As I left the house this morning the ground was still icy, but air temperatures were above freezing, and as I anticipated catching a ride in an overheated car to a cafe kept warm by the baking of all those yummy wheat-based pastries I'll never taste, I strolled out over the frozen ground in a T-shirt dress--beneath my blanket shawl--and canvas shoes. It's warmer today. The wind was still chilly but it didn't bite into me anything like the way the wind was biting just last week, when I was wearing boots and that snowproof over-dress between winter-weight clothes and the blanket shawl. Zero degrees Celsius feels warm by comparison with zero degrees Fahrenheit.
Two unrelated status-update-type things need to be posted today: official pictures of Samantha-kitten, who thinks she's Queen Cat while Heather is m.i.a., and an official comment for our Russian e-friends.
Last week I posted Samantha-kitten's first "interview," but didn't have photos of her to add. This week I have Samantha's first photo...
Not her most flattering angle, as she glared warily at the cell-phone camera, but progress is being made--she didn't try to bite the camera. (Also, during the weekend, Samantha let me touch her paws without nipping or scratching.) She's still extremely suspicious of anything going on in the air above her head. This may be related to the early conditioning that's made her a jumper and climber. She'll try to grab anything she suspects of being food out of my hands...by the Patchnose family standards Samantha has no manners at all.
Anyway the picture does show the distinctive patches of black, white, and shades-of-orange on her face. She may actually be some sort of cousin to Heather. She shares Heather's father's body shape, extra-long tail (both Pitt and Samantha have to hold their tails up or curled while walking), mostly dark color, and tough, wary personality. She has dainty little paws unlike Pitt's huge polydactyl paws, or even Pitt's brother Damian's normal-shaped but extra-large paws--but she could be Pitt's granddaughter or great-granddaughter through feral cats that have ranged around town.
(Pitt, as in "black as the...," stayed feral whereas Damian tamed easily. They were brothers abandoned in the same time and place. Both were always polite to me, and Damian was adopted and neutered and became a little girl's house pet, but Pitt looked mean and could be mean. I don't know whether Pitt's still alive somewhere; I've not seen him lately.)
In her second photo Samantha had been taking a cat-nap, or kitten-nap, and woke up just in time to blink at the camera. Yes, she does have adorable, cuddly-pet moments as well as growly, touch-me-and-I'll-bite ones...
Now about the Russians...Recently my Twitter page has been acting strange, and I received an e-mail alert from Twitter that my account was being investigated because apparently I'd followed or been followed by Russians on Twitter.
Problem? None was mentioned, but of course I've seen all those non-news stories about U.S. voters having been unethically, immorally influenced by evil, lying, cheating Russians who may have posed as U.S. citizens online in order to influence our vote, aaaggghhh...
Official statement: I, the writer known as Priscilla King, voted for Ben Carson based on his books and reputation. (I don't know him personally, but admire him enough, and distrusted Trump and Clinton enough, to feel that in 2016 wasting my presidential vote was worth it. GBP had the pleasure of voting for a presidential candidate she really liked in 1980 and 1984; I've had to pick the candidate I most wanted to vote against in every presidential election of my lifetime, and did not want to lose my first opportunity to vote for one I really liked.) Adayahi supported Trump early in the campaign because he approves of Trump's successful-self-made-businessman image. Grandma Bonnie Peters voted against Clinton because she disapproves of the whole Clinton clan. I don't even know how other members of this web site voted but I doubt very much that Internet connections had anything to do with it, since they spend so little time plugged in to the Internet.
Here's the problem I see, though. I have no problem with people of any nationality as human beings. The Internet is global; I see that as a potentially good way people can speak our truth, break down stereotypes, disprove propaganda, etc. etc. It's also a potential way people can cheat and exploit one another but I think the best way to prevent that is for everyone to keep real personal information out of the Internet. I like that Live Journal is Russian-based and Blogspot is automatically published in international "editions" with URL's that end in .nz and .ru and .fr and so on. I follow several people who blog in English from other countries and would enjoy being able to follow more of them.
Whether Twitter has a problem with certain specific countries having access to Twitter, I don't know; that would be Twitter's problem not mine. My current policy on following people on Twitter is: news sources, elected officials, writers I read, and e-friends I e-know fairly well, only. For about a year I would follow people who were following me, but this led to a messy Twitter feed and I had to unfollow a few accounts to be able to find the news items in among all the irrelevancies.
The computer has consistently reported this blog having lots of Russian readers, and also Ukrainian and occasionally significant numbers of Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian readers. What they're getting out of this web site I wish I knew; I wish they'd use the automatic translation feature and comment.
 |
| How factual are these stories? Who knows? It's comedy, but he really did visit all those places... |
What comes to mind is one of P.J. O'Rourke's stories, in (IIRC) Republican Party Reptile, where he talked and drank with a few Russians he met around the end of the Cold War. They translated a toast for him as "To Mother Russia: who comes with a sword, dies by the sword," and he drank to that. Then he taught them the one that goes (more or less) "To the United States: who meddles with the eagle must learn how to fly," and they drank to that. Everybody was sort of wary and defensive, like Samantha-kitten--but everybody wanted to practice peace and even something in the way of friendship, and they managed. I'll drink (coffee) to that.
When I read foreign election news--even election news from different States, usually--I remember that it's not my election. Usually I'm glad. Elections to the U.S. Congress do have some interest for residents of different States, since up-and-coming Congressmen from other States are potential presidential candidates or cabinet members. (In Alabama's special Senate election earlier this winter, the age of the candidates involved ruled out that consideration. In the cases of relatively young Members of Congress like Rand Paul and Mia Love, otoh...) Elections in other countries...bleep would I know who's the best representative for those people or why? When you really think about issues rather than just supporting a party, it can be hard enough to work out what's best for your own community.
I feel that way about foreign readers' opinions about U.S. elections too. Foreign readers' insights into issues may be useful. Foreign readers don't have a vote for an actual candidate, though, for a valid reason.
Even in Virginia my e-mail sometimes reflects passionate divisions of opinions between people who identify with the same political party, in different sides of the State--and these are apparently valid, plausible disagreements about the effects a specific bill might have on different communities. Currently I'm seeing intense debate about whether one specific bill, which my Delegate happens to be backing, is more likely to empower people who can hardly pay their winter electric bills to start harvesting and selling electricity to our local utility company, or empower a different local utility company to encroach on other people's property in a different part of the State. This is not a dispute between good and evil people, or even good and evil corporations--corporations are amoral, driven by greed and checked only by how immoral their customers are willing to allow them to be. It is, so far as I can tell, a dispute about how to word a basically good bill so that that bill can become a law that's equally as good for flatlanders as it is for mountain people.
(I'll say this to correspondents from further east. I have privately e-mailed Delegate Kilgore about this. What I said was basically that I'm praying for him "harder" than I've ever prayed for him before. I believe he and the bill have good intentions; I'm praying that those good intentions can be secured in laws that won't admit abuses of our district as well as yours.)
Sometimes truth has to be hammered out like a piece of hot iron, even when people consider what's best for one town, so if people have opinions about what's best for a whole country--and that country is not even their own--they need to be prudent about how they communicate those opinions. Blatant cheating, pretending to be a member of a community you've never even visited, never serves the Highest Good of All.
Yes, there are people who encourage that. I used to get e-mail from some fiscal conservatives in California who wanted more comments on issues discussed on a California news site. No problem, until the news site started trying to filter out the out-of-area comments by asking commenters to enter their zipcodes. "Use my zipcode," a correspondent invited. No, thanks. Some things need to be remembered regardless of where people live, but I do not, in fact, live in your community. And though I've written lots of reviews based on research about what customers say about products I've never used, I don't want to post any outright lies in reviews that claim that I, Priscilla King, have used those products.
Some foreign writers can and do write well enough in English to pass tests designed to guarantee clients that writers they hire have "native fluency." I don't want to encourage these people to pretend they're U.S. citizens in order to qualify for the odd five-dollar hack writing job, but I do feel empathy for the ones who try it...and respect for the ones who succeed. On Twitter, where flawless English spelling and grammar are not required...I may feel a bit judgmental about the people who've paid foreigners pennies a day to follow, like, and retweet their products (or political campaigns), but it's hard to feel anything but sympathy for the writers. Some of them worked jolly hard to learn a fairly difficult language and construct screen identities that suggest that they're natives of places they've never visited.
I'd like to encourage them to out themselves. Be honest. Use sites where you're free and positively encouraged to post from where you are, as who you are. If your real name is Olga, your real residence is Moscow, and you like or dislike a U.S. politician because you believe the stated policy X will affect you in the way Y, this U.S. reader is interested in knowing that. Use a cartoon picture and a screen name like Natalya, in order to protect the privacy of the real Olga, but tell us you're from Moscow. That's interesting...and it helps break down stereotypes that work, in the long run, against the interests of people from your country doing legitimate business here in the United States.
If I followed any Russians on Twitter, I have no idea who they are--probably people I didn't follow very long because their irrelevant conversations were clogging the feed, but at least their Twitter page fooled me on the day I visited it, so I salute them. Your English, your ability to post clever one-line jokes and cute pictures, made the grade! Cheers to you! Now please use those talents for good purposes. If you have a legal right to use Twitter from Russia--I don't know, these things change--set up Twitter accounts that admit you're in Russia. If not, use Google + or Live Journal instead. Do what you want to do; be what you are.
The more all of us can stop growling and nipping, start purring and cuddling, the better off we'll be.
(This is Samantha's very first picture...you can't really see Samantha, so it doesn't count, but maybe somebody out there will enjoy the butterfly.)
No comments:
Post a Comment