sundries

[rm]

Waiting for it to be a good time a day to try paying Patty on her India mobile to see if I can actually get through to her.

Writing meeting with Kali tonight.

What we learned from yesterday's non-scientific poll:

- If you're Jewish, you probably know what blood libel is
- if you're not Jewish, you have a better than even chance of not knowing

- Anecdata (my favorite made-up word ever) suggests that if you are from the US, not Jewish and not a medieval history scholar or hobbiest, your likelihood of knowing the term "blood libel" pre-Sarah Palin drops to around 35%.

- Anecdata also suggests to me, and I wish the polling tool on LJ was better so that I could actually do this and run the numbers for real, that people who were raised more religiously, REGARDLESS OF FAITH, are more likely to be familiar with the "blood libel" term.

- General poll problems include self-selecting respondents, comparatively low numbers of Jewish respondents, and the ways in which LJ response samples don't necessarily reflect the general population in terms of age, income and gender. In general, my gut tells me that a similar poll done on a general-population sample would show an even lower awareness of the meaning of "blood libel" among non-Jewish folks.

I have a lot of strong feelings about the current political mess, and I don't know how to express them, without being part of the problem myself. But when I hear "at the end of the day we have to remember we're all human and we all love this country and be civil" I wonder why I have to do so much work to be gentle with people who think me an animal or a demon (Jewish, gay, yadda yadda). I also know I should shut the fuck up, because dude, everything is already ugly enough, but it feels yucky.

I have to drop like $250 on DVDs this week (after just dropping about $70 last week) for various scholarship I'm working on. I'm a little less than thrilled, but I've developed my data plan and spreadsheets and schedule and structure and all that shit I never usually do in advance, and think I'll be able to knock this work out with a fair level of efficiency.

If you have projects I should be aware of for tomorrow's trash day on LfT, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Book releases, crowd-funding things, specific charity drives, etc. No guarantees, and PLEASE DON'T PM ME. I really hate the LJ system. Comment here or email to racheline AT gmail DOT com.

Comments

[skelody.livejournal.com]

Welp, I dunno if you're following along with the progress of the Genderplayful Marketplace (http://genderplayful.tumblr.com) that you linked to previously, but if not, they've surpassed their initial fundraising goal and are now putting out a call for vendors/sellers (http://genderplayful.tumblr.com/post/2678221088/vendors-its-time-to-sign-up). /boost?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oh cool. Yeah, I'll totally update on that.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Woot! I did a bit of a signal-boost for them in my last linkspam, but as I'm not on Tumblr I hadn't been paying attention to developments. (Wonder how much they've had donated to their "anything but Paypal!" fund?)

[elusis.livejournal.com]

You could ask in comments here - looks like as of the first of the year, there were a few hundred bucks in from the anti-Paypal fund, but that was when the donations were only totaling about half of the 5K goal. I'm going to guess about $1200 in total because right now the Paypal widget is showing $6800 but I think the announced total donations are around 8K.

[skelody.livejournal.com]

I joined Tumblr so I could stop manually URLing stuff, but it was 60% for this :P They've got... over a thousand (http://genderplayful.tumblr.com/paypalhaters) on the anything-but fund, it seems, although since it's manually updated I dunno how recent that figure is.

[freyas-fire.livejournal.com]

If you're getting any of your DVD's thru Amazon, fire_and_a_rose has an Amazon link on her blog where she gets a small percentage if you use the link. http://byherownwings.net/

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oh, groovy. I'll do so. Makes the HORRIFYING amount of money I have to spend slightly less awful.

[eandh99.livejournal.com]

On the "blood libel" thing, which I missed last night - not a history major, not Jewish, but well-informed enough (probably from a mix of my religious upbringing and my PhD in French, hello Dreyfus Affair) to know what it means myself. Can I believe that Palin herself didn't know the origin of the phrase? Absolutely. Do I believe that her scriptwriters didn't know? Now there my cynicism takes over and I find it very hard to believe that phrase was not a deliberate choice. And I too have a lot of trouble with the "be nice to people who would like to see you dead" advice.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Okay, so your feelings about politics, resemble my feelings far too much.

I'm trying to keep my distress regarding my own political climate low, but yesterday I had a rude awakening with friends of mine and I feel pretty helpless (what with needing to be gentle, 'cause I'm a bleeding-heart queer) and damn, it feels good to know my situation is not special!

[sethg]

I think there is a big and morally relevant distinction between “there are people in group X who mean us harm and we want to be sure that the legal system protects us from them [anti-discrimination laws, criminal sanctions for hate crimes, etc.]” and “there are people in group Y who mean us harm and we need to stock up on guns and ammo to prepare for civil war”.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Right, but let's safe people get more civil, what is the appropriate response on my part to a group of people who civilly argue that I should not have civil rights. Obviously, I'm not going to go around advocating assassination, but what are my moral rights to self-defense both rhetorical and not?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thank you for raising the question.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that an answer exists.

I see people behaving all sorts of ways, and no excellent method of telling what outcomes are most likely.

Considering that you're not that likely to pull the overall situation very far in any direction (you're a good writer with a larger than average audience, but you're hardly the only one), I don't think it would be irresponsible to experiment with showing more anger and finding out what you think of the results, both for yourself and for other people.

[xpioti.livejournal.com]

IME turning the situation around on them works, but only if they're willing to listen. If they're not willing to listen, there's not much you can do and remain civil. :|

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

"at the end of the day we have to remember we're all human and we all love this country and be civil"

I feel that this would sound much better if there was a period after "human" and that was it. "love this country" is an unnecessary assumption/condition, "and be civil" is a non-sequitur.

[malle-babbe.livejournal.com]

I wonder why I have to do so much work to be gentle with people who think me an animal or a demon (Jewish, gay, yadda yadda).

Just commenting to say that I totally hear you on this, even though my background is different.

A few years ago I had a job in an arts center at a local branch of a state university. For a while we had an artist do an anti-Iraq war installation, and one morning the director told me that their was already at least one complaint.

From there on out, I started to bring pepper spray to work.

Overreaction? Not when stuff like this has happened at other places showing art on the subject... (I don't know the official protocols for deeming something triggery, but the article does describe an assault.)

Attacked for art, S.F. gallery closes (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/05/30/GALLERY.TMP)

If someone was going to take a swing at me, I wasn't going to fold. I would not start the fight, but I would finish it.

At the time, I was living with my folks, and did tell my Mom about my worries and my purchase of pepper spray. At one point in a family conversation, she mentioned the pepper spray and why I bought it, and all of a sudden, I am being told by my that I was overreacting and being paranoid.

Le Sigh.

The real kicker is that back when Martin Luther King Jr. birthday was being made a holiday, someone made a late night death threat call to my family's home, due to the fact that we had the same last name as a then member of Congress. Dad called the cops.

So he can protect himself, and I am cannon fodder?

I truly don't know how to unpack that. I get told that I am loved, but then scolded for wanting to be safe, being assertive and not hiding my anger when being treated badly, and taking steps to protect myself. One protects things that have value, and I am not being protected, nor allowed protect myself.

Am I dense or getting my head messed with?

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I will be civil to people who think I am less than human. Nice, no.

Your poll was very enlightening as to how much of an outlier I am. (No religious education, either!)

[kathrynrose.livejournal.com]

There's a site called surveymonkey.com that will allow you to embed a poll in a website or send invites via email for people to take a poll. Basic polling is free, but for a really small membership fee you can also sort your data by "answered yes to Jewish and no knew what it meant," etc.

Not necessarily for the current question, but in case you ever have a question about which you'd like to be able to analyze responses.

[ravenskye8.livejournal.com]

I have a lot of strong feelings about the current political mess, and I don't know how to express them, without being part of the problem myself. But when I hear "at the end of the day we have to remember we're all human and we all love this country and be civil" I wonder why I have to do so much work to be gentle with people who think me an animal or a demon (Jewish, gay, yadda yadda). I also know I should shut the fuck up, because dude, everything is already ugly enough, but it feels yucky.

This. So much This.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

I'd heard of blood libel before this mess, but I only learned the term a few months ago, when a Jewish friend of mine raised concerns about the US version of Being Human (which will feature a Jewish vampire).

I was very surprised that I hadn't come across the term before, because I DID know the history associated with it -- the way that Jewish people have been blamed for Jesus' death, and that Jewish people were accused of eating babies in order to justify medieval massacres, etc -- it was just the term itself that I hadn't come across.

[rm.livejournal.com]

the US version of Being Human (which will feature a Jewish vampire)

OMG, that is... if it's done in an aware way, could be brilliant. If it's not, it's going to be very, very ugly.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

Yeah, pretty much. I'm hoping very much that there is at least one (maybe more) Jewish writer who is going to be handling this, as as you say, it could be brilliant. It could also be full of major fail.

[xpioti.livejournal.com]

Before you mentioned it, I'd never heard of "blood libel". I spent my time last night learning about blood libel and never thought to answer the poll. :)

[taffimai.livejournal.com]

For tomorrow's trash day, there's a book drive to try to begin to reconstruct a Queensland fan's lost library. I know the people involved and I consider them all trustworthy.

Link here: http://anomilygrace.livejournal.com/524227.html?style=mine