An LJ problem - what do you guys suggest?

I've bumped up against a limit of LJ I didn't know existed - you can't have more than X tags (where I think X = 1000).

What? You say, that's crazy. How can you have 1k tags? Well, I blame mizarchivist who, about five years ago, convinced me to start tagging my music posts. This is SUPER convenient, since I can easily go back and see where I've talked about a particular band or artist and compare how they sounded back then to now. I have lots of music stories in there, too.

According to LJ I have 238 posts now tagged "music." If you figure that each entry mentions up to five artists then you can see how I'd easily bump up against the limit, even with repetitions. I've bought myself a little time by eliminating some duplicates and unused tags as well as normalizing names (is it "KLF" or "the KLF" or "K.L.F." for example). But this is a problem I don't see a way around. Even upgrading to a paid LJ account would not (I think) get me more tags.

The vast majority of those tags are used only once. I could, in theory, cull those. Lord knows many of the URLs are dead nowadays. But each of them marks a thing that caught my ear at some point and I can't inherently tell which ones are going to come back. I'm pretty sure I'll never blog another Dan Balan track again, but it was such an excellent story I don't want to lose it.

So I'm at a crossroads here and not sure what to do. Seeking advice.

History is written by the winners

http://digg.com/2014/darren-wilson-testimony-transcript

That quote is echoing through my head as I read the transcript (hosted on Scribd, Digg link above) of the grand jury testimony. Officer Wilson's testimony begins on page 195.

My immediate takeaway from this is that I'm quite sure Mr Brown would have given different testimony were he still alive to tell his side of the story. Officer Wilson's testimony focuses a great deal on the initial altercation, for which Wilson has supporting evidence, and seems almost to skim over the final confrontation that resulted in Mr Brown's death. The questioning after his testimony goes back to that part, somewhat, but it's clear that we're in Officer Wilson's narrative at this point.

If the other witness to the initial incident and then (I believe also) the shooting, Mr Johnson, also testified I didn't see it here. I expect his story would differ considerably from Officer Wilson's. I've read elsewhere that other eyewitnesses to the shooting that killed Mr Brown have given accounts that are substantially different. I wonder if the grand jury also considered those accounts. I wonder if they felt, as I do, that a court of law exists to help us sort through conflicting accounts, to weigh evidence and reach decisions.

There have also been accusations that the police department of Ferguson conducted its own investigation and has not fully revealed its findings. I cannot help but assume that this is because those findings would cast further doubt on Officer Wilson's narrative. In an open court of law one could have subpoenaed those findings and examined them for further revelations. Perhaps as the FBI pursues its civil rights case against Officer Wilson we may yet get to hear that fuller story.

But today the fact remains that Officer Wilson is the one alive to write history.

"Covering", and inclusion and diversity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ii1LUMKiJ4&

Kenji Yoshino presents a very concise summary of research findings on inclusion, diversity, and 'covering' in the workforce. Big Think has been a hit-or-miss series for me, but this one speaks well. Covering, as Yoshino defines it in his original 2007 book of the same name, is "downplay[ing] a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream." Back in the day we used to call it "passing" when it meant hiding our leathers and our pictures of our same-sex partners. (For the record, Yoshino is an out gay Asian-American who has been quite vocal in writing legal theories and arguments in favor of equal marriage.)

Yoshino's research argues that although organizations have to some degree valued diversity and the benefits that supposedly flow from it, they've done things to counteract that by requiring people to cover up the identities that come from that diversity. People are penalized for expressing their non-mainstream identities. This covering harm is most often felt by groups that are struggling for acceptance and equality in the workplace - notably women, people of color, and LGB persons. That is, you may be recruited by an organization that is attempting to diversify its population but once in there you find you cannot express the identity that you associate with the important elements of your non-mainstream self. Yoshino's research argues that this requirement to cover (up) identity harms the goals of diversity: if everyone speaks, acts, and seems more like the straight white male majority what's the point of having a diverse group in the first place?

He then moves to a more startling finding, which is that 45% of straight white men they studied reported covering at work as well. These people who are the epitomes of what people are supposed to cover up and be more like in fact also cover: their religions, politics, veteran or disability status, mental or physical illness, and so on. Unsurprisingly, the straight white men who report covering also report the same negative and harmful consequences as are felt by the people in non-mainstream groups.

The implication of this is deep and his call to re-think what diversity and inclusion mean resonates very strongly with me. I'm definitely not out as bi in any meaningful context, and even though I have pictures of both my wife and my girlfriend on my desk I don't draw attention to my non-mainstream lifestyle. I've gotten really good at passing; maybe that's not such a good thing.