Clara Listensprechen's Cranny: Race relations in focus today, MLK's b'day

I'm white and I can't hide that. I'm in Oklahoma, and I can't hide that either, but I'll just address the people who have already judged me as being a stereotypical okie: you're prejudiced. I didn't grow up here--I moved here. And it's not because I find common cause with the Oklahoma history that you think you know. I've got a word for you guys to look up: redbone. If you're one of those who already knows what that means along with all its implications, you'll know exactly what I'm getting at regarding prejudice. If you have to look it up, I can assure you that you won't appreciate the full range of all that it implicates, but that's a good thing because it means you're not likely to be as prejudiced as those who use the term in their own lexicon.

But before I get into that, I'm going to address again the skeptic who thinks that if I'm a time traveler I should already know the future fate of PEGASYS. I've tried drawing you a picture and you don't understand. I could get into the mathematics of it, but I know you'll understand that even less. Permit me to take a different approach: stand me beside Stephen Moffat right now, and compare us as writers. Moffat gets the big bucks for figuring out time travel just enough to sound plausible for an audience to consider seriously. Two people on Facebook took it seriously enough to post a call for all time travelers to show themselves provided that they're visiting the present time from the future.

Now consider me by comparison: which of the two of us has a 10 year long trail of ~~frustrated~~ pissed off historians (very unprofessional, IMHO) to show for it? Moffat? Hardly. Of the two of us, I'm the one who actually knows what I'm doing; it's Moffat that makes stuff up. Two terms for you:

Amazon.com

Nate Silver
(also HERE)

These two have a firm grasp about what traveling to the future is all about. They get it, so even if you don't get it, that doesn't mean it's not possible. Chess masters get it. Good enough for me. The fact that remains is that people are still masters of their own fate as determined by their own here and now. Moffat uses phrases about rewriting time as a substitute for changing universes as I do. Those phrases are equivalent, and what we do agree on is that past and future history is a matter of record--not a matter of what any historian has anything to say about what happened or is going to happen.

Time travel to the future does NOT involve predestination, which you suggest is the case. It is not. People who think that the future is predestined are the same people who believe in other religious tommyrot, and if you want to discuss the religious tommyrot like predestination, let's take that out to the back of the woodshed. I'm not a rookie in that arena, either, as my long time buddy +Rasmus Gjesdal knows all too well. I mention Ras because if you take me up on this, odds are good to excellent that he'll chime in too, and I will not object.

Ras, if you're reading this, you might get a kick out of that thread because quite a bit of it was preserved from the old PBS Discussions Board, ha. I'm sure you'll recognize The Apostles Quiz. Ahh, good ole days. Now I'm gonna have to dig up Fred Nicolai's old bag of nuts. Boy, that was fun! ...or you might dig it up, Ras, if you saved any of that. BTW, Robert Larimer went over to MySpace after the board closed, and since the overhaul I haven't seen him, even on his old website. Me, I have some of antifascist's stuff saved in the musty archives somewhere too. Check the bottom of this page for images I'm sure you remember with amusement.

The task for everyone at any given point in time: Make every minute count.

"While you're hung up on yesterday, you've got nothing going today.
While you're hung up on tomorrow, all the good now times are slippin' away...
Try to live life like a lover, try to keep time from keeping you down.
There's only one way to make it--that's makin' every minute count."

---Spanky & Our Gang

Meanwhile, back to Topic A. The word "redbone" should have gotten the attention of a particular demographic in my audience, a demographic that would be familiar with the denotative definition of the term as well as the entirety of its common usage connotative definitions. The question that should have popped up is, how the hell do I know anything about that? Well, there's only one way a person can be familiar with common usage connotative definitions, isn't there. I apologize to the members of my audience who can't figure out this crypticism, but what I've doubtless done is touch a nerve, and I'll have to leave it at that, sorry.

Consider, also, the denotative definition of the word "prejudice". In the broadest common usage sense, it's a judgement one leaps to without proper consideration of sufficient facts at hand. In a legal sense, it's a judgment arrived at after careful consideration but intended to be held as applicable should a particular issue gets re-tried...you know, "dismissed without prejudice" or "dismissed with extreme prejudice".

Now consider what a gross error it is to render judgment on a person you don't know but you've convinced yourself that you do. It's more than an error when you render this judgment on another person and cause that person pain and/or loss or denial of access or service when you do that. What you've committed is a gross injustice.

MiniUPDATE: Thusfar I've referenced PEGASYS in a number of different posts. In one, I remember mentioning that I wasn't going to go to Huffington Post with the issue because after all this time has passed since the Off the Bus project (2008), and the launch of the new (at the time) version of HuffPo, they'd also made serious changes to their policy on an account holder's identity, and that a pen name identity isn't good enough. Well, after my long absence, I decided to visit HuffPo today only to be surprised at how my fan base grew even though I was long gone. I guess what I'm going to have to do now is establish my pen name as a real person or something--can't let my fans down!

Mini-UPDATE UPDATE: I'm as smug as a bug in a jug--I found a loophole in the rules. Logging in with my Facebook account gets me back into HuffPo without guff. It's official: I'm back on HuffPo! WOOT!!

It took me a while to find the World section on HuffPo, so for my blogger friends who want to keep an eye on that over there, here's a handy link for you. If I find a way to post about PEGASYS on HuffPo, it'll be in the Media section. It also looks like I'm going to have to start over again at the bottom, posting no articles as such myself, and because of the identity image issue, I'm afraid it'll have to stay that way. I still have Newsvine on MSNBC, though. I'm grateful for that.

Looks like HuffPo still has a record of this dispute, regarding an invite they sent me to work with Off The Bus again (previous: 2008). They were adamant about it and so was I, so I left.

Just for you, Ras! ^_^

I don't seem to have CMI's large version of that, sorry.
And for some reason I can't locate my Didieload Award. Dang. Still looking for that.

===================later==================

I found the preliminary jpeg file, but not the final gif file. So, here's the do-fer...