LGBQT

I was sitting in a friend’s office – I seem to be doing that more frequently these days – when we started talking about what I had skimmed in the headlines. Something about this agreement being a sign of the Apocalypse or something.

Clearly, I’m joking, but maybe I’m not. I’m not invested in this particular conversation, but my friends are so it’s an academic exercise at best. They were fishing for what I thought about having children learn about what I can best describe as a new concept of sexuality and whether it should be taught in schools.

Whenever I hit a topic like this, I admit my biases up front because I generally don’t view things the same. In this case, I glanced at the headlines, laughed a little and moved on with my life because any agreements are because of trade, and the reason Trinidad and Tobago is not in as good a position to negotiate anything is because of the mismanagement of the government over the years. I’m not pointing at one administration or party. I’m pointing at both.

So for me, that summarized the issue well.

But my friend has kids, nieces and nephews that could be affected, and I did notice it in a few headlines I looked at in the store. Front page news, this, because homophobia is still pretty stylish in Trinidad and Tobago. Getting into shades of sexuality in a country where heterosexual men and women ‘wine’ at, on, or through each other might be easier except it’s, for some strange reason, not. Most people I know my stance on it: I. Don’t. Care.

And no, that doesn’t mean I condone or condemn anything. I keep my sexuality tidily locked up somewhere. I think it’s in the back behind my old jeans in the closet. I could go look for it, I suppose, but what I do know is that if your sex life doesn’t affect me, I don’t care. It’s not my business. You like your sex, that sex, that’s great. Once everyone is a consenting adult and you don’t feel this need to give me details, I’m great. I’ll congratulate you if you find someone you’re happy with, but I’m not interested in the dirty details.

Others, however, seem to care a lot about what other people do and want to control it, and this has caused people to stand up for themselves, which has in turn caused a bunch of hostility when at the core of it all it’s really about authoritarianism versus liberty. We’ll get back to that point.

This being Sunday, I decided to poke around about this ‘Samoan Agreement’.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the Catholic News TT gave us, “Economic Carrots with Ideological Strings“. Archbishop Gordon is more overt with, “‘EU imposing ideology that is not ours’“, which was even echoed in Barbados. Other articles from Trinidad and Tobago seem to rehash the same thing.

Then I caught what the Prime Minister of St. Vincent said and he mentioned the 400 page document.

It struck me in reading all this uninteresting drivel. So I found the Samoan Agreement here, which links to the 403 page PDF of the Samoan Agreement. Strangely, at no point in the document itself do they call it the ‘Samoan Agreement’, which is kind of dumb. Yet, it is the Samoan Agreement, apparently.

It has nothing about abortions, homosexuality, etc. It talks a lot about human rights, it’s worded ambiguously enough that wherever a nation’s legislation and morality lands, it’s pretty simple. It requires no changes to the curriculum. Go search the document. If you find something, do something wonderful that no one has done yet: Cite it.

It may make babies be born naked, and we all know they have the right to be clothed at birth, but since this unlikely to be possible soon, I’d suggest we table it.

So now I’ll get back to that authoritarianism versus liberty thing again. Authoritarianism is blaming another for authoritarianism because authoritarianism loves the whole ‘us‘ and ‘them‘ argument. Authoritarianism is about doing what someone else wants, liberty is about doing what you want without impacting others.

From what I read, the Samoan Agreement simply says, “We agree to a standard of human rights which are necessarily ambiguous because no one can agree on them in practice.” Sex education? Sure, but it doesn’t specify a curriculum. It doesn’t really specify anything.

They’ll say, “Well, one day it could mean…” and maybe that’s true. But it is not this day. No one is being threatened by the agreement. In fact, religion shows up 4 times and they’re not telling people that they have to be of a certain religion.

Human Rights include the right to be properly informed. If you’re going to start a panic, at least cite where you got it from.

I wrote in response to something today¹, “We’re all pretending to be someone else.”

We all are. Every day. We hear about masks, we hear about all sorts of other things. Generally speaking, most people who know me will say I am as I present myself, for better and worse, but I’d rather be judged by who I am than live too many lies at the same time.

I write that because I’ve been watching this ABC News series, “Age of Influencers” (Hulu), and there’s some pretty serious stuff in there that should have people really considering what media they consume. The psychology of selling seems to have eviscerated the psychology of sanity in the cases presented.

If you’re on the Internet, you should watch “Age of Influencers”. Since it was produced in the United States, it has that bias. We had someone in Trinidad and Tobago, a man, advising women to wipe themselves with newspaper if they had a yeast infection, and other ‘bush remedies’, which should be embarrassing but apparently isn’t to this particular fellow. I won’t even bother linking him.

Stupid shouldn’t be famous.

This lead to some introspection, too, about how I curate my thoughts online in writing. I don’t know that I would have what it takes to be a caricature of myself on Instagram, or TicTok, or whatever. The land of duck lips and caked on makeup with filters and… I’m not sure I could do that.

I’m more of the ‘chat in the coffee shop while disheveled’ sort of person. I’m not going to get dressed up to stand in my own home. That seems silly. In fact, I will go ahead and say that it is silly. I don’t know why people are attracted to it, but it’s like moths to a candle.

No, I write about things that are on my mind and as people do follow my writings (thank you for those who do!), I hope to do something strange and weird to the Internet: Stuff of value. I’d like people to read something on my sites and say, “that makes sense to me”, or, “I need to think about this.”

We’re stuck on this planet, and we can chase each other’s wallets around or we can try to figure out what we’re doing, whether we should be doing it, and if we should be doing it how we could be doing it better.

I think about things. Just a few moments ago I was contemplating whether our ability and need to detect weather has diminished as our progress allowed us detect weather. During the Ice Age, things were cold and miserable. When you woke up, you didn’t need a weatherman to tell you that. It was likely just rated by how cold and miserable that particular day was.

We take ourselves way too seriously, and by that I also mean all that we have created in modern society, from currency to marriage. We’re people, but we’re silly people and because of that we should not take ourselves too seriously.

Right now, there are things going on that we can’t control within our own society, and most of us are just too busy leading silly lives to notice.

Everyone’s in a hurry and mostly not getting anywhere. Some of us spend our entire lives waiting for a moment that will not come, all because we were told in our childhood by people we trusted that it would come – or we found it in a book we believed, or maybe we read some rabbit entrails. They are equally arbitrary, though reading rabbit entrails might tell if you’re pregnant.

We’re out fighting over pronouns. I have no other real quibble with LGBQT+ folks but the pronoun thing is a bit of appropriation, because in the pre-pronouned world, when you wrote, “They are not happy”, it meant a group of people was not happy. It had commensurate weight because of the implicit number of people.

My issue is one of language. The rest of it is quite simply not my business, just as my sexual identity is not yours. Do as you wish with whomever you wish with consent, you don’t need mine to exist. And hey, use the bathroom. I don’t care about that either. Seems to me those are petty things.

Women’s rights? Well, I don’t know why people turned the clock backwards. I certainly did not want that, and to add to that suddenly humans who at least had functioning testicles for a while are competing against women in events? Ladies, I apologize, this seems a bit much for any group.

Women are going through a rough period, but that doesn’t mean that they should take it out on us men either. Instead of tearing men down, maybe elevate the ones who you do like. There are plenty of good men on the planet who don’t call themselves feminists but believe in overall equality, or better, equity. Yes, it’s a patriarchal system, but that system didn’t benefit all men, it benefited very specific groups of men. Go look up where ‘whipping boy‘ came from.

There’s a point to this. I am biased. I do have biases. We all do, and if we admit them, we can work around them. As an example, a majority of people on this planet are sexist to an extent based solely on which gender they want to have sex with.

Lately I’ve been writing lately about a lot of the underlying concepts we have to use to understand the implications of this Information Age. Most lately that has been about artificial intelligence… and I have been doing it with 2 approaches: ‘introducing tech/artificial intelligence to humanity‘ standpoint and then from the ‘introducing humanity to artificial intelligence/tech‘. The concept of bias plays a very large part of that.

Understanding our biases is important for our future. It’s something we can do. If there’s something I’d like to influence you to do, it would be to examine your biases. Examine what you believe and compare it with what you can demonstrate or observe.

Think. I want to influence people to think. It’s a romantic idea, I suppose.

¹Someone, once again, had had someone create a rogue copy of their Facebook profile and claimed to have been hacked. Not the same thing.

RealityFragments.com

Personal scribblings of Taran.

Much Ado About Samoan Agreement.