My Words Trickle Down

Recent forum chat about astrology reminded me of this, so I figured I'd try it again, as I still find astrology weirdly interesting. Chart here is from astro dot cafeastrology dot com. Also, is it just me or do they talk about sex kind of a lot? Is... is this chart hitting on me?

Anyway, here you go (IYI). Text is copypasted from the website, with particularly "accurate"-seeming bits underlined, and particularly inaccurate bits struck out:

( Bullshit divination cut for your Flist convenience )

Or: "This is why I always make you buy me drugs"

Been in bed all day with a cold/manflu-thing. Finally managed to nap, late in the afternoon, and dreamed -- as one does -- an impossibly long dream for the hour and a half I was out. It turned lucid as I started coming back into consciousness, and all the objects in the dream-space started to extend themselves in weird accordion tubes. Some sort of narrator explained to me that these were the real objects I was seeing, extending themselves into their possible spaces. "Oh," replied my dream-self, "Oh, I get it now."

"What we normally see is just a small fragment of reality," explained my semi-conscious semi-understanding of molecular physics, "Atoms themselves are mostly empty space."

By now I was starting to be awake, but experienced a moment of excitement, thinking of the possibility-clouds of electrons in solid matter: thinking, by god, these things ARE just probability clouds of matter in the shape of solid objects, they're just smaller ones than in those weird dream accordion-tubes; they are, in fact, clouds of probability shaped in precisely the dimensions of the solid objects we take them to be. Lol dreams, haha, what are they like.

But as I became even more awake, I remembered that basically all of the 'matter' in matter is in the nuclei, which don't do a whole lot of moving around, and in solids tend to be bound up into varyingly-rigid structures that move hardly at all (except for "vibrating" for being hot and so on). Feeling vaguely disappointed. Any input on this point from physicists would be appreciated.

Also, there was a robot that was supposed to be controlled by eye contact, which I offended by trying to use a mouse.

*deep breath*

I've been putting off writing about this since November, because it's upsetting to me. But I need to get it out (and I think, scary as it is, I need to leave this entry public). So here goes.

( Cowboy capitalist job bullshit under the cut )

Checking my email this morning sent me into a bit of a rage. See, I'd opened up the latest in the unending stream of clicktivist emails I get as punishment for signing their petitions elsewhere on the internet. I often get upset when I open them, although to be fair, my rage is usually directed mostly at the content. This one, however, contained good news. It was even subject-lined "Finally, some good news" (though I could swear they've used that exact phrasing before, for previous victories on the LGBT front). From AllOut.org, this is the actual opening paragraph -- bolding and hyperlink theirs:

"Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon delivered an incredibly powerful speech at the U.N. in Geneva. It's not every day that a major world figure speaks out forcefully in defense of equality. But most people didn't even hear about it.

Why? Because a handful of delegates stormed out of the meeting in protest and their story - that gay people should be denied human rights - dominated the day's news.

But we are about to change that. Our friends at the U.N. just let us REMIX Ban-Ki Moon (complete with a dance beat chosen by the team at All Out). Will you take just 2 minutes to listen to this incredibly inspiring speech and share with your friends and family? When someone like Ban Ki-Moon speaks out, it makes a difference - but only if people hear what he has to say: [youtube screengrab, also a hyperlink]"

Do you see the problem here? This is news I actually appreciate -- and even that I might not have gotten through other sources. Ban Ki-moon made a pro-LGBT speech on the floor of the UN. That's pretty great (even if the actual speech turned out to be cursory and talking-pointy). BUT, the email makes such a point of trying to make me feel all ~*~*active*~*~ and ~*~*virtuous*~*~ for the mere act of watching a video on the internet that I feel disinclined to even watch it at all.

Granted, All Out's whole platform is awareness-raising. But I recently found myself [finally getting around to] unsubscribing from Amnesty International's similar clicktivist emails because they were all written in that same content-thin, patronizing register. AMNESTY FUCKING INTERNATIONAL, whose work I respect, whose projects I support, and whose news I would actually like to hear about, if only they would write to me like a literate, thinking adult. Friend @[redacted] over on Twitter used to work for clicktivist petition generator 38 Degrees, and writes "I helped draft/proof 38 Degrees emails... I was crap at it. Just couldn't let myself write like that. They're always so thin on information and full of supposedly emotive blah. They run emails through a sentence complexity checker." I do not even know if that last sentence is a joke or not. And they ALL FUCKING DO THIS. It's like every organization that gets big enough has the same marketing hacks come 'round to tell them how.

Finally, once I'd finished bashing my half-formed rage onto Twitter, I decided I might as well go ahead and watch the video. Only I was so distracted by the distracting bolding in their email that I'd missed the fact that this wasn't just a link to the speech, it was a "REMIX ... complete with a dance beat[!]" This would have been a terrible thing to do to Ban Ki-moon, if it actually were what it implied. Instead it was taste-offensive in another way: an over-slick intersplicing of Ban's speech with emotive images of homophobic violence and soundbite-capture text quotations (complete with powerpoint word-swoosh sound effects), overlaid with music I guess you might dance to if you went to clubs that played documentary soundtracks.



No wonder God hates fags.

Having listened to Maddy Prior & June Tabor's album 'Silly Sisters' several times at work the other day, I found myself with their version of Geordie stuck in my head -- only, annoyingly, I couldn't remember all the words, so had just snippets. Thinking to exorcise it through fuller knowledge, I opened up a songbook, Rise Up Singing, that I knew to have a version of it, to scan the lyrics.

Now, I am no stranger to folk music; I'm well aware that there are about a bajillion versions of every song, especially older ones, and that they vary considerably in both words and music. This, however, was a broader divergence than I ever would have expected. The very story changes dramatically! The basic story of a man called Geordie being condemned, and then his wife coming to beg for his life is the same, but they diverge in almost evey other aspect. And I know they are supposedly the same song, as well, since the songbook lists the 'Silly Sisters' album as an example recording!

In Prior & Tabor's (which turned out to be this version, originally transcribed by Robert Burns), Geordie was a nobleman framed for the murder of another. His lady rides to court and is told his life will be spared if she collects a ginormous ransom, which she does, and so buys his freedom. In the Rise Up Singing version -- as in most other, especially English versions, it turns out -- Geordie is a poacher, and when his wife comes to beg for his freedom, she is turned away, and he dies. Talk about alternate endings!

A musician, identified only as 'Ian' in this Mudcat thread describes his own recording of the song as "an English song about a disproportionate punishment for a crime which evolved from a Scottish song about a frame-up". The Scottish versions do seem to generally pre-date the English ones (though they also seem to have become less common), and I guess changing the condemned man to reflect a common-ish crime in your area, for which the punishment is widely seen as vastly unjust, does make a sort of sense. As, given the former, does having him actually die rather than get ransomed at the last minute. But at this point, is it even still the same song? Could there have been some other English song (or several) that got morphed into this one because the tune was catchy and the story was distilled and familiar?

Oddly, this recording by Ewan MacColl seems to combine elements of several versions, but seems mostly drawn from this one, known as Gight's Ladye. Geordie's wife is still a noblewoman of some sort, but Geordie's crime is poaching. She isn't turned away out of hand, though, and goes through with the begging for ransom money as in the other Scottish versions. However, it seems to me that her success in this is left ambiguous while the narrator is distracted by telling the tale of her verbal harrassment by a bawdy lord. Though, granted, my impression of ambiguity could merely be from an inferior understanding of Scots; it's certainly not ambiguous in the 'Gight's Ladye' version given on Mudcat. But why this "Bog o' Gight" stuff? Well, a little googling proved illuminating: 'Bog-Of-Gight' is an old name for Gordon Castle, and the earliest historical event to be associated with this song/set of songs was the story of a George Gordon, who would have been lord of said castle at the time -- although the actual events of his life, at least as given on Wikipedia, don't quite line up with the song, and they CERTAINLY don't line up with the 'Gight's Ladye' version, though at a stretch they could be described by Burns' 'Geordie'.

So what is going on here? It seems unlikely that an earl -- who'd have his own hunting preserves, after all -- would be brought up for poaching. Yet the 'Gight's Ladye' version preserves an awful lot of specific names and places, far more than Burns' 'Geordie'. Could the crime have been changed to make the song more populist in one area, while in another the events were recorded more faithfully even as the names all dropped away? It's nearly impossible to tell. Though for those who feel like making minute comparisons between versions (woefully void of any information about where or when or how they were collected), it turns out Wiki has transcriptions of all of Child's collections.

Meanwhile, a few thoughts on the Burns/Child A version. In it, Geordie is framed (or blamed for the death, anyway, regardless of guilt), and his lady, upon receiving the news of his captivity, rushes to Edinburgh with all of her men. Later on, after she's made her tearful case to the king, but before the aged lord suggests a fine instead of death, we get this verse, which on first listen seems to break the pattern of the story considerably:

The Gordons cam and the Gordons ran,
And they were stark and steady;
And ay the word amang them a'
Was, Gordons keep you ready.

Then we see the king's advisor suggesting that a fine might be the wiser course of action. Because this lady brought a freaking army with her to "beg" for her dearie's life. Conclusion: the 'fairest flower o' woman-kind' is a lot more badass than you might expect.

I was born in the '80s, which means I was a child during the '90s. I remember them, but with the perspective of a child; I saw things on the news; I overheard grownups and parroted their opinions. I didn't start to become politically aware in my own right until the early '00s, and didn't start to become an 'activist' until midway through university, by which point the "Coalition of the Willing" was deeply entrenched in Iraq. My first exposure to the broad Left, then, was the Stop the War movement. (I was also involved, actually rather more heavily, in an Injustice of the Day student campaigning group, but as they were mostly of an age with me, they didn't have the depth of campaign experience that is relevant for what I want to discuss here.)

StW, or at least my acquaintances within it, seemed to be made up mostly of anti-nuclear activists, longtime pacifists (obvs.), socialists (or at least sellers of The Socialist Worker), and the regrouped remnants of the anti-globalization movement. Most of these, having found common purpose, seemed to share a collective scorn for the 'Identity Politics of the '90s', which had so divided and derailed the movement from fighting the real enemy: capitalism, neoliberalism, the military-industrial complex. My memories of the '90s include an awful lot of people emphasising their racial, gender, and sexual identities, and terms like 'political correctness' and 'affirmative action' were forever on everyone's lips; and so I took these older campaigners at their word -- their narrative certainly made a lot of sense, and helped me explain to myself how I could have reached the age of 18 without knowing that living socialists existed in the West, or how academics like Fukuyama could write bullshit like "The End of History".

However, I am starting to grow skeptical of my activist elders. I know that, for all intents and purposes, I just wasn't there in the '90s, and therefore can't really comment on what it was like, but when I see things like discussions about women's safer spaces within the occupy camps repeatedly derailed by comments like "let's not let this movement get bogged down in identity politics like the protest movements in the '90s did", I start to wonder. Did they? WERE the '90s a time when anti-capitalists laid down their ideologies in order to focus on the colour of their skin or the composition of their genitalia, as the mainstream narrative would have us believe? Or was it simply that women, people of colour, and queer people of all acronyms looked around them and saw that the broad left, just like the rest of society, was silencing their voices and their concerns, patronizing them, and telling them that their problems would be dealt with after whatever other big problem they were protesting had been solved? The '90s, after all, saw the rise of the anti-globalization movement, in opposition to the towering capitalist globalization movements coming out of the most powerful world government and inter-government agencies of the day (and now), as well as the same old pacifists and hard-bitten anti-nuke campaigners and all the other "yes that's what I've been saying all along" fringe activist movements that are always with us. They clearly weren't a time when no one was focusing on ideology. But, you know, what do I know. I was only a kid; I wasn't really "there".

Cross-posted from my less personal blog. If you want to link please use this one: http://mhuzzell.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/rape-culture-and-the-occupy-x-protests/

Like many feminists, I've been incredibly dismayed not only at the flood of reports of sexual harassment, assault and even rape in the Occupy camps, but also at many of the Occupiers' responses to them. It is, of course, completely unacceptable for the camps to distance themselves from women who have been raped, and to shame and chastise them for even thinking of taking action to protect themselves in the way that they've been taught to their whole lives -- namely, calling the police. And it is absolutely shameful that so many of these incidents have been intentionally downplayed or even hidden by the protesters in an attempt to keep the movement from "looking bad" (as if it didn't look worse to simply ignore the sexual harassment problems).

However, I have also been disappointed by the response of some of those who have been similarly appalled by the situation. Sadly, many of the articles and commentaries voicing a strong critique of the sexual safety within the camps, and the camps' responses to them, have proposed the same dead-end solution: end the occupations.

This response seems kind of bizarre when you compare the situation to many analogous ones, which don't involve protests. If someone is sexually harassed or assaulted within a company, for instance, no one expects that company to be dissolved; they expect the perpetrator to be dealt with and the organization itself to continue. Or at more physically similar events -- say, a large outdoor concert, or one of these music festivals the kids are all so fond of these days -- when someone is raped or sexually assaulted, the situation is dealt with, and the show goes on. And in ordinary life, if, say, one person rapes another in a dark alley, WE BLAME THE RAPIST, NOT THE DARK ALLEY. Or at least we should, because blaming the physical situation is really, really uncomfortably close to blaming the victim h/erself.

Furthermore, it is not clear to me what, exactly, ending the occupations would accomplish other than muffling the voices of thousands of rightfully angry citizens. The sad truth is that, in a misogynistic society such as we live in, any situation in which women are placed in vulnerable positions, in crowds, and especially where they are sleeping in relatively exposed places, many will take this opportunity to sexually assault them (and some men, too). I am not a fatalist; I do not think this is in any way 'inevitable', nor do I think that the fact that it does happen is an excuse for allowing it to. However, it is important to acknowledge that it does, and that these atrocities are not unique to the Occupy camps. People are sexually assaulted all the time -- at concerts, at festivals, at parties surrounded by friends and acquaintances. And no one would argue that this is a reason not to have concerts, or festivals, or parties; nor should they.

I am skeptical, too, about some of the outrage against the anti-police sentiments of many of the Occupy protesters. Personally, I would never condemn someone for calling or going to the police when they felt their safety was in danger, quite simply because that is how we are taught to react, and for most people, reaching for these perceived authority figures is an act of self-defence. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the police and the courts have an extremely bad track record when it comes to dealing with rape reports -- often harassing survivors so badly that they have sometimes said that the results of making the report were almost as bad as the rape itself -- which is among the reasons so many rapes go unreported. Unless there happens to be an officer on hand to actually stop the assault from taking place, there's probably not much they're going to be able or willing to do to help you. The system of legal redress for sexual crimes is hopelessly broken (if 'broken' is even a term that can apply to a system that has been weighted against the victims from the beginning; that has never brought anything like justice or healing to survivors, delivering only petty vengeance at best, and a humiliating ordeal at worst or in addition). Given this inefficacy, and the fact that many people -- especially long-time activists, the poor, and people of colour -- have either been physically or sexually assaulted themselves by police, or have had it happen to those close to them (not to mention the police violence that has already been inflicted on several of the Occupy camps themselves), it is hardly surprising that many wish to find other ways of dealing with the problem of sexual attacks in the camp communities that they are creating, to develop their own systems of security.

What, then, is the solution? I have to admit, I don't really know. It's easy enough to name the source of the problem: patriarchy, misogyny, and (duh) the perpetrators of sexual attacks themselves. But I have no more idea of how to prevent sexual attacks in the Occupations than in any other area of life. The basic advice seems to be the same: 1) Don't sexaully harass, assault, or rape anyone (simple!); 2) If you witness a sexual attack taking place, INTERVENE -- say something, do something, call for help, call the attacker out on their behaviour, even (or especially) if it is as "subtle" as leering, making inappropriate comments, or using sexually threatening body language and the like; 3) When you see your comrades (or "passers-by" or "free lunchers" who are, like, totally unconnected with the camp, obvs) engaging in sexist language or behaviour, or voicing sexist opinions, CALL THEM OUT ON IT. This last is the more long-term solution, as obviously calling someone out on their sexist language today is probably not going to stop them raping someone tonight, but if complete non-tolerance of sexism becomes the norm, then (and only then) we will have hoisted ourselves out of the rape culture, and THAT will have a serious impact in reducing rape and other sexual assault and harassment.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that, as spaces in which people are trying to build an intentional sense of community and communitarian spirit, the Occupy camps are exceptionally good places to practice this sort of community-based rape prevention. They're certainly better suited to tackle sexual assault problems than, say, a music festival or a concert or even most larger house parties. The first step, though, is for the protesters to acknowledge the problem and tackle it head-on; if they continue to equivocate and distance themselves from those who have been sexually harassed and attacked within the camps, then they will only perpetuate the rape culture of the wider world. They will sow discontent among themselves and, ultimately, the movement will fail. There can be no class liberation without women's liberation. We can't wait until after The Revolution to tackle patriarchy. We have to do it NOW.

Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something

Um, all of them? In their own small, subtle ways?

I am struggling to call to mind a book that has drastically changed my opinion about anything, major or minor. I suppose there are several examples in philosophy, but that's sort of expected, right? Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding destabilized my naive views on causality, for instance. [insert other examples here]

I suppose the best example I can find flows from these: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I read it just after finishing my degree in Analytic Philosophy, and drank it in like a cool glass of milk after a meal full of chilies. On the one hand, it was though it were giving me permission to question analytic philosophy at its very roots (and not just in its own terms), while on the other it reframed Aristotle's ideas into something not only palatable but eminently useful; overall, a much-needed detox from my degree.

( Upcoming Days )

Edit: Disabled comments on this post, as it was attracting absurd levels of spam for reasons unknown.

Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read

Capital by Karl Marx, of course. Although given its immense density, and the difficulty of actually understanding it on first read-through, without the support of a class or at least a discussion group or something, I'd settle for The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. Both of these lay out theories about economics that are desperately important to understand in our current geopolitical climate -- the former broad, the latter, specific.

I, um, include myself in that 'more people' as well, incidentally. Both of these are books that I've started, and read most of, but never quite finished. Then again, they are both also written in the sort of structure that lays out its theories succinctly at the beginning, then spends the rest of the time justifying them from various angles. Though I do intend to finish both eventually... I skimmed to the end of Capital, but without the reading group with whom I'd read the first 2/3, I found it much less edifying.

( Upcoming Days )

For some reason there's a party every night this weekend, and there's some event that means a lot of nerdy-interest buildings are open to the public, and it's been a beautiful day and would have been a great one for going out and looking at buildings and going up to the bike station to figure out what's wrong with my crankset ... but I am just too tired. For no good reason, really, except that I've been staving off a sort of low-level cold all week, and I guess maybe it is stealing all my energy?

I am still trying to figure out whether I'll have enough of said energy to go to the party tonight. I'd thought that by skipping all the daytime fun stuff/bicycle maintenance chores, I might feel rested enough to go out tonight -- and I might yet, but right now I'm still feeling pretty damn groggy. And it's 4.5 miles of all uphill, all busy roads to get there. And it's a joint birthday party for an acquaintance and someone I don't know at all. On the other hand, both of these people are good friends with a lot of people who I am much closer to, and haven't seen nearly enough of all summer.