I have heard a few stories lately of hollywood celebrities who have decided to wait until gay marriage is legal to get married themselves. The latest is Full House star Jodie Sweetin who was proposed to this last week by her long time boyfriend and "baby dady" to their child. They have not set a date because they are waiting for gay marriage first - no matter how long it takes. This supposedly passive aggressive form of protest is not one I would see being all that effective. Why? Because, who cares if a celebrity gets married or not. It isn't necessarily hurting society as a whole for this to happen.
Generally protests are designed to disrupt economic activities or political movement in order to encourage change through disruption or economic injury. But this? Think of the gay wedding planners who won't be getting paid to put on her wedding? They are the one's getting hurt, not society.
I do find this to be a very odd form of protest. I am not sure there is much value in doing so. Nevertheless, to each his own in sharing their voice.
Quite true. What would you suggest Jodi do instead to pressure lawmakers to correct what she perceives as a gross injustice?
ReplyDeleteI am not going to suggest what she should do because I don't agree with her position. But there are pretty well understood methods of expressing your voice on any political matter. If she wants to know them, or if you do Charles, I suggest taken a class.
ReplyDeleteI am simply saying that this does not constitute a protest, or anything like unto it. How many law makers are sitting there going, "I just read that Jodie Sweetin is not going to get married until we allow gay marriage - let's hurry and change the law so that she can get married."
And Charles, "Gross injustice?" Really, don't you think that is hyperbole? Gross, maybe. Injustice, not hardly.
We have gone over this before. They don't have a different right than straight people do, they just don't want to take advantage of it. There is no injustice here.
It's a win win really. Now we don't have to hear about their "gross injustice of over spent weddings" and the subsequent divorces when their fickle self promoting marriages fall apart. -GWH-
ReplyDeleteYou'll note that I said "what she perceives as a gross injustice". While I agree that Jodi's form of protest is inadequate, I am trying to raise the question "What form of protest would be successful in our current political environment?"
ReplyDeleteJodi is expressing her voice, if not through her actions, through the publicity her position is getting in the media. She is trying to amplify her voice in the public arena by taking an action that garners publicity. Not too shabby actually. Obviously you and I, not having the name recognition that comes from being on a long-running TV sitcom, don't have this protest method available to us. If we pulled this stunt, no one would notice or care. At least Jodi's protest got noticed, although it's unlikely to be successful.
I just wish celebrities would focus on stuff like hunger in Africa, and then protest by self induced fasting until the problem is taken care of. A protest like that would accomplish something...namely ridding the world of pompous self appointed liberal agents of percieved social injustices. -GWH-
ReplyDeleteThe casue of African hunger is a lack of rule of law, education, republican style government and capitalism. Most of the worlds poverty stems from a lack of capitalism and effective government under repulican principles.
ReplyDeleteFirst person to equate the word "repulican" in this context here with the American politcal party of the same name shall be known as naive and unread.
Republican, not repulican. I often type too fast. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteGlad you corrected that, I was thinking you might be naive and unread. Also, are there pompous self-appointed conservative agents who belittle social injustice? Just wondering.
ReplyDeletenope, just celebretards. The average every day working joe doesn't have time or the medium to tout his perspective to the world to fight all the injustices in the world. He's too busy working trying to overcome his own daily injustices which he accepts as just another fact of life, which is - life is hard, now get over it and go to work. -GWH-
ReplyDeleteSource of much of the worlds problems: Uneven distribution of free market capitalism.
ReplyDeleteMore like uneven distribution caused by so-called free market capitalism, but why quibble? GWH is right that the average joe simply doesn't have time to get involved in fighting injustice, and the worse the economy gets the less time he will have. Injustice however, will probably get worse until the average joe can no longer avoid fighting it.
ReplyDeleteTrue free market capitalism will indeed have uneven distribution, but that's the incentive in it all. You have the freedom and ability to change your station in life, along with taking upon yourself the risk of such a venture. If you fail, then you eat it, not spreading it among everyone else, as if it's everyone's elses' problem that you failed such as the banking industry has done to the American people. What we have is not free market capitalism, it is chrony capitalism as you coined it earlier, but where you want to go for full fledged control by the government as if that is somehow better the rest of us on this blog are saying....whoa, hey, ease up on all of the government control and interference and lets get back to the principles that made us the greatest nation in the history of humankind. -GWH-
ReplyDeleteWe should get back to some of those principles we had in the past - like high tariffs that protected American manufactures, and strong financial regulation that protected the assets of Americans from the speculators, and strong labor unions that helped spread the wealth generated by America's business success to more and more Americans.
ReplyDeleteGo back further. I'm not talking the Carter era.
ReplyDelete-GWH-
Got a question for ya Charles, define "speculation" for me please. I am wondering if you are referring to the futures markets. Many who are totally ignorant of what the futures market is and does like to label that as "speculation" without realizing that agriculture, resouce extraction and all kinds of manufacturing could not happen without it.
ReplyDeleteI dont want to assume you are equating it with speculation though. So I am actually curious to know what you define it as?
Pahoran, the commodity market question is really quite simple. Anyone who purchases a futures contract on a commodity and is in a position to actually receive and make use of the commodity themselves is an investor. Anyone who is simply buying and selling futures but has no capability to or interest in accepting delivery of the commodity in question is a speculator.
ReplyDeleteThe speculators I was referring to are banks and other financial institutions who are using depositor's money (or money they are loaned from the Fed) to speculate in derivatives markets for example. I don't know of any actual productive industry that is dependent on financial derivatives, CDO's, or credit default swaps.