Censorship
Again, as always. First there was Shylock, in Merchant of Venice, the negative portrayal of a Jewish moneylender. Then there was Huck Finn, the not-so-negative but perhaps a little too stereotypical depiction of a former black slave in the South. And there have been hundreds, thousands since then. Lolita, De Sade, Fahrenheit 451, the list goes on and is endless.
But the latest casualties are hitting a little closer to home. I mean Pepe Le Pew, who was an overly affectionate doesn't-take-no for an answer skunk. Presumably a comically reference to French Canadians or stereotypes about French Lovers. And not technically "Censured" so much as cancelled, so - fine - most things are humorous or relevant only in the context of the culture - time, place and people - that produced them. But that they publicize it is worrisome - part of a larger trend of whitewashing history. And by whitewashing it I mean making it as Vanilla as possible; devoid of anything that might possibly offend anyone.
But I should say, if you're killing Pepe you should really be killing Ms. Piggy. Like, I get a lotta creepy/stalker/abusive vibes out of her and Kermit. Picture me screaming and waving my hands and shouting "Somebody, won't somebody PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!".
I should make up a sign saying "Cancel Ms Piggy" and go stand with the Anti-Maskers tomorrow. There's been a lot of protesting lately, but it's never about things that matter.
This is not to be confused with "Cancel Culture", in which a "celebrity" does something outrageous or stupid or questionable and then loses their lavish lifestyle, endorsements, etc. I don't give a damned about that. That people get upset about somebody losing their job over doing something stupid is entirely what the whole wide rest of the real world deals with on a day to day basis. It's less "Cancel Culture" than it is "Consequence Culture".
But this is not cancel culture - this is revisionist history, pandering to those who are taking offense where none is given.
And the latest victim - Dr. Seuss.
Author of "Oh, The Thinks you can Think". Only, apparently, you can't. 6 Titles being pulled from publication by the Dr. Seuss foundation on the advice of educators and other so-called experts.
I disagree with this - the censure of history and art and literature.
The "Negative" or "Stereotypical" depictions included a Chinese boy who eats with sticks. Hair done up in Pigtails. Now - really - I looked at it again - to jog my memory - and - could still see nothing of offense in it. Yes, it's a stereotype built upon centuries of their own traditions. The hair, the clothes, chopsticks - until comparatively recently were a very visible portion of their culture. Not in a bad way - it marked them as being different. And when you're a kid it's interesting to view the world as different, exciting to think that different people have different lives, dress, act, and eat in a manner unfamiliar to ourselves.
Another one - "McElligots's Pool" - for having "Eskimo Fish" that wore parkas. I mean - HOLY FUCK! Have you been north of the 49th? Parkas are fucking mandatory in this country 6 to 9 months of the year! It's a stereotype for a fucking reason! It's the truth! Would an Eskimo (They don't even exist, specifically, merely a broad generalization for any indigenous people that live above the Arctic Circle) take offense to being depicted in a parka? Fucking hell! Or are they worried about the depictions of the fish?
They are stereotypes, surely - but negative? Hardly.
These stereotypes engage us and inspire curiosity about peoples and cultures different than us. To be told that Eskimos and Chinese people live in houses just like ours is boring and inspires no one to travel. And, depending where you're from, it's not necessarily true. To be told that Eskimos suffer criminally high rates of substance abuse, addiction, depression and suicide - well - while accurate might also be construed as negative. And it isn't going to inspire anybody to visit. To be told that the Chinese are torturing and raping innocent people held in concentration and forced labor camps might also encourage some negative stereotypes.
If they had said that they were discontinuing the books because no one was buying them I'd understand. But this whitewashing, censure of books because they "Might" cause offense is insane. Given that there are probably fewer than a dozen of these books available in the NorthWest Territories/Nunavut I doubt very much any of the children there are being offended by fish in Parkas. Most likely they find it humorous just like the rest of the world. And given their circumstances they would be I'm sure glad of any portrayal that drew interest to their lifestyles.
There seems to be this equivocation that to depict anyone as different than ourselves is bad. I would disagree. Cultures can be bad, but cultures aren't race. And Dr. Seuss isn't portraying these cultures in a negative way. His books were designed to inspire curiosity and learning. I very much doubt he intended to offend anyone - given that in 1971 he actually went through and revised a good many of his illustrations that might be considered offensive.
Now I'm taking this a bit personally because I personally love stereotypes. No shit. Greedy Bankers. No ones arguing that one. Killer Incompetent Bungling Cops. Another truism. Crooked Lawyers. Yep. Wait...I just described the Prime Time TV/Movie Line and no one's protesting that. Vacuous, insipid women looking for their Prince Charming? The Bachelor, purportedly a REALITY TV SHOW and - just wow - doesn't anybody want to protest that? If not that, then surely the contestants and very premise of it!
Me, I liked the idea of living in a world with headhunters, cannibals, witch-doctors - even if they're not current, they're part of our history. And the fact that we interpret these differences as "negative" and "stereotypical" when we should, in fact, be teaching our kids that it's OK to be different and we celebrate that - is - to say the least - infuriating.
Perhaps I'm not as "liberal" as I thought.
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- Category: Books
Panning for Gold near Trail
Yesterday, arranged to go down and pan for gold with Chris. Trail. There's some great cracks in a bedrock exposure I'd seen from the road, worth checking out.
But, driving out through Nelson, nearing the old homeless camp, we pass a small table with a handmade sign up - "Magic Rocks for Sale". A little kid is sitting with his mom at a little table covered with rocks. And there's no getting away from it, we have to stop.
The kid, a folding little TV Dinner table, on it he's got about 30 pieces of gravel. The same gravel as we're standing on. A little jar full of money. We look at the rocks. They're gravel. Just gravel. Literally the same gravel we're standing on. And I want to support small business and enterprising youth and so I ask "How Much?".
The kid hums and haws, he's got the gravel sorted into about 4 little piles on the table, there's no difference in any of them, they're all just gravel, but he's giving us the prices...."This pile it's $5.00 a rock....". I'm incredulous, but I don't dare say, his mom is there, it's a little, a lot out of my league. SO Chris and I go back to the truck, scrounge up a few crystals and fluorite lost at the bottom of my rucksack, Chris finds him some pieces of silver ore, we give it to him. Who knows, maybe one day he could be working for me?
Anyways, onward to Trail:
A bit of panning, next to no gold, Chris finds a few flakes - tiny, not worth the effort, and after a bit of crevassing I give up and go and canvas the landscape. This bedrock is pretty cool:
Coarse feldspar sills, smoky quartz, granular crystals like pegmatites but lacking in the mica and other minerals. The basalt has cooked out the minerals - clear divisions and cavities in the rock.
Clearly I wasn't the only one who found this interesting...
In the pan, fine sand, under the loop - black sand, lots of garnet - pyrope, almandine, some citrine, green stones which I guess to be olivine (given the basalts), quartz.
These would be the pretty pictures if I could find a way to take their picture. I need my USB Microscope...
The chromites excite me - the green - in conjunction with the garnets, are used as indicators for diamonds. Maybe it's not all quartz. When I have pictures I'll share.
Anyways, that - more or less, was the day.
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- Category: Blog
Implied Consent
It's everywhere and it's become a little too overwhelming.
If you think about it, philosophically, your entire lie is implied consent - you were born without your permission, you work without it, live, die with out it, it's merely taken for granted. Too much of life happens "TO" you, without any consultation, and at no point in the process are you sufficiently informed to to make even the simplest of decisions.
Nobody is, despite what they tell you, and when you consent to anything you're generally setting yourself up for a whole slew of unintended and unimagined consequences which may well haunt you until the end of your days.
But this isn't about that.
I'm speaking of Advertising, which has become ubiquitous online - and given how much of our lives is conducted online now it's become too much.
In websites, often so cluttered that you can't see the very article you came for, that then try and sell you adblockers for the very ads they're throwing at you - YouTube, I mean you. I mean, fucking hell, I have to watch an ad now just to watch an ad or product endorsement.
Product endorsements are another ones - clickbait articles that lead you to paid advertisements masking as news articles, "New discovery", the abundant products embedded in reviews, movies, books even (American Psycho), the list doesn't end.
The news itself - nothing but product endorsements, those flashes on rising crime, civil unrest, violence, they're all selling you on anti-depressants, security systems, guns, when was the last time you saw a news story about a company that paid for advertising? You don't. You pay for advertising and all the news is good. Pay for the news and you still get the ads, now only they're embedded in the journalism, not in the margins.
Every website rapes you with them - how many don't? Not many, for sure. And they're loaded in before the content - waiting on your article? Sorry, wait for the ads which we have to determine by your browsing history, user profile, internet searches, predicted age, sex, hobbies...
They've made it a condition of accessing the internet - it's become the new social contract, you're on occasion reminded by the insidious "Accept cookies" that pops up from time to time, the terms and conditions of which no one in the world has time to read.
And what's really starting to piss me off is how my email has been hijacked by it. "Promotions" tab for things I have no interest in, have never searched, I used to think it was that Rod Boyle Bastard in Australia signing me up for all sorts of random shit (Actually, I'm sure he's a pretty solid guy. With a name like that...), but of late I'm just convinced that it's google trying to monetize the fuck out of me, sure, I could get a new email address, but I've had this for years, and there's the "Sunk-Costs" fallacy, that I've invested in this email, who has time to change it, my letterhead and stationary, notify relatives, businesses? And they know this, that's why they start this shit with you.
I've come up with a theory that I should perhaps just start over online. Ditch all my emails. Only surf the net in full privacy mode. Physically write out the music videos I like and scrub my online presence. Maybe.
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- Category: Ideas & Questions
Facebook Fraudsters
On FaceBook, against my better judgement, but - finding rentals out here you leave no stone unturned, and there are the various groups, local, it is after a fashion a way to keep in touch with my less frequent local acquaintances.
Anyways, these acquaintances, there's always a few that are over-sharing, that's the point, some, 4 or 5 times a day posting a fucking picture of every goddamned sausage they eat, the "filtered" selfies that - if you ran into them on the street you would never recognize them, the lie of the camera that it adds weight when in fact most cameras have been used to hide it. Really, if you've ever tried FaceBook you know exactly who and what I mean.
And scrolling through my "FaceBook News" (Oxymoron?) there are videos, little segways that are designed to amuse or briefly entertain you, keep you on their site in lieu of postings from your friends, viral videos, memes or highlight reels from movies with titles like "WHY YOU DON'T BULLY KEANU REEVES..." and I'm wondering what the fuck up Keanu Reeves is a nice guy and all but I'd hardly call him a friend and why is he sending me this shit is he worried about me bullying him and you watch the reel and it's a dumb-ass collection of nonsense movies he starred in and all the voices are a pitch too high to avoid getting taken down for copyright infringement, it's no longer Keanu Reeves it's "Squeaky" Reeves...
Strange thing is it just pops up, like it's "My" sort of content, my own circle of friends isn't painful enough FaceBook's finding me more? Giving me "Humorous" or "Thoughtful" insights (rarely to never!) into the minds and likes of people it judges to be my peers.
I need to figure out this algorithm. Presumably it's a little more sophisticated than Reddit's formula, which is if you scroll too far they start showing you pictures of pretty girls "2Busty2Hide" and sexualized anime children and then they hit you with the ads for a Therapist or Suicide counselling because, really, if you scrolled that far into Reddit you're probably at high risk...
But todays complaint isn't about FaceBook. You can't really complain about it anyways, I'm just perpetually surprised by it, the whole "Stranger in a Strange Land" Schtick. Complaining about FaceBook is a little like complaining about the government, or taxes, it does nothing, and at the moment I kind of have to have it.
No, todays complaint isn't about Facebook. It's about their fucking ads.
As a kid I bought a "Boney the Skeleton", from the back of a comic book, 6' high, glow in the dark eyes, $1.00. And so I saved up and sent off for it to receive, many, many weeks later after I'd long forgotten - a 6' plastic printed sheet poster of a skeleton with glow in the dark dots that you stuck in the eyes. "SCARY". Not.
My disappointment was profound. I genuinely thought I was going to get a skeleton.
Anyways, an early lesson on advertising and skepticism about the mail-order comics business, which in many respects resembles the internet and in every way resembles FaceBook.
Adverts that popped up in my feed over Christmas included the Astronomia by Jacob & Co., original retail price over $500, 000 US, now knocked off on Facebook for under $50.00 per watch. The ads are shot for shot rip-offs (by which I mean directly copied) from Jacob's promotional material. And then there's the Jacob & Co. Bugatti Watch, with a real working V16 Engine inside...
Why not? The half million dollar price tag reflects it's uniqueness, limited run, why shouldn't China reverse engineer one, knock off a few thousand for a fraction of the price, why, they have entire factories devoted to doing nothing but this!
There were others and I look and kind of want them but ... well, now a lot older and only slightly wiser. I bookmark the links, they've since disappeared. The most likely explanation is that they never existed in the first place. Not on FaceBook anyways, and surely not for $50.00.
Now I'm besieged with ads for a Magic-Tapestry, which you can see here (click here) or here (click here) or here (click here).
See? Real Cool. And a bargain at double the price. And it must be a hot product, look at all the different vendors selling it. Read the comments.
Wow. I'll have to get one. Maybe 2. Perfect...imagine tripping on acid, or mushrooms, or maybe just smoke a joint or hang it in your tent for the next big music festival.
Really, I need to have it. Goddamn it I'm not going to let it disappear on me I'm going to order one right away....
Just right after I do the teensiest bit of research..."Buyer Beware", "Due Diligence" and all...I shouldn't have to do this, really, it's FaceBook, that's all they do is sell advertising, they're a huge company worth billions, surely they vet their advertisers?
But, the slightest bit of sleuthing and you find out that, in fact, it is a complete fraud. That there's nothing like this for sale, it doesn't exist, period, and the whole "Magic Tapestry" thing was a rip-off of some DJ's light mapping, which was pretty cool, but it wasn't a fucking magic carpet and I'm damned sure that these bastards aren't making or selling anything close to what they're advertising, but as long as FaceBook is making money no one's complaining. Not for another 6-8 weeks, at which point the products will start to arrive and the reviews start to come in and all the vending websites will have mysteriously rolled up and disappeared...
You can see where they ripped off their promotional materials here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKwcfDHQx5E
So, I wasn't going to complain about FaceBook but they have one job - know who's paying you - and they're clearly not doing it.
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- Category: Rants
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