Turtle on roller skates

This is post 5000! In the last fifteen years I’ve put up five thousand posts to this blog. I’ve written about a wide variety of topics over those 5000 posts, though there is one overarching theme. I call the blog Gay Crows Nest and say I’m looking at the culture from the gay perspective. However, the major theme is now about various groups and individuals who try to assert they are superior to others, causing oppression to those others, and the many ways the oppressed resist and build community instead. I poked at my calculator and see since I started blogging there have been about 5,500 days. That does not mean there were only 500 days in 15 years I did not blog – this year I’ll blog only 215 of 365 days, though that’s almost 6 Mb of writing. What it means is before the pandemic I tended to break up a day’s writing by major topic into separate posts with minor topics in one “tidbits” post – I don’t think I’ve used the “tidbits” flag since 2019. In 2009 I posted 459 times, a record I’ll probably never match. Since the pandemic started – and that first year I posted nearly every day (I didn’t have much else to do) – I changed my method, posting only once a day no matter how many topics were in the one post. And 2020 remains my year with the most writing, about 12.7 Mb in 333 posts. Today I went down to the Detroit Institute of Arts to see a couple of their temporary exhibits, then attend the Detroit Film Theater showing of the 2021-22 winners of the British Arrows. Yes, that means I spent money to sit through 75 minutes of the best British TV commercials. I watch very little American TV and I always mute the commercials. The winners of the Arrows are enjoyable because the British sense of humor is so different from ours and many of these little scenes are wildly imaginative. Many don’t give an indication of the corporate name or the product until the end. Some of them are for charities rather than companies. The Arrows have, of course, a website of the winners and I see the presentation in the theater didn’t include all of them. My favorites: A turtle roller skating through traffic turns out to be an advertisement for train travel. In the middle of a Medieval battle sequence and death scene is a guy in a bathrobe with an ironing board who keeps asking the scene to be replayed – an ad for the replay feature for Alexa/Amazon streaming. Four people surf the wind, gliding over the fields and through the forests, in an ad for Burberry. In a Starbucks commercial Gemma claims his real name of James. Sometime in the 9th Century a bunch of Danes ready to invade England are held up because their leader refuses to wear a helmet. Volvo said the ultimate safety test isn’t dropping their car from 100 feet, it’s transitioning to all electric as a response to climate change. Disabled athletes show how much determination they have to get into the Paralympics – they should have sports available to them because they are 15% of the world population, which is 1 billion people. Yesterday I wrote that I had read 45 books this year. Make it 46. I had started one with 230 pages that I thought would take a few days and into the new year. But this one is a graphic story, pages of cartoon style pictures and few words, and I finished in a day – not even staying up late. It is Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, a memoir. Maia was born female but definitely doesn’t feel female, yet doesn’t feel quite male either. Maia doesn’t like the nonbinary they/them pronouns so settled on e/em/eir – if e could work up the nerve to insist people actually use them. E took quite a while to figure out what eir identity is. As for orientation e settled on bisexual, though better yet, just leave sex out if it. It is quite a journey of self discovery. Yes, this is one of the books Republicans love to ban. In this case I see their point – a tiny bit. Kobabe includes images of menstrual blood (which for er includes a great deal more discomfort than the usual female), a dildo in a harness, and fantasies of two naked men. However, the need for this sort of book to be available to queer kids and the need for cisgender kids to understand what some of their peers are going through far outweighs any squeamishness some adults might have. I’m sure the kids are puzzled – you’re upset about images of that? Yeah, I know the real purpose of banning the book isn’t because of a few uncomfortable images, but to deny queer kids the understanding that what they are experiencing is just a small piece of the vast panoply of normal ways of being human, and thus oppressing them. Maia struggles for so long because e doesn’t know there are words for transgender and nonbinary, that such things exist. So buy the book, read it, and give it to the youth in your life. The news has been full of the big snowstorm that arrived just before Christmas and fouled air travel with thousands of flights canceled per day. Yes, the storm also snarled train, bus, and car travel (with dozens dying in Buffalo), but with a lot less consequence. In air travel, the worst is definitely Southwest Airlines who, a week later, is still stumbling around and canceling flights. There are now reports explaining why Southwest canceled nearly 16,000 flights over the week and will likely pass 18,000 flight before they’re back close to normal. Hunter of Daily Kos explained some of their problem is they don’t use the hub system of other airlines, instead they use a system with a web of routes and shorter flights. That means their planes and crew have a greater number of airports where they might be stuck. But the majority of the problem is that Southwest uses a scheduling system that’s 20 years old and crashed when overloaded. Wrote Hunter:

It's the central theme of capitalism, pandemic-era or not; if you design systems meant to squeeze maximum efficiency while spending the minimum possible on robustness, those systems will fail during unexpected stresses because that's what they're built to do.

The system is 20 years old because the board spent the money instead on paying shareholders. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos reported the company spent $6 billion on stock buyback – and the only reason to do that is to boost stock price as a favor to investors. And that $6 billion did not go to upgrading the computer systems. Southwest gambled that they could get away with it, but lost the bet. Though maybe the company leadership will get away with it. Pennyfarthing quoted journalist Adam Johnson, writing on Stubstack, who wrote:

All of this is a toxic brew of mutual antagonism. “Customer satisfaction” is at a 17-year low, and the only human face people can take their frustration out on is a low-wage worker. Obviously there’s never an excuse to yell at anyone in customer service. The point is not a moral one—it’s that it's by design. Indeed, corporate executives very much want you to vent your frustration on their low-wage workers. This way you get the vague feeling of agency and control in a system designed to remove any and all forms of it. Southwest Airlines ticketing agents, cashiers at Nando’s Chicken, low-wage call center workers for Verizon overseas, become corporate sin eaters, absorbing all the frustration and anger brought about by our greasy, cost-cutting executives. Add to this the severe mental and physical harms—and death—laid at the feet of low wage workers during the pandemic, and our built-in system of mutual antagonism compounds dozens of other stressors. We are conditioned to get mad at the human face we see before us, the “representative” of the company who personally profits nothing from our purchase. We are conditioned to get mad at the waiter when our food is late (and penalize this “bad service” with a bad tip) when the vast majority of the time it’s due to understaffing by a cheapskate boss. We are conditioned to get upset with the enforcer of arbitrary rules at a hotel checkout, despite it not being their rule at all. We are conditioned to be hostile to the very people we should have the most solidarity with.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and a few Democratic members of Congress are investigating the situation and intend to force Southwest management to compensate stranded travelers for the useless tickets plus the meals and hotel stays customers had to pay for. I hope they can make it happen. Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about Republican hypocrisy. She listed several examples, such as Sen. Lindsay Graham saying abortion law should be left to the states and then later proposed a federal abortion ban. And of Republicans yelling about voter fraud while they’re the ones indicted for voter fraud. Clawson wrote:

If you think that consistency within any specific issue is desirable, or that doing a turnabout on one thing represents hypocrisy, all of these things look ragingly hypocritical. But that’s misunderstanding how the right-wing thinks. It’s actually really simple: The right-wing belief system is that if it benefits them, it’s good. If they want it, it’s right. If it helps them gain power, it’s proper. ... So rather than talking about these turnabouts as hypocrisy, we should be talking about how they show that Republicans don’t believe the rules should ever apply to them. How they’re rejecting any accountability for the powerful even as they insist on the most brutal forms of punishment for people without power. How all they care about is themselves and what benefits them right now, without any thought to anyone else or a future past their own most immediate ambitions.

Note: If it benefits them right now it is good, even if it contradicts what they said at any time before. That is similar to a way I wrote about before – the conservative position can be summarized: “I can tell you what to do. You can’t tell me what to do.” And all of that is about someone trying to justify why they should be above us in the social hierarchy and oppressing us as part of their justification.