|
|
Monday, January 12th, 2009
| |
12:09 am - I have a kitten
|
|
| Monday, March 31st, 2008
| |
3:28 pm - Because rape is hilarious unless a woman is involved...
|
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-klein30mar30,0,2240882.story
An interesting article about prison rape.
I've seen a shocking two separate mentions of issues related to male rape in comments threads here on LJ lately. And with my friend's list of about eight I figured that was fairly exceptional, and thought I'd share this.
The author basically tries to address the strange social disconnect that surrounds male prison rape. How it's a source of comedy and traumatic violence, and goes on to raise questions about the American criminal justice system (which, aside from the comments about the large percentage of population, I think are almost equally applicable in Canada).
It's interesting that Prisons have come to be viewed as places of punishment rather than "correction" these days. Prisons have always had this role of the ultimate site of a society's repression. For the theory nerds (hi K.) there are the obvious panopticon ties. More interestingly, though, I think is just quick archetypal history: The romans had their public torture and execution of criminals, crucification, throwing them to animals, quartering, etc., all as vicious as their authoritarian mentality of conquest and human exploitation (they invented a train, a real one powered by a differential steam engine that went on tracks, and never developed it because slaves were cheaper than donkeys); the medieval ages saw dungeons directly in the basements of whoever had power at the time, the local king called all the shots and punishment was arbitrary and local, like authority; the Victorians had their asylums they banished madness to and workhouses where the poor could serve prison sentences, all about ways to normalize society and shove what didn't fit out of the way; then the modern period where prisons were at once arbitrary and harsh but less judgmental and increasingly open to reform; leading into the era of the welfare state that started in the 40s, increased attention to the social institutions and how they could be homogenized under government agency control also leads to a "softening" of prisons as they began to incorporate more trade skills, access to books, and educational or self improvement (often religious) classes; then the "war on drugs" takes off as a dash cunning way to use the full extent of state power, the military, the justice system, the government, on a propaganda war, increase of foreign influence in strategic independent Nations, and those uppity black/ethnic people.
And lets not forget the communist gulags and gitmo.
Anyway, given that general progression it's interesting to think about how the way a society treats its prisoners is reflective of its attitude towards the world. From top down absolute power, to sweeping schemes of social control, to reformation, to direct punishment.
So to me the really interesting question is this: Is male rape in prisons something that occurs as a result of how society is, or as a result of how prisons are used in society? The two aren't totally interdependent, but are we putting the cart before the horse in condemning male rape in prisons while prisons are still used to reflect the norms the ruling class has towards society at large?
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
| |
10:22 pm
|
Headline:Journalists complain that job is hard.
Journalists the media over try to make public understand the cruel approbation of public speaking and debate, the risk of being in the media spot light, is something so terrifying to them they can't help but repeat the administration line.
"Some of reporters at the press conference appeared to have some second thoughts themselves. ABC's Terry Moran said the president was not "sufficiently challenged" and that reporters ended up "looking like zombies."
Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times explained, "We were very deferential" because "it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there...on prime-time live television asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war." She admitted that "no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time." "
The questions they wish they asked.
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Monday, February 25th, 2008
| |
4:30 pm
|
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2006/11/2973_obama_to_report.html
Obama to Reporter: I'm Sorry for "Messing Up Your Game"
"In the past Barack Obama has been accused of many things -- having ties to a crooked political fundraiser, for one -- but this, I dare say, is a first. In a recent column in the Henry Daily Herald of McDonough, Georgia, reporter Nicklaus Lovelady lambasts Obama for ruining his chances with a love interest working for a rival paper. Best to let Lovelady take it from here:
"I had the looks, I had the charm and I had my eye on this pretty young thing who was doing an internship for a competing paper.
It took me nearly two months of running into each other at various news events before I worked up the nerve to begin talking to her.
And then Obama shows up.
The senator made his way to SIUE one day to introduce some legislation that would increase grants for students. Prior to that, me and the girl became really cool as I let her in on a few tricks of the trade.
The day Obama came, there was a huge press conference at the university’s student center with about 100 people inside the conference room and hundreds more viewing the conference on a big screen in the lobby.
Obama did his thing, and at the end there was segment for questions by the media.
After about five questions from different television and newspaper reporters, I stood up to ask mine.
“Wait a minute son, this is for professional media only,” Obama said to me.
“What do you mean? I work for the local paper,” I said with a crackling nervous voice.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were a college student. You have such a baby face,” he said with an unremorseful grin.
At that point everyone in the room turned to look at me and laugh. The 800 people in the lobby laughed as my face was projected on the big screen."
Alas, the "pretty young thing" was laughing, too. And, after that humiliating episode, she was no longer interested in Lovelady's "tricks of the trade." "Obama owes me a public apology for making me look like a court jester and for blocking my shot," Lovelady's column concludes. "Until that time, Hillary or Giuliani will get my vote."
Not about to lose Lovelady's vote, Obama, who has yet to declare whether or not he'll seek the presidency in 2008, phoned the reporter “to publicly apologize for messing up your game. I read that; I felt terrible. I didn't know there were any ladies around. I just wanted to let you know that I'm deeply sorry.”
Presidential material? Definitely."
Also for the life of me I cannot find the preview button on LJ anymore to see if I've formatted this like a retarded monkey. I pulled out the LJ cut due to incompetence, sorry.
current mood:  pleased
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008
| |
10:58 pm - So... I had a fun day, if you have a very strange sense of fun.
|
I decided I was going to read Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klien, and then followed it up with The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere ElseBy Hernando de Soto. He's the head economist behind one of the more influential policy groups in South America and is involved with a lot of the finical reconstruction going on there, and has a lot of proof in his pudding from his work in his native country of Peru.
Let me tell you, a very eye opening 24 hours. Cramming in the last of my recreation reading before I start the term.
First chapter of The Mystery of Capital
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/desoto-capital.html
lots of information on Shock Doctrine
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/the-book
Both books are easy reading, but Shock Doctrine is written in a very journalistic style, if you can read a newspaper you'll have no problem turning the pages on that one.
|
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
|
| Thursday, December 20th, 2007
| |
12:49 pm
|
|
| Tuesday, June 5th, 2007
| |
3:40 am - I post twice in one month for this...
|
Dear video game designers. As of right now, at a local hardware store, I can buy a head mounted flashlight that will last for 12 hours without ever needing a battery change, a chance to recharge, or depletion of any shared energy reserves. Just by itself, with a battery.
If your high tech future military cannot equip it's soldiers with such a device why are they engaging in any sort of struggle with consequences more complex than "winner buys next round of shots WOOOOO!!!"
|
|
(4 comments | comment on this)
|
| Friday, June 1st, 2007
| |
9:55 am
|
It's been 13 years and the blue album is fucking awesome.
Further updates as events warrant.
current music: Guess.
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Thursday, April 5th, 2007
| |
1:43 pm - I'd like to solve the puzzle
|
|
| Friday, December 29th, 2006
| |
10:52 am - Sony, and why I just don't get it. Nerdom to follow.
|
So there are out there still Sony fan boys that are pretty die hard in their defense of Sony, and I don't get it. I just don't get it. Everything Sony's done has seemed terrible. As far as I can tell, these are there most recent acomplishments.
Illegally installing spyware into root-kits, and then when caught doing it justified it with by saying "most people don't know what root-kits are, so why should they need to worry about it" (not an exact quote).
Releasing their stupid UMD movies or whatever for the PSP. Now the PSP has a pretty decent resolution, but sony hardwired in stuff (on the newer PSPs it's hardwired, may be soft on some old ones, whatever) to force the user to use arbitrarily smaller resolutions with any format they didn't purchase for sony for like $30. Can you imagine Kraft releaseing a mac and cheese product, serving size 3-4 people, or 1-2 people if you don't use Kraft brand butter.
Under producing the PS3 IN THE EXACT SAME WAY THEY DID THE PS2. I'm convinced this is an evil plan to be done intentionally to mask the fact both systems launched with total shit in terms of opening titles. You basically have a fancy system that costs way more money than anything on the market, and nothing to do with it except gloat on line about how you camped out for days to get it. Good thing theres online gloating for proud PS3 honors, god knows their isn't anything to play on the thing. As far as I know there's only one title that's both a PS3 exclusive, and expected to be amazing. Even if it's just vast incompetence, it still doesn't speak very highly of sony.
And I almost forgot the other thing, sony's "all I want for Christmas is a PSP" where they hired people who pretended to be unaffiliated with the company to try and start a viral campaign supporting buying PSPs for your loved ones at Christmas. It got exposed, they tried to play it off as a joke, then took down the site.
And basically I've never heard of them doing anything good. Like, ever. I don't see or understand any of their virtues that they supposedly have, only the masses of failures and downright unethical business practices. I have nothing against sony, I'm open to the idea of not reviling them. I just can't find any reason to. I hear both good and bad things about their competitors, but with sony it's all bad stuff.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, December 20th, 2006
| |
10:24 pm - Minimum wage
|
So this issue has been getting on my nerves a bit lately, but I want to suggest a crazy assbackwards idea about minimum wage laws. I don't take credit for inventing this idea, I'm sure it's been thought of before and I very likely heard it from somewhere else and I just can't rememember. Anyway, there are about 261 working days in a year, lets say 8 hours a day.
Poverty Line / 261 / 8
That way no one with a full time job would be in poverty.
Every outsourcing base argument I've seen is, basically, terrible and entirely based around premises that exist only in the land of the hypothetical (i.e. grocery stores actually have freezers full of immigrants that they're waiting to dethaw and put to work illegally).
Thoughts?
|
|
(5 comments | comment on this)
|
| Saturday, November 11th, 2006
| |
11:48 pm - Douglas Coupland and Bonbons.
|
Hi live journal! I promise I’m not going to pretend like I’m making a new effort to post more. I’ve done that several times and I’m probably more tired of writing it than you are of reading it. So yeah, I’ll write something again in a few months, until then it’s back to lurking in comments. But I saw a play tonight and I wanted to sort of ramble on about it to some one in a vague and incoherent manner. The play, which I was not crazy about, has been running through my head a lot, to make me wonder why exactly I didn’t like it so much more than I didn’t like many other attempts to express candy coated philosophy which we all get bombarded with. Things that make us think that speak to us, that we like, and then don’t change anything about is in any real ways. So yeah, let me start again fresh here.
Ok, I just saw the play “Life After God” which is a play adaptation of a Douglas Coupland’s short story by the same name. Now, something really grates my soul about the play and it’s premise. Fundamentally it’s a struggle against the overwhelming irony of today’s society. I GET THAT. I’m soooooo on board. I’m not in total agreement, but as a premise, as a subject for exploration, as content for a play/movie/shortstory/novel, I’m right there with ya. The crisis of belief in a “post- religious society” I accept that as a totally valid premise.
But here’s where the play degenerates into waking life with less existentialism. If you’re cynical like me you may immediately think “waking life with less existentialism wouldn’t that just be like watching cartoons high?” The answer is yes. Yes it would be. Now, the problem is because of the crafty premise of the play (escaping cynicism and irony and all that stuff) it’s almost impossible to criticize. If you critique it, you’re buying into the cynicism the play attempts to confront. Well I’m gonna say flat out that’s bullshit and not a valid enough argument to derail my incoming critiques. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance does this do, the “if you disagree you don’t get it!” That’s a rhetorical trick made to defend indefensible non-rhetorical ideas.
So with that out of the way, here’s my problem with Douglas Coupland, and this play in specific. It encourages thought while discouraging thinking. It contains captivating thoughts, and seeming great significance, but part of his claim to fame is the ability to capture this within a pop-culture context that we all live in. However, this seems to end up with these pre-packaged thoughts that all urge you to accept the message but totally remove the need to consider the message. The message is the cherry filling in the box of bonbons you scarf down in a moment of weakness. You don’t think about the bonbons, you don’t think about the calories, or what’s in them, or you could probably even get chocolate junk food that TASTED BETTER if you wanted but the bonbons screamed to you in a moment of weakness so that’s what you’ll eat!
And yeah, that’s why I’m not crazy about the play. A lot of this extrapolates past Douglass Coupland, and some of it doesn’t. I’m up for elaborating on it more I guess, but the need to ramble has passed.
Also, they used “Losing my religion” as background music for a scene where one of the characters loses his faith in religion. That’s just not even trying.
|
|
(3 comments | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, May 9th, 2006
| |
4:04 am - Oh my god, so compelling
|
Damn you first season of the OC!
and 5 hours later, I'm done for the night.
Wow, I can't stop watching, even though it's so very soap opera. My girlfriend would spurn me for this and she watches America's next top model. I'm doomed!
(But omg, what crazy dangers will Ryan face now!)
|
|
(3 comments | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, April 18th, 2006
| |
3:37 am - Dear Google
|
I have tried to avoid fanboi ism, but my socks have been knocked off, behold:
http://pages.google.com/
Seriously, it's like google was sitting around trying to come up with a buisness model and said:
"lets take everything other companies do, do it for free, and then do it better."
Fuck, this is awesome.
Less than 5 miniutes just screwing around and I all ready have:
http://cheshire.rabbit.googlepages.com/home
And like half of that time was spent trying to select a bunny picture.
Fuckwin.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Thursday, April 13th, 2006
| |
2:04 pm
|
|
| Friday, April 7th, 2006
| |
4:59 am - The most emo post I've made in years
|
Seriously, this is non-coherent ramblings that some how took me an hour to write at 4am. terrible reading.
This is the sort of non-coherent whining pap that live journal was designed for. Stream of consciousness crossed with self pity. Also the formatting will probably be fucked, as that happens every time I copy something into word to spell check.
So for the past 4 or 5 days I’ve been all hella Emo-pants, but after listening to postal service songs for like the 50th time I thought I’d bitch in live journal (side note: is it just me or is The Postal Service totally Men Without Hats meets Dashboard?).
Back when I was running around willy-nilly with (admitly somewhat misguided) Unitarians a lot of the time after attending events I felt this feeling of withdrawal. Like I had hit some sort of high point in life where everyone was willing to acknowledge what a perfect snowflake I was and lo we could twinkle about free from the repression of our poor 16 year old lives.
The cynicism, woven in ever so subtly in my previous paragraph (also, what the fuck I’ve picked up that journalistic trend of using one sentence paragraphs all the sudden) I guess is part of the reason I’ve been feeling so mopey lately. The whole point was that it wasn’t actually a place of existentialist bliss like I (we all) felt at the time. But it kind of was. It was all terribly inauthentic in a lot of ways, but despite my cynicism there was a genuine level of acceptance. Granted, it should be noted, acceptance of a shared experience amongst middle class, young, white people, which isn’t exactly a hard experience to share with all the abundance of false nostalgia that pop culture loves. None-the-less, there was still something authentic.
Unfortunately it didn’t last, probably in part due to my own self-indulgent-jackassery, in part because the scene just shifted to one I wasn’t used to, and in part because I just grew out to old and too cynical, and too in different to the cruel and usual treatment every 16 year old girl in the entire world undergoes at the hands of their parents/peers.
Here comes the segue.
I’ve basically been feeling that same sense of withdrawal that I did prior to my cynical asshole days and I haven’t recognized it. So as I’ve been sitting around feeling sorry for myself without getting it and feeling nostalgia for stuff that hasn’t happened (seriously, I’m nostalgic for events I hope to do in the future by likely never will because they’re entirely unrealistic constructions, what the fuck? I blame Matt Mays) I’ve been wondering what exactly it is I’m feeling newly isolated from, and honestly, it’s the summer.
Recently I’ve been finding myself, very suddenly, as part of a community that actually has intellectual consistency. It feels ridiculously good to have individuals with whom I can talk about an unrestrained field of subjects, books, sex, politics, gender, music, life, while drinking and tossing about witticisms, obscure references, and laughing. It’s fucking clichéd, I know, but for a long time my life’s been pretty divided into “friend’s from high-school” who, despite being a nice bunch, are really still exactly the fucking same people I went to high-school with; and, my stoner friends, with whom I have a good time but can’t claim to really ever have much conversation.
Additionally there are some friends I’ve known for a long time, but never got close to until this past year (yes, you), who have become fairly key to my social self, are likewise gonna be gone. They deserve their own paragraph.
So the summary of my whining about things almost identical as what I complain about people whining about in my first paragraphs is this:
I have friends who are not the people I was 4 years ago, but are the people I am now, except it doesn’t do me much good
P.S. the crowd known general as “the D&D group” would count as a third category if I ever fucking saw any of y’all. We’re all pretty good at our individual levels of diaspora. I barely know anything about even the people I do see.
P.P.S. Told you it was going to be whiney.
current mood: Neurotic and self-absorbed
current music: Matt Mays - City of Lakes
|
|
(3 comments | comment on this)
|
| Friday, February 10th, 2006
| |
3:43 am
|
David Emerson is my MP, as in he ran in my riding and I almost voted for him. This makes his COMPLETE AND UTTERY FUCKWITTERY all the more frustrating for me. He should be dragged out and shot behind the chemical sheds.
Now, this may be coming across as unnecessarily harsh, so I did a little research into the ridings history and since 1963 we've elected but one person from a right wing party. So Mr. Emerson decides to run as a Liberal, which for those unacquainted with the Canadian political system, is roughly equivalent to the American Democrats. However, 2 weeks after getting elected he SWITCHES FUCKING PARTIES. So, he is conveniently a liberal just long enough to get elected in a district that has gone not-right ("left" may be a little too kind to the liberals) for over 20 consecutive years and then switches before he's even moved into his new town. There are being comparisons drawn to other MP's that have done this but frankly I think they're all moot. Past MP's have switched parties because of an irreconcilable difference between their party line and their personal beliefs. This is not the case here as: one, there haven't been any party lines or personal decisions yet, there haven't even been any fucking meetings for any party after the elections; two, David Emerson obviously has no personal beliefs, and is just a tool for political appointments (a juicy one which he received as part of the package for his defection).
Let me explain that last statement. I see two possibilities for his shift, either he planned it before getting elected, or planned it after. If he did it beforehand, then he's merely a lying jackass who deceived his riding to get elected. If he decided after getting elected, he's a fuckwit shill who will change his beliefs for money and power.
He recently complained all over the newspapers that his children were coming home crying after being lectured at school by their peers about his actions. I think there is some truth in this, namely: Children in gradeschool know this guy is a giant fuckwit.
Further proof of this is a recent poll before the election that showed less than 25% of people could identify him. 90% of the riding couldn’t think of a single thing he accomplished in office. When asked David Emerson personally had a 34% approval rating, yet, the liberal party had a 53% approval rating.
So, in summation 
FUCKWIT
something totally different
( Read more... )
|
|
(7 comments | comment on this)
|
| |
2:53 am
|
HTML is fucking with me, I don't know what's up, probably a broken tag. Will repost in a moment.
Ok, it looks fine in all the previews, all the links and images working, but as soon as I post it I get errors. Any ideas?
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Thursday, February 2nd, 2006
| |
4:48 am - Plummeting and you and me.
|
So it’s not weekly, but twice in a month is an improvement for me anyway. So I’ll try and run with this. Sorry if I ramble a bit, trying to get used to this whole self expression thing again.
So a few weeks ago one of my friends fell out of a 3rd story window and wound up in the hospital for a few weeks. I went to visit him a few times and again at his new ground floor apartment while he gets his mobility back and it has been on my mind a fair bit.
I think everyone goes through some sort of moment when someone they know dies when they get very meditative about the nature of mortality and death and all that sort of thing. Meditating over your own mortality when someone else dies has become a clichéd actually, but I think it’s a pretty healthy one to go through (side note: when did all clichés become unacceptable? A lot of them are horrible but there are several I’m very attached to).
However this has been a bit different than that, notably my friend is still alive and recovering faster than anybody thought, so it’s not that I’m worried about the frailty or fleetingness of life. It’s more, through visiting him in the hospital a few times, I’ve become so aware of the network of people and social contracts that I move in. Everyone’s actions seemed so scripted to the situation, people knew exactly what to do. I mean that without cynicism, I was certainly as much a part of it as anyone else (in regards to the scripting part, not time invested) and it was only retrospectively after a few visits I sort of caught on.
I guess I don’t have anything profound to say about the subject, it was just a very good lesson for me in the roles of ideology and assumptions in society. The sort of total lack of surprise at everything, the shared assumptions of how things were to be that underlied all the interactions which orbited said elevationly challenged friend.
It was very reassuring, actually, knowing that such a network exists. As much as it seems totally unsurprising conceptually, feeling yourself to be a part of a larger ideology was for me rather unsettling. But at the same time it’s very comforting to know I have sweet ideology looking out for me. I guess there’s this sort of assumption that links any sort of presubscribed behaviour with strict dogma, and the very word ideology raises the heckles on necks. That was exactly my reaction reading a lot of post-Marxist criticism and discussion of ideology. But well it may lack a place in any utopian socialist paradise, in the current capitalist system its incarnations are not entirely malicious. Hell, if I ever fall out a 3rd story window I’ll count myself lucky to have people react the same way.
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, January 17th, 2006
| |
2:41 am
|
So way back during my Christmas holidays I made a resolution to myself, that I wasn’t going to get so self involved over the school term, and I was going to try and function in a more healthy and spiritually holistic sort of way. One facet of this was my intent to update my journal weekly. Nothing personal, because, I’ll be honest, my life is boring as fuck; more me rambling in paragraph form about topics that pique my interest. However, as my constant lack of updates speaks to, I’ve been failing this mission in a pretty big way. I’ve started a few entries, but never really felt like I had anything worth posting.
Although just today I saw a post by Elsabet where she was doing some neat meme where she comments anonymously on folks who read her journal, and one got me thinking: “18 - God, you annoy me sometimes. You think you're so great, when really you're just as great as everyone else. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, so stop being so holier-than-thou.”
The first thought that struck me was “Is she talking about me?” then I scaled the ego back for a moment and comforted myself by assuming not since I fucking update bi-yearly, and she has like a trillion people on her friend’s list. It’s probably gonna be someone whose journal she actually remembers she has on her list rather than myself. Or, it could of course be me. Hell, a description like that applies to about two thirds of the internet, I’m amazed she got by without copying and pasting it 17 times, but then again I’m sure elsabet hangs out in better crowds than I.
Anyway, the moral of this rather narcissistic and self indulgent rambling is that I want to make an earnest effort to update at least biweekly, for at least a few months to try and get myself used to writing things without titles like “How Regionalism is effected by Modernity in Hugh MacLenan’s Barometer Rising.” The sort of things that bring me no fulfillment. God-forbid, I may actually start writing recreationally again.
Hopefully I won’t slip into the depths of assholiery described above. I try to resist it, but it’s never been my strongest suite. I’m prone to bouts of semi-intellectual pretentiousness that I’ve always had a hard time fighting off. I’m really not that bad once you get to know me.
Anyway, this is mostly a preface to my mission. I wanted to write this down and throw it on my decaying semblance of a journal so that I feel guilt and motivation to actually follow through with my task. Also it’s good to write out a mission statement of sorts, rambling though it may be, to state my reasons for doing things, not to mention to brood over my perceived faults because that’s the sort of guy I am!
current mood: ponderous
current music: Matt Mays and El Torpedo - On the Hood
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
|
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
beeblez's journal
