Grandiose

Tribal peoples feel a shift in the earth's magnetism, astronomers note an increased rate of expansion of the universe, and North Korea launches a celebratory missile trial, landing just short of the state of Hawaii. Why? You know why. I, Ray Ray Montoya, have deigned to return from my self imposed exile in order to inform, entertain, and enlighten you.

 I talk to the the people, the masses, the fan base and other whom I must inspire. They occasionally enlighten me regarding a word the people or hipsters are familiar that I am not. One such word is "shipping," have you heard of it? As I understand it, "shipping" is a verb that refers to fan-fiction that pairs together two characters who never quite "sealed the deal" in authorized shows or publications. For instance, pre-season 7 Agent Scully and Agent Mulder action is "shipping." In the same vein, fan written speculations involving Captain Picard loving down Dr Crusher would also be shipping. I had never heard the term until someone used it, and I demanded explanation. After that, I began to see it everywhere.

Facebook, like an increasingly less satisfying drug, is hard to stay away from. From a logophile standpoint, Facebook is only interesting in that it generates new terminology all the time! It seems many conspiratorial women (sorry, too much meth in my cornflakes) maintain "frenemies" on their friend's lists, those who are acknowledged in public for reasons economic and social, but who are secretly distrusted and kept close because close is where one keeps her enemies. Sexist of me? A woman tells me that this is done because being friends with the friends of friends maintain peace. Perhaps, and to be fair, my stupid little  conclusion has not been peer reviewed. To be even more fair, I know of men who have had their bosses on the friends list-never a good idea. In some cases, it's cost a dude dearly.

Another word? "Vaguebook" I think that word is self explanatory-one someone posts something intentionally vague and out of context on Facebook. For example, if I were to say "kisses that taste like barley soup" people might think I'm actually making a serious point or referring to an event in my life. Wrong!  I have just recently made a policy of not committing the sin of Vaguebook because I don't want to  be accused of spreading rumors, gossip, what have you, and our words are more important than we seem to think in "The West."

The blog is in hiatus, but not dead.

When What You Don't Know Says A lot.

Hello, my pretties.


   As of late, your mad scientist has been giving his victims,er, subjects a battery of tests to see how big their individual vocabularies are. Sadly, it is not uncommon for students to graduate from a failed school district with reading and writing skills at the 5/6th grade level. This isn't news, however. As a brilliant social scientist, I was much more intrigued to observe the common misunderstandings of  certain words amongst my test subjects. 
 Some of the mistakes were obvious: "vocation" was often mistaken for "vacation." So too was it common for my lab rats to confuse the word "fabricate" with "clothe."
  Less obviously resolved is the tendency for students to believe that the word "extrovert" means a "main idea." My dear legions, why do you think this is? The word clandestine, which means secretive or covert, was often thought to be a synonym for "noble." I can only speculate that the letter combinations like "destine" and the word "clan" bring to mind great families and royal bloodlines, but I can't be sure. The only potential confusion that makes a sad, grim kind of sense to me is that many of the testers, who have come from poor backgrounds with unstable family lives, conflate the word "diversity" with "separation."

                 ending on a less pleasant note,
                            RRM.

YouTube, Russian Antisemitism, And Even a Little Word Nerdery

     YouTube is a wonderful concept and website, and yet it is sadly true that spending a lot of time on  YouTube in not necessarily the mark of an intellectually curious or well informed person.  Let's come out  with it: I watch an awful lot of professional wrestling on YouTube, and I've never uploaded anything, so I'm in no position to throw stones about people wasting their time on the internet in general or YouTube in particular. There are some channels that I feel are worthwhile on YouTube however. YouTube is one of the best vehicles for exposing the misconduct of public officials-think of the famous police brutality videos that have gone viral-"Don't taze  me, bro."  There are a lot of international perspectives available on YouTube as well-some quality reporting not available via local television or cable, really.  Even so, I am starting to suspect that their are no good sources for news on YouTube, just some occasionally insightful videos. Even establishment journalism turns over a few rocks. I used to watch the Young Turks- hosted by Cenk Uygur, who had a brief run with MSNBC. Cenk is intelligent enough and sometimes funny, but often his commentary makes up 90% of a video, and I'm often more interested in raw footage. I am still subscribed to NDTV, which provides great coverage of the Chinese news and events. I thought I had hit the jackpot at first; it was good journalism coming from a Chinese perspective-then I looked at the channel and noticed that they broadcast out of the United States!  Then there's Russia Today. Russia Today -one of the most popular YouTube accounts extant. Russia Today provides more coverage of American police brutality than the other networks,  and it gave the Occupy movement that I was sympathetic to an enormous amount of coverage. News is presented in a professional format, and it certainly couldn't be accused of being bought and paid for by American corporations. No, it could instead be accused of being bought and paid for the by the Kremlin because, well, it is...  It becomes painfully obvious when watching Russia Today that their interviews and discussions include only one source or spokesperson. Civil libertarians, peace activists, scientists, entrepreneurs, Marxists, fascists, diplomats, whoever, are interviewed and given a forum with no debate or opposition whatsoever. Beyond that, none of this scrutiny gets applied to  to Mother Russia. Any coverage of American foreign involvement comes from an opposite perspective- in some ways it's refreshing as the Arab Spring has always had threatening undercurrents and American support has been suspect. All of the sudden we're back on the side of Saudi bank rolled fundamentalists again. Whatever, it's very clear that Russia Today  supports the Russian government's geopolitical agenda. This includes critical coverage of Israel.  Russian criticism of Israel! Russian criticism of Jews!  Criticism of the cruel Zionist occupation of parts of Palestine is valid, but Russia criticizing anything Jewish arouses my suspicion. It's not hyperbole to state that the nation of Russia invented the pogrom.   The noun Pogrom derives from a Russian verb to "wreak havoc or destroy." Soon enough, the word became synonymous with Russian  police or constabularies putting up the "closed" sign and allowing anti-Semitic rioters to brutalize Russian Jews. Long before Hitler's atrocities required the invention of the word , genocide, the (attempted) murder of an entire race, Russian bigotry resulted in the need for the word pogrom.
 Am I biased and self-righteous? A bit. I am prone to be dismissive of Anti Israeli coverage from the  media of a nation with the largest Neo-Nazi movement on earth. I was further irked by Russia Today giving the spokesperson of the fascist Larouche cult an open floor. So too has this cult been accused of antisemitism. On the other hand, YouTube videos and comment threads are hotbeds of antisemitism. Perhaps, just as the E.P.A. tolerates limited amounts of toxins the air and streams, I should just accept that some media outlets will just have to operate at a 15%  level of antisemitism. After all, if your favorite book had one page that was ripped or written on, you  still wouldn't  trash the entire novel.

                                           sarcastically,

                                               Ray Ray Montoya

    P.S. This whole topic brings to mind several interview's with Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat. Borat told interviewers, " At first the Khazakistani censors were concerned with the level of antisemitism in the moviefilm. Then after review they decided there was just enough."

An Island of Chauvinists?

By some accounts, 2009 saw Great Britain's standard of living rise above those of Americans. I'm assuming that meant that Britons are living better, but mayhap it just means that percentage by which their quality of life has improved was significantly higher than the American growth. I don't know. In any event, this was three years ago, but for quite some time now a small percentage of Britons now seem to think that they've entered some kind of superior standing and freely insult and characterize Americans as stupid, fat, chauvinist, just generally inferior. There's some legitimacy behind these criticisms as America, located in the heart of capitalism and wide class disparity, seems hellbent on destroying social services, cutting rather than expanding the social safety net, and doing all this while fighting wars of conquest in order to maintain a fossil fuel habit that is unsustainable. A certain reactionary strain in our nation's spiritual life is an impediment to our thinking as well. But then America is still at this time, the world's largest economy and military superpower. In some ways, our problems now become the world's problems soon.

Indeed, the United Kingdom's relatively high standard of living isn't quite as solid a foundation as it might seem. The youth riots of last summer  attest to that and they seem to be the exemplification of the increasing amount of youth violence and discontentment that nation is experiencing.  A restless and somewhat extremist Muslim population, again largely youthful, has been linked to terrorism and has been inflammatory to the general public to say the least. In response, bigoted, far right fascist groups like the English Defence League and the British National Party are aggressively mobilizing in the streets, protesting Mosques and spewing their hellbroth of extreme nationalism/ Neo-Nazi ideology. These fascist or crypto-fascist groups are far more overt and prominent than their American counterparts.

A return to a great and imperial Britain is, of course, a nostalgic dream for many British reactionaries. Great Britain was one of the few other nations to commit troops to America's invasion of Iraq. This is a collective blind spot in the British political street. A famous headline in the U.K. asked "A Nation of Idiots?" about the U.S. as a result of the electorate's reelection of George W.Bush. This was stupid for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that in both the 2000 and 2004 elections, voter fraud was a heavy factor. This was also hypocritical as not too long afterwards Tony Blair, who played a big role in involving the U.K. in the Iraq debacle, was reelected. Moreover, though the United States initiated and led the Iraq occupation, the American public was always heavily divided and largely skeptical of the Iraq war. Not since the Vietnam War, where there had been conscription, had the cities, capitals, and campuses of America been so full of protesters and radicals.

It's likely that, as a species, our sense of national pride provides an ego boost and national difficulties are hard to reconcile, so it's much easier for some Britons to project onto the United States all of the problems that are insidiously and slowly undermining the United Kingdom as well. America the uneducated and obese is not alone as obesity and failing school systems are increasingly a problem in Great Britain.

The bottom line is that Americans are preyed upon by the forces of commodification and crony capitalism-forces western Europe has more ably resisted, but is not immune to.  Hopefully, the U.K. will continue to resist capital's pernicious influence, or they may exchange the inaccurate stereotype of unattractive red hair, terrible teeth, and shabby dress for their new stereotype- overweight junk food eating illiterates. In the mean time, it's best for workers of the world to unite and to avoid cheap stereotypes.

Fag

If "slut" is a word many women use to describe other women who don't model feminine virtue then men use the word "fag" in the same way to describe non-compliant men. I don't think I have any good friends at this point who use the term "faggot" in a serious way, so you'll have to forgive me if I access past high-school memories to make my point.

Obviously, "fag" is often used by men to describe other men who they suspect are attracted to or have sex with other men. It's also used to describe men who don't seem to conform to masculine expectations. Men who aren't physically strong, who dance a little too fluidly, who express  certain emotions a little too easily, who prefer to hang out with women, or who prefer fruity drinks with umbrellas and maraschino cherries earn this term. I've heard this hate speech used more than once in situations where I suspect the accuser had not bothered to actually consider whether or not the accused actually slept with men or not. In any case, it's someone calling someone else a name because they don't like the other person's behavior. One man assumes another man is bound to follow a certain code, just as he is. As I said earlier, there are not Laura Ingalls Wilders anymore, nor are there chastity belts; there aren't any Daniel Boons ar Davy Crocketts either. Name calling makes you a hypocrite.
Of course, faggot is an inherently ugly word. Faggots originally meant burning sticks. Homosexuals were burned to death in the past, so thus the conflation.

The "Slut" word.

In a fit of brilliance as an amateur social scientist, I posted the other day on Facebook "You're a slut, but you're a nice slut." The responses were interesting, but that's another post. To me, the notion of female sexual morality based on how many or how few men you have sex with is relative and makes more than a few women hypocrites. We've all been there when a woman sees another woman, who is usually attractive, wearing a midriff or booty shorts or whatever, and the woman observing her then let's loose with the hatin', "What a slut." Alternatively, she may be in some kind of competition to get the attention of a man with another woman. If her rival seems to offer"it" too freely, then she is also a "slut" or "ho," "scank," "hoochie mama," "whore," "tramp" or any other derogatory term. When catfighting ensues, I wisely and paternally settle it by saying "Ladies, ladies, compared to your grandmothers you're both sluts." This, of course," assumes none of the grandmothers in questions were prostitutes. "You see girls, assuming your age is around 25-30 years old, many of you have already had 5,10, perhaps even dozens of lovers, ranging from fiances to flings. Why shouldn't you? With proper use of protection and birth control, there aren't necessarily any negative social effects." 


One of the sluts then replies,  "Yeah, but professor Montoya, shouldn't it be special? I mean is it moral to give it to just anyone? Doesn't it say something about a woman's morality or even her self esteem?"


As I am the expert, I get to answer a question with a question, "Forgive me for this alarming question, but how many men do you think your grandmother had sex with before she was married? Maybe one or two at the most? 
After looking at me with profound disgust, she responds "Probably not too many, if anyone." 


I reply then, "Of course, we know that there was more activity back then than anyone cares to admit, but certainly a bit less of it. Birth control wasn't as available. And if the women of the Grandma generation knew that a woman had 10 lovers in the past, and she wasn't married, then what do you think they would've called her?" At this point, the woman in question breaks down, sobbing,  "Oh God, I'm a rancid, disposable slut. Let us return to the values of our forefathers and......."


I quickly intercede, "No, no, no, there's no call for that. I have no problem with people maintaining their chastity or virtue, but I think it's a far greater transgression for those who live in glass houses to throw stones. Everyone is a slut compared to someone. The truth is if you aren't undermining committed relationships intentionally, spreading herpes, getting pregnant by absentee fathers constantly, then it ain't no one's business! By all means, fuck who you like as long as you're safe!"


Seriously, I  think people should maintain their self respect and standards, but that might not be affected by how much skin you do or do not show or whether or not you enjoy casual sex. Oddly enough, the original meaning for slut was a lazy housewife. I remember reading a centuries old greeting card at a museum "You've slept all day. Get up and get a broom you lazy slut!..."


Men are the biggest hypocrites on the "slut" issue. Aside from the fact that many men would tell you that they seek out as many trysts as possible, they also, in many cases, call women "sluts" for doing exactly what it is they'd like them to do.


If you're still insisting that we need to cling to some kind of traditional morality where these matters are involved, ultimately, I don't disagree, but I'd caution you that you getting too moralistic might mean your more  flamboyant friends being called "fags" unwed mothers getting scarlet letters, and general stigma for those with regular human appetites.