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short takes
Prior to receiving an invitation to one I had not heard the word
"webinar", but I instantly understood what it meant. That's a good
sign in new vocabulary. (Contrast with, for example, "blog".)
Not that I'm eager to start talking about webinars (let alone holding
them), but still.
This week's episode of 24 included a PSA saying, essentially, "not all muslims are terrorists". Well duh. If the show were one of those fake documentaries I could see something like that, but doesn't everyone understand that 24 is fiction? And anyway, it looks like that's going to become very, very obvious next week, unless the previews are very misleading.
Someone posted "flushing 101" posters in the restrooms at work. I first saw the poster in a stall where the previous occupant had not flushed. I hope that wasn't the person who posted the sign.
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Important Guides To Living (http://homepage.mac.com/metahacker/igtl/roll/), volume 2. I'm tempted to post this in paper form every so often.
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Have you seen cleaning the f--king kitchen for dummies?
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(from that link:) You think that, if you leave things long enough, the washing-up pixies will come and clean them, ready for the next time.
I had an ex-housemate that we swore thought this way. There were obviously Little People who followed him around and made all the chores go away. No, really. We have pictures of the fall-out.
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I have heard that there had been some complaints about choosing Muslims as terrorist for the show earlier in the season. Problem is that, right now, showing arabic (or Muslim) terrorists is like showing Russian spies in the '80s. It is the cultural reference point that we, the American audience share at the moment. I should hope this doesn't mean that that same American audience is going to assume that all arabs are terrorists. But, what were the producers going to do, make the terrorists Canadian? We'd all have trouble with that suspension of disbelief thing, in that case.
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As for people being smart enough to tell the difference between fact and fiction, well, a lot of Americans do take their impressions from the overall culture.
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I'm Italian, but people don't assume I'm connected to the Mafia even with popular depictions like The Godfather out there. Should the Italian-American lobby be able to interfere with shows about the Mafia just in case someone is stupid enough to say "hey, he's named 'Luigi' -- sounds like Mafia to me!"?
Yes, in the wake of 9/11 there were some incidents of stupid people attacking innocent people. But y'know what? There weren't a lot and there was a large outcry about it. And that was based on real events, not fiction. There will always be some stupid people and some violent people, and some stupid violent people, but they're not the ones who are going to listen to the PSAs anyway. Meanwhile, the PSA just insults the intelligence of everyone else, and giving in to this kind of pressure helps prevent good stories from getting written and aired in the future.
Consider the intimidation factor. If your publisher tells you "we can't publish this story that depicts $GROUP in a bad light because of your one character, unless we publish a disclaimer in the front that may cause some of your readers to punt", are you going to go along with that or are you going to change your story? And then the next time you just won't write a Muslim terrorist or a young black murderer or whatever at all, because you know it'll bring down flack, and in the end you'll be reduced to writing stories about French-grandma terrorists. Is that good for anyone?
It's yet another part of the general abdication of responsibility for education. Many parents expect schools to do what's their responsibility, and many adults expect someone to just tell them what's true instead of doing some thinking and some work themselves. It's very sad, and it gives enormous power to those doing the telling. Do we really want to condone that?
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(Self, repeat after me: no ranting before the first dose of caffeine settles in...)
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I don't assume people have brains, until they show that they do. There's plenty of group-think in America...
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I think those of us in Metro Detroit have had an interesting view to the anti-arabic debates in this country, since 9/11. Metro Detroit has the highest arab population in the world for a city, other than Baghdad itself (and if Bush has his way...). After 9/11, there were so many comedians doing the "You know you'd get off the plane if you saw an arab sitting next to you." All anyone from Detroit could think was, Well, you never took a plane out of Metro, then, or you'd never fly anywhere.
Mainly, my point is that arabic faces are just so common here that you cannot spend your life running around thinking every one you do see is a terrorist. You'd never get anything done!
I do hope that sort of feeling on the subject can spread across the country a bit. I, for one, don't think that 24 is effecting the situation one way or another, with or without the PSA.
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Interesting. A lot of Australians, Britons, and even a few Americans were killed by Indonesian Muslim terrorists more recently than 9/11.
I would have thought the bombings would have made the US news.
Maybe it just doesn't penetrate the conscious.
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It would also be easy to come, incorrectly, to the conclusion that most Muslims are terrorists. Moderate Islam seems (from the outside) to be doing little to rein in the lunatic fringe.
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Me too. There are Christian and secular Arabs, and probably lots of other religious affiliations, but all we ever see is strongly-committed Muslims. Heck, I'd assume that Islam, like all other religions with which I'm familiar, has its "unobsrvant" members too -- people who are nominally members but don't practice. Portrayals of Arabs in the media are focused on just this one type of Arab.
Metro Detroit has the highest arab population in the world for a city, other than Baghdad itself
Wow. I had no idea! Yes, I imagine your experiences in the last few years are rather different from those in other parts of the country, just as my experiences with regard to other races (black? Aisan? yeah, so what?) are different from some locations in the south.
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And that diversity is truly a marvelous thing. I wouldn't change it for the world! I went to a grade school, called Burton International, that allowed the students from bilingual households to spend some of their daily school time studying in their native tongues. Children from a wide array of backgrounds (Chinese, Singh, Arabic, Hispanic, Nigerian, to name the few I can remember off the top of my head) would, first, get involved in the program to ease their transition into an English speaking classes (assuming that they needed that particular help), but then were allowed to continue language studies in their own language. The result was that they were not required to be "homogenized" into some bland "Americanness," but could retain their native culture, while also being able to function within the dominant culture. It was viewed, by those of us from single-language homes, as something that added to the rich cultural environment of our school, enhancing the educational experiences for all of us there. I would say, from my experiences with other school districts, since, that this program was a thing unique to Detroit, one that the rest of the country's schools would benefit from!
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I also think that part of the problem is that there hasn't been a single event of Indonesian terrorism with with the same high numbers of victims as 9/11. Due to that, it is easy for Americans to feel like it just isn't as bad, as it's only "one or two" (or a dozen or so), not bothering to understand the enormity of the terrorism over time. (We Americans love out statistics but just aren't really very good at fully understanding them.