Tag: Ukraine

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Algorithms, Censorship, and You

Have you been the victim of a static algorithm? You might be entitled to compensation. Well, no, probably not.

I’m a member of a Facebook group where people express candid opinions. Recently one of the active members had a post removed by FB because, it said, its algorithm identified inappropriate language (we think it was because of a four letter word associated with fornication and other fun activities). Now, this group has adult members who in the real world use some pretty salty language, and we would be shocked, shocked, I tell you (I said, clutching my pearls) if everyone suddenly went Church Lady on us. The algorithm apparently has set parameters for what is fine to post and what is not without taking into consideration the person using it, the group, or the situation. This is not AI as far as I can tell, because Artificial Intelligence learns and might in time figure out that this group likes its colorful language.

So, here it is–the problem of censorship in its infant phase, telling you what is and isn’t acceptable in a private group. Mind you, I totally agree with the unacceptability of hate speech, bullying, denigration, and all the other stuff that is not acceptable in just about every circumstance. But, I sort of wonder how these authors would promote their books on Facebook or other sites that make determinations about the use of certain words. And to top all that off, that same word shows up elsewhere on FB. Why one place and not the other?

As I have said many times, I don’t believe in censorship (except every copy of Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster should be burned), but if we must censor, shouldn’t it be from a set of agreed upon standards? Shouldn’t it be consistent, fair, take into consideration context? But that is harder than it might seem. In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked to describe his test for obscenity. He responded: “I know it when I see it.” He probably didn’t. We have been struggling with defining limits on speech and other forms of expression for a very long time.

We as a society have agreed to remove some words from use because of their charged past. Recently I was watching the television series about Bass Reeves, the first Black deputy U. S. Marshall west of the Mississippi, based on a biographical book series by Sidney Thompson. When a White woman, the former owner of Bass and his wife, offers to take them back into servitude and to be kind enough to keep their children from being “field n*****s”, it was profoundly shocking to hear the “N word” spoken. When Jennie slaps her and throws her out of her home, I was cheering along with everybody else, I’m pretty sure. Words do have power, and words can hurt. But knowing when to use those words can be important. I’m sure the actress who had to utter that word struggled to keep from flinching, but the power of that ugliness was necessary because it conveyed the ugliness of the time.

I think most Americans believe we are free and open minded. Yet a tiny handful of people have been challenging and succeeding in getting a huge number of books banned. Minority opinions have overridden the majority and demanded removal of access to literature often about other minorities, underrepresented people who struggle to have their voices heard.  It seems like a kind of madness for one tiny group to silence another tiny group when most of us want to hear what they have to say so we can judge for ourselves from a position of knowledge and exposure to different ideas and points of view.

High schools and middle schools have become a hot bed of censorship.  We appear to be so terrified of offending and controversy that we silence needed dialogs. The students of Jackson-Reed High School were denied the opportunity to host a  Palestinian cultural event, and the same school pushed back on teachers covering Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus” and “Night” by Elie Wiese which both deal with the Holocaust.  The thing is, if Vladimir Putin is determined that the Ukrainian country and culture have no right to exist,  and Benjamin Netanyahu thinks 25,000 dead Palestinians are not enough, perhaps children should be taught and adults reminded what genocide looks like.

So back to our algorithm. Who decided f*** is not okay for Facebook posts in a members only group? Why is it okay in some places and not others? Where is the contingency, the consideration for who and why it is used? Can we challenge it? (Apparently, these decisions can be challenged.) Or should we just let someone else decide what we can and can not say? To that I say, f*** no.*

*This is not a members only blog and anyone can find and read it, so I will in this instance self edit. However, if you would care to hear my vast array of colorful nouns, adjectives, epithets, and verbs, feel free to contact me, and the horse I rode in on.

Image: Me and the horse I rode in on. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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The Empty Table

My favorite Christmas movie is the 1951 film Scrooge (as it was called in England, but A Christmas Carol in the U.S.) starring the wonderful Alistair Sim. And my favorite scene, and I am not alone in this, is when Scrooge steps into the room adjacent to his bedchamber. and sees the entire room decked with greenery and a huge man dressed in a fur-trimmed robe, the Ghost of Christmas Present, enthroned upon “turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.” That is how Dickens describes him in the original 1843 story. A fire roars in the fireplace, and further light comes from the torch the Ghost holds that is shaped not unlike a cornucopia. This is the feast that is Christmas. And who does not try in some way to keep the feast, whatever winter holiday you celebrate?

Feasting is integral to our winter holidays, and in fact, to most celebrating of any sort. Yet in the United States, according to a November 29, 2023, report from the U. S. Department of Agriculture, in 2022, 12.8 percent of U.S. households were food insecure at least some time during the year, meaning they had difficulty providing enough food for all their members. That translates to about 44 million people, 13 million of whom are children. And why, in the richest country in the world would that be?

I just finished reading Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted. In the book, Desmond re-examines the debate about how and why poverty exists in America. The good news is, poverty can be defeated. The bad news is, the U.S. isn’t doing it–at least not very well, not as well as other developed nations. The Washington Post tells me 15 states with Republican governors have refused U.S. government funding for summer food programs for children who depend on school lunches the rest of the year to feed them. The reasons vary from, why do this when there is an obesity problem in the U.S. to “I don’t believe in welfare”. Meanwhile, children go hungry.

It has been argued that famine is not the result of lack of food but of the lack of distribution. In fact, the first food aid programs in 1939 were to help farmers during the Great Depression who could not sell their excess harvests and to get the food that would otherwise go to waste to people who were malnourished or even starving.

In my house, I have this strange idea that no one, man nor beast, should be hungry. We feed the birds, plant things that provide forage and nectar, compost our food scraps that help keep the opossum fat, donate to Harvesters, and worry over whether the little spider that lives behind the trash can in the bathroom has enough tiny bugs in the winter to get by. We take food to neighbors and gratefully receive it from them in return. Food is love, to be shared. It is also the most basic of human  necessities. Droughts and floods destroy crops but not in every part of the world all at once. Those disasters can be mitigated by people of good will who recognize the need and find a way to help.

The use of food as a weapon of war, or as political leverage is beyond the bounds of human decency. People in Gaza and Ukraine should not starve.  People in poor neighborhoods, urban or rural, should not go without. There is plenty of food, if only we share it, find ways to distribute it, make it available through food assistance, community gardens, donations.

Scrooge, in the end, finds his heart and learns to share the bounty of Christmas all the year. Our winter feasting may end when we decided to get back on that diet and lose a few pounds, but sharing our feast throughout the year with those who are hungry should never end.

Image: No food. By Marilyn Evans

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Killing the Dog

One famous maxim about writing is “Don’t kill the dog”, its premise being readers will tolerate a lot, but killing a beloved pet is beyond the pale—you risk losing your readers who can forgive a lot, but not that. Of course, rules are made to be broken if there is a good enough reason. Old Yeller and John Wick both kill the dog. John Wick’s story has to justify the murder and mayhem that ensues because a horrible injustice was done to him and his dog, Daisy. This is how we know what bad people John is up against so anything he does is justified (and they are trying to kill him as well, so, self defense). It may be cheap and cheesy short hand, but it gets the job done. Old Yeller, like so many children’s books, is trying to teach kids a lesson that is good for them. I abandoned children’s books from an early age because of the “lessons.” I asked myself, incredulous, the Little Princess is supposed to suck up all the abuse she got when she was suddenly poor, then all was forgiven when she was rich again? I don’t think so.

Children’s literature disgusted my grade-school self, so I turned to murder mysteries. Death usually happened early and off-stage. The rest of the story was about catching the bad guy(s) (usually through cleverness and perseverance) and dispensing justice. I didn’t need those depressing children’s books. I learned my “good for you lessons” from “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”. The bad guys may not always have been caught by the authorities, but the universe had a way of evening things up. One way or another, justice came and no dogs were harmed.

Beyond avoiding killing the beloved pet, how authors write about death and violence depends on the genre. The mysteries I was reading when I was a child were mostly “cozies” with characters like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple or Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. But not all mysteries are cozies, and I have enjoyed gritty novels, films, and television programs as well. These can get extremely violent, and the morality sometimes is ambiguous. No one would describe the writing of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, or Thomas Harris as cozies. True crime can be the most violent of all genres, sometimes with little or no justification for the violence, but hopefully, because the crime has been discovered, solved, and written about, justice was finally served. In the end, most readers and viewers want some sort of justice, even if it is the Twilight Zone kind.

You may recall I’m a fan of horror fiction. Once upon a time, a lot of the violence in horror was fantastical and often had some moral basis underlying it. Fairly stern censorship also limited the depiction of violence during certain eras, but a sub-genre of horror has arisen in the last decades that is increasingly violent. Though “classic” horror still persists, non-human monsters and psychological thrills have in many cases given way to slashers and gore—who dies and how can be pretty much no holds barred.

Our views on violence have changed over time, and our attitudes are affected by the context. How would you write this story? A man slaps another man in a very public setting to defend his wife’s honor. At a certain time and in a certain place, this would demand a duel. In a tragedy, the loyal husband would be killed or maimed. A comedy, a mystery, a romance, a horror story would likely all handle the situation and its outcome differently. In real life, Will Smith gets shunned, and Chris Rock gets sold-out audiences. Assaulting someone in public is not acceptable, we say, suggesting nowadays we have a lower tolerance for violence in real life than in fiction or in the past. But do we?

A man claims self defense, and is free to walk the streets after killing someone. If the man “in fear for his life” is a White police officer and the “threat” is an unarmed Black man, how do we feel about that? How do we read it? How do we write it? Or if a man has a permit for his gun, is startled awake by yelling men crashing into an apartment, and reaches for his gun, is he standing his ground and defending himself? And if the intruders turn out to be cops with a no-knock warrant and possibly the wrong apartment, is that different? Is it a horror story, a tragedy, or an extremely dark comedy? Does race, gender, nationality, social status of the victim or the cops make a difference? Should it? I image how you read it and write it, may very much depend on your personal experience.

If you have a friend or relative who has been the victim of violence, or you yourself have been victimized, you might respond differently to a fictionalized account of an incident that resembles your own. If it’s personal, all abstraction is gone—this was real, this happened to me, and I’m not detached, I’m not okay with it.

How realistic is the violence in modern fiction? How realistic should it be? A convenient fictional device is to hit someone over the head to render them unconscious, removing them from the action but not killing them. In reality, this kind of attack can lead to permanent brain damage or even death. In the novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”, Stephen King describes a beating that renders a man permanently crippled. This is entirely possible. People who are violently attacked don’t usually jump right back up and carry on as though nothing has happened. Few authors describe the true toll of violence on the body and the mind.

Writers are told there can be no story without conflict. One quick and easy route to conflict can be a fight and a body count. The people who die may become ciphers, not real, not important except to show the prowess of the one killing them. In the real world, dead people have families and friends who mourn them. I have long thought that if more stories told about the aftermath of violence, the emergency rooms and months or perhaps years of physical therapy a victim might endure, it might seem less attractive to those who try to emulate their fictional heroes or anti-heroes by assaulting others. The quiet scene of the family at the grave side does little to show how damaged a death leaves family and friends. Yet for all the discomfort and reluctance authors (and perhaps their publishers) may feel, some stories have addressed the aftermath of death—its effect on those left behind, the ones truly grieving and feeling all the pain. Some novels and memoirs deal honestly with the pain of loss. Do we really want to read about this? Isn’t it painful and uncomfortable? Should it be?

I wonder how we will write the violence of the war in Ukraine. The Russian soldiers have been told a story—that Nazi’s are committing genocide against Russian-speaking people—so any violence they commit is justified. But even if they believe this, how could anything justify the torture, rape, execution of non-combatants, the indiscriminate deaths of children, pregnant women, and old people? Even animals are not safe from the violence. Ukrainian cows have been shot dead, in one instance while they stood in their stanchions waiting to be milked. I doubt there is any evidence that they were Nazi cows. Once violence is unleashed, it is often hard to contain. The Russian soldiers seem to have lost sight of what it is they are trying to accomplish, unless the death of every living thing in Ukraine is their true goal.

I fear violence and death casually depicted in fiction may desensitize people and should be used carefully, yet truthful depictions are required to ground a story in the sometimes grim realities of the world. Storytellers have a responsibility in how they portray those realities. I believe we must write honestly about the consequences of violence, the harm that can be inflicted, mental as well as physical. One of the things that makes Stephen King a great horror writer is that in as little as a paragraph he can make you care about a character so when he kills off that person in the next paragraph, you are horrified. And we should be horrified when someone is killed by violence. Anyone. Not just the dog.

Image: Bourbon, a dog who is very much alive. By Laurie Jackson-Prater.

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Making Families

A friend once invited me to a party with a lot of people she worked with. I didn’t know anyone there except her, but I’m a social critter so that didn’t stop me from interacting with this gang of university types. After all, I read a book once (and had recently dropped out of a PhD program, but that’s another story). There was this guy surrounded by a few folks who was spouting some crap about how the American family was imperiled and dead or dying. Never one to be shy about keeping my opinions to myself (especially when there is alcohol involved), I challenged him. My view is that family is so important that if we don’t have one or if the one we have fails to serve, we create a new family. My friend was utterly humiliated–the guy was a professor who taught family relations or some such. But he WAS wrong. I’ve seen all kinds of families that took the place of absent or dysfunctional families. I belong to some.

Social, recreational, mutual support, religious, and other kinds of groups can become the family we need when we need it. We will seek out people who provide emotional, social, and maybe even financial help. We need that. We crave it. And if your birth family doesn’t provide what you need, you have every right to join a different family, one of your own choosing, your own creation. The internet has made it easier to meet and become part of communities of support and to help in forming new families to fill the needs of those who can not get what they so desperately need from their biological kin.

This morning I read about Stepan, a social media sensation with over one million followers, an influencer who also happens to be a cat. He used to live in Ukraine. Suddenly, Instagram and TikTok posts from Stepan stopped. His followers waited an anxious two weeks before they finally heard that he was safely in France. His human, Anna, and her two sons were able to escape the heavily bombed city of Kharkiv. Once they were in Poland, help came from The World Influencers and Bloggers Association and the organization’s CEO and founder Maria Grazhina Chaplin. Last year this organization named Stepan one of the world’s top “petfluencers.”

Through the media, social networks, and other resources, a great many of us have joined an international family that  watches and waits anxiously as our distant, new loved ones deal with the atrocities of an unprovoked assault on their home. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become our favorite cousin, loved and admired by the whole family, while Vladimir Putin seems like the creepy uncle you wish your Aunt Betty would divorce.  Through social media and instant news, we are closer than ever to people we can and should love and support.

As winter turns to spring, we all pray this war will end and restore our family and friends, human and animal alike, to a peaceful world. When it is finally over, rebuilding will be a long and difficult process. Hopefully the people of Ukraine will get some help from their new world family. In the mean time, I’ll be planting sunflowers in my garden.

Some information for this post came from the Washington Post article “How Stepan, Ukraine’s Most Famous Cat, Escaped the War to Safety” by Taylor Lorenz.

Image: Sunflower seeds. By Marilyn Evans.