We have a new social media trend: Change your avatar to #DumpStoli, specifically, and ask your local watering holes to stop offering all Russian vodkas, in general. Bars who are independently proactive about this are making the news cycles already. It was pioneered last week by gay Seattle writer/activist/sex adviser, Dan Savage, of whom I am personally a big fan. His Savage Love column in my local Georgia Straight is probably the most coherent account of sexuality today. He started the Dump Stoli campaign in protest to Putin’s signing in a new legislation which outlaws the “propagating” of the gay agenda, including teaching children in schools that homosexuality is on par with heterosexuality and that gay marriage should be part of Russian society.

I am not sure how much of a firestorm it has already generated on Facebook, but I would imagine that somewhere around 25% of my former list have taken up yet another Display Image Cause that, as with Kony2012, will do nothing for greater human rights in a sovereign country half a world away. Dan Savage is a very smart man and his column has, in its own right, opened up the eyes of people like me, who in their teenage years were not at all accepting of such “deviant” lifestyles. Today, I could care less about who loves whom and in what ways. As long as they don’t hurt children, they deserve all the rights in the book. I also understand that he is in some ways a savior to people who otherwise feel judged because of their lifestyle and he gives them, for the most part, very sound advice on how to go about their love lives.

So it strikes me a bit odd that a person with a good amount intellect and proven rationality would start a boycott of another country’s export item, in this case alcohol, as if this part of the world will somehow influence the Duma to change their archaic way of thinking. If you’re doing it in solidarity with gay Russians, then all the power to you, but if you’re trying to change mentality or punish an economic behemoth like Russia, then you may be a bit delusional, and I would argue, quite vain. Also, what about human rights globally? Shouldn’t we treat everyone the same then?

For one, I really hope that everyone here in the West realizes that Gay Rights in Russia are on par with Women’s Rights in Saudi Arabia and Children’s Rights in the Congo and the Central African Republic. Yet, we still guzzle oil like a nation of nimrods and are slowly developing cortical tumors because of our cell phone use. I am sure that Savage has at some point driven a car or taken a cab, in which case there’s a 1 in 5 chance that the fuel the vehicle used came from the Saudi lands, where they will behead women without a second thought. With certainty, he uses a cellular phone, which cannot work without the crucial minerals mined in the Congo by children under catastrophic conditions and with no protective gear whatsoever. So my question is, whether we will start a boycott of cars because of the awful Arabic traditions in regards to women, and whether we will boycott cell phones now, as well, since children are central to the extraction of those raw materials. (On a side note, these minerals make their way to factory cities in China to be processed and then assembled into high-end phones by tens of thousands of workers in, again, disastrous conditions for microscopic pay; we definitely need to boycott cellular technology.)

Then, there is the issue with who exactly are we, the West, to castigate other countries on human rights violations? Canada was complicit in the illegal incarceration of a teenager at Guantanamo for seven years and the United States not only allows on-going, unpunished murders of black teens, but also shrugs off any and all responsibility to address or, by some miracle, allay the pernicious indiscriminate mass surveillance of the whole Western hemisphere? Are we so deluded with our own hypocrisy and farcical activism for universal human rights, and are we so mentally isolated that we cannot see our own transgressions right here, but only focus on the cretinous deeds and laws of other countries whose mentality we do NOT understand.

By all measures then, we HAVE to boycott everything made in Europe and North America. Americans need to boycott Canadian maple syrup and tar sands oil, and Canadians have to boycott Coca-Cola, WalMart and its whole culture. I am with Dan on the point that the whole American national team has to opt out of the Olympic Games in Sochi next year, but try explaining that to professional snowboarders, skiers, hockey players and especially their sponsors.

Dan, as it was in the United States and the rest of the West throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s and underway still today, gay rights in Russia will evolve eventually. So naive a protest as refusing to drink a particular beverage will not in any way affect the laws there. What happens if SPI does receive a hard enough blow to its net income, the state will take over that company, as it has with many other ones, and sell its stock to places like China and Saudi Arabia and Uganda; places that could really give a fuck about gay rights. Sad as it is.

For what it’s worth, I prefer Bourbon over vodka any day and recommend everyone else to drink that. Vodka is neither classy, nor for an adult to drink. So let’s keep America American, have three fingers of Wild Turkey and do some self-reflection before we judge others, even if they deserve judgement.

Yours on par,

Sasha