Sorry I’ve been MIA — you’d think making a 5 minute show would be easy, but man, it’s pretty nuts. Speaking of, these guys make a show for the same company and I enjoyed this one a lot:
Backpack Picnic
Thursday, September 13th, 2007Never forget
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
It’s that day again. The day that wingnuts remind us to NEVER! FORGET! (while conveniently ignoring the plight of uninsured rescue workers still suffering from health effects and those now ineligible for workers’ compensation. But who cares about that when you can wave a little flag?).
Today, also, many of us remember that other thing that happened on September 11th. You know, that time the CIA overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile to install a neoconservative wet dream of a dictator.
Despite Pinochet’s death and the election of a supposedly centre-left president, the ripples of American democracy-building exercises are still hurting Chileans. Few, if any, have been screwed over more than the indigenous Mapuche people. Like all native inhabitants of the Americas, colonization wasn’t kind to them—they were frequently evicted from their communal lands and subject to systemic persecution.
Salvador Allende was one of their few beacons of hope:
In 1972, Law #17.729 of the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende completely restructured the Mapuche land situation. As one Chilean lawyer we met told us, this is the only legislation in the history of Chile which has been favorable to the Mapuche.
I bet you can guess what happened to the Mapuche in 1973:
In September 1973 the Pinochet military regime took power and a widespread and bloody revenge was visited on the Mapuche who had dared to question the injustices of history and retake the lands which had always been theirs.
“… On the day of the coup, the big landowners, the land barons, the military and the carabineros started a great manhunt against the Mapuches who had struggled and gained their land back; … the massacres of Lautaro, Cunco, Meli-Peuco, Nehuente, … Lonquimay … and Panguipulli … The counter-revolution of 1973 hit the Mapuche populations even harder than most other sectors …” (UN Ad Hoc Working Group on the Situation of Human Rights in Chile 1978). “No one has ever been able to accurately establish the number of Mapuches actually killed at /that/ time. Only /in 1979/, after six years, /were/ some people gaining the courage to explain what happened to them and their families” (Inter-Church Committee on Human Rights in Latin America 1980).
The issue is still land. The Chilean government would like to use Mapuche lands for mining, logging, and the construction of a large hydro-electric dam. The Mapuche, obviously, take issue with this, and face torture, murder, and imprisonment for fighting back. They are especially targeted by counter-terrorism legislation originally introduced by Pinochet, which allows prosecutors to withhold evidence from the defense for up to six months, and to conceal the identity of prosecution witnesses.
Michelle Bachelet, President of Chile, claims that the hundreds of Mapuche political prisoners (including tribal leaders and activists, several of whom regularly go on hunger strikes), are all “common criminals.” Meanwhile, the Mapuche suffer under the brunt of corporate globalization and the War on Terror, 1973-style, their cause ignored by most of the world.
The Mapuche Nation website has more information, and information on how you can help.
Rape and assumptions
Monday, September 10th, 2007Two women were raped last Friday in their dorm rooms at York University, and the rapists tried for a few others before being chased out. I was hesitant to read about the attacks in any detail, figuring that any news coverage would be chock-full of the usual victim-blaming, but I finally caved and checked out the far-right National Post. Their article did not disappoint.
The details that we know are as follows: There were two attackers, both white men in their early 20s. The dorms are only accessible by swipe cards. The victims’ rooms were unlocked.
The Post doesn’t stop at reporting those facts, though. They’ve got to get some racism and classism in there:
Students at York say they are inured to a certain amount of insecurity after a series of random sex assaults on the vast, sprawling campus last year and due to their proximity to a troubled neighbourhood that is often the scene of gang, drug and gun violence. But many were reeling yesterday from the brazen nature of the most recent attacks.
York, for those of you who haven’t had the dubious pleasure of attending, is bleak and, yes, quite sprawling. It’s also fairly isolated from the “troubled” (read: primarily black and lower class) Jane and Finch neighbourhood. Most of the people who live in the surrounding community don’t have the money or opportunities to attend university. One of the big problems with Jane and Finch is its awful urban planning—there’s nowhere to walk to. So York students, most of whom commute, don’t really venture off the campus, and people who live nearby don’t really venture on campus.
[York University spokesman] Mr. Bilyk said no one is sure how the two suspects managed to gain entry to the dorm, which requires use of a swipe card and where visitors are supposed to sign in. He speculated the pair might have slipped in behind a larger group returning from a pub night held on campus Thursday as part of frosh week festivities.
Or, you know, they could be students. Given their age and their access to the building, it seems as likely a possibility as any. York students seem to think so too.
York security’s advice is typical: Women should be “vigilant,” make sure that no one follows them home at night, make sure that their doors are locked, don’t walk around unaccompanied. They declined to provide advice for the menfolk, such as “don’t rape women.”
Since both the university and the media seem to be running on the assumption that sexual violence is linked to income, or that well-off university students can’t be rapists, I’m not holding out hope for these guys being caught.
The tragic pussification of G.I. Joe
Sunday, September 9th, 2007An international cartel of Paramount global marketing executives and focus groups decided to give a rather malicious “fuck you!” to remaining WWII veterans by giving G.I. Joe a P.C. makeover for his new movie, something previously unheard of in the whole honorable history of the iconic “action figure”*.
At least, that’s the lens that Devil’s Advocate choses to view life through.
Now they are changing G.I. Joe into a multicultural soldier with no American affiliation. Yes, Hollywood limousine liberal idiots are exceeding my patience. I can handle their unabashed socialism, even their global warming insanity, but when they attack G.I. Joe, enough is enough.
No! We’re not exceeding his patience! Things are very serious, indeed. He may be forced to write an even angrier blog post if things continue in this vein. Possibly photoshop could be involved. What crawled up DA’s ass and died? I guess the idea that making an American-soldier-kicking-ass-and-taking-names movie isn’t going to go over so hot overseas, so they turned the Joes into Team America: World Police but without the marionette scat scene.
Paramount has confirmed that in their new movie, the name G.I. Joe will become an acronym for ““Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity” — an international, coed task force charged with defeating bad guys. It will no longer stand for government issued, as in issued by the American government.”
Advocate might want to de-bunch his panties, because The Real American Hero has a long and distinguished history of being brought to heel by the forces of the Limousine Liberals:
1) G.I. Joe has been at least nominally co-ed since the 80′s, when the creatively named Lady Jaye (could have been worse, ask poor Miss Marvel) was the most kick-ass female character available on afternoon TV.
2) G.I. Joe responded to the Civil Rights era by introducing the first of many token characters (in this case, a black man) as early as 1965, which is probably a coincidence that had nothing to do with the events of that year.
3) G.I. Joe was already an international task force by 1966, he also conquered space that year.
4) Add another item to the Iraq/Vietnam Parallels list:
By 1970, in the wake of the Vietnam War, Hasbro sought to downplay the war theme that had initially defined “G.I. Joe”. The line became known as “The Adventures of G.I. Joe” for a time. G.I. Joe was now cast as the leader of the “Adventure Team”, an adventuring/spy-like organization with the goal of rescue missions and fighting evil. The look of the doll was also changed in 1970 with the addition of a flocked beard (an innovation developed in England by Palitoy’s for their licensed version of Joe, Action Man). A retooled African American Adventurer was also introduced around this time.
5) The nineties found Joe fighting…fighting for the environment. Go Planet!
It’s clear that us liberals have been systematically deballing Joe since he stepped out of the military magazines and into the global marketplace. It’s a little late in the game for Devil’s Advocate’s solution:
Evidently, they are worried that the rest of the world would not accept an American soldier movie. Well, if we look at the facts, the rest of the world would be controlled by Nazis if it were not for the G. I. Joe. So if they do not like it, don’t make the movie. This is disgraceful.
Now that’s a jingle I want to see Paramount actually try: “Geee-Eyeeee Joooeeeeee!!!! If it weren’t for us you’d all be speaking Gerrr-maannnn!” Because if there’s anything that will get European children’s asses in seats, it’s reminding them that the grandparents of the people who financed and produced the movie offered crucial assistance to their great-grandparents in a war that was already over for half a century before they were born! Also, you’ll completely fail to piss off the parents of those kids with your mind-boggling assholery. Some people seem to forget that we had a bit of a hand in creating the conditions that lead up to WWII in the first place, so now that the initial flush of post-war euphoria is a half a damn century in the past, maybe we don’t want to brandish that particular sword about too often seeing as Europe is rebuilt and even let Germany into the EU and everything.
Clearly, Hollywood has forgotten the, “Real American Hero.” G.I. Joe originally symbolized the American WWII soldier and our greatest generation. Now Hollywood celebrities are going to turn him into a politically correct Feminazi. Isn’t anything sacred to these people?
What do you do with a grown man who is willing to work himself into such a lather because a fifty year old toy is failing to honor the past the way we expect our pop culture icons to? No, GI Joe is not fucking sacred to anyone, not any more than the X-Men or even Batman. This is not a travesty of historical revisionism, hell, it’s not even worth the kind of sputtering mouth-foaming that would be more appropriate for discovering a Starbucks in the middle of the National WWII Memorial. It’s just a new version of GI Joe that is designed to do what GI Joe was always designed for -to bringing money to Hasboro Toy Inc by the barrel full.
*Not a doll, goddammit. Not even the ones that are the perfect size to prong Barbie. Not that mine ever did.
Education: big mistake or bad idea?
Sunday, September 9th, 2007“How much are YOU WORTH?” A shady computer tech school in my area begins their radio commercials asking people to pause and reflect on that question before going on to imply that a certification in information technology will be worth about 50K right at graduation, and creating a false sense of prestige by saying you have to pass a test (oh, god, not a test!) to qualify for their program. For a person stuck in some of the armpits of service jobs we have here, such an offer must sound pretty tempting – I know that at my least employed and most desperate I spent $200 on a bartending course that was laughably useless although by the time I was willing to admit that, the check had already cleared and the classroom had moved on to the next geographical set of suckers. I keep the certification just to remind myself that I’m not as smart as I think I am.
I thought about that a few days ago when Cog over at Offsprung touched a nerve on the topic of useless vs useful college degrees. Cog, who I guess got burned by his expensive but ultimately not lucrative undergraduate program, subscribes to “the idea of college is to spend lots of money to get a degree that will get you a job.” A view that drives others (like me) insane. By the middle of the thread, it was very clear that this was a highly personal subject that divided people into roughly three or four camps that were speaking different languages. And I thought about it when I ran into today’s MSN list’o'the hour, Top Earning College Degrees.
Of the top 10 starting salaries according to major, no fewer than five have the word “engineering” in them. Two or three others (depending on how you count economics) involve high finance, and the remaining ones are computer related. Unifying theme? Math, and plenty of it. And they’re freaking hard.
The participants in Cog’s conversation were heavy on the liberal arts degrees, no shock since college graduates in general are heavy on the liberal arts. As far as I can tell, they divided into camps roughly along these lines:
1) Cog’s Supporters: People who feel that since the conventional wisdom is that you need a degree to get a decent job then you should pick your major based on lists like the one offered by MSN to ensure that you’re not burning money.
2) People who feel that education is it’s own reward.
3) Sensible Educational Theory types, who’d like to agree with statement 2 but have been crushed by reality and would like us hoity-toity learn-for-the-love-of-it types to wake up to the real world, kids.
I belong to group 2, but I have to admit to being a bit of a hypocrite; I ended up trading a kind of joke major for a more impressive, and more reliably lucrative, one. You see, my original major was communications, which I studied at a University that cost as much per year as three or four years at the place I ended up graduating from. So really, I almost made the same costly mistake that Cog appears to think he made. But by the end of that year I was bored out of my mind, I hated the school, and I realized that for what I wanted to do, college was the complete wrong path.
So I quit, and spent a year in theatre, doing some prop stuff and stagehand stuff. But when I realized that I could -if I was lucky and worked my ass off- maybe someday have my boss’ job, I quit that too. I went back to school but this time I majored in physics, and it took 5 years which basically sucked the whole way through. But then I got my degree and it really was the magic piece of paper everyone thinks a college degree is, and I’ve been doing pretty OK ever since.
So with that disclaimer out of the way, I’d like to use this thread to sort out some confusion I saw between the camps in Cog’s thread, because it seems that a lot of people were talking over each other. The whole thing has a tawdry Mommy-war vibe to it, with opposing camps that each have really good points but are defensive and see only where they disagree. So let’s open this can of worms with an insanely long post!
(more…)
Craft envy
Saturday, September 8th, 2007
Just to prove that I’m not an angry curmudgeonly type all the time, I thought that I’d draw your attention to Slate’s adorable article on political crafts. I think that the above cross-stitch is probably my favourite, but I’d love to make a Homeland Security quilt as well (but where would I put it?).
But no mention of the knitted uterus? Or the precursors to today’s hipster radical crafts, like the AIDS Memorial Quilt or Chilean arpilleras? Kids these days have no historical context.
No-maitenance relationships are like plasma TVs: great while they last, but they die sudden and irrepairable deaths sooner than you expected
Saturday, September 8th, 2007Could you be dating a high-maintenance chick, and not even know it? Danger lurks around every corner when you’re dealing with the pussy oversoul. Lucky for you, Lady Margot Carmichael Hunnybunting Lovelace Sycamore-Lester is back with another one of her searingly insightful relationship quoteunquote articles, this one in easy-to-digest quiz form: Is your bitch too much effort? Let’s take the quiz together:
1. You land a huge new account at work. Your lady friend’s response:
* Fantastic. Pick up something extravagant for me at Tiffany’s on the way home. (Score = -1)
* Great. I have some items on lay-away that I can pay off! (Score = 1)
* Finally! More money for us to enjoy! Let’s hit the mall this weekend. (Score = 2)
* Let’s go out to dinner to celebrate! (Score = 3)
* I’m so proud of you! Tell me all about it. (Score = 4)
If you look closely, you’ll see that the first three responses are actually the same response curved for socioeconomic status and/or age. In this age of scandalously easy credit, the only places I see layaway available are the seediest stores that cater to people who simply can’t get credit, even loan-shark OMGWTF predatory credit. Why would a guy who has the kind of job where “landing a new account” directly and immediately affects his income be dating the kind of woman who’s got a bunch of crap on layaway at Burlington Coat Factory? I’ve shopped for clothes in that garish pit- you can’t take a woman wearing them anywhere nice; at least, not without a time machine to take you back to when that kind of low-grade polyester was acceptable. Although since I’ve stopped shopping there, my supply of eye-catching tiger-print blouses has dwindled to nothing, and that makes me a little sad.
Four is a rational and perfectly acceptable response, and five is the imaginary perfect woman response as measured in Money Involved/Feminine Selflessness. In reality, yes I am proud of you, but don’t tell me all about it for the love of god because your job bores me to death. No offense intended, as I’m sure mine bores you to death as well. I don’t need the details, hon, to be sufficiently proud of the results.
No matter however, as the next four questions will follow the same pattern, with the answers weighted toward “all women are childish, selfish, money sucking pits” with one “human response” and one “imaginary perfect woman that the albatross you currently date is preventing you from finding”. Except for the fourth question, which shows there is no grey area between a needy attention whore with no sense of perspective and an angel. Girlfriend perfection will continue to be measured in units of “Money She’s Costing Me”/”Feminine Selflessness” ($/fs) which I propose we name “margots.” If margots << 1, she's a keeper.
Shockingly enough, a score of 15 on this quiz (which would be a straight average of human-based answers) gets her labeled "A little self-absorbed, but depending on your personality, you might not mind. Check your gut to see if you can deal with these behaviors. " That's right: suggesting that you celebrate newly earned financial success with dinner (nevermind that some women would go so far as to follow that statement with the words, “my treat!” which is standard for congratulating someone) or asking for 10 minutes to comb your hair and find your shoes before going out to grab a casual bite means you are “self absorbed.” But can you ever find a perfect woman – one who anticipates your every need, is beautiful even though her medicine cabinet doesn’t contain a single product you wouldn’t use yourself, and who, most importantly, costs no money whatsoever?
Let’s ask Margot:
Freelance writer Margot Carmichael Lester, author of The Real Life Guide to Life After College, has dated a few high-maintenance dudes in her day and is glad to have finally landed a new model that requires very little upkeep.
What? Goddammit, Margot: how does your experience with high-maintenance men give you the right to castigate women for being so damn needy? You don’t even know if the perfect woman exists! You just got the perfect guy, or the guy you’re trying to give a shout-out to in your bio so he doesn’t get pissed off, and you assume that there is a comparable woman! But you don’t know…you just. don’t. know. What if a guy takes this quiz, finds out he’s dating a mere 14 when he could have an 18 or even a 20, and spends the rest of his life searching for a woman who doesn’t exist? His loneliness is all your fault.*
In reality, Margot has confused excessively needy and demanding immature women with women that expect a guy to pull his weight in the work part of making a relationship work. Guys need to be warned about girls who score 16+ on quizzes like this: they’re the ones that are going to come to their senses in ten years and realize that they can reduce their workload by the equivalent of one demanding child simply by getting divorced. But the 14s and 15s, the ones that will tell you to wait just a freaking second while she finds her shoes, those are the ones that will give you a little notice before heading out the door.
*Well, it’s certainly not his fault, and you’re the only other woman involved in this situation. Shame on you, does your pastor know you give out this kind of crap advice?
Psychological Torture: A How-To Guide
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007Here’s something neat that you can read in preparation for your inevitable incarceration in Guantanamo Bay—a U.S. Government-funded manual on psychological torture, published in 1961 by John Wiley & Sons.*
It begins with “don’t try this at home” reassurances:
This work might help the armed forces to offset the lack of knowledge that was in part held responsible for much of the success Communist captors achieved in interrogation of United States prisoners of war in Korea (64). Its value for this purpose is limited in that it assumes an interrogator who pursues his objective of developing information rationally. Past experience indicates that practices encountered by prisoners of war are not determined exclusively by considerations of logic (5). A rational examination of the problem cannot lead to predictions of a nonrational opponent’s actions. Historically, there has been frequent resort to coercive practices for eliciting information, despite abundant evidence that such measures are relatively ineffective. Some estimates of what an opponent is likely to do, in addition to those based on considerations of what it will be feasible and advantageous for him to do, are required in devising measures for thwarting enemy exploitation attempts against prisoners of war.
Basically—this is what the Commies did; we’re just trying to guard against it. I’ll let Fred Clark explain why this isn’t very convincing:
During the Cold War, American spies and soldiers who were captured by the Soviet Union or its proxies were subjected to physical and psychological torture. America began studying the KGB’s interrogation methods for the same reasons that firefighters study fires: to learn how to fight against it, and how to survive when fighting against it. This study produced what became America’s SERE training. That stood for “survive, evade, resist, escape.” Training Americans to understand KGB torture so that they would be better able to survive, evade, resist or escape it was as rational and prudent a step as training firefighters to understand fire for all the same reasons.
But as America’s understanding of these KGB methods grew, U.S. military and intelligence agencies began to attract and produce their own version of firebugs in uniform. Unlike the fire departments, who try to filter out these madmen, the CIA institutionalized their efforts. Historian Alfred McCoy describes how, almost from its inception, the CIA’s SERE training was also perverse-engineered to provide training in how to adopt, conduct and inflict KGB-style interrogations. (A longer version of McCoy’s essay is here, at Tomgram. For primary sources and complete documentation, see “Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past” from the National Security Archive.)
Anyway, the 1961 book is a blueprint for current human rights violations. Check out some of the chapter titles: “Effects of Disturbed Bodily Functions Upon Brain Function,” “The Effects of Reduced Environmental Stimulation on Human Behavior: A Review,” “Length of Stay in Experimental Isolation and Time Perception,” and keep this book in mind next time you encounter someone who thinks that what they did to Jose Padilla wasn’t a big deal.
* Probably best known for their For Dummies series.
Fake Labour Day!
Monday, September 3rd, 2007
If you live in North America, you might have gotten a day off today owing to the success of the ruling class in banishing the spectre of labour history from the minds of the toiling masses. You should have actually got May 1st off.
Here are a few drive-by links:
Nihilistic_kid talks about racist and nativist sentiments in the labour movement…and speculative fiction community.*
Race and class have always been tied together, and only fools and bosses try to separate them out. For a while, Debs was a fool. For a much longer period, the labor movement was Fool Central, and there is still plenty of foolishness to go around. When assisting in the ultimately failed attempt to organize some Manhattan bicycle messengers into the Teamsters in the 1990s, I saw that some the black and Latino messengers got “information packets”about the union from their employer, in which it explained that labor unions were much like the Ku Klux Klan and held down minorities and women. That’s a hard charge to beat, but is much harder when it’s true. Naturally, in our case it was false — though there were plenty of reactionary characters in the Teamsters, especially those who were collecting big checks to “organize”…nothing. They got theirs already, and this sort of race-bating, not effectively answered as a matter of principle, helped doom the organization drive. Racism and chauvinism split movements far more decisively than flag-waving and chest-thumping about class to the exclusion of race helps movements. That’s why the labor movement had to learn to shuck off the ideologies of racism and nativism — a lesson it keeps having to learn, actually.
Speaking of the Ku Klux Klan, did you hear what happened to them in Knoxville?
“White Power!” the Nazi’s [sic] shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.
“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.
“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.
Finally, the most recent update to the I.W.W. vs. Starbucks is in the New York Daily News.
“We don’t think people should spend their hard-earned money on a company that has no respect for its workers,” said union organizer Daniel Gross, 28, outside the Manhattan courtroom where the hearings are taking place.
“Any time workers organized, the company responded with a vicious anti-union campaign,” Gross added.
The charges stem from incidents at four Starbucks locations in the city. The labor relations panel, an independent federal agency that mediates labor disputes, found enough merit in 30 of the union charges to take the company to court.
And with that, I am off to mourn the end of summer.
* I don’t really know the context of the latter. Apparently, I need to do more reading.
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