#...it's something a lot of marginalized people both experience and may even perpetuate on individual levels...

[uncanny-tranny]

In political spheres, I so often want to ask, "is what you're doing 'punching up,' or are they just an easily-available, acceptable target?"

[junker-town]

‘It’s just business’

How MLB became a microcosm of capitalism’s failure.

“It’s just business.” You hear it whenever some marginalized community loses a necessary service, or when a sick person is denied sorely needed coverage for their health, or when a laborer’s basic humanity is impugned, all in the name of the almighty dollar.

It’s a phrase spring-loaded with the connotation that “businesses” are in the business of doing anything and everything to make money, and that their mere existence justifies the collateral damage they cause. On some level, it’s difficult to blame people if they default to “it’s just business” when they encounter a wrong being done by a company that manufactures their steel cut oats or designer toothbrushes — if only because, hell, we all need to get on with our day.

We’ve been told “it’s just business” so often in our lives that we accept it as easily as air. It has become a state of existence, perpetuated by economic titans such as Milton Friedman, who declared “there is one and only one social responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.”

Plenty of people disagree with this worldview, but there’s no denying the rules of the game are ill-defined, malleable, unenforced and yet somehow ubiquitous. What they are not is equitable or ethical.

Major League Baseball is a prime example, having emphasized its bottom line at the expense of both players and fans by constantly changing the rules of the game. It has done so despite having already bilked cities, counties and states for tax breaks and public dollars for stadiums, despite an antitrust exemption upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and despite the foundational importance of fans as stakeholders in its individual organizations and the league.

There isn’t (yet) a salary cap, but front offices — likely due to pressure from ownership — have begun to treat the aptly named Competitive Balance Tax as a line in the sand. In 2012, MLB placed a heavy tax on spending more than five percent of one’s draft allotment that no team has yet to breach. Once the ability to spend freely in the draft was eliminated, teams used the international free agent market to build teams cheaply relative to the free agent market, proper. The most recent CBA tried to put a stop to that by implementing a hard cap on international spending, but regular free agency spending never bounced back. And despite these supposed great competitive balance measures, MLB has experienced record talent disparity over the last two offseasons.

The words “competitive balance” and “parity” often get used in sports, the idea being that leagues should strive for an environment where some combination of talent, intelligence, stamina and plain old luck decides champions, and not budgetary advantages. To that end, leagues and owners pursued options like salary caps, the draft, the reserve clause, international spending caps, luxury taxes, draft pick compensation, restricted free agency … the list goes on.

And conveniently, all of these measures come at the expense of labor. It’s not just salary caps, which are a transfer of wealth from players (labor) to owners, but the draft, too, which eliminates the ability of draftees to leverage teams against each other. Competitive balancing is always about limiting the top spenders rather than prodding the cheapskates.

As consumers, we’ve gotten used to rationalizing upcharges or degraded service, like the collective action of major American airlines which started offering a “basic economy” class that is helpful only to people who are traveling long distances on airplanes without bags (as we all love to do). We come to believe our inconvenience is helping a company stay afloat and continue to provide a service we otherwise wouldn’t have. Too often, though, we are being underserved and oversold in the pursuit of a temporarily attractive bottom line that will boost a stock price just long enough for that company to sell itself to another corporation, leaving them, and us, to hold the bag.

It doesn’t have to work this way though, mostly because this way isn’t working out for the vast majority. As Anu Aga, ex-chairperson of the giant engineering firm Thermax Limited, said “we survive by breathing but we can’t say we live to breathe. Likewise, making money is very important for a business to survive, but money alone cannot be the reason for business to exist.”

Baseball isn’t a vital industry to humanity, but it is a good study in how capitalism corrupts itself. In theory, a baseball team’s goals are simple: win games and entertain fans. By pursuing profit, it can also aim higher, building community spirit in the process. But in practice, baseball has become cheap and callous. After decades of spiritual degradation, MLB has come to epitomize the clash between society and late capitalism, and the ways in which capitalism is winning.

It’s strange that shareholder-first ideology has become so prevalent in sports. Efficiency uber-alles, especially in baseball, is orthodoxy these days, but that certainly wasn’t always the case. The late-era George Steinbrenner Yankees were built upon the Core Four, and supplemented by mercenary free agents who helped bring World Series titles to the Bronx.

And yet, after a pair of frosty offseasons, MLB now presides over organizations that routinely pass over premium talent at prices that are more than justifiable by public advanced metrics.

For a long time, $/WAR was the default framework by which free agent signings or trades were evaluated. This inevitably led to teams to lean on quality, young talent that was — and this is crucial — under team control for long periods of time. That control, which gives teams unilateral ability to decide salary for the first three years of any player’s career, became an end unto itself. It wasn’t rare to read something along the lines of “yes, Team A dealt away Superstar X to Team B for a smattering of players you haven’t heard of, but Team B will receive 15 controllable seasons in return, while Team A will receive only a year.”

Efficiency was, and is, the name of the game. It’s not enough to win, but you also have to appear smart while doing so. This is, in part, why teams don’t simply promote their prospects to the majors when they’re ready. Instead, they wait until after they’ve manipulated those players’ service time to gain an additional year of control.

As on-field optimization became de rigeur, baseball teams began using the same heartlessly efficient principles in other decision-making areas of their organizations. It isn’t enough to sell out a crowd, teams must maximize dollars per customer. That means ceding traditional fan seating to luxury boxes, raising ticket and concession prices, and generally just making it more difficult to attend a baseball game. This shift was aptly summed up by Robert Alvarado, the Los Angeles Angels’ then-VP of marketing and ticket sales, to Pedro Moura in this 2015 OC Register piece:

“We may not be reaching as many of the people on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, but those people, they may enjoy the game, but they pay less, and we’re not seeing the conversion on the per-caps,” Alvarado said. “In doing so, the ticket price that we’re offering those people, it’s not like I can segregate them, because I’m offering it up to the public, and I’m basically downselling everybody else in order to accommodate them.”

How one perceives that statement depends a lot on their views of why a business, and why a baseball team, exists. If the goal is to make money, then optimizing “per-cap” conversions is a reasonable place to start (even if one could also argue quite convincingly that it’s short-sighted). If one happens to think a baseball team exists to serve its community, as a municipal staple and entertainment option, then the statement is outrageous. Choosing empty seats — to intentionally not serve a significant portion of the fan base, to ensure upper-class patrons don’t see their perceived value impacted — is blasphemy.

Owning a sports franchise means shepherding a sacred member of the community that has existed for generations. It means benefitting from decades of handed-down fandom. To be unwilling to invest in a team should be considered sacrilege.

If, according to Aga, money alone cannot be the reason for a business to exist, then what is? There may not be one reason, exactly, but if there were, serving the community, be it locally, nationally or globally, seems as good a place to start as any. To look at the people and environments that compose those communities and think first of them, to think of returns on objectives rather than returns on investments. The rules of the game work a lot better when they’re geared towards the consumers they purport to serve rather than the bottom line.

Somewhere along the way, a bunch of people decided prioritizing shareholders above success and fan experience was just the way things ought to be. That making an extra buck at everyone else’s expense was the cost of doing business. That because a company or a corporation was incentivized to do something — or more accurately, was not incentivized not to do something — they bore no responsibility for their actions. None of this holds objective truth. We have agency and responsibility that extends beyond our incentives, or else they would be called mandates. We can hold people responsible for the communities they leave in ruins in the reckless pursuit of the bottom line. We can choose differently.

For sports franchises, that entails a commitment to winning more than efficiency. No matter what people implore you to believe, sports franchises aren’t like other businesses. They inspire fierce allegiance like few brands can, sworn lifelong fealty merely by virtue of being born in their general vicinity. They trade in cultural value, and thus have an obligation to provide for that culture.

Other brands sometimes create those loyalties, sure, but that’s often thanks to a period of time when the product was best in class, before marketing took over. When it comes to other businesses we tend to, eventually, update our priors based on quality, price, convenience or some other service standard. Yet, when’s the last time someone changed their favorite baseball team due to ticket prices? They might show up less often, but their allegiances — who they root for — tend to be entrenched. This means the only way for a team to adequately serve its “customers” is through good-faith competition. Rebuilds are acceptable when they’re not also (read: actually) an effort to line ownership’s pockets, and they’re even more acceptable when the team later spends to win.

That puts sports teams in a unique relationship with their customers. They are highly incentivized to do right by their fans, and yet they can also easily abuse that relationship if they want. Essentially, they are free to choose either Friedman’s or Aga’s view of capitalism.

Sports franchises are an obvious, and potentially powerful, tool to build community, and yet so often, and seemingly increasingly, they take the path of least resistance. My argument, my plea, extends to businesses of all stripes: Focus first on serving your customers and employees, and allow profit to serve as a guideline within that endeavor. Justify your existence. If as a company you’re already profitable, but can further increase profits by slashing essential services or making them worse, do you do it? A commitment to profit maximization provides an easy answer. But so does a commitment to your community.

Sadly, this time of global crisis has dampened hope that teams can put others first. We’ve seen athletes come to the fore, offering to cover the salaries of stadium workers who are suffering in the absence of sports, and deepen their bonds to the people and places they represent. And while many organizations have pledged to do the same, too often they’ve led from behind, waiting until they’ve been shamed to support employees rather than lay them off.

Rarely have corporations been forced to so distinctly choose between rededicating themselves to communities or continuing to plunder as they see fit. The pandemic gave baseball a test in this regard. They’ve clearly flunked it.

[nothingman]

Getting angry over Roxane Gay’s canceled comic book is easy. Supporting it, and books like it, is harder.  

The comic book industry doesn’t care if you’re a New York Times best-selling author or the winner of a National Book Award — it has no problem canceling books, even great ones, even ones featuring Black Panther, the star of Marvel’s next big movie after Thor: Ragnarok.

New York Times best-selling author Roxane Gay confirmed on Twitter this week that Marvel has canceled Black Panther: World of Wakanda, after publishing only six issues.

Sadly, the series was cancelled but I hope to revisit the characters. https://t.co/7kieeBWdQy

— roxane gay (@rgay) June 12, 2017

Gay was co-writing the book with National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates and Yona Harvey, while Alitha Martinez and Afua Richardson provided the art. It centers on exploring the stories of the other, intriguing characters who live in Black Panther’s fictional country of Wakanda.

The book’s cancellation comes as a surprise to many, since Gay and Coates are well-known and critically acclaimed authors. And its timing, to an outside observer, might seem shocking: Coates announced that Marvel canceled his Black Panther and Crew comic in May, and both cancellations have come just as Marvel Studios is kicking off its marketing campaign for its 2018 Black Panther movie, whose first teaser trailer was released earlier this month.

The decision to cancel both of these titles will no doubt ignite the perpetual debate over Marvel’s commitment to diversity in its stories and comic books. Canning two books that feature black characters seems egregious, especially when there are plenty of marquee superhero titles that bumble along in mediocrity. But the cancellations also represent a deeper struggle of the comic book industry, simply because the industry is built in a way that makes it hard for newer, lesser-known comics to succeed.

The comic book industry’s sales structure is killing good comic books

The blunt reason why Marvel canceled Coates’s and Gay’s comic books, or any other comic book, is that they weren’t selling. Gay’s World of Wakanda debuted in November and sold an estimated 57,073 issues according to Comichron, a site that catalogs the yearly and monthly sales of comic books. Its last issue, the sixth in the series, was published in April and sold 14,547 copies. That’s a major drop; a “good” sales figure for a typical comic book is around 30,000 to 35,000 copies.

Quite simply, World of Wakanda wasn’t selling well enough — but the solution isn’t as simple as going to your local comic store and buying more copies of Gay’s books.

That’s because, in Marvel’s eyes, the number of copies of World of Wakanda that were sold in comic book stores was decided months ago.

Considering the numerous ways and formats in which we are now able consume different kinds of pop culture, from books to music to television shows to movies, the comic book industry is unique in that it still relies on an outdated method of distribution.

Every major US comic book company — Marvel, DC, Image, etc. — relies on one company, Diamond Comic Distributors, to print and ship their books to independent retailers, a.k.a. the owners of comic book shops. Diamond sells comics to comic book shops as final sale, meaning owners aren’t allowed to return or exchange books that didn’t sell. This is in contrast to traditional book retailers, which can sell back the books they weren’t able to sell.

Further, these orders are tallied three months in advance of a comic book’s release, based on what the industry calls “solicitations.” Solicitations are a couple of pages’ worth of unlettered previews that show off the issue and give retailers a gauge of how many copies to order.

Faced with this system, retailers will hedge their bets. They want to pick the comic books they can sell the most copies of, since they’re taking that final sale hit, which means titles focused on A-list superheroes like Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man are favored over titles that feature newer characters, and big events and crossovers like Secret Empire take priority over regular stories.

Marvel, in turn, tends to lean into what those retailers want, producing more titles that feature A-list superheroes or that involve big events and crossovers, and culling titles featuring lesser-known characters that might not sell as well. As a result, lots of new books and stories don’t have much of a chance to succeed or a margin for error.

It’s a system that rewards the status quo, instead of taking risks and breaking new ground.

It’s easy to get mad about Gay’s and Coates’s comic books being canceled. It’s harder to support them.

Back in April, one of Marvel’s vice presidents said in an interview that Marvel had learned from retailers that diversity hasn’t been selling. It caused a massive, angry backlash against the company and was widely covered by news outlets.

Clearly, fans and critics were upset by the statement, and feel passionate about the importance of diverse comic books. But turning that passion and anger into something tangible is difficult.

The comic book industry isn’t going to magically change its distribution system overnight, and in order to flourish within the system, comic books must be preordered. Since comic books are sold to retailers as final sale and are ordered three months in advance, walking into your local comic book shop and buying a book off the shelf does nothing to directly support the book in the eyes of the publisher or Diamond’s sales.

The only real way around this is to preorder a book from your local shop in advance of its release, which alerts the shop owner that there’s interest in a title, and that they should stock it in on their shelves. Comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick explained the importance and effect of readers’ preorders on her Tumblr:

If the shop knows you’re going to buy, well then, that’s a no-brainer sale for them, isn’t it? Most stores will reward a guaranteed purchase with a discount. And at some stores the discounts get deeper if you subscribe to (or “pull”) a title, and deeper still if you pull multiple titles. If they get enough pre-orders on a book, the book has “buzz” and they may take a chance and order a few extra copies for the shelf as well. Orders numbers go up, customer is happy, publisher is happy, book exists for at least another month.

Truth be told, that’s a lot of work and money to invest into comic books — let alone books with no guarantee, due to the limitations of solicitations system, that they’ll be great or have staying power — but it’s the nature of the industry.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that digital copies of comics that you can buy and read online don’t have the same clout with publishers as sales of physical copies from traditional retailers — comic book companies like Marvel don’t release the digital sales of their individual comic books, making it hard to know how much of a difference they make. And waiting for collected editions of comic books to be published so that you have multiple issues in one volume — which comics fans do because of convenience and because it allows a whole story to be told — doesn’t really do much to support a comic whose fate is determined by how well it sells month to month.

What makes the situation even trickier is that more casual Marvel fans who don’t follow lots of comic books may not be privy to how the system works.

Since its release last week, the teaser trailer for Black Panther, the Marvel studios blockbuster based on the comics, has been viewed more than 22 million times. If 1 percent of the people who watched the teaser trailer had also preordered Gay’s or Coates’s comic books, the books would be Marvel’s best-sellers by a long shot.

There’s no question that Marvel could do a better job of promoting its lesser-known, more diverse comic books, and of educating its massive fan base about the existence and importance of preorders. Perhaps the company could also experiment with different publishing strategies when it’s launching new titles that might not sell at first — perhaps by making them digital-first, or by releasing books like World of Wakanda in the same style that Netflix uses for its TV shows, as a bingeable collection. But there’s also a responsibility for fans to support the art they say they want to see.

via Vox - All

[freedomss0n]

a comment from an FB group by Sam Haft

typed up by @thewhaleridingvulcan

Because we keep running into this Are Ashkenazi Jews White? thing all the time - the answer is “Here’s why you reasonably think they are, and here’s why Ashkenazi Jews should be able to identify as conditionally white and/or white passing” (though personally I stay away from calling Ashkis “POC” because that tends to imply a racial struggle that our generation has dealt with much less). I’ve had some wine so this might be a little meandering. Bear with me. Ashki Jews in the USA experience two kinds of privilege, at the whims of their surrounding whites, which is why they are often seen as just white. 1 - white passing privilege - Ashkenazi Jews have semitic features and european features, and some look more european. Sometimes that’s from intermarriage, but probably it’s from having a family exposed to generations of pogrom rape, and in both cases it is not their ashkenazi genes that makes them look like your average mayonnaise goy 2 - model minority privilege - for the less social justice literate, this is the process of white people allowing you to participate in systems that perpetuate white dominance in exchange for using you as a rhetorical tool to divide people of minorities in this country. for example “white supremacy doesn’t have to do with why you’re having a hard time, indian americans have the highest mean income in the country! do we have indian supremacy???” - yes, but indian americans, jews, east asian americans, and other groups used as model minorities still experience a lot of racial oppression that doesn’t cleanly fit into racially biased systems that were created in America (for the most part) to hamstring the upward mobility of black people. This is also called the “model minority MYTH” for this reason - it doesn’t immunize this group from racial oppression, it simply means white people are using their accidental success to oppress other people of color. Because Ashki Jews are, to my knowledge, the only ethnic minority group that is BOTH white passing AND a “model minority”, there is understandably a persistent conceit that this is all it takes to have “Whiteness.” Moreover getting arguably the “best deal” of all oppressed groups (which is something we should be aware of and make space for those less privileged) doesn’t make us less of an oppressed group, nor is oppression olympics productive anyway. Here are some things that make the case for the unique Jewish nonwhiteness: - Ashkis experience a *massively* disproportionate amount of hate crime, even in the USA. Go to a place that *doesn’t* have HALF the world’s Jewish population? That number goes up, not down. In France, Ashkis are NOT white - they experience hate crimes higher than //any group,// including any group commonly accepted in the USA as POC. One of the reasons Jews do not have whiteness is that our whiteness does not travel - the USA may have a lot of Jews but in places with fewer Jews, our features stop blending in with “average white looks” particularly well, or even at *all.* - Examine the difference between white passing and goy passing. Maybe you’ve not been - as are many jews - mistaken for latinx or middle eastern… but are you identifiable to strangers as a jew? If you are, sorry, but you’re not “blending into whiteness.” - Look at antisemitism; is it about what religion we practice, or about an accusation of genetic guilt and filth? It’s racial, nobody is asking you if you’re religious before calling you a kike or throwing spare change at you. - Look at the way we treat ashkenazi jewish features; I’m sure many of us have heard the line, “Are you Jewish? No offense.” The depiction of “Jewish features” (read: ashkenazi features) as ugly and sexually unappealing is ubiquitous. - Look at history. Our oppression in the is NOT comparable to that of the Irish or Italians, as it is sometimes compared. The Irish/Italians do not experience the kind of discrimination we do - even today. It was commonly accepted that many apartment buildings, country clubs, suburban communities - all places where there can be effective gatekeepers to whiteness - could and would reject Jews by virtue of being Jewish, even as recently as the 1990s. Moreover the Irish and Italians did not experience a systematic industrialized genocide (and RECENTLY) - though the British did try to starve the Irish out of Ireland, they sure didn’t try to collect all of them in the same place and wipe them off the Earth. - Also, we vote differently from the white voter demographic. This is important, that we do not as a group cosign and vote for the political oppression that white people vote for (though of course some individuals do) - Another element of whiteness that doesn’t apply to ashkis (addressed this a little bit earlier); being white is a privilege that travels. An Irish American person will look white in New York City and will look white in Fargo. If I can travel and stop being identified by strangers as a white person - and thus lose what white passing privilege I would otherwise have - I am not white, I simply have conditional access to whiteness in places where there are a lot of secular Jews. - The final element of whiteness that doesn’t apply to ashkis; being white is hereditary. If it’s not hereditary, you’re /passing/ for white. But if two Ashki people have a kid and their kid looks extra semitic, they’re not going to experience the same white passing life, nor will they experience whiteness. And, last thought, as an ethnic minority that experiences significant racism, has been the victim of millennia of ethnic cleansing from white europeans, Ashkenazi Jews should NOT be expected to identify as their single greatest historical abuser. Ashkenazi Jews only exist because Europeans scattered them from Israel in the first place, and raped and abused them for centuries, kicking them out of dozens of countries and more than once trying to murder them all. Thrusting whiteness upon Ashkenazi Jews who suffer more at the hands of whiteness than from anything else is a hideous thing to do. Ashkenazi Jews have tremendous privilege *for an oppressed ethnic minority* but are still *an oppressed ethnic minority* and ought to have the freedom to self-identify proudly as people who are marginalized to seek empowerment in the face of those who would marginalize them. Or, if they want, identify as white. But they deserve that consideration. /end of wordvomit

[anchorwind]

Of Anger and Everyday Americans

What is anger?  In my younger days I would have I would have told you anger is a force of destruction used to justify the worst in all of us; I would have told you anger is a means by which otherwise good people are capable of terrible things; I would have told you anger is to be avoided for it does brings naught but harm.  Having spent a great deal of time trying to understand the past, my past as well as my country's past,  I have tried to gain a greater understanding of anger.  I now understand anger to be a fundamental part of the human experience.  Anger is an actionable emotion or force,  it drives us, compels us, to act.   What is this action?  Protection.  Anger, even right down to the base fight-or-flight responses,  brings forth the energy and drive, the will and focus, to protect. We become angered, and then wish to protect, frequently as everyday Americans in our everyday lives.  If your face is struck, you get angry and act in order to protect your face.  If you are insulted, you get angry and act in order to protect your ego.  People, in angered states, act to protect all sorts of things:  lifestyles, countries, families, ideals, records, myths and legends, and more.  Anger, being a potentially explosive actionable emotion has the potential to be a tool for constructive change or terrible regret.  Unfortunately, I live in a time and place wherein anger has been wielded more as a weapon of fear and oppression than for anything inspiring joy or peace. I live in a time and place wherein there are powers-that-be who have figured out anger is an infinite wealth generating device from those who tend to be: small-minded, closed-minded, and malleable.  Entire (mega) churches,  24/7 media networks, political networks, advertising campaigns, and social media operations have been designed to manipulate you into doing their bidding. A primary tool which makes the aforementioned so successful is the anger of the audience. I would like to remind you at this point, dear reader, most people on an individual level are actually pretty cool.  Most people have positives to bring to the table.  People aren't born evil, they're taught evil by others.  This learned evil,  this cyclical evil does make people do and believe in terrible things.  However, some of it stems from that anger-protection relationship, many:  racists, sexists, homophobes, etc,  are afraid of something  and are trying to protect themselves in some way, harmful though their actions may be objectively. Everyday Americans have been getting systemically screwed for generations.  This isn't even news.  What is news is the sheer scale of it;  it is hard to comprehend the magnitude when you begin to understand.   For example, it is easy to feel sympathy for Black people in marginalized inner city neighborhoods in the sense of the level of racism from every angle that made the ghetto a thing:  from the reason Black people came here to begin with, through institutional racism at banks, and every other place in America, it is easy to understand.  It's virtually everywhere and almost impossible to ignore unless, perhaps, you're racist yourself and trying extraordinarily hard to convince yourself facts aren't real. When you look at the experiences of Minorities, and Women, as a collective whole, things are still fairly easy to understand.  It may not be quite as in your face and egregious but it's still virtually impossible to ignore unless you construct your own alternate reality.   This is where those churches, media, politicians, etc., come in.   They, using fear-driven anger are actually constructing alternate realities for people who are themselves being screwed, but not by the people they are told to be angry at.   I now live in a time and place wherein the alleged 'leader' can stand in front of microphones and actually tell his audience to ignore what they are seeing and hearing.   That individual is telling his audience to discard objectivity and be comforted by the alternate reality that feeds into the anger,  the particular anger that suits the goals of: the political party, the media network, the advertisers, the church coffers, etc. While fear-driven anger is being rained upon us from pulpits, airwaves, and screens of all sizes, we who are trying to keep everyday Americans all focused on the real problems are being drowned out.  Anger is energetic,  anger is loud and raucous.  Anger can be a self-perpetuating echo-chamber of impressive quality and quantity.  Anger does not like competition, often enough.   What is the upper limit of anger?  Does it have one?   I think you cannot exhaust anger,  but instead focus and channel it appropriately.  You must educate the angry and pull back the curtain of Oz for they have been dividing and conquering us for far too long. Yes,  there are certain parties and groups more guilty than others but no one is clean here.  However,  why do we fight amongst ourselves for diminishing scraps when we watch them decimate the economy, and the environment,  and scoop up it all up for pennies on the dollar (with no real consequences)?   Why do we re-litigate the same fights, instead of investing into the human capital of ourselves for ourselves and our progeny?   Why do we allow ourselves to be perpetually reactive, instead of seizing our potential to be proactive?  These, and more,  are where anger is, and should be,  a valuable ally.  These are problems facing everyday Americans in which we need to be angry. We need to be angry about the state of voting (suppression, etc), gerrymandering,  representation, economic inequality,  freedom of information, privacy,  human rights (women's, LGBT, immigrants, children's, etc), and just the plain ol' fact we have a level of corruption in the government so astounding we can't even unpack one catastrophe before we learn of the next.   However,  even the simple act of establishing a problem in this time and place in which I live will bring out misguided angry responses from those who feel they need to protect 'their team.'   The alternate reality created by the fear-driven anger has created this new black-and-white paradigm.   "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists" said George W. Bush not that long ago.  Similarly, an increasingly common thought process postulates Nixon would not have faced consequences if Fox News had been around in his time.   Nixon was just at the forefront of what would truly become the fear-driven anger we see now,  the manufactured outrage and faux hate. I see hope on the horizon,  as I do with many things.   The people from whom I experience the greatest degree or frequency of fear-driven anger, of blind anger, of unresponsive alternate reality anger,  tend to be a narrowing demographic of people who represent everyday Americans less and less.  I understand part of why fear-driven anger works so well on them is who they are and what they feel they're trying to protect.   The people peddling the anger and fear to them are doing well to convince them equality for us is taking something away from them, being they were the ones who had it all from the start.  However,  that's not what equality means here in the real world.  Here amongst us angry everyday Americans,  hungry for change, we have growing awareness of how our world came to be.  We have a growing awareness of what we need to do about it,  and how to get there - which includes loving and educating that narrowing demographic preyed upon by the fearmongers.  The road often feels impossibly long and littered with people who profit from obstructing progress.   However,  anger gives us drive and focus.  I still have a lot to learn about how to be assertive, and how to be on the constructive side of anger.  My country still has a lot to damage to repair,  but both myself and my country is emerging from dark periods in time better in the long run with a tool in our arsenal. ~Monk Anchorwind P.S. - I am many things:  passionate, creative, flawed, vulnerable, scarred, patient, hopeful, broken, driven, empathetic, flexible, remorseful, forward-thinking...    I am not, however, small-minded.   My fault list is deep and many, but I can at least look in the mirror and know I have always pushed myself and those in my surroundings to think deeper, be more accepting, challenge perspectives.  The surface answer (what you are presented) is rarely the full answer.    This is true in maths, sciences, human nature to include all the things we've invented (religion, movies,  what you see in the news, et al.,) .   Invest in yourself and your fellow man (as in humanity) to feel more, think more,  get out of your comfort zone some.   We're all better for it. We're just people called people on a planet called dirt.   We're all on the same team, who generally want the same things.    We evolved from the same place and are headed in the same direction - as in literally,  we orbit the same mundane star in the same galaxy at speeds hard to fathom in an ever expanding universe so impossibly large we will never, ever, learn it all.   We, individually and collectively, are capable of a great many things.    It's such a waste we've squandered the bulk of our existence already and are on course to continue doing so.   Perhaps we'll actually channel our anger for constructive purposes and right our wrongs.    There are more of us then there are of them and the system relies on us.  It would be painful,  and we want to protect our families and such, but when is enough enough? Much love. Read the full article

[treehugginglibrarian]

RAWR! Things That Make Me Angry

It’s been a long couple of days/weeks/months. To that end, the number of things that seem to be infuriating me and/or generally making me crazy has gotten pretty high. I thought about doing a series of posts, and then realized it would be so much more fun to just get it all out there in one fell swoop. I’ll attempt some semblance of order in the chaos that is my angry thoughts, but I make no promises. Feel free to pitch your own anger out there as well. I’d hate to be the only one to find this post cathartic.

Anger at My Profession (and its Organizations) Recently I did a presentation for the Ohio Library Council’s Youth Services Conference. It went pretty well, the topic was well-received, and those who attended that session seemed happy they had chosen to do so. I’m not disappointed that I went. I am disappointed by the way organizations like the OLC, ALA (the American Library Association), PLA (the Public Library Association), and so forth have taken to treating those who agree to speak at their events. 

When I first received my speaker’s agreement for this event, I was a little bit shocked to see that I was being charged a fee to attend. That’s right- not only were they not paying me for my time, thus necessitating that my library pay me for my time even though I wasn’t even going to be at work that day, they had the audacity to attempt to charge me and/or my employer for the use of my time. They wanted me to pay them to spread knowledge and information. They want me to pay them to make their conference possible. 

Well, that’s a load of steaming fucking horse shit if ever I’ve encountered it, and it turns out library councils and associations all over the country are now doing this. So much for being an actual profession where our skill sets and capabilities are respected. We are, as individuals, so completely disrespected by the very organizations that are supposed to be fighting for us, that we’re now required to pay to pass our know-how onto our peers. 

I got the fee waived on the basis that I am not now, and likely never will be, a youth services librarian and thus wasn’t staying for the entire conference or for lunch. The principle of the entire thing is just maddening, though. They don’t pay mileage. They don’t pay for handouts. They don’t even provide all of the electronic devices needed to make the conference possible. And, to boot, they expect you to pay them to work.

To add insult to injury, I’m already a member of a committee that is part of the OLC. So I’m already doing work for them on the regular, as a committee member. Work that I’ve already paid them to do, because despite being a committee member who ends up speaking with a weird sense of regularity I am required to pay my annual dues. So they want me to pay them, more than once, to do work for them.  

Get the fuck outta here with that. My time, my energy, and my knowledge is something for which I should be paid. So the least you can do is avoid charging me to share it.  

Suffice to say, it’ll be the last conference of that nature that I’ll be doing. Thankfully, the committee I’m a member of seems to do just as much work at individual libraries, which don’t charge you to come speak, as they do at conferences. I’ve also already presented and/or created presentations for three or four different events this year, and I’m not done yet. 

Any other librarians out there right fucking sick of being treated like we’re not worthwhile professionals by the very organizations that are supposed to be helping us, as professionals? Don’t answer that. It’s rhetorical. I’ve had this conversation with dozens of them and, so far, they have all found the practice to be a steaming pile of cow manure. 

Get your shit together, library land. We deserve better.

Anger at My House Okay. I’m not actually angry at my house. I’m just really over contractors who can’t fucking communicate. If you say you’re going to call a homeowner, pick up the damn phone and call. The contractors working on our basement have a pretty spotty attendance record and basically no ability to utilize a phone. This was especially fun when we arrived home on day one and found no keys in the house, no lock box on the door, no note explaining these absences, and neither of us had a voicemail or missed call from them. 

If a homeowner is having to chase you down to find out when you’ll be in next, or where their keys are, you’re doing it wrong. 

In the end, it took them two more days to get our keys into a lock box on our door and, at the paltry rate at which they are moving we are genuinely questioning whether these idiots will be done by the time we leave for Spain. I am absolutely certain we could have gotten this work done faster, and likely for less money than our deductible is going to be, just by doing it ourselves. 

There’s also just so much shit all over my house right now. It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s just a product of having a basement that is completely out of commission, and some stuff that really can’t be stored in the garage. It’s a little exhausting being surrounded by stuff constantly, though. We’re trying to keep the clutter to a minimum in the spaces we really spend a lot of time in, but basically anywhere else it’s become a free for all. We’re going on over a month since the “Great Flood of 2018,” and I’m ready for it to be over. And I know it won’t be, not completely, not for a while yet, since we’re still looking at having to dig up an entire pipe in the front yard. Because we really needed the “Big Dig of 2018” to go with the great flood, right?

Anger Over Animals There’s a giant, wheelable, privacy fence over my driveway. My dad built it and, once it’s painted absurd rainbow colors, I’m sure it’ll look awesome and annoy the neighbors. It’s not there for aesthetics, though. It’s there because a neighbor complained about the fact that we have a pit bull. So, my dog crashed at my folks house for a week or two while we figured out how to deal with the nosy neighbor problem, and now we have a privacy fence over our driveway so that the only people who can see into our backyard are the next door neighbors who have met our pibble and know he’s a sweetie pie.

Here’s the thing about pits- you may think you know one on sight, but there’s a really good chance you don’t. If you mix a lab and a boxer, you’re liable to get a head with a pretty boxy shape but an actual nose, and you know what it’s going to look like? A pit bull. Even though it’s not one. In fact, this experiment could be repeated, successfully, by mixing a boxer with a number of different dog breeds. All of them would come out with the tell-tale boxy head of a pit bull, and none of them would be pit bulls. The idea that a dog should be banned, taken away, or put down based on the say-so of anyone other than a geneticist, particularly when the dog has done nothing wrong, is fucking absurd. 

How about this- leave my dog alone and I won’t call the police on your screaming crotch goblins when you forget to drag their asses back inside at 9pm. Goodness knows my dog is far less obnoxious than your kids are.

Anger at Doctors and/or the VA This one is sort of perpetual and may well be unnecessary, since so few veterans aren’t mad at the VA about something. In my case, I just really wish my wife’s doctors would both listen to her and cooperate with each other. Even as they are refusing to prescribe her the things that she knows will work, they seem equally determined to force her to take medications that aren’t really helping or that are actively hurting her. I can’t say for certain, but I think it might stem in part from the fact that she has four psychiatrists, none of whom want to agree with each other about a damn fucking thing. 

So. We talk in circles with each of them, arriving at a conclusion, only to have that conclusion thrown out the next day when one of the other psychs decides they don’t like that plan. It’s a vicious and pointless cycle that serves to do little more than mandate an irrational amount of time off of work for me, and an absurd feeling of frustration and hopelessness for both of us. Anyone who wonders how we can have as many vets killing themselves each day as we do has clearly never attempted to get anything done with the doctors at the VA. It’s an exhausting, demoralizing, process that leaves the patient and their family completely beaten down and generally ready to throw in the towel. So, it does basically the exact opposite of what a medical system should do. Good job, guys.

Anger at the Gays An acquaintance/coworker/human I’m loosely associated with through work posted a meme on that dastardly devil that is social media basically demanding that all those who are not strictly gay or lesbian stop using the term “gay” to describe themselves. I mean, I get it. No one likes to feel erased. Here’s the thing, though. If you’re going to demand that people stop erasing you, you have to do it from a position of marginalization and you have to do it in a fashion that doesn’t erase other people in the process.

While gays are definitely marginalized compared to the straight folk of our world, the reality is those on the binary ends of the sexuality spectrum really are the most privileged among us. They have an easier time defining themselves, an easier time finding their identities, and the likelihood that anyone is going to tell them they don’t exist is pretty slim. Bisexuals and asexuals, for example, basically get told we don’t exist from the minute we walk out of the closet. 

The insult is all the worse for bisexuals, since so many gay people actually lay claim to our sexuality for at least a little while, as they test the water outside of their closets. Eventually they paddle their way out and cast off the mantle of bi, thereby adding to the pervasive notion that all bisexuals are little more than straight women who want attention or gay people who are scared to come out. So demanding that your sexuality descriptor remain completely untouched by anyone other than you and yours’ is hypocritical as fuck, to start.  

It’s also insanely transphobic. And the one argument presented to me in an attempt to illustrate the lack of transphobia in this demand of word purity did nothing more than effectively eradicate trans people’s self-perceived identities completely. See, here’s the thing, sexuality is an internally experienced concept, even if it is externally perceived. This means that perception is sometimes completely wrong. And like anything else having to do with our persons, our bodies, and our own identities, the rest of the world doesn’t get to tell us how we are going to identify. 

While it’s fun to mock seemingly straight men who call themselves lesbians because it’s a notion that is pretty comical, the reality is there are humans on this planet who would look, to us, like straight men but who would actually be lesbians. How is this crazy gender-bending nonsense possible? Because sometimes men who like men are actually women who look like men, and they just haven’t started presenting in a fashion that makes who they truly are completely apparent to those around them. You don’t get to tell them that they aren’t who they are just because your perception of them doesn’t match their reality. 

I had one woman attempt to accuse me of homophobia while telling me that trans people are covered under “genderality” rather than “sexuality.” No, it’s not a made-up word, though I was confused at first, too. Genderality is apparently to gender what sexuality is to sex. Well, sort of. Strictly speaking it has to do with gender presentation rather than gender actual, which is a pretty big difference if you ask most trans individuals. Beyond being unnecessarily confusing as fuck, this sort of reinforces the notion that gender, as a construct, is based not on how we perceive ourselves and interpret these perceptions, but instead upon how those around us perceive our gender. Hello bathroom laws. 

“But, but, genderality assessments made based on a person’s chosen gender aren’t transphobic!” Except yes, they are. All you have to do to realize this is look at things from the perspective of a transgender person’s partner. 

First, it’s necessary to understand that in a world where genderality is a thing that exists, sexuality is based completely upon sex organs and/or chromosomes. Since gender is a perceived construct and one’s attraction to various genders would be described via words such as gynophilic or androphilic, sexuality becomes something that is effectively impossible to know for certain based upon your perception. A couple that consists of a feminine woman and a feminine woman *might* be a lesbian couple in which both parties are gynophilic in nature and, based upon the usual constructs us pedants use to describe the couplings we see around us merely describing them as lesbians if we’re not told any differently would probably make sense. BUT- if one of those women is actually transgender and has not yet undergone surgery, then a world in which genderality and sexuality are completely separate concepts would have you believe this is a heterosexual relationship and that calling themselves lesbians would actually be inappropriate. 

Depending on the nature of the couple, they might, indeed, agree with you. If the transwoman was presenting as a man when the couple got married, and she is the only woman her wife has ever been with or will ever be with, they may well agree that the cis woman, at least, is generally straight. The cis woman’s ability to maintain her identity as straight should not, in any way, hinge upon the genitals that her spouse has now or may well have in the future, if for no other reason than the fact that those genitals are absolutely none of our business. Those genitals don’t suddenly become the business of other people just because the cis woman is now a lesbian in a seemingly straight relationship. A lesbian married to a transman owes you no more explanation for why they call themselves a lesbian, than a straight woman married to a transwoman does. Their identities are compositions of where they have come from, the experiences they have had, the way they feel about sex, and how they experience attraction. None of these things are any of our business. They are the business of the person laying claim to the identity and that person’s partner.    

The introduction of ‘genderality’ vs ‘sexuality’ has actually, effectively, nullified the argument that only certain individuals should be allowed to use the words gay and lesbian. If a lesbian in a straight-presenting relationship would, theoretically, be encouraged to remain a lesbian on the basis of her partner’s genitals or chromosomes, completely regardless of how they are perceived by the rest of the world, there’s really no reason to be having this conversation since there’s really no way for any gay or lesbian in a tiff about this shit to ever really know *why* any given couple is identifying the way they are. Unless we’re just going to start checking everyone’s genitals and/or demanding chromosomal proof that they are who their sexuality designator says they are. The argument in the original meme had nothing to do with genitals, though, and everything to do with perceived sexuality based on the gender presentations of those involved in any given relationship. Gender presentations that might not be accurate or that may well tell an incomplete story.  

Until lesbians and gays are comfortable with the rest of the queer community assigning them roles in their relationships (man, woman, top, bottom, mother, father, so forth) based upon their outward presentation, and not upon their own, personal, lived experience and their own, personal, sex lives, I really think they need to get the fuck out of everyone else’s bedrooms. How anyone else on this lovely planet identifies is absolutely not something you have any say in. Unless you’re comfortable with me calling you, the butch but comfortably female half of your relationship, the “man” from now on. After all, perception from the outside is all that matters, right? 

I don’t know if that’s everything I’m mad at right now, but it’s definitely the ones occupying the most space in my brain. Feel free to let me know if you have anything you’d like me to be angry about on your behalf. I apparently have enough of it to spread around right now, for some reason!

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

back story Pressured to remain silent Activist tells why it’s harder for black women to report campus rape RACE MAY affect how campuses handle sex assaults, even at black ones, Chardonnay Madkins says. (Terrence Antonio James Chicago Tribune) By Lauren Rosenblatt WASHINGTON — Chardonnay Madkins knows firsthand the pressures African American women can face when reporting campus sexual assaults. She says she was assaulted in two incidents, once at a mostly white college and another time at a historically black college. In reporting the assaults, Madkins says she endured similar efforts — some subtle and some overt — to persuade her to back down rather than lodge a complaint against a fellow black student. As project manager for the advocacy group End Rape on Campus, Madkins, 25, is working to bring more attention to the role race can play in how campus sexual assaults are handled, and the distinct difficulties black women can face. She is also preparing to launch Centering the Margin, a program that will help school officials and students recognize how sexual assaults can affect members of marginalized communities differently. The Los Angeles Times spoke to Madkins about her work. Her responses to The Times�� questions have been edited for length and clarity. Do black women have a harder time dealing with and reporting sexual assault than white women? Yes. Part of that is because [of] where black women are, compared to white women, in terms of being accepted into college and accessing resources. Another thing is the narrative around sexual violence largely focuses around straight, cisgender [non-transgender], white women. So if you don’t really fall into that category, you don’t really have as much knowledge about sexual violence against your particular community. Another barrier is that most likely their perpetrators are men of color, specifically black men. Especially on college campuses and historically black colleges and universities, there are subtle pressures from the [black] community. It tells these black women to remain silent because the education of their perpetrator is essentially more important than their education, and that [they] can’t be another person who sends a black man to jail. [Women are told:] “These are the few black men who were able to make it to college and you trying to report them is going to hinder their success.” So when you stack all of that on top of the great disconnect between the black community and law enforcement, that’s enough for black survivors to not feel comfortable reporting their sexual assault. Where does that pressure to stay silent come from? That comes from not only the overall black community, but also these individual campuses [and students].... They’ll tell you to not really speak out about it, to keep it a secret. They’ll say: “Well, it doesn’t mean you have to necessarily tell the school or tell the police or do one or the other. Or maybe you’re the one that misinterpreted what happened.” When it comes to ... sexual violence that is perpetuated against them by black men, that’s a very hard case to prove. Other people might not know that [black men] essentially have the help and support of the overall black community because of how black men are placed. They’re the highest part of the social hierarchy within the black community. How does that make a black woman survivor feel? I think that makes them feel really isolated. So black women often receive less support than others? At least in my experience, being a survivor on campus, I kind of lost all of my community there when I did come forward. I think that depends on what environment your campus is going through. I know when I was assaulted, these conversations [about sexual assault] were not happening on my campus at all, so I believe that is one of the reasons I didn’t have as much support from — not only the general campus overall — but especially from the black community. But once I was at the historically black campus, [after the second assault] I still saw that same kind of reaction from all the black women on campus. What was their reaction? There’s this kind of negative, I guess, stereotype or idea that black women are just super strong and they can be super resilient. And sometimes that can be empowering. But when we’re talking about kinds of trauma and being able to have the space and ability to heal from that, black women aren’t really given that because they are seen as so strong. So on both campuses, and this is from people who I’ve regarded as very close, best friends of mine, they had that same reaction of, “You’ll get over it. You’re strong.” Sexual violence and rape isn’t something to “get over.” That’s trauma. That’s something I have to live with and wake up to every single day. Do you see a difference in how sexual assault reports are handled on historically black colleges versus predominantly white campuses? On historically black colleges and universities, race does play a major part, just like how race plays a major part on predominantly white campuses. The only thing is that there’s this idea that if you come from the same kind of racial background or if you’re another person of color, that you can’t technically discriminate against somebody based on their race. It’s very clear if you’re on a predominantly white campus and someone dismisses your claim because they say that you’re a black woman and sexually promiscuous, you can say easily OK, that probably plays into the kind of stereotypes. On a historically black college or university, we have usually very conservative older black people who don’t say the same things. But because that kind of sentiment is coming from another black person, that’s when people have a hard time being able to wrap their heads around [it], still perpetuating this ultimate discrimination. So even black campuses perpetuate some of these racial stereotypes? Right, right. These are just microcosms of the larger society, so because we have sexism, racism, classism, etc., in overall society, we’re seeing this on a smaller scale on these campuses. Historically black colleges and universities are not immune to that. If anything, to a certain extent, when it comes to their reputation and image, they try to overcompensate in the sense of covering up all negative kind of publicity from coming out because of the overall systemic racism. How does an incident of sexual assault being reported affect their reputation? Just the negative publicity. That’s going to perpetuate the idea — or this is what they say — that all black men are rapists and you can’t really send your children to a school that is predominantly black because it’s not safe. I think that schools are really, really scared of that. How does that affect the way they handle sexual assault cases? In some instances, that means that they will discourage survivors from reporting, or doing things to discourage survivors to continue forward with their report. What do you think is the solution for this? Just start having these conversations at younger ages. And within the black community. When we’re talking about things like police violence or other kinds of inequalities within our community, that we are also inclusive of the inequalities more marginalized black people experience, like black women — black cis[gender] and transgender women — black LGBTQ, black incarcerated folks and black people with disabilities, because those people are just as equally important to our community. Because it deals with sensitive racial issues, do you think that makes it harder to have a conversation? I don’t think it makes it harder. I think it makes it so people don’t want to listen. We understand that when we’re saying these things that it makes some people uncomfortable. What we hear a lot is that if we’re talking about sexual violence, then we just want to talk about sexual violence and we don’t want to talk about racial issues or gay rights issues or anything else because this is the topic we’re focusing on and everything else is divisive. I think those responses are the reason why we’re still where we are today. These issues don’t happen in a vacuum and when there are people who live at these intersections, it is most important to not only talk about these issues but center them. lauren.rosenblatt @latimes.com