Insufferably boring.
Against the Balkanization of "History"
Yesterday was Alan Turing‘s birthday, and this weekend is LGBT “Pride” weekend. And never the twain shall meet, it seems.
Turing played a huge role in laying the theoretical foundation for computing. His life is considered computer history, and for some reason, this means it can’t be part of queer history, even though he was gay, he was persecuted and prosecuted for being gay, and he killed himself after receiving the humiliation of chemical castration by estrogen “treatments”. In the same way that black history is given its own month and treated as separate from other history, LGBT history is segregated from other history as well. If it doesn’t specifically pertain to the history of LGBT civil rights, apparently it doesn’t count.
Needless to say, I think this is ridiculous. I also think it’s incredibly self-defeating for the LGBT movement not to make more of the overlapping history it does have. Turing is a clear case of a genius whose life was cut short by homophobia. Some of the graybeards who were instrumental in the early Unix days of the 1970s are still making huge contributions to computer science – inventing the Go language and the widely-used UTF-8 encoding system for Unicode characters, for example. Turing died at the age of 41; he could easily have lived to see the beginning of the Unix epoch and made even more amazing contributions. He might also have had more insights into biology, especially developmental biology.
I think it’s important that we make clear these connections: that the world lost a brilliant mathematician and scientist to the bigotry of the day. It’s great that the British government apologized in 2009 for what it did six decades ago, but even better would be to tackle today’s discriminations – against trans people and Muslims to name two groups – that unfairly cut short the potential of both individuals and of the societies of which they are a part.
Movie Review: Taqwacore
I was really anticipating the movie Taqwacore, about “the North American Muslim punk movement”. What’s not to love right there?
The trailer is enticing. Unfortunately, the movie did not provide much more than the trailer did. Watch the trailer below, then read the rest of my comments, and save yourself the 80 minutes of the movie.
The San Francisco Sit/Lie Law and the Hypocrisies of History
Harvey
Yesterday, May 22nd, would have been Harvey Milk‘s 81st birthday. In San Francisco people held rallies and celebrations.
I and other activists against the recently passed “Sit/Lie” law held another Sidewalks are for People day. The Sit/Lie law makes it illegal to sit or lie on any public sidewalk between 7am and 11pm. It’s illegal to sit on the curb while waiting for the bus, it’s illegal to put a folding chair on the sidewalk to enjoy the sun and greet your neighbors, and it’s illegal to sit down if you’re holding a sidewalk sale, even if you’re a child running a little lemonade stand.
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SFPD Cars with Automatic License-Plate Recognition (ALPR)
Do you see those weird-looking things on the cop car around the lights? Those are surveillance cameras. I noticed this car (car 1272) driving very slowly around. I stopped and asked them about the devices on the roof.
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Banned Books ACLU Poster
Q. What’s that, Mommy?
A. Just some of the greatest books of the 20th century, dear.
Boycott Bottled Water Graffito in SF
One great thing about San Francisco is that you get used to finding things on the street. This morning, for example, on the way to a friend’s house I came across a box of books, and took a couple for myself, including A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami.
You also find graffiti, much of it lame, some of it great. This piece is a black and red (heh) stencil, around a San Francisco Water Department access panel, poetically enough:
Book Review: The Anti-Capitalism Reader
I picked up this collection of essays many years ago. I had read a few of the pieces here and there, but recently decided to read the whole thing through from front to back. I got a startling sense of time warp.
I write this just two weeks after Osama bin Laden was assassinated by the United States, an event that seems anti-climactic, of an unimportance that would be astonishing to any time-traveler from nine or ten years ago. Already the story is fading from the news, subject only to occasional reverberations around discussion of the merits of torture or conspiracy theories that he is still alive. There is no indication that the US is any closer to ending its occupations of Iraq or Afghanistan, its wars in Libya or Pakistan, or its various military actions in other places across the world.
The Anti-Capitalism Reader, edited by Joel Schalit, was published in 2002, and many of the essays refer to the events of September 11th, 2001. Reading the interviews and analysis, you can feel the epochal status of 9/11 at that time, while now it has faded, representing only the turning point to the Dreary New Normal. Continue reading “Book Review: The Anti-Capitalism Reader”
On Republican Donor Support for Same-sex Marriage
I recently read this New York Times article on GOP donor support for same-sex marriage. Astonishingly, most of the new money to lobby for same-sex marriage in New York state is coming from wealthy donors to the Republican party.
Predictably, it’s seen from two angles: 1) libertarian – it’s not the state’s business to butt into people’s relationships – and 2) support for same-sex marriage is “good for business” and would be part of New York state’s “competitive advantage”.
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Class and Unhappiness
I had a bizarre evening. I went to a party at the house of a colleague who, it turns out, is quite rich. I couldn’t help but see class in all the interactions of the evening, especially the hired staff in the background who cleared away plates and poured drinks. I had a great conversation with the doorman, who plays poker online for a living, and was doing this job to make ends meet while waiting to collect money held up in various online forums due to the US trying to illegalize online gambling.
Later, on the way home, I ran into a friend of a friend who is a solid middle-class blue-collar worker, doing carpentry in the homes of the rich. He pointed out that the rich are often miserable. We talked for a while about how the system is so fucked up that even those who are “benefiting” from it, those who succeed by its rules, are often unhappy. In other words, even many elements of the ruling class are so unhappy under our current social system that they are amenable to a discussion about how we could organize our lives differently.
We don’t envy the rich so much as we feel sorry for them. And we extend our hand to them, to join us in creating an entirely new world.
Update – 2011/05/16
I don’t mean to imply that all rich people (or the party host) are unhappy. But I do think there is a pattern where unhappy people who aren’t well-off can imagine that their unhappiness will be cured by money; if they succeed in becoming rich, and remain unhappy, they are at a loss for what the underlying problem could be. Even the “winners” in our society are often profoundly alienated.
Fish Rock Road 