Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 9, 2022, Winnipeg, Manitoba A11SUNDAY, JANUARY 9, 2022 C M Y K PAGE A11 ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM ARTS ● LIFE I LIFESTYLES D E AR MISS LONELYHEARTS: My in-laws went rogue with gift-giving for my little one this past Christmas, even though we provided a list. They are overly generous, I must say, but they ended up buying an enormous amount of unwanted things (not a single item from the list). I’m left with feelings of dread and guilt. How long do I keep the items before I can donate them? I don’t want to offend anyone, but I also don’t want to just fill my house with things, since I’m making my own efforts to declutter. My little one doesn’t even particularly like or pay attention to these items. I’ve spoken to a few friends and this rogue gift-giving sounds pretty universal. How do I navigate this? What do most people do? I’ve had frank discussions with my own family, but I don’t feel comfortable doing this with the in-laws. — Overgifted, Manitoba Dear Overgifted: “Going rogue” is different from “going overboard” — it’s ignoring the rules set out. You gave your in-laws a list of pre-approved gifts they probably didn’t ask for. Most people wouldn’t feel like “hopping to it” if handed a list. The fun for them is shopping for items that express their love and a feeling of fun. Something else is going on with you and the in-laws. It sounds like a power struggle. Do you feel pushed around or outdone by your mate’s family? You are so upset by these gifts, you use the words “guilt” and “dread” and can’t wait for the earliest date to divest your- self of them. It’s about more than your decluttering project, isn’t it? Why do you take issue with relatives giving your child lots of gifts, when many families would love it? If this stems from pre-existing boundary issues with your husband’s family, that should be something you and your part- ner address in the near future. If you can’t talk to his family togeth- er, then your husband should talk to them alone on behalf of you both, as they should love him too much to create a big rift over this. As for getting rid of the gifts, put most of them in a closet. If an in-law asks where they are, say your child doesn’t seem ready for them yet, but will probably be interested later. Dear Miss Lonelyhearts: I fell in love this Christmas season with another woman. I’ve known her as a friend for a long time. We’d been fighting the attraction for a few months, but ended up declaring our true feelings before Christmas. We stayed with each other at her beautiful condo for 10 whole days and got along perfectly. She asked me at midnight on New Year’s Eve if I’d move in with her, and I said yes. We’ve known each other since high school and have been close friends, though we always had other partners. Both of us have been out of the closet for some time, though not with our families. I said, “We should tell our families we’re a couple before we move in together.” She said, “Why invite discussion? Let’s just do it and let them speculate.” What do you think? My family are open-minded and would be disappointed if I wasn’t honest with them, especially since I still live with them, and we’re close. — Excited But Confused, St. Boniface Dear Confused: If the decision is going to cause debate with your new love’s family, she’ll want to handle it the way she suggested — on her end. And, why not? You, on the other hand, are luckier. You’re free to tell your more liberal family you’re a couple, without a hassle. Though they’ll miss you at home, they’ll probably be fine with your moving in together. Neither one of you should insist the other follows her lead with the disclo- sure, because the families are different — and you two want this to be a happy situation. Your love will tell her family when the time is right, or let them ask about it when they start to figure it out. Please send your questions and comments to lovecoach@hotmail.com or Miss Lonelyhearts c/o the Winnipeg Free Press, 1355 Mountain Ave., Winnipeg, MB, R2X 3B6. Gift guilt grounded in more than over-giving MAUREEN SCURFIELD MISS LONELYHEARTS In 1939, producer Alfred Lion recorded boogie- woogie pianists Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons at a session in New York. Lion pressed only a few copies for his friends, but demand for the records was so great, that he made other re- cordings of Dixieland artists such as Sidney Bechet. This was the beginning of Lion’s famous Blue Note record label, for which practically every major jazz artist of the past 50 years has recorded at one time or another. Lion sold the label to Liberty-United Artists in 1966. He died in 1987. In 1941, folk singer Joan Baez was born in Staten Island, N.Y. Her politics and music have always been closely connected, and she was active in opposing the U.S. military draft and American involvement in the Vietnam War. In March 1968, she married David Harris, a former student leader at Stanford University who was facing a three-year prison term for draft resistance. Baez played an important role in launching Bob Dylan’s career, inviting him on stage during her concerts in the early ’60s. In 1944, rock guitarist Jimmy Page was born in London. He established his reputation as a session musician in London in the early ’60s, and is rumoured to have played the guitar solo on The Kinks’ recording of You Really Got Me. Page later joined The Yardbirds as bass guitarist, taking over the lead guitar role when Jeff Beck left the group. When The Yardbirds disbanded in 1968, Page formed Led Zeppelin with vocalist Robert Plant, bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham. Led Zeppelin is generally regarded as the first heavy metal rock group, with hits including Whole Lotta Love, Immigrant Song, and the anthem Stairway to Heaven. By the mid-’70s, Led Zeppelin was selling out at stadiums around the world but the group disbanded after Bonham’s death in 1980. In 1994, Page and Plant reunited for an MTV Unplugged performance and subsequent world tour. In 1964, The Temptations recorded the song The Way You Do the Things You Do at Motown Studios in Detroit. In 1965, The Beatles ‘65 album hit No. 1 and stayed there for nine weeks. In 1973, The Rolling Stones had to scrap plans to tour the Orient when Japan refused to grant Mick Jagger a visa. The Japanese turned down Jagger’s request on account of his 1969 drug bust. In 1976, C.W. McCall’s recording of Convoy reached the top of the country music charts. Its success led to a long string of C.B. radio-related novelty records during the next 18 months. In 1977, country singer Emmylou Harris married Brian Ahern. In 1979, A Gift of Song — The Music for UNICEF Concert was held at the United Nations General As- sembly. Nine top recording artists, including Abba, the Bee Gees and Rod Stewart, performed songs and donated the copyrights to UNICEF. In 1984, Van Halen released 1984. Lead singer David Lee Roth left the band a year later and was replaced by Sammy Hagar. Roth rejoined the band in 2007. In 1988, singer Frank Sinatra was paid US$1 million for a single performance to help launch a new resort on Australia’s Gold Coast. It was Sinatra’s first performance in the country in 14 years. He had been banned by Australian unions in 1974 after calling female reporters hookers and male reporters drunks. In 1988, Canadian country singer Con Archer died of a heart attack at his home in Cannington, Ont. He was 46. His hits included Sandy and Happy Anniversary. In 1990, Madonna began auditioning dancers for her 1990 world tour. She had taken out a newspaper ad that said wimps and wanna-be’s need not apply. In 1997, Stone Temple Pilots lead singer Scott Weiland checked himself into a drug treatment centre in California. It was his second drug rehab stint in a year. Weiland had spent five months in a court-ordered program that led to the dropping of cocaine and heroin charges against him. In 1997, jazz musician Lionel Hampton was pre- sented with the National Medal of the Arts by U.S. President Bill Clinton at a White House ceremony. The presentation took place two days after the 88-year-old Hampton lost most of his possessions in a fire at his New York apartment. In 1998, leading British composer Sir Michael Tippett died in London at age 93. He was known for expressing radical political views in his music. One of Tippett’s best-known works is the oratorio Child of Our Times, composed as a response to the Depression of the 1930s. He served three months in prison for being a conscientious objector during the Second World War. In 2001, a multi-million-dollar defamation lawsuit filed by rock singer Alannah Myles against the National Post was settled out of court just before jury selection began. In 2002, it was announced that rocker Bryan Ad- ams was among four photographers appointed to take pictures of the Queen for her Golden Jubilee. A photo Adams took of the Queen in 2000 was used in a breast cancer fundraising project. In 2009, Jon Hager, who was half of the musical comedy duo The Hager Twins on the variety TV series Hee Haw, died in Nashville, Tenn., at age 67, eight months after his brother Jim died. The twins were in the original cast of the syndicated TV show, which had its debut in 1969, satirizing country life with a mixture of music and comedy. Both were guitarists and drummers and continued to perform together after leaving the show in 1986. Both were cast members of Hee Haw from 1969-86. The show lasted until 1993. In 2009, Davidson County (Tennessee) Probate Judge Randy Kennedy denied Christopher Edward Tanner’s request to exhume the body of late country star Eddy Arnold for DNA testing to prove he is the singer’s illegitimate son. In 2010, New York rapper and G-Unit member Lloyd Banks and his three-man crew were arrested and charged in Kitchener, Ont., with forcible confinement and aggravated assault and robbery. Waterloo regional police said a music promoter was allegedly held against his will, robbed and beaten in a Kitchener hotel over a dispute about a performance and appearance fee at Club NV in Brantford. In 2012, The Doors premiered the song She Smells So Nice on the band’s Facebook page. The song was recorded during the L.A. Woman sessions and stayed in the vault for over 40 years. In 2013, Three Days Grace lead singer Adam Gontier left the group due to an undisclosed health issue. In 2013, radio broadcaster Frank Page, best known for giving a teenaged Elvis Presley one of his first radio gigs in 1954, died in hospital in Shreveport, La. He was 87. — The Canadian Press TODAY IN MUSIC HISTORY EVAN AGOSTINI / INVISION Folk legend Joan Baez was born on this day in 1941. “By not calling it censorship, we do ourselves a disservice,” York says. “We shouldn’t limit the term to just things we disagree with.” Fighting over whether a given speech restric- tion is or isn’t censorship, she adds, is often an excuse to avoid harder, more nuanced discussions as to exactly which types of speech ought to be restricted, and by whom, and on what authority. “There are a lot of people in the U.S. who will claim to be (free speech absolutists but then basi- cally be fine with censoring sexuality,” she says. In contrast, expressions of sexuality are widely accepted in Germany, where York now lives, but there’s broad consensus that censorship of Holo- caust denial is warranted. In New Zealand, she adds, the democratically elected government has a Chief Censor who reviews the content of films and literature. “I’m very wary of censorship,” York says. “But the reason is, who do you trust to do it? It’s not that all speech is totally equal and valid.” In other words, the problem York sees isn’t so- cial platforms banning a powerful figure such as Trump. It’s their lack of legitimacy as arbiters of speech, especially when they’re censoring people who lack the stature to speak out through other means. David Kaye, a law professor at University of California-Irvine and the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, agrees that we should be wary of tech giants’ power over discourse — especially in countries that lack a robust free press. But he balks at applying the term “censorship” to content moderation deci- sions taken by the likes of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube in the United States. “For Greene or any member of Congress, particularly on the right, to claim censorship by a platform I think is just a little bit silly,” Kaye says. “First of all, they’re often making those claims on massive traditional media platforms.” (Greene recently decried her Twitter ban on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight.) We’re better off, Kaye believes, reserving the term “censorship” for the many instances around the world in which speech restrictions are backed by the power of the state. That can include cases in which “the state puts demands on social media to take down content, or criminalizes individuals who tweet,” as has happened in China, the United Arab Emirates, Myanmar and elsewhere. But that’s not the same as Twitter suspending Greene for incurring multiple strikes against its own terms of service. “If we start to dilute the idea of censorship as a state-driven tool by equating it with what plat- forms are doing, we start to misunderstand what platforms are actually doing, and why they’re doing it,” Kaye said. “Which is not to say it isn’t problematic” when tech companies ban political figures, he added — especially when they lack fair, transparent processes for making those decisions. Chinmayi Arun, who has studied the intersec- tion of law, technology and society in India and the United States, thinks depriving social plat- forms of the ability to restrict politicians’ speech would be dangerous — but that shouldn’t insulate those platforms from questions about the legiti- macy of their decisions. “Political leaders, especially heads of state, have a much greater capacity to incite violence than most individuals, and a social media plat- form should not enable dangerous incitement,” says Arun, a resident fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and affiliate of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center. “It follows from this that social media platforms will have to refuse to carry political leaders’ speech sometimes. That said, it would also be unhealthy for democracy if major social media platforms began to arbitrarily block political leaders.” What the three experts agree on is that the largest social platforms’ ever-growing influence over the flow of information means scrutiny of their decisions is warranted, whether you call it censorship or not. Yet, as Arun suggested, that scrutiny shouldn’t be limited to their decisions on what speech to block. Too often overlooked in the debates over what social networks take down is that they aren’t just passive conduits of information: Their recommen- dation algorithms and design decisions actively shape what speech gets heard, and by how many, and how it is framed — often fuelling the kind of divisive content that they later face pressure to remove. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may or may not have censored Trump a year ago. But there’s no doubt that for years prior, they amplified and enabled him. And if they hadn’t suspended him, their systems would have continued to be com- plicit in his bid to undermine the presidential election. — Bloomberg CENSORSHIP ● FROM A10 JUSTIN SULLIVAN / GETTY IMAGES Former president Donald Trump’s First Amendment lawsuit against Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which have all deactivated his accounts, is unlikely to win, legal experts say, because the First Amendment applies to government restrictions, not those by private companies. A_11_Jan-09-22_FP_01.indd 11 2022-01-08 10:35 PM ;