The Antisocial Socialist

Meme time! snarkitysnarks asked me to explain the following LJ interests:

billboard improvement (I don't believe I ever asked about this)
making baby jesus cry (hee)
maoist kitsch (?)
phil ochs (are there more songs of his I should know about?)
‽ (what is...what? this is your last interest)

billboard improvement

Okay, so there is no such thing as free speech.

Maybe you have an abstract right to free speech. You will, in most places, not be arrested for tacking up a poster. But it will be taken down. You can shout on a street corner, or send a letter to the editor, but no on actually listens to you. Even in this age of democratized media, you can make the most rational, sensible statements and be utterly ignored.

Meanwhile, a large corporation can hire psychologists, marketing experts, and graphic designers to create something perfectly eye-catching and spend millions of dollars to put up a massive billboard that will violate your mental and physical space. You have no say in this whatsoever. You cannot simply choose to ignore it. Your visual environment is consistently under assault from all directions. A large corporation can buy speech; you cannot afford it.

So, of course, I find it tremendously cathartic when some punk gets up on a billboard late at night and improves it.



True story: When I first moved to Toronto, Sauza was running a series of subway ads. One of them was this:

( cut for transphobia )

making baby jesus cry

I don’t know how this got started. I think zingerella and I started saying it all the time for some reason. And then we started saying “sad panda” and the result was “you make baby Jesus a sad panda.” Oh, and at one point I made this Flash animation that was Leila Khaled chasing Ann Coulter around with an axe, and Eva Braun showed up, or something. I don’t think there’s much more of a story than that.

maoist kitsch

Hmm. Some people think I’m a Maoist because of my conditional support for the Naxalites or whatever but I’m not. Mostly I collect Maoist kitsch because it’s funny as hell. It doesn’t matter what bizarre object exists, Maoists manage to slap a piece of socialist realist art on it. Like I have a Mao alarm clock and a Mao hat and a poster on my wall that roughly translates to: “Unite and drive out the imperialists and the ass-kissers.”

I genuinely like the aesthetic of socialist realism, by the way. I shouldn’t. The art critic in me shudders. But I think it’s pretty.

phil ochs

I grew up listening to Phil Ochs and knowing the words to “Draft Dodger Rag” and “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” but I didn’t know they were by the same guy or anything about him. And then years later, I was searching for good songs about anarchism and found “Spanish Civil War Song.” It struck me, despite the reference to “25 years ago,” as sounding quite contemporary, so I looked around for information on this Phil Ochs guy so that I could maybe attend a show.

Oh. He killed himself. Also he was the Tupac to Bob Dylan’s Biggie. And if you read anything about his life you will totally hate Dylan. Shitgoddamnit.

Really, all of his songs are fantastic. He can be a bit didactic in his political songs, but he makes up for it with scathing wit. In terms of songs you should hear, besides the ones I mentioned:

“Changes”—Pretty much everyone agrees this is his best song. Also it was written in Toronto.
“I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore”—The song that political people think is his best song.
”When I’m Gone”—That’s another one of his best songs. Hahaha.
“Cops of the World”—One of those songs that you think is contemporary. I made a video about the Iraq War to this song and it totally fit.
“White Boots Marching In a Yellow Land”—Along the same lines.
“I’ll Be There”—I don’t think there is a decent recording of this anywhere, but it’s great.
“Here’s to the State of Mississippi”—More historically specific except not really.
“The Iron Lady”—I actually prefer Diamanda Galas’ cover, but not by much.
“Remember Me”—snarkitysnarks, remind me to put that on the next mixtape. For Molly. You’ll see why.

Someone is going to inevitably jump in the comments and say that “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends” is actually Phil Ochs’ best song, but this is not true.

Despite the fact that he was a blatant pinko commie, Phil Ochs’ estate and record company are capitalist asshats and thus it is hard to find his music online. I have bunches; I’m happy to share. He would have approved.

‽

That’s an interrobang. It is a Real Actual Punctuation mark. It is the grammatical equivalent of saying:

WHAT

Except louder.

I need to use it more frequently than you might think.

Really interesting article on how different languages shape what we think about. The part about colour and art on the last page is particularly cool.

But what I'm really wondering about is the bit on gendered words. With all the debate about which pronouns to use (in English) for people who do not identify as exclusively male or female (or persons who have not told us their gender and whom we don't want to offend by presuming), it did not occur to me that most European languages have a far more rigorously gendered grammar than English. I mean, I knew, but it didn't occur to me to bring it up in conversations about why I don't think invented pronouns will catch on with the mainstream and the singular they is the most elegant solution, though of course I will defer to an individual's pronoun of choice. In many languages, in that last clause, I would have had to have identified the gender of "an individual."

So for those of you who speak other languages: Is there a similar discussion about gendered language in, say, Spanish or French or German?

A Flickr collection of teabagger signs.



On my less-happy days, I don't know how I stand living in a world that spawns people like this.

P.S. Not because of the spelling and grammar fail. Just because I can't cope with knowing there are human beings so devoid of empathy.

And some of it was terrible, and some of it was beautiful...

freetobeme had a bunch of good ones today. Here are my favourites:


War Zone: A woman uses a Super-8 camera to talk back to street harassers. Grungy, angry, and frequently funny.

A mother and daughter talk about fat. This is long and painful but well worth the read.

"I'm not disappointed in your body," I said. "I think you're beautiful." Jess looked at me skeptically. "I do," I insisted. "Your eyes, your hair, your manner, everything about who you are—it's all beautiful." But my perceptive daughter heard the roar of words unsaid. I never said "your body," because to say I found it beautiful would have been a lie.

On a related note, Fatshionista talks about healthcare and personal responsibility.

symbioid brings us this little piece of terror. A high school student and his parents are suing a school district for allegedly using school laptops to spy on children and their families at home.

Via pope_guilty, the best captcha ever:


Thanks to curgoth and pluvka, I now have new decorations for my classroom:

How to use a semicolon
How to use an apostrophe
Ten words you need to stop misspelling

As my generation becomes old fogies, the distinction between "your" and "you're" will be forgotten by the vast majority of English-speakers, if it isn't already.

Via terry_terrible: I have no idea who this George Hutchins guy is but his website is a work of art. And by that I mean that before you click on the following link:

1. Make sure that you are sober. In particular, refrain from the use of hallucinogenic drugs, as you will almost certainly have a bad trip even without them.

2. Have a cup of coffee. I tried looking at it without the benefit of caffeine and—let's just say you need all your wits about you.

3. Put on some sunglasses.

4. If you have epilepsy, a heart condition, or a moderately developed aesthetic sensibility, this site is probably not for you.

Okay, here it is. Keep your hand on the back button of your browser at all times, just in case.

The forum is probably my favourite part, as it's 99% anonymous trolls making the lulz, 1% George Hutchins responding in ALL CAPS, and 1% George Hutchins responding under a different username in third-person.

( Highlights! )

P.S. He also advocates "more better jobs" and moving Hollywood to North Carolina.

First, the serious stuff:
Chris Clarke (will my e-crush on him never cease?) has a heartbreaking and brutal post about Haïti. You should read it.

Also on Pandagon, Ilyka has a post about an out-of-control high school in Louisiana where the black students can't so much as catch a bit of shade without the white students threatening to lynch them.

krinndnz linked to the recently declassified PowerPoint slides of the Pentagon's *ahem* plan to invade Iraq. I can't make sense of them, and I bet half the people at the Pentagon couldn't either, because the whole point of PowerPoint is to confuse. Actually, the entire post is pretty right-on.

Then the fun stuff:

Also from krinndnz, two blogs for your edification and amusement: Literally, A Web Log and the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. I have not looked at the latter in enough detail to ascertain whether "Good" Burger in Toronto is in there, but I hope so.

dania_audax has a link to a comic that nearly cost me a keyboard this morning: Who Is Your Savior?

Finally, in the Funny or Sad? category, we have this story from fengi. I'll just quote from the same bit, because...wow:

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government's $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces.

Facing tough questions before a congressional panel last week, Broadcasting Board of Governors member Joaquin Blaya admitted none of the senior news managers at the network spoke Arabic when the terrorist messages made it onto the air courtesy of U.S. taxpayer funds. Nor did Blaya himself or any of the other officials at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the network.
...
Blaya conceded that the top officials in the network's chain of command could not understand what was being said on al Hurra broadcasts...the network's news division also had no assignment desk, he said. That left decisions over al Hurra's content in the hands of its reporters and producers, who are, according to Blaya, hastily-hired Arabic-speaking journalists with insufficient understanding of Western journalistic practices or the network's pro-Western mission.