitudes of other queer people.
Don’t contribute to someone’s trauma. Don’t be an asshole about bisexual people—all the time, not just when you think you’re in the presence of a bisexual person. Because if those National Institutes of Health studies about covert sexual activity are correct, about 46% of the population is bi (and about 6% is exclusively gay). So if you’re sitting around with a half-dozen people, the odds are more than one of them is bi. You just don’t know it.
When the NIH published those studies in the mid-90s, the summary included this little gem: Americans would rather admit to being heroin addicts than tell someone they were bisexual. And that’s because of homophobia in general, but also biphobia among both the straight and queer communities.
So, if someone tells you they are bisexual, don’t argue with them, don’t doubt them or try to convince them that they’re just confused or curious or uncertain. Believe them. Accept them. They were brave enough to open up to you. The least you can do in the face of that is refrain from being a jerk. You know, don’t be a “contemptible, stupid, or inconsiderate person.”
Instead, be an ally. Their sexuality is valid. Period.
“We can disagree and love each other and less that disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” (click to embiggen)Since I wrote about the Nazi getting punched yesterday, I thought I was through, but a lot of people have been sharing a tweet that says, “I want to live in a world where people wearing Nazi symbols and people wearing rainbows can do so without being attacked.” And oh, I have so many responses to this. The first is that this is the mother of all false equivalents. When queer people and their allies where rainbows, they are saying “everyone deserves to live free of unfair discrimination no matter their sexual orientation and gender identity.” That is it. When a person wears a swastika, they are saying, “I think people like me should be able to live a life of privilege and that everyone who is a different race or religion should go away and/or die.”
That is not histrionics. When they talk about “saving the white race” and so-called “self deportation” and the like, they are saying “go away and die!” When they say that queer people are a threat to the future of the planet, they are saying we deserve to be killed. When they say that brown and black people are destroying “white culture” they are saying brown and black people deserve to be killed. When Richard Spencer said, literally moments before he was punched in the face on camera last summer, “we have to ask ourselves whether humanity needs the black man, and having confronted that question, then ask how to most efficiently dispose of them” he is saying that black people aren’t human and that they must be killed.
And if you don’t believe that saying that deserves a punch in the mouth, then I question more than just your morals.
In the case of the angry man who was punched in downtown Seattle this weekend: he wasn’t punched just for wearing the swastika. He was punched for yelling at every dark-skinned person he passed on the street, specifically calling them an ape. He was explicitly saying that they aren’t human. He brought a frickin’ banana with him that he eventually threw at someone after screaming that that person was an ape—underlining and emphasizing the claim that the person thus targeted isn’t human (and implying that said people don’t deserve rights, dignity, respect at the least, and that killing would not be murder). That wasn’t just expressing an opinion, that his verbal assault and a declaration of intent. And under the law, throwing the banana is physical assault.
Wearing a rainbow and chanting “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” is none of those things.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you can say mean, hateful, threatening things to other people and that those other people have no rights to speak up and defend themselves. Calling other humans animals, and saying or implying those humans should he rounded up and executed is not merely stating an opinion, it is revealing their hateful and murderous character. So if other people don’t want to be friends with a hateful person advocating genocide, that’s just making the decision not to associate with horrible people.
“Your sexuality is valid.” (click to embiggen)When we wear rainbows, we’re saying “my sexuality is valid, and your sexuality is valid, and bi, gay, pansexual, transexual, asexual, and straight people are all equally valid and have a right to be who they are.” Yes, we’re saying the straight people are valid, too. We aren’t calling for straight people to self-deport. We aren’t calling for straight people to be killed. We aren’t calling for straight people to be converted. Rightwing anti-gay people do call for queer people to be fired from their jobs, denied the right to rent or own homes, denied the right to put their spouses and children on their medical insurance, denied the right to marry their significant others, denied the right to adopt, denied the right to protection from assault and harassment, denied health care, and so forth. They advocate rounding us up and putting us in prison, or camps, or so-called hospitals (depending on how blatant they are in their bigotry). They advocate the widely debunked conversion therapy. They advocate bullying queer kids in school (when you insist that religiously conservative kids can’t be punished for bullying queer kids or the children of queer parents, you are advocating bullying).
When the anti-gay people (including the neo-Nazis) do that, it isn’t a difference of opinion, it is oppression and assault.
When queer people say we don’t want to be bullied, we shouldn’t be discriminated against, we deserve to have our families and jobs and homes just like anyone else, we aren’t calling for the oppression of anyone else. Because not being allowed to discriminate isn’t oppression. Not being allowed to bully, terrorize, or assault queer people isn’t oppression.
Sexuality isn’t an opinion or a choice. Sexual identity isn’t an opinion or a choice. Sorry, the medical science has been clear on that for a long time.
Hate, however, is a choice. Violence against others because of the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, and so forth is a choice.
All races are valid. All sexualities are valid.
Not all choices are valid.
There are only a couple reasons that you can’t see that distinction. There are only a few reasons you would defend the hate by attacking its opposite. Either you aren’t very bright, you’re deeply misinformed, or you are blinded by hatred.
Please, step out of the darkness and join us in a more glittery, sunny world of the rainbow.
Several years ago I witnessed an altercation on the bus. When I first got on, I noticed one guy with blond hair that was combed just so and his mustache was freshly trimmed, and he was dressed in what looked like a new suit and tie. He was sitting up super-straight, as if he had an iron rod up his backside. Everything about him radiated attitude. His smile was particularly smug.
I had already seen that one of my favorite seats near the back was open, so I headed back there and turned my attention back to the news radio I was listening to on my headphones.
Except as the bus pulled away from the stop, I could see people up in the front of the bus near this guy being more agitated. A couple people leaned forward and seemed to be addressing him angrily. And then I noticed that a woman also up in the front had put her hands over the ears of the little boy (who I presumed was her son) in the seat next to her, so I pulled off my headphones to hear was was happening…Continue reading Angry men on buses — not all violence is equal→
(Click to embiggen)In the old days, when reading usually meant you were holding a physical book or magazine or manuscript in your hand, if something you read so infuriated you or was simply awfully written, you could literally throw it against the wall (or into the trashcan) in disgust. On Sunday this last weekend I really, really wanted to do that after reading a particular blog post. I’m not going to link to it or identify the author, because that would just be harassment—even though the author of the blog post is a professional who uses their blog to give advice and has (self) published books offering advice on writing. Instead, I need to follow the advice I give all the time: if you want more good things in the world for people to read, don’t complain about what’s out there, make something yourself.
Over the years I’ve had many conversations with aspiring writers. This happened especially a lot when I was the publisher of a small zine and attending sf/f conventions where I appeared on writing and publishing panels and usually had a table selling copies of the zine. A significant fraction of these random aspiring writers would talk about stories that they were working on but couldn’t quite figure out how to finish. And once I got into the details with them, it would eventually emerge that they hadn’t actually written any of the story. It was an idea they had and which they had talked about at length with friends. In many cases they would talk about the files they had full of descriptions of characters and an outline of the history of the world, but when pressed, they would admit that they hadn’t actually written a single word of the story itself.
Planning and thinking and even doodling about a story, gathering research and writing up background information are important tasks which are often necessary to the writing process, but none of that is the actual story. So I would tell these writers a few of rules:
Stop talking about the story to other people, because that just makes the storytelling part of your brain think you’ve already written the tale. Sit down and start writing it.
You don’t have to do world building before you start writing. Recently I saw a lot of people online passing around an excerpt from on old interview with one of Tolkein’s kids where the kid asserts that dad didn’t start writing the story itself down until the children started catching him in contradictions. I don’t know if the anecdote is true, but you can tell a lot of story before you have to stop and start making notes about the world building.
Just sit down and put one word after the other. Don’t worry about whether you’ve started the story at the correct place. Don’t worry about the perfect opening line. You can figure that out later. Don’t get hung up (in the first draft) worrying about if people will understand the story or will like the story. Just start writing. The first draft is you telling the story to yourself. Worry about everything else after you have finished the first draft.
Don’t stop and go back and re-write scenes again and again. Force yourself to leave things in the story until you reach an ending. Yes, you may scrap a ton of what you wrote later, but don’t fall into the trap of rewriting one scene for eternity.
Write. A writer writes. Do it!
If you are writing a story, you’re writing. If you’re doing something else, you aren’t writing. Obviously, sometimes you have to take a break, or do some plotting, or jot down background information, or update a timeline, and so forth in order to know what to write next, none of that is actually writing. So if you’re spending more time on that than actually writing the tale, you need to stop, sit down at your favorite word processor or writing notebook, and start writing.
The blog post that angered me this weekend asserted that if you haven’t been published you aren’t a writer. I tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to gatekeeping, but even discounting that, I have problems with that distinction. I understand that the author was trying to address the issue of people who are merely daydreaming about writing. And I agree that we do a disservice to aspiring writers if we enable their mistaken notions that writing is easy or that it’s a sort of magic process of ideas coming to us from the ether.
But getting published is a very arbitrary and classist hurdle. And particularly in this age of self-publishing, it’s not a terribly useful distinction.
Are you writing? Not background notes, but an actual story with dialogue and a narrative moving forward? Then you are a writer. Maybe you’re still in the early stages of learning your craft. Maybe what you wrote this morning was completely awful. Maybe you’re still afraid to show it to other people. Maybe you showed it to someone and they didn’t like it.
That’s not important.
Are you writing? Are you doing the work of putting one word after the other striving to get to the end of the tale?
If you are writing a story, even if you don’t know what you’re doing yet, you’re a writer.
Click to embiggen)So Trump supporters have been organizing a so-called Mother Of All Rallies online for some time, and yesterday was the day. They have boasted, variously, that they had hundreds of thousands of confirmed attendees, or over a million confirmed attendees, et cetera. And how many people showed up? “Hundreds.” They couldn’t even get enough to fill a suburban high school football stadium! Pro-Trump rally draws hundreds, not thousands to Washington.
But just a few blocks away there was a bigger rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial: Pro-Trump Rally Dwarfed By ‘Juggalo’ Demonstration In D.C.. So fans of Insane Clown Posse were able to muster a much bigger crowd the the Make America Great Again people. But it gets worse! On the same day, Hillary Clinton was doing a book signing at a Costco in Brookfield, Connecticut.. guess what? Hillary Clinton Book-Signing Draws More Than 1,000 To Brookfield Costco. Hillary’s book signings are drawing larger crowds that the Trump supporters can muster!
Some folks are pointing to the news stories about former Trump supporters burning their Make America Great Again hats and this rally as indicating his support is slipping among his hardcore. I’m not sure that’s anywhere near the whole story. I think another important part is just how many fake accounts (twitterbots and such) make up the online Trump supporter crowd: Trump Twitter bots, numbering in millions, could be used to blanket internet with weaponized false info (by the way, that headline should read “is already being used to” not could be). A similar problem exists on Facebook, though because of some of the company’s policies, it’s a lot harder to determine just how many fake Americans Russian hackers manufactured to spread fake news and amp up membership on Pro-Trump pages: The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election. So I think one reason the organizers were expecting bigger crowds is they just haven’t figured out how many of their supportors online are fake accounts.
Besides, the Trump supporters burning their hats? They’re doing it for very racist reasons: Trump Supporters Are Burning Their MAGA Hats: They’re not happy about his prospective deal with Democrats to protect DACA recipients. That’s right, the hardcore supporters are angry because undocumented people who were brought to this country as children might, might be given a path to citizenship. You know, that thing the Trump supporter keep angrily asking why the Dreamers and such haven’t already done (because legally they still can’t)?
One more thing: all of those supporters burning those hats? They may want to think about the little American flag on that thing: I Wonder If Angry, MAGA Hat-Burning Trump Supporters Know They’re Burning a Tiny American Flag, Too. Since the pro-trump/anti-semetic/pro-gun demographic (i.e., most of his supporters) is also historically the same people who scream bloody murder if someone burns a U.S. flag as a protest.
But then, you can’t expect consistency from people who define the Statue of Liberty as a non-patriotic symbol, and reduce Christianity to hating queers.
This week’s Surviving the World Comic is spot on. (click to embiggen) survivingtheworld.netIt’s Friday, the third Friday in September. I should be more happy about that than I am.
This week, my husband came down sick early in the week, and I have followed. So it hasn’t been a fabulous week for us. And you may notice that this week’s collection of links is a bit shorter, as once again I haven’t had as much time to read the news.
Anyway, here are the links I gathered this week, sorted into categories as accurately as I could.
This Week in Racists, White Nationalists, and other deplorables:
Good Christian Boys: Jesus Worse Than Hitler.“We executed Nazis after World War 2 for engaging in collective punishment and ordering reprisal killings—rounding up and shooting innocent villagers after resistance fighters staged attacks. Kevin would have us believe that Jesus—the Prince of Peace, the Friend of the Poor, the Lamb of God, etc.—will happily drown little old straight ladies in nursing homes because He’s angry at gay men cavorting in bars on the other side of town.”
Abuse as defined in one of my dictionaries… (click to embiggen)I can’t count the number of times, as a child, that some adult (relatives, teachers, or people from church) would take me aside to suggest or insist that if I would just be more obedient or behave the way my dad expected, he wouldn’t have to be so strict with me. I know my younger siblings got similar admonishments: Dad wouldn’t be forced to use such strict punishments on us if only we could placate his moods. They never referred to his behavior as “abuse,” it was always said that he was “strict” and that he “had a temper.” And while they often implied that they thought his punishment was harsher than necessary, they never acknowledged that his behavior had crossed a line into being unacceptable or uncalled for. Which is quite amazing if I explain some of the specifics.
Apple announced more than one new phone yesterday, and like most years, a certain percentage of current iPhone owners are debating which one to upgrade to as our older iPhones are now more than two years old. More than one person I know is still hanging onto the same iPhone they’ve owned for three years and not sure that they will upgrade this year or wait a bit. But Apple haters all act as if all of us blindly rush out to buy the newest one every year. We don’t, but hey, if your life is so hollow that you need to make fun of other people’s choices of what goods and services to use, I guess that’s what you have to do.
But the really funny thing for me is how many of the haters are making fun of the cost of the high end Apply phone (not the shiny new iPhone 8 that the vast majority of us will buy, but the premium model that literally most of us can’t—not just because of the price, but because of manufacturing limits, but I’ll come back to that) are also comparing it to a particular Samsung Galaxy, about which others were asking just last month: Why does Samsung think you’d be willing to spend nearly $1,000 on a Galaxy Note 8?. Seriously, you can’t complain about price by comparing it to a phone that is just as expensive.
The answer to the question isn’t about either company being greedy—it’s about first the fact that some of those components simply cost more. The OLED screen currently used in the Galaxy Note 8 and that will be in the iPhone X costs at least $100 more each at wholesale than the screen used in the iPhone 8 and comparable screens on other Samsung phones that are less costly than the Galaxy Note 8. And that isn’t the only more expensive component either phone has.
But there’s another factor that a lot of people don’t get: manufacturing scale. The last few years, Apple has sold, on average, 800,000 new iPhones a day. In order to meet the demand, not only do they have to manufacture phones close to that rate, but all of the components that they buy from other companies have to be manufactured by those other companies at that rate. Samsung, currently the only source of the high-end OLED screen mentioned above, literally can’t manufacture them fast enough to meet that kind of demand. And that isn’t the only component in the premium phones like that. So part of the reason that both Samsung and Apple are charging nearly 1000 bucks for their highest-end phones is because they want most of their customers to buy the other models, the ones that don’t have components which can’t (yet) be produced at that quantity.
Embedding the screenshot of the quoted tweet in case the original goes away…So, chill. You buy the phone you want, or stick with the one you have already, and don’t be a douche making remarks that are far less clever than you think they are about other people’s choices and preferences. As more than one person has observed: asshole is the failure mode of clever.
I had a couple more posts about writing ready to go up this week. One was kind of a sequel to Monday’s Confessions of a writing tool addict—good intentions paving the way, while the other was a follow up on a much older post: Trust the reader to keep up. But then on Tuesday morning I read an essay that made me want to rethink some advice that I give out all of the time, but that I suspect I don’t follow as much as I think I do. And even more importantly, it makes me want to rethink some of my assumptions. You should really go read Celcilia Tan’s essay, “Let Me Tell You” at Uncanny Magazine.
Anyway, I unscheduled my two posts. I may rewrite them and post them eventually. Or I may just scrap them and start over. Tan’s essay has got me thinking about several things.
And an old and dear acquaintance reminded me that this excellent music video exists, and that in addition to being a good song, the lyrics speak truth:
Propellerheads feat: Miss Shirley Bassey – History Repeating:
Font Folly 