Matt Damon’s obliviousness

The actor has a persona of an enlightened person so it was surprising to read an interview in which he claimed that he had just recently stopped using a slur term for gays after his daughter had upbraided him about it. His defense for using it was that the term “was commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application”.

He said his daughter had taken him to task after he used the word in a joke at a dinner party. “She went to her room and wrote a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous. I said, ‘I retire the f-slur!’ I understood,” he said in the interview.

Damon, who in 2017 apologized for saying sexual assault was “a spectrum of behavior” after a similar outcry, immediately came under fire from LGBTQ+ activists.

The admission is quite astonishing. If he was expecting praise for his newfound understanding, he was mistaken. The general reaction has been “What took you so long?”

Damon was born in 1970, one year after the Stonewall riots which brought to the public’s attention the way that the LGBT community was harassed by the police and the public and acted as a catalyst for the advancing of gay rights around the world. By the time he was a ‘kid’ of (say) ten years of age, the movement for LGBT rights was well underway. But even if he missed it and his family and peers did not correct him as a child, surely by the time he reached adulthood and entered the workplace he had to personally know gay people and be aware that such slurs are hurtful and not acceptable? We are long past the stage when people can use their childhood as an excuse for obliviousness about things like this.

The person who comes out well is his daughter for rebuking him. The only positive thing that emerges about Damon from this episode is that he raised a child who is willing and able to challenge parental authority when they say do something wrong. Most of the time children are more enlightened about changing social mores than their parents and we would do well to listen to them.

Film review: Athlete A (2020) and gymnast abuse

I had not been aware of this documentary that dealt with the massive abuse of women gymnasts in the US until three days ago when I was reading about all the turmoil in gymnastics. I watched it yesterday on Netflix and was just horrified that what it revealed was far worse than I had imagined. I do not follow gymnastics but was aware that Dr. Larry Nassar had been convicted and sentenced to essentially life in prison for the sexual abuse of girls under the guise of treating them for injuries incurred during their routines. What I had not been aware of was the vast scale of the abuse that goes on all over the country, with over 50 coaches having had allegations made against them about their predatory behavior but with the governing body USA Gymnastics doing little or nothing about it and even allowing them to move around. It reminded me of nothing so much as the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts. It seems like just as those two organizations provided an environment congenial to predators of boys, gymnastics did the same with girls.
[Read more…]

The bipartisan war on whistleblowers

When it comes to covering up the abuses by the government’s military and security services, all political partisan divisions disappear and the two parties become as one in prosecuting those people who have the temerity to leak information. This has happened repeatedly with whistleblowers and the government’s weapon of choice is the Espionage Act, something that strips defendants of most of the legal protections they are normally have access to and makes getting convictions easier and punishments harsher.
[Read more…]

The link between climate change and extreme weather becomes hard to ignore

We know that the relationship between climate change and weather is a statistical one, in that rising global temperatures will cause more extreme weather patterns to occur more frequently. But that causal arrow goes just one way, in that we cannot take any particular weather event, however extreme, and unequivocally blame it on climate change. This puts the scientifically minded at a disadvantage when arguing with climate change skeptics who have no compunction about taking isolated anomalous events (such as the recent cold snap in Texas) and using it to proclaim that global warming is not occurring or is a hoax. Most of us refrain from fighting anecdotes with anecdotes.
[Read more…]

Housing discrimination in the US

While much attention is focused on income inequality in the US, a much more glaring discrepancy exists with wealth. On average, the average Black person has just 13% of the wealth of the average white person. This is because most people’s wealth is tied up in their homes but for the longest time, Black families were denied access to buying homes due to racist polices. such as real estate covenants that prohibited the sale of homes to them, that were aided by federal, state, and local governments. As a result, they could not build up their assets and pass them on to their children, which is how much wealth is accumulated.

John Oliver looked at this situation and points out that when it comes to this particular issue, the individual cases of harm done to Black people is quite clear, with some of the victims still alive, which makes the remedy of reparations to right the wrongs, also clear.

By their friends you will know them

On Tuesday, August 3, Democratic voters will pick their candidate to fill the Ohio congressional seat that fell vacant when Marcia Fudge became secretary of housing and urban development. I wrote about this race before, how it reveals the deep neoliberal commitment of the Democratic party establishment, and the need to elect outspoken progressives like Nina Turner, who was a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders. Matthew Cunningham-Cook writes that the right wing elements within the Democratic party establishment, such as Hillary Clinton and James Clyburn, are joining forces with wealthy Republican donors and the members of the Israel lobby to support her opponent Shontel Brown.
[Read more…]

What can happen when you ‘do your own research’

Anti-vaxxers encourage people to do their own research on the vaccines. Doing research on anything is a good idea but you have to know how to do research. This is particularly important in the internet and social media age where one is flooded with information and most of it is of highly dubious quality. It is not simply a question of how many times a particular point of view one comes across or whether one personally knows the sender of the information. Those are irrelevant. One has to learn how to evaluate the credibility of sources and be aware of how risks should be evaluated.

From friends and relatives I get forwarded articles that have been circulating on the internet, asking for my opinion. If the article is unsigned or not from credible institutions or has no links to original sources, then I deeply discount what it says. The anti-vaxxers have been flooding the zone with misinformation and thus their urging people to ‘do your own research’ without telling them how best to do it is somewhat disingenuous since it will likely result in people arriving at faulty conclusions.
[Read more…]

Not all hypocrisies are equally deserving of opprobrium

Ever since Edward Snowden revealed the vast extent to which governments and tech companies collect data on each and every one of us, people should have assumed that anything they do is known or inferable since communication technology is so all-encompassing that we all leave a trail almost wherever we go and whatever we do. So we should live as if the details of our lives can be revealed at any time. This is not a good way to live but it is the reality.

But this causes a problem for those who are pretty much forced to live part of their lives in secret. This is the case for gay Catholic priests. While we may wonder why they joined and stay in an institution that shuns them just for who they are, there are plenty of scenarios by which someone could end up being a prominent member of an organization that discriminates against people like them and not everyone is in a position to quit. But that does not mean that they deserve to be outed for their private activities, as happened with a high-ranking administrator of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
[Read more…]

How billionaires use their sports teams to avoid taxes

The invaluable investigative site ProPublica has been mining its trove of confidential tax documents that were released to it to expose the many ways that the wealthy members of the oligarchy exploit the system to make even more money and avoid paying taxes. I posted recently about how they revealed how wealthy people in the US abuse the Roth IRA provision that was designed to help ordinary people save for their retirement. Their latest report shows what is going on with sports teams.

Wealthy individuals buy sports teams (or a share of them) and it is assumed that they do so at least partly because they like the glamor associated with hobnobbing with elite athletes and hosting dignitaries in their luxury boxes. But those are not the only perks. ProPublica shows that these teams are also a tax dodge that enable owners to pay taxes at a lower rate than even the highest paid athletes.
[Read more…]