The Antisocial Socialist

God help me I'm going to hold forth on art history again. This is mainly instigated by a friend elsewhere, who challenged my statement that the aesthetics of AI are inherently fascist. I respect his challenge, and I want to respond with something other than "vibes" so I'm going to go off half-cocked and attempt to draw an historical parallel with the OG fascist movement.

I know more a little more than a normal amount about Italian art. I would argue that it peaked not in the Renaissance but in the Baroque era (source: vibes), but Italian artists have been chasing that high ever since, as has every other artist in the Western world. You can't really blame them.





Don't get me wrong, I stan my gay king Michelangelo. But I find Gentileschi a far more interesting artist. Sue me.

( more about art )

So what does this have to do with AI and why I think, based on my vibes, that AI is fascist? It goes back to the pattern I suggested in both Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism. An avant-garde art movement meets a nascent political movement, the former gleefully attaches to the latter, only to be betrayed when the latter comes to power in favour of more conservative aesthetics. 

And this is what I witness happening in the visual iconography of modern-day fascism. Let's take a trip down the rabbit hole to, say, 2014-2016. What's the ascendent visual style of the alt-right? It's janky, ugly-on-purpose, constructed with the most basic tools available, edgy and debauched. It's creative—evil, yes, but it's doing something different and exciting, so much so that it escapes containment. In 2025, what is the visual style of fascism? Slick, corporate, but unnerving. Too perfect in that Uncanny Valley way. More beholden to Thomas Kinkade than to Matt Furie. It feels off, because its proponents want the symbolism of power without a particular deep interest in the structure and the foundations of the aesthetic. An arcade of Roman columns that, when you turn sideways, is nothing more than a Western movie film set facade, all plywood that whole time. 

Fascists are simple creatures; they want art that they can understand, none of that high-falutin' Jew degenerate modernist stuff. The problem is that artists, left alive long enough, will tend to change and innovate. They'll fall in love with the art of other cultures. They'll create community. Fascists want art without artists; art that doesn't show the brushstrokes or enable bohemian lifestyles, art that is frictionless and vapid. It's fitting to me that one of the plagiarism machines is called DALL-E because Dalí would have genuinely approved. Mussolini would have wet his pants over AI's potential, at once forward-looking and reactionary, relying on regression to the mean in all things. 

Just like the Futurists of yore, the unruly and radical propagandists of 4chan have been abandoned by the same forces they put in power. Their innovation is no longer necessary. They're not even worth subjecting to the Night of the Long Knives.

The ugliness of this aesthetic doesn't even breach the top three reasons to always oppose AI, obviously. That's the environmental holocaust that it unleashes, the use of the technology to target apartment buildings in Gaza or immigrants in the former USA, the mass unemployment it threatens to unleash, and the wholesale theft of creative work. But it's also ugly in the way that the art of totalitarian regimes tends towards ugliness, bereft of a culture of experimentation that makes for great art. And that's why I think it's fascist rather than simply boring.

Alberta voters should have a new tax, with the revenues going directly to compensate victims of the wildfires in Nova Scotia. The amount of tax will be determined by the amount of physical damage + pain and suffering. Let's see how the UCP's promises of low taxes (at the cost of human rights and the planet) stack up once externalities are factored in.

Also, before you say it, I know that Notley isn't much better on bootlicking the oil and gas sector. But Smith is smugger about it and a literal fascist, so fuck her and everyone who voted for her.

Pull up folks—it's time for a rant about statues and monuments.

Hi! Your friendly high school art teacher here. I'm a nice white lady and can't speak to the Black experience of grief and rage brought about by systemic racism—I sympathize, I empathize, and I stand in solidarity, but I will never have that lived experience to be an expert. But do you know what I do know a lot about? Art history. Thanks to the efforts of my truly outstanding teachers and profs throughout high school and university and a bit of Googling 'cause I'm rusty and this isn't my area of focus, I have enough of an understanding of the evolution of sculpture done by white people and what led those monuments that have gotten white people's panties in a bunch throughout the Western world to tell you why tearing them down is no biggie.

Caveat the First: A lot more than statues needs to get torn down. We're talking the entire system of white supremacy and capitalism, etc., but it is shitty if you're a BIPOC to have to walk by some ugly tribute to a slave-owning asshole, and so tearing them down is a low-effort way to open a dialogue about history, reduce microaggressions, and make cities more aesthetically appealing (these statues are f u g l y, fight me). It's a symbol and a start, not a solution.

Caveat the Second: I have very strong feelings about Art, and Public Art, and what constitutes Good Public Art and Bad Public Art, and I can totally get how the art that you're used to can have emotional resonance. I flipped my shit when they moved the Henry Moore sculpture to the wrong side of the AGO, okay? I also lost it when I found out that Gandhi's Roti was closing even though I haven't eaten there in years because change sucks, especially when you feel that that the thing you like (delicious roti if you don't think too hard about what the kitchen looks like) is being replaced by a thing you do not like (idk probably big box stores or condos). I personally do not understand white people's emotional connection to fugly statues but I take it there is one, or one is performed. So I can't really speak to the passion white people are suddenly feeling about rando slaveholder statues. I don't get it and I'll never get it. Also RIP Gandhi's Roti.

Caveat the Third: This is a rant, not a proper essay. You want facts, crack a book. It's also hella simplified.

( art history! )

 So because I'm off work (which means working 4-6 hours a day on course planning), I've been marathoning Queer Eye at night. It's a silly makeover show and it frequently made me cry. Go figure. I mean, it's not a perfect show, but it's really, really good, and transcends the medium in some fascinating ways.

I'm not the first person to notice its model of non-toxic masculinity—arguably, that's its greatest appeal. Most of it is about how to be a man—the main difference from the original show is that the category of man is much more broadly and realistically defined than in the older version of the show, encompassing queer men, trans men, and men as a community (the firefighter episode and the one where they makeover a woman). It's much more overtly political, addressing racism, police brutality, transphobia, and homophobia. But at its heart, it's a show about how to be an adult—dress your age, learn to cook for yourself, walk tall, and clean your room.

Clean your room? Sounds familiar.


(There's actually a Queer Eye reference in there, so I'm clearly not the only person to notice.)

The thing is, when you hear a certain segment of J*rd*n P*t*rs*n fanboys talking, excluding the overt incels and MRA and fascist types, "clean your room" is the advice he gives they seem to find most important and powerful. And it's one of the bits of advice that I happen to agree with. I liked the kid who said that his mother had told him to clean his room for years and he didn't listen until JP told him too, which sums up why JP and his fans are garbage humans. But it is good advice.

But unpacking it further, you see why the same advice is given by one of the most famous advocates of toxic masculinity active today, and five famous advocates of non-toxic masculinity. JP's focus is on dominating others, particularly women—see also lobsters. But moreover, he would like young men to "set their own house in order before trying to change the world." This is one of those woo bits of advice that sounds good when written in a fancy script on the background of a sunset but is actually terrible. No one ever has their house in order. Ever. Therefore, no one can ever change the world. Contrast with what, say, Karamo Brown would say—not to speak for him, but you can paraphrase what he says on the show as a need to "be a man" for other people in your life and for your community. While it's usually an individual who gets made over in the show, a lot of the focus is on the relationships between the guys and their loved ones, their work, and their towns. 

The other thing that occurred to me is how much of contemporary discourse around masculinity posits the crisis of white, het, cis men as some kind of a new problem. White men, we are told, increasingly feel that they have no place in the world, and that's why they turn to fascism. Which, okay, but isn't the white, het, cis male crisis of identity the basis of essentially every work of literature ever that is considered important? 

Which is why I think it's so important to have alternative, better models of masculinity. Not JP's hyperindividualistic (except for sex, which should be collectivized) Fascism Lite, but a masculinity that is a broad umbrella for diverse identities and emphasizes strength through responsibility and compassion (and you will note that these are qualities also necessary in femininity and everywhere else on the gender spectrum). And that's why a silly makeover show made me cry a bunch and why I'm working on keeping my room a little cleaner for the revolution.

Or, Why You Can't Win a Debate with Jordan Peterson or His Fanboys


Back when I was a kid—contrary to what my students believe, this is well after dinosaurs roamed the earth—the idea that said earth was flat was laughable. To say that someone was a Flat Earther tended to be hyperbole; it was to state that they believed in something so outlandish that they might as well claim that the earth is flat. Now, of course, in this post-truth age, Flat Earth theory is treated in the media as a valid theory to be debated right next to the conventional, verifiable fact that the earth is round, because Round Eartherism is one extreme and Flat Eartherism is another extreme, and the truth must lie somewhere in the middle.

I was not a kid when evolutionary psychology passed from a fad to a joke, and remember the process well. It was as though the chattering class realized, all at once, that this bizarre construct made no sense whatsoever and let's never talk about the time we decided that The Flintstones represented an accurate portrait of the lifestyles of prehistoric man and for some reason it was also the natural default for gender dynamics. This was likely around the time that the guy who popularized the Paleo Diet dropped dead of a heart attack at 51. The two might have been related, actually.

A lot of ideas seem like they make some kind of intuitive sense, but fall apart upon further examination. Eugenics, for example, probably made sense at one point. A binary theory of gender linked to chromosomes, now disproven by science and the fact that there are humans who have something other than XX or XY chromosomes. One would dearly hope that the end of chattel slavery, World War II, and the Civil Rights era might have put the question of whether the Aryan race was the best one, or even existed as a discrete thing, to rest once and for all—and for some time it was the case that only a fringe minority of whackjobs believed it was still in question.

Sadly, we do in fact live in a post-truth era, and harried schoolteachers find themselves having to deal with the phenomenon that is Jordan B. Peterson, pop-psychologist to the stars, Alt Reich gateway drug, and lobster aficionado. Friends outside the education field, or those who are lucky enough to not have white 16-21-year-old boys as their primary demographic, keep asking me why I keep harping on this guy, but all the TAs, contract faculty, and high school teachers in primarily white schools nod their heads. This is a guy who has a lot to say about subjects that he knows nothing about, and perhaps because of this, is wildly popular amongst people with just a little bit of knowledge.

Now, Lobster Boy himself is not a neo-Nazi, but like fellow Canadians Paul Fromm and Ernst Zundel, he has a lot of rather horrible ideas hidden behind facades of FREEZED PEACH and JUST ASKING QUESTIONS. The official line from him and his followers tends to be that they were Classical Liberals (whatever that means) until some Social Justice Warrior hurt their feelings, and this has made them question the consensus of eggheads in ivory towers re: whether you get to oppress other people or not. And to be honest, he's not that many degrees away from Fromm and Zundel, both in real life associations and in ideology. I shy away from slippery slopes, but his YouTube videos are basically a mudslide down a steep cliff in a tsunami into an ocean of Pepe icons and triple parentheses.

Recently, I posted this rather excellent review of Lobster Boy's latest opus to Facebook (if you haven't read it, go do so now. I'll wait. The review, I mean. Not the book.). A fellow (left-leaning) teacher seemed upset at this, and other attempts to silence Peterson's Right To Free Speech, saying that if he was so popular, didn't it make sense to read what he had to say?

To which I responded, no, not at all. There is no point. I've listened to some of his videos and read some of his articles, and I've come to the conclusion that reading any more is acutely counterproductive, particularly if money or clicks are involved.

His philosophy, such that it is (and political philosophy is not his field; his doctorate is in psychology and he's not actually good at that), is a cobbled-together rehash of many different ideas that are self-evidently bullshit and have been debunked by brighter minds than I. No one with any intellectual credibility really takes evolutionary psychology seriously anymore. Same with the gender binary. Western chauvinism is taken seriously by lunatics like white supremacists and the President of the United States, I suppose, but philosophers and political scientists have by and large rejected it. Woo sells well, but you're unlucky to find a reputable doctor who advises sticking jade eggs up your twat. And no one with a grade school understanding of the evolutionary tree would buy that lobster behaviour is an accurate predictor of human behaviour.

But Peterson's very perniciousness is that he is such a slippery fellow, and such a sloppy writer, that it's impossible to discern exactly what he believes. That's Just Asking Questions in action; push too far in a reactionary direction and you were merely intellectually curious. This, I think, is part of why he is so popular—he is good at wise-sounding aphorisms that appeal to the sorts of men who see themselves as deficient or oppressed, but his politics are deniable and vague enough that his fanboys can fill in their own meanings.

And such a person is useless to debate. I'm curious to watch his face-off with Zizek, who actually has a lot of the same problems despite being more to the left, because a) it's going to be a hilarious shitshow, b) they'll probably both be coked up going in, and c) Peterson is almost certainly going to win despite being much, much stupider. (Confession of a former Zizek fangirl: I was wrong, mea culpa.)

As I explained to my colleague, the primary reason for this is that the liberal and the reactionary have very different victory conditions in a debate. (The hard left no-platforms someone like Peterson, which is where I'm coming from.) The liberal believes she is engaging in a war of ideas. She will win the debate by making more points, supported by more facts, that adhere to more rigorous logic. Her goal is to prove herself right and her opponent wrong, and lest you think that I'm bashing liberals here, I will admit to a tremendous amount of sympathy with this goal. That really ought to be the goal of a debate. That's how it was when I was a kid learning how to win debates.

But the reactionary—be it Nazi Classic or Alt Reich—does not share this goal. The reactionary knows that his ideas are illogical, because the reactionary believes in the primacy of emotion over reason. That's why he's a reactionary—because he rejects the Enlightenment tradition. He knows that in a free market of ideas, if such a thing ever existed, his ideas would be unpopular. His goal is to have his ideas accepted as ideas worth debating in the first place. He is like a Flat Earther in that respect; he wants his feelings to be put on a level playing field with empirical science. Once that happens, it doesn't matter if he wins or loses; his ideas have been accepted into the mainstream.

So the second you fall into a debating trap, be it with JBP or one of his followers, you have lost. It doesn't matter how logical you are. It doesn't matter how correct you are. You have acknowledged that a bunch of debunked hokum deserves to be considered along with serious political philosophy, that Deepak Chopra (either one, really) can share a stage with Stephen Hawking and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. You have gotten into a shit-flinging fight with a baboon, and whoever wins, you're both going to get covered in shit.

Sadly, we as a society are already sliding down that slippery, shitty slope. Ignoring Lobster Boy and the crustacean trend he represents are not options. The only valid responses seem intuitively wrong to the logical mind, and of these, the only viably non-violent ones are no-platforming and mockery. You cannot engage his ideas as ideas any more than you can engage a debating partner who hasn't done the background readings and instead of formulating an argument, pulls down his pants and farts in your face. 

("But Sabotabby! Isn't viciously mocking the fash and/or suppressing their FREEZED PEACH what turned Classical Liberals such as JBP and his acolyte Lindsay Shepherd into Alt Reich darlings?" If you believe that, dear friends, I have a bridge to sell you. They were like that already, and carefully constructed the narrative they spin. Besides, aren't these guys all about Manly Masculinity and the primacy of the brave individual? Can SJWs like me have such an impact on their feelings as to make them cry and drive them down a dark path?)

You can't throw shit better than a baboon. You can't nail Jell-O to a wall. And you can't win a debate where you don't understand the other side's victory conditions.

There’s this glurgy poem about the Earth being a few feet in diameter. It’s an incredibly cheesy poem (and will you check out the cheesy website I found when I went searching for it to write this post), but I’m kind of partial to it for what it reveals about human psychology. It ends as follows:

“People would love it, and defend it with their lives because they would somehow know that their lives could be nothing without it.

If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter.”

This gap, between real things and representations of things, is at the heart of something I’ve been struggling to get my head around in recent months. The passion I see for stories, be they movies, games, or—gasp—sometimes novels, is something that I share, and yet it boggles me that as much as they affect culture in a broad sense, they seem to often have little impact on the individuals most devoted to them.
( long and with pictures )

Today, in a fit of pique, the following occurred to me (prompted by me posting a leftist pop culture critique, only to be told that the author of said post was being called out at the moment, though for reasons that had nothing to do with his post):


Okay, that's not completely fair, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that the left has become even more of a toxic and humourless wasteland than it was the last time I was regularly going to protests, with less effect. Say what you will about grim Stalinist and Maoist dystopias, at least they were effective. What passes for activism these days is not, largely because call-out culture, about which many pixels have been spilled, targets our friends rather than our enemies. 

Also, I am pretty sure that there is not much overlap between "people who are heavily, or even slightly involved in real-life activism" and "people who call out problematic people over the internet." I can't prove it, though.

That's not to say that we should pretend that problematic ideas and people don't exist in our movement. Of course they do. And we shouldn't tolerate sexism or racism and transphobia from our allies any more than we tolerate it from our enemies, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. A rigid adherence to standards nurtured in academia and inaccessible to the vast majority of people who feel that shit is fucked up and wrong is not productive, and it's not like we have so many friends that we can afford to alienate most of them.*

At the root of this, I think, is an overabundance of seriousness. We have focused so much on creating the perfect political terminology, actions that walk the line between confronting capital and creating a safe space**, ensuring that our meetings take place under appropriately sterile circumstances, that we have failed to create a lively, dynamic culture that extends past the protest and meeting and Facebook re-share and into our daily lives. In short, we have forgotten that this struggle should be fun.

"But wait," my straw-activist† exclaims. "You're not taking this seriously! Not everyone has the privilege of being an activist because it's fun."

Of course, no one's an activist because it's fun. It's not fun. Even when you get to fight with a Nazi, it's much more scary than anything else. I would vastly rather marathon Netflix on the couch than wake up at ass o' clock to march in the streets, and I really do it because I'm compelled, because I don't have the privilege of ignoring the world's drunken flailing towards fascism. Because if we lose, I die and my friends die. Fun isn't the end goal here; it's part of the process.

If you look at movements throughout the world and throughout history, you'll see that desperate times and privation and hard, often fatal struggles, did not stop people from having a sense of humour or building community and culture. Witness the dark satire in the plays of Brecht, the poetry of the Zapatistas, the songs of Joe Hill. What I see missing on the left is the hopeful alternative, the shared art and music and theatre, the giant puppets in the street protests, the creative actions, the meetings in pubs†† that bleed into social gatherings. The idea of fighting for and not just fighting against. Even totalitarian state communism had its enjoyable moments; strangely enough these days the only people I see really creating an active, vibrant political culture are tankies. The very people who you'd expect to be the most uptight and humourless are the ones manufacturing memes like they're boots for the revolution. And good on them; it's why I like tankies more than most people whose politics I, on paper, agree with.

It's a matter of pragmatism, not warm fuzzies. Seriousness is unsustainable. Most of the young people currently calling out this that and the other thing††† will not, long-term, be involved in activism. Anger is a good temporary fuel, but it burns out quickly once jobs and kids come into the picture. The way to retain people and to draw more into the movement is by building links that are less easily severed—those of friendship and community.

Among the most effective groups I was ever a part of had as its core members myself (then an anarchist), a Trotskyist, two MLMs, and a Cuban revolution fanboy. We did not have much political common ground with each other, much less with some of our allies. What we did have was a simple shared goal and debriefing sessions at skeezy bars that degenerated into drunken giggling that had nothing, superficially, to do with politics. I don't doubt that these types of connections are happening now, on an individual level, but I don't see it happening at a larger scale. I don't know how to make it happen—most of the new comrades I meet manage to piss me off within 30 seconds of interaction—but I think it needs to. I know it needs to.

It's worked for the far-right. Their schoolyard humour got Cheeto Benito elected. People who like the spadgebasket like him because, for whatever reason, they find him funny. They're in no small part desperate, jobless, broke, and suffering, but they can find the space for a laugh.

In other words, more giant puppets, people. More biting satire and music and graffiti and I don't care what, just lighten the fuck up and stop trying to make everything perfect and safe.

P.S. If you hadn't noticed, I'm under the same name on LJ and DW. I'm not jumping ship on the latter, ridiculous TOS or not, seeing as I have a paid account at least through next year. But if you wanna add me on DW for the same fun content and fewer icons, by all means do so.

* I say this as someone who holds a lot of grudges. There are people on the left who, for reasons of offences committed recently and otherwise, I cannot be in the same room with.

** This is impossible BTW.

† Not really. I've met loads of people like this.

†† You can't do that, Sabotabby. That's ableist!

††† Today I learned that Love Life of an Asian Guy is racist and misogynist, and that PissPigGranddad—who as far as I'm concerned is a fucking hero—is a "war tourist."

There's so much stupid out there, and it's hard to know when to start when savagely mocking things, even without the US elections stealing a problematic plot point from an episode of Doctor Who. But here are three things that made me roll my eyes so hard that simply a link and a snarky remark on FB was not enough.

1. Facebook, as you probably heard, took down a post from a Norwegian daily featuring the famous photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, best known as the "napalm girl," but be a decent person and call her by her name, okay?  Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Aftenposten, retaliated brilliantly, as you can read here, and eventually Facebook did relent. However, their justification—that is is just too much effort to distinguish between one of the most famous photographs of all time depicting a massive political turning point and child pornography—is what's hella stupid.

Fortunately, I don't need to do a takedown of the whole thing, because Dan Hon did it rather beautifully here, and do take some time to read that post, because it's great and includes one of the most awesome trigger warnings I've ever seen on an online article. But the key takeaway is encapsulated quite nicely here:

Facebook - and, more or less, Silicon Valley, in terms of the way that the Valley talks about itself, presents itself and so-on - is built on and prides itself in solving Difficult Problems. At least, they are now. Facebook is a multi-billion dollar public company where *some* things are difficult and worth doing (e.g. Internet access to 1bn people using custom-built drones, but other things are, by implication, *TOO HARD* and don't warrant the effort.

I was going on at great length yesterday to a friend about my hatred of Facebook's sorting algorithm, and how it can cause some friends to disappear and some to become disproportionately prominent, and make you feel as though no one is listening to you and you're shouting into a void when it decides it doesn't like one of your posts. (It's bad enough when it happens on FB; worse when it happens in cases like hiring practices or policing techniques; we are increasingly delegating large parts of our lives to supposedly objective technology that's created by subjective, and generally speaking, racist, humans.) LJ solved this particular problem in a very simple way, by showing you every post by every friend in the order that they posted it, without continuous scrolling. Now, obviously, this doesn't fit with FB's business model at all, or the way that most people use it, but it does show that the problem can be solved.

Historically, we have not asked big monstrous corporations to solve all of the world's problems, but Silicon Valley seems determined to solve all the world's problems, or at least "disrupt" and create problems where there weren't any problems before. And we seem willing to surrender the questions of what problems exist, and which are worth solving, to them, which is why the US seems to have delegated creating its educational policy to Bill Gates, of all people. Which brings me to a tangential point raised by someone in the BoingBoing forums: At what point do we make a distinction between the traditional definition of free speech being freedom from government repression, and start being honest about the control over the discourse that corporations get. At what point is Facebook equivalent to or more powerful than a state actor? I think we're there; Facebook is the primary news source for a huge chunk of the population, and at some point we need to force it to act responsibly or force it to abdicate this role.

Anyway, fucking stupid. Hire some humans who can distinguish between a black-and-white news photo of a naked child on fire and actual porn, and pay them a living wage.

2. SPEAKING OF A LIVING WAGE...Okay, I've mocked this to shit already today but I'm not done mocking, no I am not.  Via Everyday Feminism, currently vying with Upworthy for the Worst Place On the Internet: 20 Ways to Help Your Employees Struggling with Food Insecurity and Hunger.

Now, for a site that claims to be all about accessibility, EF is slightly less accessible than, say, Alex Jones after 72 hours of substituting Red Bull, vodka, and crystal meth cocktails for sleep, which is to say it's one of the worst-written sites I've ever seen. I'm guessing they don't have paid editors. Every article is skimmable at best, and tends to amount to: "Be gentle, check your privilege, and don't forget to self-care with your yogurt." But this is possibly the worst article of every bad article I've ever read there, because not one of these 20 ways is "pay your employees a living wage."

Because, sorry. A minimum wage is supposed to be a living wage, and if your employees are on food stamps, you are not paying them enough. If you "can't afford" to pay them enough, as EF suggested in their equally ludicrous rebuttal to the criticism this article garnered, you are a shitty businessperson and deserve to go bankrupt. And if you have the time and money to learn about your employee's food sensitivities—again, you are not paying them enough, and hardworking taxpayers should not be expected to subsidize your lack of business acumen.

Should you be in the odd position where you cannot control how much you pay your employees (let's say you're the just-above-minimum-wage manager of a McDonald's, though if you were, I'm not sure why food sensitivities would be an issue), plenty of helpful friendly unions would be happy to come and visit your employees and assist them in organizing to get their wages raised.

Also, they include the worst suggestion of all time, which is to load up on meat-lovers pizza. Please do not do this, whether your workers are starving or not. In 100% of catered work events I have attended, the "meat-lovers" go right for the paltry vegetarian options and eat it all up before the vegetarians can get to it.

3. Finally, let's talk about architecture. Check out York U's new building! Now, York U is already the repository for a collection of the worst architectural trends in the last half-century (as is Toronto in general; we spawned Frank Gehry, after all) but this one is just too hilarious to be believed. It's like the Edgy White Liberal of buildings. You can practically see the #hashtags in #every #sentence in that #puffpiece.

Guess what, starchitects. People figured out hundreds of years ago how to make buildings work, and you can't improve on it all that much. Human beings like to feel relatively contained, and more importantly, like their ambient noise to be contained, particularly in places where they're supposed to work or study. That's why universities have quaint, outmoded features like "classrooms" and "lecture halls." Ever tried to work in an open concept office? It's distracting as anything. I'm all for less productivity—productivity is one of the Great Lies of late-stage capitalism—but I would rather be unproductive on my own terms. And common areas for meeting with students? When students want to meet with me outside of class time, it's quite often to tell me that they're struggling with family or workload or mental health issues, so why not just shout that all over the #learningspaces where the whole #engineering program can hear it?

Plus, like every building erected in the last 20 years, it looks like the architect gave up, crumpled the blueprints, and submitted the balled-up paper as the actual design.

Kill it with fucking fire.

The stupidest comment I've seen today (in response to a comment I made elsewhere about how police can basically murder with impunity):

"I don't think being put on adminstrative leave pending investigation and having your murder inspire riots and protests is "impunity.""

Pity the poor cop on paid leave who isn't currently dead or having his skull bashed in, unlike a good many other people. The only thing worse than cops is the culture of racism and bootlicking that enables them. And that's regular people with a fetish for authority and a delusion that what happened to that poor kid in Missouri won't ever happen to anyone they love.