Listen Up

Is this anyone's idea of effective marketing?

When I first saw this, I supposed that I'd happened upon the world's most sinful dog adoption event. But it turned out that there was also a Pride exhibition going on in the building that day.

There were churches in attendance with booths set up, at least a couple, and nary a mention of fire and/or brimstone between them. It was only these guys outside who seemed to have a bone to pick. I don't know what it is about this particular convention center that draws in the local Evangelical crowd, but it seems that every time I go there, or go by there, there is some obvious proselytizing going on, even if it's only leaving cards and leaflets all over the place.

What these two, standing out in what was a fairly warm day for the local area with their sign and bullhorn, were hoping to accomplish was unclear to me. The churches that had registered to set up inside seemed to be a more welcoming bunch. So I can't rule out that being unwelcoming is, in fact, the point of displays like this; a loud and visible reminder to everyone in the area (let alone the people attending the Pride event) that these guys though of themselves as quite literally holier-than-thou. Because, let's face it, no one was going to sign up for these guys' church on the basis of what they were doing. You couldn't even see what church they belonged to, if they displayed it at all (that may have been what the small picture frame on the ground near the many holding the sign was for). They certainly didn't have any visible literature to give anyone.

So all they seemed to be doing was telegraphing their opposition to queerness. Which, okay; but I'm pretty sure that anyone who's the least bit aware of religious conservatism in the United States is well aware of that opposition. That's not something that needs to be constantly shouted from the street corners. Unless the shouting is the point of it all.

Covered

This has the whiff a bad idea from the start. Canadian author Sam Forster decided that he'd "go undercover" as it were, and using dark makeup and a wig, traveled some parts of the United States to get a look for himself of the experience of being a Black person. If the online responses to the announcement of his book about the project, Seven Shoulders: Taxonomizing Racism in Modern America, are anything to go by, the Black American community was not amused.

Mainly because they were too busy being offended by a action that, while probably ill-advised, doesn't appear to have been intended to be malicious in any way.

I understand the assertion that if Mr. Forster wanted to write a book about race relation in the United States, he could have spoken to some number of Black people and simply told their stories. But I don't understand that to have been the entire goal. He wanted to understand for himself, first hand, what being Black in America is like. But the problem with that is the unspoken presumption that there's a something that it's like to be Black in America, rather than a few million individual somethings. But that's an error that a lot of people make... after all, it's not like "Whiteness" is understood to be experienced differently by every individual, because it's simply a thing that's out there.

But, and I may alone in this, I applaud him for giving a shot. Whether he went about it in the right way or not, he wanted to understand enough that he took it upon himself to do something that took a great deal of time and effort, and may have even jeopardized his career. That's very much more than can be said for a lot of people. Then again, Mr. Forster is Canadian, so that may have something to do with in. I've long suspected that the way we talk about, and deal with, race in the United States is an active impediment to the progress that people say they want.

Whether his book will do as he hopes, and break through to some people who don't find the writing of Black journalists and academics compelling, I don't know. I doubt that it will. After all, people who actively have something against Black people tend to also dislike White people they perceive as siding with them. But at least he managed to gain some attention for yet another book about race in America.

I'd like to learn more about the book, but the news coverage is more or less exclusively about the negative reaction of "Black Twitter" to the whole project. Outrage for the outrage cycle. I don't know if I'm going to take the time to read it for myself, given that I already understand what it's like to be me in the modern United States. But I suspect it might be a worthwhile takealong the next time I need to travel somewhere; or maybe an audio version would be a good way to spend some time.

In any event, I do think that it would be a good thing for the book to find an audience, if for no other reason than it's going to be a different perspective on something that I think any number of people believe that they already know everything there is to know about.

Equally

Not the first thing that I think of for LGBT+ progress, but okay...

Every June now, like clockwork, someone posts this sentiment. And I've always been curious as to what end; is the point really to trade discomfort for discomfort? I've always been suspicious of people who make it a point to wish negative things on other people, regardless of their motives. Mainly because the world is a bad enough place as it is, and adding to that makes nothing better.

But maybe I shouldn't say that, because I think that there are people who take a certain amount of pleasure in the pain of those they understand to be their enemies. And I would venture for those people, knowing that being celebrated hurts other people does make their life better. And that's what matters to them. After all, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people (and everyone else who identifies as queer) aren't really any different than anyone else. Why should they be above being jackasses to their fellow people any more than anyone else is?

And I suppose that's what bothers me about it. This invocation of Pride Month to take note of the negative aspect of equality; to remind everyone that queer people can be the asshole just like straight people can. Or, perhaps more accurately, that as a species, humans are assholes. And nothing really gets in the way of that. Not safety and security, histories of oppression, or time spent calling out people for being assholes.
 

Labor Saving

If I'm understanding the chain of events correctly, this was posted to X, then picked up by a magazine called Edge, where someone photographed it, and then it was posted to LinkedIn.

I understand the sentiment expressed in this posting. But it illustrates one of the pitfalls of the current debate around generative automated systems (I've stopped calling them "A.I." They're not intelligent, and are a long way from being so.)

And that pitfall can be expressed as a question: Why are people who perform paid domestic labor more worthy of having their livelihoods automated away than knowledge workers? Because another good way to have more time to do art and writing is to pay someone else to do laundry and dishes.

If the general perspective on "AI" is that it should treat some groups of people as valuable, and others as expendable, then each group's fighting for its self-interest will ensure that everyone loses.

The widespread anxiety about increasing automation is the sense that it's being driven because people begrudge each other their salaries (often due to a sense of their own poverty), rather than there being more productive work than the current available labor force can manage. It's more or less a given that many investors in companies begrudge the money that is paid out in salaries, and the moment that an automated system becomes "good enough" to do passable work at lower cost, the layoffs will begin.

And so a fight in which what people are fighting for is to have their jobs preserved while others are cut, so that they can access services more cheaply will simply end in more people being laid off. Because once it's profitable to have automation do laundry, dishes, art and writing, there will be plenty of time for other chores, given the number of people who won't have to take a break to work a job.

Everyone For Themselves

The idea of Americans as individualistic is somewhere between stereotype and cliché. The United States is well known for prizing a rugged self-sufficiency dating back to when most of country was frontier land, and a settler's nearest neighbors may have been miles away. While there are still parts of the country where the next house is over the horizon, the idea of the open frontier is viewed as a relic of a past long-gone. But the virtuousness of individualism persists, and I've started to wonder why.

There's a phrase that I've come to associate with a certain Conservative mindset of the past few years: "No-one is coming to save us." And as I've encountered it more and more, my understanding of the ethic of self-sufficiency started to change. American culture isn't as much individualistic as it is isolating. If one views the broader society as being some combination of indifferent and unreliable, then being ready, willing and able to do everything for oneself starts to make quite a bit of sense. And if other people won't or can't come to one's assistance in a time of need, why spend the time and effort needed to be ready to assist them?

The lack of social trust that is so evident in the United States started to have a broader reason than simple disunity; the idea that large parts of American society had been set up to operate well in circumstances where social trust was, for whatever reason, lacking. And once the system had been shown to operate reasonably well without that trust, the general lack of need for it inhibited its growth. (After all, the United States has managed to do quite a bit without ever needing to be broadly unified.)

While I think that smaller groups feel the lack of social cohesion more acutely than larger groups, I think that everyone feels it to some degree or another. But the society as a whole doesn't feel it strongly enough to perceive it as a problem that needs fixing.