Rachel Maddow disappoints, again

The American liberal TV presenter and author Rachel Maddow just did a Reddit 'Ask Me Anything' and it just reinforced my disappointment in her. She got properly criticised on Reddit and that's rare from anyone other than the wingnuts. It's an odd thing, this free pass she appears to have, which I wish I'd read more about.

Maddow has an influential, great show, which covers a lot of territory that mainstream US TV (as opposed to somewhere like Democracy Now!) ignores. It is well-sourced and argued and Maddow herself is smart but also witty and good with the snark.

Her show is mostly US politics and very rarely covers international issues, bar America's wars, but that is hardly atypical for US TV. It does cover military issues a lot, unsurprising since that's what she wrote her book about. It has pretty much campaigned for homecoming parades and done a lot on veteran's issues.

In a US context she's practically a communist, but looked at from across the pond it's pretty safe stuff.

When she first appeared, on Keith Olbermann's MSNBC show, she was a breath of fresh air in cable news. A liberal woman who could argue really well and be likeable whilst doing it.

If you were British and paying attention to the presidential elections, both the last time and the one before, her show stood out from the rest as a very good one-stop to get a briefing from (as I detailed in 2008, the BBC's coverage really was awful, just reciting beltway thinking, as they did again in 2012). But for me, watching her show (and her), one instance piled on another to make me less of a fan and then something happened during the last election which made me start to not like her so much at all.

Here's a website which deserves more attention

A few days ago I read a fascinating report by the Caribbean gay activist Maurice Tomlinson. It explained how, slowly but surely, LGBT rights were improving on the island nation of Barbados.

This sort of story tends to not get widely read. And that's because it doesn't tend to get reported in mainstream media, nor even in gay media. For one thing it is too nuanced, you have to explain stuff at length, and it doesn't really 'hang' on one event.

Other topics do have outlets which do this sort of knowledgeable, backgrounded and internationalist reporting: Foreign Policy Magazine or The Economist immediately spring to mind. But LGBT stories? Not so much.

So I was pleased to discover that Tomlinson's report wasn't just circulating on activist lists and amongst the NGOs, it was published on a website I'd never heard of which has stacks of similar reports.

76 Crimes is named for the countries around the world which criminalise homosexuality. Current stories include one by a Ugandan updating on the situation with the 'Kill the Gays' bill, how activists in Cameroon are teaching health workers about gender identity and sexual orientation and another report on similar work in Singapore.

The website is the work of American journalist Colin Stewart but much of its contributions come from writers from all around the world. Stewart has pulled together some of those contributions for the book, 'From Wrongs to Gay Rights', money from which funds the St. Paul’s Foundation for International Reconciliation, which supports activists in many of those 76 countries.

When The Guardian is 'heteronormative'

'Heteronormativity' is the practice of assuming that the entire world is straight and that there is nothing wrong with presenting it that way. Words like that are not normally my favourites, anything requiring an explanation is usually dodgy and this one, as they often do, has an academic world source so should be automatically suspect. However I can't think of a better one to describe this way of looking at the world.

If you regularly visit the Guardian's website you may have noticed that they run little adverts (illustrated above) for their in-house produced 'Soulmates' dating service. These adverts exclusively present what look like heterosexual potential couples.

The first thing which struck me as problematic with this was actually not that I'm a raging gay activist scouring the internet looking to make trouble but that it made no business sense.

On the face of it, presenting the service consistently on the site as being for heterosexuals - first appearances count a LOT on the web, people barely glance at adverts - seems like plain bad marketing practice. Here's a Guardian 'profit centre' which could earn more (cough) 'pink pounds' if it actually promoted itself better.

The 'Soulmates' to be found on the website are definitely not exclusively heterosexual. In fact, the last time I looked there were 1,500 hits for 'man looking for woman' and 1,200 for 'man looking for man'.

Now if I was a raging troublemaker I might think of this as 'disappearing' gay people, almost 'closeting' them, certainly representations of them. My mate who writes the Fagburn blog has been documenting this in another area; how news websites keep on using cake-top decorations on gay marriage stories rather than photos of happy gay couples. Or when they do use photos their heads are cut off or they're viewed from the back walking down the street.

So I wrote with a positive inquiry and have a response. The images are "chosen automatically according to which profiles are proving to be the most popular on the site (the most-viewed, most-favourited, etc)."

It isn't a manual choice which profiles appear in the ads on the rest of the Guardian's website, but it is a choice to present one male and one female one.

I also got an answer to a question I hadn't actually asked, which is that:

Because the majority of Soulmates members are straight, this means that straight members are always likely to be getting more views and 'likes' than gay members, and therefore are much more likely to be automatically selected for the homepage slot.

This would be the service's homepage, not the Guardian's. But that shows an array of profile images, so I wouldn't have any issue with it.

They do know that a big minority of their users are lesbian, gay, trans or bisexual and, I'm told, are happy users of the service. So did they take my comments in the spirit offered in order to both better serve those users as well as their bottom line? Happy to report that it's a yes:

We are reviewing how we can make changes to this process to promote a more diverse selection of our users.

The 'fight online porn' crusaders' gay roadkill

Texas has become, like the Tennessee of the Scopes evolution trial, a modern day laboratory for the influence of 'Xstianism'. That's the spot on term invented for their sort of muscular, dominionist religiosity by the writer Andrew Sullivan.

Texan Xstians have taken over the body that decides what gets taught in the state's schools. Alongside the teaching of 'intelligent design' they want history rewritten to say things like that McCarthyism was a good idea and so was the gold standard.

Writing last year for the New York Review of Books, Gail Collins describes how the state's School Board members ..

.. seemed determined just to sprinkle stuff its members liked hither and yon, and eliminate words they found objectionable in favor of more appealing ones. Reading through the deletions and additions, it becomes clear that a majority of board members hated the word “democratic,” for which they consistently substituted “constitutional republic.” They also really disliked “capitalism” (see rather: “free enterprise system”) and “natural law” (“laws of nature and nature’s God”).

What Collins discovered was that this ideology was having a national impact in the USA because Texas is such a big market for textbooks and what can be sold to Texas can be mostly sold elsewhere. She quotes one expert saying that the proportion of social studies textbooks sold nationally that contain the basic Texas-approved narrative range from about half to 80 percent.

Books, printed books, usually expensive and arguably overpriced textbooks, are still bought in large quantities by students everywhere because they are a requirement. But elsewhere students look to the internet for information and what they will find there are barriers resulting from heavy, ideological influence from Xstianists. Recently joining the Xstianists at the digital barricades have been some other forces such as feminism.

Music · Sounds Of Blackness · Optimistic †&♥

Have loved gospel music since discovering Andraé Crouch in my teens. I didn't know it then but there is a strong gay participant in the African-American art form from where so many incredible singers have been drawn.

Sounds of Blackness are from from Minneapolis/St. Paul -- same place as Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and Prince.

'Optimistic †&♥', written by Jam + Lewis, is from their funky high charting point in the early 90s. It seems real for my relaunch of blogging :]

Watch/ listen to a live performance of Optimistic / Hold On (Change Is Comin') after the jump » »

Channel Four are idiots

Repost for Blogging Against Disablism, 2013.

Australian comedian Adam Hills has attracted worldwide attention for blistering comments he made this week about fellow comedian, the legend that is Joan Rivers.

Rivers has been slagging off pop diva Adele for her weight and Hills went to town on his show The Last Leg. He said:

How dare you make fun of one of the best female role models on the planet for the way she looks. Adele is one of the very few women in pop music that I want my daughter to look up to – and you’re making jokes about the way she looks? When you’re so insecure about your own face, you’ve spent more money on it than the producers of Life of Pi spent on that tiger?

And much more ...

An American blog I follow alerted me to it but the embedded YouTube clip has been taken down because stupid Channel Four made a DMCA take-down request. As it has for the many other attempts to put Hills comments up on YouTube.

Why? What possible negatives could there be for the clip going viral? It makes absolutely no sense.

I'm sure Hills is just delighted (not) at C£4's actions.

Perez Hilton has video up so you can watch thanks to him after the jump:

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

Dear oh dear.

The often interesting Tom Chivers gets his paunch on in the Telegraph arguing that Justin Bieber isn't very rawk'n'roll for apologising for turning up awfully late to a gig.

Apparently Guns'n'Roses are still doing it and that's what rock'n'roll is all about. He would know being a Guns'n'Roses fan and having been inconvenienced by them on one occasion.

Tom, sweetie. Your projection is showing.

Rock'n'roll was never just about consumption of Jack Daniels/'whizz' and stuffing the punters. Only in a Bullington Club world ... For the rest of us it's just rude. And Bieber is 'rock'n'roll' in the same sense that Macauley Culkin is a method actor.

There are limits. Aka 'cheating' as you may recall Johnny Rotten saying in the Julien Temple footage of the Pistols' last gig.

Grace Jones did this at a gig once in Oz that I was at. Appeared at 4am. That was about money. A diva can get away with it (just about), a pubescent, transcient pop phenom needs to say sorry to look after the income.

The Muslims who love the gays

Published 11 February, 2013 by Box Turtle Bulletin.


Last week’s historic vote on gay marriage in the British House of Commons was noteworthy not just for the quality of the speeches, such as this one by MP David Lammy, but also for how Muslim MPs voted.

Five Labour Muslim MPs supported gay marriage as did one Conservative. Three other MPs who could not attend had previously stated their support, two Conservatives and one Labour. Only one Muslim MP, the Conservative Rehman Chisti, joined the scores of MPs citing ‘religious grounds’ in their opposition.

Many MPs explicitly said that they took their orders from the Vatican, or cited Bible verses in the debate. That seven out of eight Muslim MPs did the opposite should be better known. It’s unfortunate that it is not as it would probably surprise many, although it should not.

Muslim MPs only arrived in any numbers in Britain at the last election but both locally in Britain as well as in other Western democracies numerous Muslim politicians have shown themselves to be gay friendly and supportive of LGBT rights. The sole Muslim member of the US House of Representatives, Keith Ellison, has a 100% Rating from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). HRC President Joe Solmonese calls him “a true champion”.

Although senior Muslim organizations joined the opposition led by the English and Scottish Catholic Churches to the marriage bill, you would hardly know it — a source of anger to some Muslims. In contrast to various Bishops, there have been no headlines about the latest outrageous statement from prominent Muslim clerics claiming that civilization is about to end.

Why not? Perhaps because any assumption that British Muslims are opposed to LGBT equality is somewhat dashed not just by these MPs actions but also by polls. One in 2011 found that British Muslims are more likely to strongly agree with the statement ‘I am proud of how Britain treats gay people’ than are people of no religion. Only Sikhs were more likely to strongly agree.

Hubristic web design

When I view a website I do it through a lens called AdBlock. It's a web browser add-on which automatically blocks almost all web advertising, thus making web browsing bearable.

Adblock is also able to identify every element in a website, thus allowing me to block things like hyper-irritating, corner-vision, flashing gifs. For almost every website I regularly visit I have used this feature to block at least one element.

Why run AdBlock? It's not some aversion to advertising, it's because, like most people in the actual, non Apple Store fetishist world, my broadband isn't that fast and is too regularly stuffed and my computer kit isn't that fabulous either.

Fact is that the real reason I use Adblock is because many websites are becoming as cluttered as Victorian living rooms. Weighed down with 'stuff' which is relevant to them but irrelevant to their users. And not only irrelevant but irritating.

The absolute worst example of this I have ever seen is on a website (disclosure, I have written for) called care2.com. A huge site, though not huge PR wise, that would be change.org (org = sic). It runs adverts as the background image on pages. This means that if you accidentally click on the background, which is pretty easy to do, you get automatically sent off to a 'sponsor' page. Surely a 'how to piss off users' 101?

And Think Progress. Your liberal audience may be well be hippys but at some point a bomb will be thrown if you persist in throwing up Rep. Keith Ellison-endorsed pop-up to 'encourage' people to sign-up for f**king emails. Dontchaknow pop-ups are prescribed in Xstian doctrine? Using them is like licking Beelzebub's anus.