(Click to embiggen)It’s Friday! Nearly the end of May. In the U.S., we’re on the brink of Memorial Day weekend… which snuck up on me because time feels like a fog.
It’s been drizzly and cool this week. Most of my flowers are wildly blooming, and there have been lots of bees flitting from flower to flower. I just wish work wasn’t so freakishly busy that I could take a few more breaks during the day to enjoy it. On the other hand, I’m really glad I still have a job. So…
Meanwhile, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about the pandemic, five stories about deplorable people, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
Some days you really can’t do more than roll your eyes or yell “WTF!?” Just skim the headlines to see what I mean (you can also go read the articles for all the grim details
I’ve been seeing people refer to rightwing dominionist so-called christians as a death cult, and I used to think that was a (very) slight exaggeration, but now I’m rethinking that.
Let’s shift gears a bit. The following headline and the opening of the article would appear to contradict one of the articles I linked to on Friday, but that actually don’t:
The problem is that the phrase “class war” is being used to mean very different things. The article I link to today shows that poor other working class people overwhelmingly support continuing shelter in place/stay home orders. While only a slightly smaller percentage of middle class people also support it. Opposition to quarantines comes not just from a very small minority, but almost entirely from the very well-to-do and the stinking rich.
Folks like the executives and highest-paid pundits at Fox News, for instance, while they all continue to work from home, are egging governors to “reopen” the economy, by which they mean, stop the unemployment payments and force people who aren’t well off enough to quarantine voluntarily to go out and work and expose themselves and their families to the pandemic.
The polls in the above article clearly indicate that it is the rich who want to reap the benefits of social distancing, while making the working poor shoulder most of the risk of the pandemic.
Friday’s headline, which claimed that was no evidence of a class war was using the class war phrase much differently. And, IMHO, poorly. They were using it not to refer to actual economic strata within society, but instead to refer to a mostly mythical division. Fox News and their ilk have been trying to portray the protestors as representing the working class, while saying the only people who want the quarantine orders to continue are leftwing elites. The article then quoted virtually identical findings as the one above: the overwhelming majority of the country favor the quarantine measures, and the lower income the people are, the more likely they are to support it.
By adopting the disingenuous definitions of class, they wind up writing a headline that says the opposite of what the article showed.
Because the so-called “left elite” isn’t an economic class. It mostly is a myth, because inherent in the way the phrase is usually used is the notion that no one in the working class support any liberal policies, at all.
We had record-breaking heat over the weekend, prompting my husband and I to order takeout from a restaurant far enough away that we would up spending more than an hour in the air-conditioned car. Then temps dropped on Monday and we’ve had some drizzling nearly every day this week and temperatures generally in a much more pleasant range.
Meanwhile, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about the pandemic, five stories about the war criminal pretending to be president, five stories about deplorable people, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
When I first saw the headline, I didn’t see the subhead about the story having a happy ending. Instead, I found myself reliving the times as a kid that I was teased and/or punished for acting wrong—and usually not understanding what I had done that was so wrong. For instance, I loved singing along to music played on the radio, my parents’ records, or the TV… and sometimes the reaction from family and friends was encouraging. And other times I would get teased or yelled at or even spanked for my antics. And to me there wasn’t a clear difference between the times that my dancing and singing would make people happy and the times when I would get called a sissy or freak or pussy.
The first time I remember anyone calling me a faggot was when I was nine years old… and it was a teacher who did it. He wasn’t my regular teacher. The school district I had just transferred to had elementary students spend a few hours each week doing fairly simply physical education activities under the supervision of a secondary teacher. We were lined up in the gym waiting to be taken back to class one day, and music was playing from somewhere. I don’t remember why, nor do I remember what the song was that was playing, but I recognized it, and I was doing jazz hands and bouncing to the music while singing along when the teacher walked up, grabbed my arm, and (at least how I perceived it at the time) yelled in my face to ask whether I was a little girl or a little boy?
I stammered back that I was a boy. And he shook me and growled, “Then stop acting like a faggot!”
When our regular teacher arrived to collect us, the phys ed teacher explained that I was in trouble because I had been acting up and distracting the other students. So for the next several days I wasn’t allowed to go outside for recess. I had to stay in the classroom with my head down on my desk. I was told that I needed to spend the time thinking about how bad it was to distract other students from lessons.
None of which made sense. The lesson was over. We were standing in line. Absolutely no education was going on, we were just standing in line waiting for our regular teacher to come get us.
That’s not even the worst of it. Because the phys ed teacher had called me a faggot, and it wasn’t a word I was familiar with, I asked my regular teacher what it meant. And I got in trouble even more for saying “dirty words” in the classroom. But I was just quoting another teacher!
It was only a month or so later when a Sunday School teacher gave me my very first own dictionary, and one of the words I eventually looked up in it was faggot. And in that dictionary the word is defined as “a bundle of sticks, twigs, etc bound together used for fuel etc.” Which didn’t help at all. How was me singing along to music acting like a bundle of sticks?
To get back to the story linked above, when it says “The child was participating in a viral “Savage” dance challenge with his sister. He looks longingly at her as she continues to dance.” I really understand that part about looking on longingly as others were allowed to do what I couldn’t do. It wasn’t always gender-based, which is what made it so hard for me to figure out what I was doing wrong all the time.
The end result was that those of us who didn’t conform to gender stereotypes—whether due to sexual orientations, or gender dysphoria, or simple statistical variance—all found ourselves crashing and burning between various metaphorical Scylla and Charybdis with neither map nor compass nor guide to see us through.
Which means that many over us spent years waffling between extremes around our own identity. Which brings me to another headline: Queer Rock ‘n’ Roll Legend Little Richard Is Dead at 87. Some versions of the blog post that eventually became this one started after I saw the first story a few daya ago about the death of Rock star Little Richard.
Little Richard was an extremely flamboyant rockstar whose stage persona inspired a large number of performers ranging from James Brown to Prince. At different times in he career he flirted with being out; other times he blatantly admitted to his queerness—for example when he said that “if Elvis is the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll than I am the Queen” as well so the several times he described himself as “omnisexual.” Unfortunately, at many more parts of his career he denounced gay/lesbian people, and transgender people, and referred to parts of his own life as a struggle against sexual sin.
I went through several drafts this weekend of a post about him… and then I found the blog post that covered most of my points more succinctly than I had been able to:
Although rock ’n’ roll was an unabashedly macho music in its early days, Little Richard, who had performed in drag as a teenager, presented a very different picture onstage: gaudily dressed, his hair piled six inches high, his face aglow with cinematic makeup. He was fond of saying in later years that if Elvis was the king of rock ’n’ roll, he was the queen.
…Little Richard will always represent a sad existence to this once-closeted gay boy of the 1970s and ’80s. If it had just been my own self-loathing that made me feel embarrassed for him then I would only fault myself. But his clear struggle between his faith and his sexuality — at one point he became a preacher and more recently he denounced gay and transgender people as “unnatural” — represented everything that is wrong with organized religion, and I found his willingness to go along with it humiliating for everyone concerned. Still, you have to believe that the joy his music brought so many people is something that will be remembered far longer than the harm he caused so many LGBTQ people — himself included — during his 87 years on planet Earth.
When Little Richard appeared on various musical variety shows during the 60s and 70s, he represented a painful contrast. Part of me loved his stage persona and performance, but another part of me was deeply ashamed, because while I was still struggling with my own sexuality, he was clearly far outside of the acceptable boundaries of gender expression. Yet I still identified with part of what he was doing.
It wasn’t until many decades later that I learned that the original version of his first top forty hit, Tutti frutti referred to the kind of black gay man who wanted to be sexually dominated by other types of men. When he decided to record the song, he cleaned up the lyrics, but there were whiffs of the meaning that carried through, nonetheless.
I guess what I’m saying is that part of me understands why Litte Richard was never quite brave enough to come out and stay out. While another (much smaller) part of me understands why he had so much trouble negotiating his shame. But the greatest part of me remains deeply disappointed that he kept retreating back into self-loathing.
Well. Here we are. So, keep your end of the bargain…It’s Friday! We’ve reached the second Friday in May, already!
I’ve been doing a better job of taking at least a few minutes at the end of each workday to practice playing the ukulele, but I am way behind on so many other goals I set for the year.
Meanwhile, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about the pandemic, five stories about the war criminal pretending to be president, five stories about deplorable people, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
Don’t Wear a Mask for Yourself . “Models show that if 80 percent of people wear masks that are 60 percent effective, easily achievable with cloth, we can get to an effective R0 of less than one. That’s enough to halt the spread of the disease.”
Remembering what day it is shouldn’t be as difficult as it has become. Even though I check my calendar every morning, and if it’s work day review meetings and deadlines, it still feel like all the days are blended together.
Meanwhile, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about the pandemic, five stories about deplorable people, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
A group is threatening legal action & demanding payment for use of the bisexual pride flag. A few problems with this: the creator of the Bi Pride flag back in 1998 officially put the trademark in the public domain. You can’t copyright a color combination. There is no record of a copyright. One of the articles you find if you search in Google for the guy who created the flag is one published by this group several years ago where he explains about putting it in the public domain…
I googled ‘crackpot UFO books’ and this picture of the cover of one of the books someone one gave me in middle school came up.I’ve been a science fiction fan for Longer than I can remember, thanks to my mom being a big sf fan who read whatever she was reading at the time aloud to me from the time I was an infant. And so from a very early age I was familiar with the idea that there might be life on other planets. Was it something like we saw in movies like Forbidden Planet or The Day the Earth Stood Still? Or was it something more like The Blob? Or—as I read more science fact articles and the like—it began to seem much more likely that if we encountered alien life, it was going to be something like single-cell life living in the soil of Mars or under the methane clouds of Saturn’s moon, Titan. Which may seem less exciting than saucers descending on various national capital cities, but would be a pretty big deal for science!
During my late elementary and middle school years, because of my interest in science fiction, lots of people who weren’t very versed in the science part of sf always assumed that I believed that UFO sightings were always proof of aliens buzzing the planet. And just as more than one adult in my life felt compelled to loan me a copy of Chariots of the Gods—other books about flying saucers, alien abductions, and the like would be handed off to me when it would turn up in a pile of used books and the like. Including, yes, the one pictured above.
And the sorts of adults who would grab such a book with the intention of giving it to a kid they knew are exactly the sort who do not listen when to that kid when they try to explain that this isn’t really the same thing.
But I’m going to try to do the equivalent type of explanation about a related issue that came up in the news this week.
A whole lot of people on social media were sharing this headline: Pentagon declassifies Navy videos that purportedly show UFOs. And a lot of those people were making the same snarky comment, pointing out that since the videos show something that is unidentified, that it is incorrect to say “purportedly.” Because everyone knows that UFOs are unidentified.
That isn’t correct, for two reasons.
First, true the initialism UFO is from the phrase “unidentified flying object”, but you have to look at the entire phrase. It’s not just any unidentified thing. It is an unidentified thing which is flying, and the most common definition of flying is “the action of guiding, piloting, or travelling in an aircraft or spacecraft.” The next most common definition is “move through the air with wings or other propulsion.” In other words, it’s a loaded term. The other issue is the word object, “a material thing (that can be) seen or perceived.”
Which is one reason why the term used by scientists and aviation experts and military analyst use to describe things like those shown in the three de-classified videos is “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Because we don’t know if it’s a physical object, and we don’t know that it is actually being propelled. Some of the unidentified phenomena could be rare electromagnetic phenomena that is visible to human eyes or cameras and registers are radar and similar devices as if it is a physical thing. We really don’t know.
The other reason why using the term “purportedly show UFOs” is because not all readers interpret the collection of letters UFOs as the initialism I mentioned above. As more than one science writer I read back in the day liked to point out, a lot of enthusiasts and crackpots are convinced that the object is not unidentified at all.
But it isn’t just the crackpots and alien enthusiasts. Language isn’t logical. Human brains don’t process language like an algorithm acting on a string of numbers. I’ve pointed out in other contexts that “any sequence of one or more sounds or morphemes (intuitively recognized by native speakers as) constituting the basic units of meaningful speech used in forming a sentence or sentences in a language.” UFO isn’t just can initialism, it’s a word. Think of it that way for a moment, as if it were spelled euephoe. Words have multiple meaning, not simply one. Sometimes one meaning is much more prevalent than others, and sometimes not.
Again, lots of people think of a euephoe as a physical machine designed by someone to propel itself through the sky. And a substantial fraction of them think that it comes from another world.
Headline writers have to take into account various common meanings of words.
Other news sites used UFO in their headlines, and once you get into the article it is clear that they are using it as a synonym for unidentified aerial phenomena. Which is a legitimate choice, though one I’m less sympathetic to.
Even though I am not an enthusiast who believes that aliens from across interstellar space have been regularly visiting us, I have to acknowledge that there are people who do. But I also have to acknowledge that even among those who think anyone who believes in the possibility of life on other planets is just like the crackpots, the term UFO means a physical machine that came to Earth from somewhere else and was built by someone. So I think the headlines that used the word purported got it right.
But it’s language. So there’s never only one right way to do something.
“The venn diagram of people protesting shelter in place orders because they don’t like ‘the government telling them what to do’ and people who think the government to tell pregnant people who want abortions what to do with their bodies is one giant f-ing circle.”
It has started raining again, and the pollen count has gone down a bit. So I am a bit less miserable and the last couple of days haven’t been quite so anxiously playing the “are my symptoms extreme hay fever or have I finally caught the COVID-19 virus” game? Which, may I say, might qualify as the worst game in the history of games!
Meanwhile, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about the pandemic, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
Hospital delivers bodies to Philly medical examiner in the open back of a pickup truck. At Daring Fireball, where I found the link to this post, John Gruber noted: ” These aren’t bad people. No one wants to see dead bodies piled in the back of a pickup like bags of sand. This is the result of a system that is overwhelmed by the pandemic’s death toll.”
Font Folly 