The Antisocial Socialist

Electronic music. Communism. Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin. Futurism. Alchemy and the occult.

There are a few times that I've wished that I were more mechanically and musically inclined. Alas, I lack the talent to ever build one, though given that it's played by drawing, I'm pretty sure I could actually play one.

ETA: Here it is being played (starts at around 4:17):

I haven't been able to do very much lately, to the point where even blogging is kind of exhausting. And pretty much all food looks unappetizing. This said, I managed to make this for lunch today:



It's onion ring eggs. Yes, I get my recipes from BoingBoing, why do you ask?

In other news, I'm kind of addicted to housewife blogs at the moment. This one's my favourite, mostly for the ridiculous link posts (though her DIY posts are also quite impressive). It's making me want to buy chalk paint, even though in real life I despise the fact the chalkboards exist.

This post made me sick to my stomach. It's about a gay kid whose parents had her violently kidnapped in the middle of the night and brought to a brainwashing camp where she was abused in an attempt to turn her into some sort of Stepford wife. WWASP and Cross Creek, the facility at which this child was tortured, are apparently real things, as is the horrifyingly named Teen Escort Service. These are for-profit companies that are, unbelievably, allowed to operate.

If half of the allegations in that post are true, how are these places allowed to operate legally? Can't we round up the owners and operators of these places and put them in our own re-education camps or something?

BoingBoing discussion on a new documentary called Race to Nowhere. The movie looks interesting—certainly something that I'd like to see. The discussion on BB is interesting. As always, the libertarians, homeschoolers*, and union-bashers are out in full-force, but so are a number of high school teachers and geeky types. (Oddly, the two posts from high school students seem to roughly concur with what the teachers are saying.)

My favourite comment so far is bigmike7 at #15, who says some sensible things, including:

[...] not everybody should be expected to conform to one way of learning. The older system most of us grew up with assumes a student is highly motivated and wants to learn. Students that either don't try or aren't bright were expected to fall by the wayside. The current system is basically the same, but overlaid with the idea that every student is intelligent and if the student is failing then it's the teacher's fault. I say it's the same in that it's still a program everyone is expected to go through.
[...]
The people in my school that are fanatical over "Schools of the Future" are the same ones that two years ago told me my students were too loud as they were working on their math problems together. Now they're preaching to me about collaboration. Schools of the Future people are extremely rigid and do not want to hear anything besides testimonials about the miracles of students' making powerpoint presentations. They are the teachers that were failing at teaching their students. Assigning no homework and no tests lets them off the hook.

I did far too much homework in elementary school, where the focus was rote memorization, and I recall being stressed out from an early age. I did a substantial amount of homework in high school as well, both because I had to but also because I was genuinely interested in what I was learning. I bitched and moaned about it, because I was a teenager, but I won't say that staying up until 2 am hand-painting Victorian floral wallpaper with watercolours taught me nothing, despite being repetitive, torturous, and technologically pointless**. Self-discipline is an undervalued skill in modern education.

My subject area is not conducive to homework, much to the joy of my students. I tell them at the beginning of class that if they are reasonably disciplined, they can get away with little to none. There is no legal way for the vast majority of them to afford the software we use in class, so the amount of homework I can assign is limited. It's essentially studying for tests (which few of them do; it's standard practice in many classrooms to allow five minutes of study time before a test) and planning work (which few of them do). A student who is focused can obtain a reasonably high mark in my class without doing homework. A student who is not focused will need to do homework–amazingly, they tend to not figure out that they can't slack off for all 75 minutes of the class, hand something crappy in at the last minute, and then expect a decent grade. A student who is actually serious will choose to do homework.

In other subject areas, I think homework is necessary. Math is a no-brainer, but there's also English. I compare the number of books we read in my high school English classes to the number of books my kids read, and the difference is staggering. Short of the university-level English classes, kids read maybe one novel a semester. We read at home and discussed in class. In a semester system (and even in a non-semester system), there's not enough time to read multiple books and analyze them.

It may very well be that today's students have too much unnecessary homework, and they definitely have too much make-work (which is different than drilling and rote-learning, by the way). But I've seen the result of the other extreme too, and it's no less useless.

Boyhowdy at #33 says the same thing:

I teach in an inner city school where there is a comprehensive culture of "nobody does homework here" that I have concluded, after three years of pushing every which way, is a truly immovable force. The result: students read less, because they do not read at home, and have to spend classtime READING BOOKS OUT LOUD; students often arrive in ninth grade functionally illiterate as a result, and the average four-year graduation rate is far under 30%. Even in my media and communications class - where homework can be "watch the evening news, and watch for x, so we can discuss it in class", or "have someone tell you a good joke, and then come tell us about it and the experience of hearing/telling it", only gets done by about a quarter of the kids.

* I am not 100% against homeschooling, but damned if homeschooling parents don't make incredibly difficult not to be.

** Even in the 90s, you could have just scanned it and used Photoshop. But that wasn't the point.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan's manhood is too hot for Apple to handle.

Now, the idea of a Ulysses comic makes about as much sense as a Watchmen movie, for exactly the same reason, but that's just silly. How tiny does Steve Jobs' peen have to be for him to feel threatened by Mulligan's? Just sayin'.

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.

Via BoingBoing, every violent act in the Superbowl ads:


Most of that just comes off as slapstick, to be honest. None of it's as violent as the following ad, which also apparently aired during the Superbowl (via fengi):



I know, rationally, that most men I encounter don't think that way about women. I mean, they can't, right? You can't hide that kind of hatred.

Can you?

I saved the worse for last. This story comes to us via audrawilliams.

( cut because I don't want to even look at the link when I check my LJ )

You know, I think I'm just going to curl up under a pile of blankets with my cats for awhile. Wake me up when the world doesn't suck so much.

Here are the five stupidest stories to make the headlines in my five-minute scan of today's news.

5. A French parliamentary commission proposes banning niqabs and burqas
Presenting conclusions after six months of hearings, the panel also suggested barring foreign women from obtaining French visas or citizenship if they insisted on veiling their faces. I've already blogged before about why I think this is moronic, but to reiterate: Men deciding what women can and cannot wear is fucking sexist, regardless of whether the motivation is patronizing pseudo-feminism, post-911 paranoia, or a misguided interpretation of Muslim dress codes.

4. Nashville censors tell a Toronto theatre group to "tone down" Romeo and Juliet
"If Mercutio doesn't offend the Nurse with his line about the bawdy hand of the dial being upon the prick of noon and she doesn't try to exit in protest, then what happens to the rest of the play?" When I was in 9th grade, we had to study this play. Okay. I think it's not the greatest choice for high schoolers, but whatever. Our English teacher showed us the Zeffirelli film and censored the sex scene by holding a white piece of paper in front of it. This is probably the root of my Victorian porn fetish or something.

3. Children's TV show hosts detained by London police for terrorism.
"We were stopped, not arrested, but they had to say 'we are holding you under the Anti-Terrorism Act because you're running around in flak jackets and a utility belt', and I said 'and please put spangly blue hairdryer' and he was, like, 'all right'." Really, London? Really?

2. Tofu cream pies are terrorism.
A Liberal MP says he believes the federal government should investigate whether the pieing of Fisheries Minister Gail Shea by a woman opposed to the seal hunt constitutes an act of terrorism. Never mind that this story creates a weird mash-up in my head that involves Osama bin Laden starring in a Marx Brothers movie. This story gave me an intense craving for pie. Plz to be serving up more of this sort of terrorism and less of the blowing-stuff-up sort, kthnx.

And the stupidest story of the day...

Get ready...

Drum roll...

1. SoCal school district bans the dictionary.
A Southern California school board has pulled the Merriam-Webster dictionary off its shelves after a parent complained about the entry “oral sex.”

Okay, so you, like everyone else in the world, looked up dirty words in the dictionary and tittered. In fairness, we were all in fifth grade, when "poo-poo" stopped being the funniest thing ever*, to be replaced by "self-abuse" (what?). Maybe it even, well, made you a little hot. You can admit it, I won't judge.

But did you ever encounter a dictionary that defined "oral sex" in such detail that you would know how to do it? I'm pretty sure Merriam-Webster doesn't.

Poll-time!

[Poll #1516926]

Comment with your rants about descriptive versus prescriptive dictionaries.

* I jest, of course. "Poo-poo" is still funniest.

1. Via springheel_jack:


Why does Rambo have an anchor in Afghanistan? Because he is prepared.

HOLY SHIT IT'S A RAMBO COLOURING BOOK. Click on that link and there's MORE. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to download those and colour them in. Hahahaha. The 80s were so strange.*

2. If you have a few hours to kill, check out The Power of Nightmares so we can discuss it. It's pretty good; a parallel history of Islamic terrorism and neoconservatism. I think it's too soft on Nixon and Kissinger (you know your cast is pure evil when Kissinger is the good guy) but it's fascinating stuff.

3. If you are artistically talented, you should participate in Bruce Schneier's TSA logo contest.

4. And if you are a web designer, you might know about this already, but if not, check out Accessify. I ran across it in my attempt to find a resource on accessible web design that's, well, accessible to teenagers. This has tutorials and plain language, which the W3C pages, while great, do not.

* Tagged "rambo iii" because apparently I only have one Rambo tag and it's oddly specific.

Check out this awesome thread on Tor.com A bunch of artists—professionals and amateurs alike—are invited to post Lovecraft-inspired art. There's some really amazing work to fill you with squidly joy.

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On a completely unrelated note, this is exactly the sort of thing that pisses me off about the so-called atheist movement. Hey guys, let's write an edgy article about atheists and Christmas! Only we'll mostly just interview atheists from the dominant culture who grew up with warm, fuzzy childhood memories of opening presents on Christmas Day.

I feel like I'm going to be saying this from now until New Year's, but here we go again:

Christmas is not universal.

I don't care how much you don't think it's about religion—for those who are not of your religion and were not raised within your religion, it's going to be about religion, or at the very least, about a cultural experience that we don't share. Stop pretending it's for everyone. It isn't.

I am not obligated to have any sort of "holiday spirit" whatsoever. I mean, I'm happy that I'm getting some time off—I need it. But I don't demand that people observe my religious holidays, and I should not be expected to observe anyone else's. Muslims aren't asking y'all to fast at Ramadan. And yeah, that includes wearing a goddamned Santa hat—it just isn't my tradition, it means nothing to me, and I find it silly. Nor will I sing songs that, however innocuous they may seem to lapsed Christians, are actually celebrations of the (inaccurate) birthday of a deity that I don't believe in.

Anyway, most self-described members of the atheist movement have not let go of a religious mindset. That's why they're a "movement." Not being from an evangelical religious background myself, I have utterly no desire to convert anyone to atheism or spend money on bus ads when it could be used to, say, feed the poor or something.

More on why I can't bloody stand this season later, I'm sure.

ETA: Just to clear up some misunderstandings, I am not saying that you are a bad person or a bad atheist if you celebrate Christmas. Just that I can't stand it when it's assumed to be the default or that people like me are expected to relate to it or participate in it somehow.