Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

Schools Reflect Prisons More and More Everyday

American schools and prisons become more of a mirror image every day. Prisons now contain classrooms, art centers, computer labs, libraries, and other things we would expect to find in a school. Schools are now surrounded by chain link fencing, guards and metal detectors are posted at entrances, and students are prohibited from having mechanisms that could conceal anything that they’re carrying:

A New York high school is the latest in the nation to ban backpacks following several bomb threats, and has even taken extra steps, including sealing up students’ lockers.

For the last two weeks of the school year, students at Wantagh High School — located about 34 miles east of New York City — are being forced to carry their books and belongings in plastic bags, sign in and out to use the bathroom and submit to searches when entering the building. But the sealing up of lockers took school security to a new level.

When I was in high school there were whispers of backpack bans but they were similar to the whispers about instating school uniforms: they are brought up every now and then only to be shot down by people who aren’t completely stupid. But now, from my understanding, backpack bans aren’t unheard of but the sealing up of lockers is new to me. Depending on the school an average student may have anywhere from four to eight classes. Trying to lug around everything you need for those classes all day is annoying to say the least. But schools are often spend a great deal of time making students’ lives miserable while paying lip service to making a safe learning environment.

At this rate they might as well just house students in prisons.

Now It’s Nerd Culture, Which is Synonymous with Rape Culture

Misogyny, white privilege, masculinity, and America’s gun culture have all been blamed as the causes of the shooting in California. I figured at this point every social justice warrior cause would have been insinuated as the One True Cause but I figured wrong. As it turns out the quintessential rape culture hasn’t received any love yet. Fortunately one brave warrior has stood up and pointed out that the shooting was indeed caused by the nerd culture, which is synonymous with the rape culture! The best part about this article is that it makes a case based on insinuations derived from a fictional story:

Princess Leia was raped by Jabba the Hutt.

How many times, I don’t know, nor do I care to know the specifics. But these were the most brutal gangsters in all of the galaxy, the worst of the worst, and so she was. And it was soul-crushing and brutal and something that Leia never spoke of — not to her brother Luke Skywalker and not to her lover Han Solo. When it was all said and done, she was a shadow of her former self.

Although Leia’s rape may have happened off-screen, make no mistake, it happened. And after it was done, Leia was dressed in rags and chained to her rapist. She was nothing more than an object, a toy, for any and all to see.

And for many, if not most geeks today, this particular image of Leia is the quintessential image of geek sexiness and yet at heart it is the image of a rape fantasy.

I’m sure there are a few other things to blame but the media’s one week window of reporting is fast closing. Get your accusations out there now or you won’t get the big page hits!

The Pointless Finger Pointing Continues

In addition to California’s “weak” gun laws, mental illness, misogyny, and white privilege the shooting in California is now also the fault of America’s gun culture! But that’s not all! As an added bonus the shooting was also the product of toxic masculinity! As I said everybody is running as fast as they can towards this shooting to exploit it for their personal gain. I’ve not seen a flock of vulture this ravenous since Sandy Hook.

I’m still waiting for the article that blames this incident on Republican created “anarchy”. If anybody reading this comes across such an article please send it my way posthaste.

Check Your Privilege

Remember how I said everybody was exploiting the recent shooting in California to push their personal agenda? Case in point:

Welp. Another young white guy has decided that his disillusionment with his life should become somebody else’s problem. On Saturday, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger (who, as many commenters have pointed out, had a white father and mother of Asian descent) went on a killing spree on the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara, murdering his three roommates, shooting women outside a sorority house, and hitting people with his car as he attempted to get away from police.

How many times must troubled young white men engage in these terroristic acts that make public space unsafe for everyone before we admit that white male privilege kills?

Emphasis mine. So our killer, who exploited California’s “weak” gun laws, was a mentally ill misogynist who was set off by his white privilege. I wonder when some neoliberal author will blame this whole event on Republican created “anarchy”.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Or if you’re in France fuck measuring altogether:

The French train operator SNCF has discovered that 2,000 new trains it ordered at a cost of 15bn euros ($20.5bn; £12.1bn) are too wide for many regional platforms.

The BBC’s Christian Fraser in Paris says that it is an embarrassing blunder that has so far cost the rail operator over 50m euros ($68.4m; £40.6m).

How does something like this happen? The concept of measuring things isn’t something that our species has only recently stumbled across. We’ve been measuring things for millennia. In fact it’s often one of the first things we do when we’re building something. The fact that nobody thought to take a tape measure to these new trains to determine whether or not they would actually fit in the terminals is almost beyond my ability to comprehend.

At this rate we won’t need to cryogenically freeze somebody for them to experience this:

Open Carry Texas Strikes Again

File this under the With Friends Like This Who Needs Enemies category. Hot on the heels of convincing Chipotle to request gun owners not carry their firearms into its stores Open Carry Texas went to work convincing Chili’s to consider the same:

Chili’s is reviewing its policy on guns in its restaurants after a pro-gun group upset diners by bringing rifles to one of its Texas locations.

The restaurant chain’s statement comes just days after another cadre of Texas activists, also carrying guns, prompted Chipotle to issue a statement telling customers that guns aren’t welcome at any of its locations.

Chili’s isn’t going that far yet, but the idea is on the table. “Given the recent attention to open carry laws, we are evaluating our policy to ensure we provide a safe environment for our guests and team members,” a spokeswoman for Brinker International, Chili’s parent company, told The Huffington Post.

Although it’s futile I will point out that Chili’s, like Chipotle, is a business interested in making money. Becoming a battleground for political issues is a detrimental to that mission. If you pick a side or even appear as though you’re thinking about maybe picking a side you’re likely to piss of approximately half of your customer base.

Luckily for us gun rights activists Open Carry Texas has officially revamped its activism strategy, which means the number of incidents like this will hopefully go down. But let this be a lesson to anybody involved in a political battle, leave anybody who doesn’t ask to be involved out of it.

Net Neutrality for Libertarians

Net neutrality is a hot topic in libertarian circles. May libertarians mistakenly see net neutrality as another unwelcome intrusion of the state into the free market. It’s not that uncommon of a trap for libertarians to fall for. When they see a battle that appears to be private enterprise versus government they instinctively side with private enterprise. But net neutrality isn’t a debate between private enterprise and government regulations. It’s merely government regulations versus government regulations.

The mistake lies in seeing businesses like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast as private enterprises. In reality they are where they are today thanks to special privileges granted to them by the state. AT&T and Verizon, for example, have government granted monopolies over a lot of wireless spectrum and Comcast enjoys near or outright monopolies in many areas thanks to government control over who can build networking infrastructure where. Many states even have restrictions against municipalities providing Internet service because of Internet service provider (ISP) lobbying efforts.

But that’s not all. At one time telephone companies were the primarily ISPs. But ISPs have become content providers and content providers have become ISPs. I believe this is what really sparked the net neutrality war. Companies with monopolies on a great deal of copyrighted material suddenly found a way to further exploit that monopoly by controlling what their ISP customers can access. Comcast can leverage its licensed monopolies on a lot of entertainment content by charging competitors such as Netflix an inflated rate that makes it untenable for Comcast customers to utilize Netflix. And if you just download the content from alternate sources (such as BitTorrent) you’re in violation of the law because you don’t have a license for that monopolized content.

What more libertarians should focus on is the fact that there is no free market in providing Internet access. Only those granted permission by the state can do so. And much of the content that makes the Internet valuable is controlled by a handful of ISPs that will happily withhold said content unless you’re getting Internet access through them.

In other words no matter who wins we lose. Losing net neutrality won’t be a win for the free market and keeping it will mean more government control over something that has had too much government control over it. What is truly needed is the destruction of the monopolies on content and infrastructure, which isn’t going to happen through the political process (since the content providers/ISPs have such effective lobbying efforts).

Trigger Warning: The Author of This Blog is an A-Hole

There are so many feel good movements on the Internet that I can’t keep track of them all. Some of the most prevalent ones (that I’m aware of) are the push for people to use gender neutral terms (which is really fucking difficult when the language you’re using is English), stop using the word retarded, and include trigger warnings on any material that may trigger a traumatic memory of people you haven’t met. The last one has been gaining some traction as of late and it appears to be spreading outside of the Internet:

It’s a phrase that’s been requested this semester by a number of college students to be applied to classic books — The Great Gatsby (for misogyny and violence), Huck Finn (for racism), Things Fall Apart (for colonialism and religious persecution), Mrs. Dalloway (for suicide), Shakespeare (for … you name it). These students are asking for what essentially constitute red-flag alerts to be placed, in some cases, upon the literature itself, or, at least, in class syllabuses, and invoked prior to lectures.

These feel good movements, in addition to being an attempt to protect everybody’s sensitive feelings, generally have an (sometimes) unintended side effect: censorship. As the article goes on to state:

Of course, life doesn’t come with a trigger warning, even if it should. And while a classroom conversation about emotionally fraught subjects would seem not only advisable but also just part of any decent teaching method, slapping a trigger warning on classic works of literature seems a short step away from book banning, a kind of censorship based on offenses to individual feelings.

Whenever I run across a comment that says some permutation of “Dude, add a trigger warning!” (Dude? Way to jump to assumptions that all offense things on the Internet are posted by men you misandrist asshole!) it triggers my trigger, which is triggered whenever I run across somebody bitching because there isn’t an included trigger warning. How is the author of an article or a comment supposed to know that the content of his work is going to set off some random stranger’s traumatic memories?

Of course the opinion that trigger warning are bullshit isn’t generally accepted within the halls of the social justice warriors so they will often demand that you be censored for expressing it. And if you do include a trigger warning they will demand that you be censored because you posted something online that you expected to trigger somebody’s traumatic memories.

Imagine a class of 30 students. Each student has lived a separate life full of different experiences from every other member of the class. More than likely more than one of the students has suffered a traumatic experience and it’s also likely the the type of trauma suffered by each sufferer is different from the other sufferers. What happens when the instructor of a literature class chooses to assign Huck Finn and one of the students who suffered racial trauma objects? That instructor will be faced with deciding to assign a different book or being labeled an asshole for making a student who is triggered by the assigned material read it. Since the former is less likely to end in a week long bitchfest on Twitter as social justice warriors create a clever hashtag to use to derogatorily refer to the instructor he or she will probably choose to assign a different book. So let’s say that the instructor decides to assign Mrs. Dalloway instead only to find out one of his students was traumatized by a past attempt to commit suicide. Again we return to one of two options. Eventually the only titles that become acceptable to assign are sanitized tomes devoid of almost everything that makes for a great work (namely addressing or exploring a controversial topic).

In addition to being based entirely on random people’s feelings, trigger warning are also time period dependent. Consider many of the works of Samuel Clemens. Many of his titles contain what we now consider to be very racist language. But when they were written the terms used were part of the vernacular. When the books were written nobody would have demanded a trigger warning be added to the book. So in addition to having to predict the feels of every potential reader authors and publishers must either predict what will offend individuals in the future or periodically update the included trigger warnings.

Trying to manage such a subjective time sensitive clusterfuck as trigger warnings on novels is retarded (I’m just going to tick off all of the easily offendeds’ boxes). Because of the difficult of managing such a mess colleges and instructors will choose the much easier path of assigning completely sterile works to the detriment of students everywhere.

I’m Not Saying They’re Gold Diggers

Here in the United States we have a tradition that goes back at least as long as I have been alive. When something bad happens to you or one of your family members the tradition is to find an organization that is both tangentially linked to the bad thing and wealthy and file a lawsuit against it. That is exactly what family members of four New York firefighters who were ambushed by a man with a firearm are doing:

The families of four New York state firefighters are suing St. Paul-based Gander Mountain, alleging that the retailer’s Rochester, N.Y.-area outlet could have prevented a “straw buyer” from purchasing the rifle that was turned over to a convicted killer and used on Christmas Eve 2012 to kill two firefighters and wound two others.

The lawsuit, which has the legal heft of prominent gun control advocates behind it, said the rifle used in the bloody ambush should never have been sold to 22-year-old Dawn Nguyen in 2010 with the eventual shooter at her side.

Along with payment to the families of punitive and compensatory damages, the suit seeks to have Gander Mountain reform its practices and employee training procedures to prevent these “straw purchasers.” The suit was filed Tuesday in state court in Rochester, N.Y.

How can Gander Mountain stop straw purchases? Preventing straw purchases requires the ability to read minds, which no human has as far as I know (although I sometimes suspect that my mother has such powers). There is no way for employees of Gander Mountain to know that a person purchasing a firearm isn’t doing so with the intention of giving that gun to a prohibited person. Even if, as this lawsuit insinuates, I go into Gander Mountain with a friend and purchase a gun there is no way for the employees involved with the transaction to know if I’m buying it for myself or to give to my friend.

In other words what this lawsuit is demanding is that Gander Mountain perform an impossible feat, which hopefully means that this lawsuit will be dismissed.

Thankfully the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act shields gun manufacturers and dealers from a lot of legal gold digging. But it doesn’t completely close the door as manufacturers and dealers can still be sued for selling defective products, breaching contracts, and performing criminal actions. Depending on how this legal gold digging is being justified the case may get thrown out or Gander Mountain may be dragged into a pointless lawsuit because it was unable to read one man’s mind.

Chipotle Requests Gun Owners Not Bring Guns Into Its Stores

I have no issue with open carry. In fact I open carry quite often (basically whenever I’m on a bicycle). But actions have consequences and if you’re open carrying AR-15 rifles into stores you should understand that backlash is a likely outcome. Case in point, after an incident involving gun rights activists open carrying rifles into a Texas Chipotle location the company has officially requested that customers not bring guns into their stores:

NEW YORK (AP) — Chipotle is asking customers not to bring firearms into its stores after it says gun rights advocates brought military-style assault rifles into one of its restaurants in Texas.

The Denver-based company notes that it has traditionally complied with local laws regarding open and concealed firearms.

But in a statement Monday, the company said that “the display of firearms in our restaurants has now created an environment that is potentially intimidating or uncomfortable for many of our customers.”

I’m not going to invest time into criticizing those who were carrying rifles into Chipotle. They knew what they were doing and what the possible consequences would be. The lesson to take away from this announcement is the same lesson to take away from Starbuck’s similar announcement: being a dick never helps. I know that there’s nothing inherently dickish about the act open carrying firearms. But intent does play a factor in everything and when your intent is to make a political statement by open carrying then it’s a dickish act. Let’s face it, much like religion, politics is a topic that should only be discussed upon invitation. Any attempt to bring up politics before an invitation has been made is dickish.

Am I going to boycott Chipotle over this? Well I couldn’t even if I wanted to since I never eat at Chipotle. It seems to put cilantro in everything and cilantro does not interact favorably with my tastebuds (that shit tastes nasty and I don’t know how people enjoy it).