Reasons to be cynical: David Cameron's analytical skills

[Forgive me for being a little late on this one - other stuff got in the way.]

Findings from a paper titled "Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009", by Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joacim Voth:

"Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? From the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s to anti-government demonstrations in Greece in 2010-11, austerity has tended to go hand in hand with politically motivated violence and social instability. In this paper, we assemble cross-country evidence for the period 1919 to the present, and examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability."

Wisdom from British PM David Cameron:

"[T]hese riots were not about poverty: that insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this. No, this was about people showing indifference to right and wrong, people with a twisted moral code, people with a complete absence of self-restraint."

Well, then, I suppose that settles it. I guess it was too much to hope that Cameron and company might have actually learned something? Something that would lessen the likelihood that this might keep happening, and then happen again? (And again...)

VMAs and Gaga

In what was an unsurprisingly awful show - Britney and Foo Fighters won the first two awards of the night, making it feel as if we had been transported back to the late 90s - Gaga managed to steal the spotlight at the VMAs, again. What was surprising was that she did it by completely abandoning her shtick - no costume changes, nothing absurd or abstract or excessive. She just played the role of her own ex-boyfriend, Joe Calderone, for the entire night. (A character who has mostly elicited comparisons to Bob Dylan but strikes me much more as Al Pacino-as-Scarface if he were also one of the T-Birds from Grease.)


Predictably, the tween and teenybopper response on Twitter has been a mixture of amusement, disappointment, and transphobic outrage (in a poll on EW, I'm told that Gaga was the number one choice for both the most and least favorite thing about the show). Here's what I just grabbed off the Twitter feed for the VMAs:

• no offense lady gaga but if you are transgendered you are not BORN THIS WAY!!!! [this could be transphobic in so many different ways that i won't bother trying to unpack them all]
• I think Lady Gaga has lost the plot
• Lady Gaga is amazing!
• Lady gaga looked messed up last night
• The VMA's was more of a freak show than the Cantina on a Wednesday night. Only think missing was Gaga shooting first [it's a Star Wars joke - Gaga is being compared to a green, reptilian alien]

The great thing, though, is this - for the first time in years, Gaga has managed to unsettle and disturb people again. Her method of coming up with outfits and routines that were increasingly bizarre had become, well, routine. And so she did the only thing she could to recapture her audience's sense of wonder and horror: she wore a white V-neck and strapped her breasts down.

When journalism takes an embarassing turn

It didn't take long for someone to write a mean and cynical piece about Jack Layton's death and the surprisingly warm and loud response that it's garnered - in fact, it took less than 12 hours.

Most of Christie Blatchford's snark is directed at the outpouring of grief, as if Layton is undeserving or the people saddened by his death are somehow misguided, which is both a cowardly thing to do (if you're suggesting that he's unworthy of the attention, why mock the people who are giving it rather than the object of their attention?) and cruel. To be so casually dismissive of grief, especially on the day the man died and when it's still so new and even raw, is indecent and inhumane if not simply inhuman. And to demean it as "spectacle"? I find it hard to critique even the most showy politicians for being a bit effusive - again, these are knee-jerk, gut-reactions to the news that a colleague and/or friend has died. Docking them points for style is just unwarranted.

But when Blatchford does turn her attention to Layton, the venom is actually worse. Her discussion of Layton's letter opens innocuously enough, as she characterizes it as an example of "what a canny, relentless, thoroughly ambitious fellow Mr. Layton was", and these things are certainly true. The letter is not an apolitical one - Layton knew, as did we all, that it was his cult of personality that won the NDP second-place in the election, and that he probably wanted to make some grand gesture and take advantage of that one last time. Blatchford gets nastier, though: she describes his prose as "vainglorious" and "sophistry" that's full of "bumper-sticker slogans" and "ruthless partisan politicking" . Whether it was with the sophistry or bumper-sticker comment, one thing is certain - we've crossed solidly into the territory of shamelessness. Real classy stuff, right there.

She also asks, "Who thinks to leave a 1,000-word missive meant for public consumption and released by his family and the party mid-day"? To which I feel it necessary to reply, who thinks it necessary to use 1,000 words to kick a warm corpse and heap scorn upon the people mourning it?

(I should add that I don't think Jack Layton's parting letter is perfect, by any means. It's sweet, but probably too precious. I suppose we could begrudge him the overt partisanship, but I wouldn't really expect anything less from him. But, really - given that he finalized it from bed, two days before his death? Do we really expect perfection? I'll let Andrew Coyne sum it up for me: "You're allowed to exploit your own death. You get a free, one-time-only pass.")

Jack Layton, 1950-2011

Jack Layton died this morning. It wasn't surprising so much as sudden - I knew when it was announced that the cancer had spread that he probably didn't have much time, but you never think that today will be the day.

I got it in my head to write a blog about Jack - about how refreshing his choice to campaign on optimism was, about how hilarious and cutting he could be ("that's a hash-tag fail" remains my favorite debate line, ever) - but then his family released his final statement to his friends, the party, and the country. His own letter's concluding lines seem a far fairer tribute than I could ever devise.

"My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world."

Thinking about Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I caught Rise of the Planet of the Apes yesterday with a friend, and we both reached the same basic conclusions:

1 - On the whole, it was better than we expected. The revolution plot was well-constructed and Caesar (as an adult) looked shockingly real and made for a surprisingly compelling and sympathetic lead.
2 - But it was just as racist as we expected.

I don't know what it is about monkeys and apes, but corporate media doesn't seem capable of writing stories about them without stumbling into racist clichés, representations, and/or rhetoric.

In the new Apes film, the opening scene takes place in Africa, where poachers are capturing the apes for scientific research. The poachers, of course, are generic African mercenaries with rag-tag clothing and cleaver-like swords.

Now, it's not really clear why this is necessary - and the scene is so unnecessary that the Wikipedia summary of the movie omits it entirely. What I'm guessing is that it was meant to show how similar humans and apes are in the first place. As the apes run from the poachers, they hoot and scream - and so do the poachers who chase them. The only obvious inference is that we're supposed to note their similarity, or even note how difficult it is to tell them apart.

But this doesn't really resonate in the intended way, I think. Because if they thought they were saying something about how animalistic humanity is, they probably should have said it in a way that isn't quite so outrageously cliché and recognizably white supremacist. I mean, really - you can't make this point in a way that doesn't display a stunning lack of creativity and, worse, have centuries of racist symbolic weight attached to it?

A joke that's making the rounds...

A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.'

Star Trek's dangerous, savage child race

I was talking about Star Trek: The Next Generation with some people in my department last week, and it gave me a renewed appreciation for the show's ability to be reflexive about its own liberal progress narrative.

Now, to be fair, the examples of TNG's failure to note its own racism and neocolonial attitudes greatly outnumber the contrary examples. (Which, it should be added, are mostly confined to the show's final season, too.) A cursory look at the show's first season, especially, reveals some hilariously racist stuff, especially with the utopian planet of beautiful white people and the dystopian planet of murderous, polygamist, black tribes. (Admittedly, there is a dark-lining to the silver cloud in the former episode, but there is nothing to redeem the latter one.)

What specifically occurred to me, though, was that the show both begins and ends with episodes that challenge its own teleology and smug self-righteousness. Take, for instance, the pilot, where the omnipotent Q puts humanity on trial for being a "a dangerous, savage child race" that goes looking for wars. Picard's response to the charge is to ask Q to "test us", noting that "our mission is long". And while Picard passes the test in the pilot, we eventually learn in the finale that, to quote Q again, "the trial never ends" - that the entire series has been a continuation of the test that began six and a half year earlier, making the show one gigantic exercise in allaying Q's concerns.

In the end, Picard convinces Q to spare humanity because, for "one iota" of a second, the captain realizes that the laws of science are being broken and they need to roll with it rather than waste time figuring out ways to make it conform to their expectations. There's no assurance that humanity is not essentially barbarous, and no confirmation that humans have indeed evolved - only the realization that we're still, and always will be, on probation.

Idris Elba, Mickey Rourke, and how race matters in casting

The Thor movie trailer has come out and, predictably, some fans are protesting that Idris Elba, who is black, shouldn't have been cast as a Norse god, all of whom are white. Elba as Heimdall is pictured below:

Thankfully, most responses have been supportive of the Elba casting. That said, a lot of them still miss the point of casting him. Take this summary of the issue by Monika Bartyzel at Moviefone:

At some point we all have to realize that changing the skin color of a fictional character is not an affront to anyone, and should be seen no differently than a different hairstyle, a modernized wardrobe or any of the other changes that fall on fictional figures...

Unfortunately, it's precisely this kind of fallacious "color-blind" theorizing that allows critics of the casting-decision to turn around and accuse the author of the Moviefone critique of being a hypocrite:

Could Bartyzel be any more of a hypocrite? She thinks it’s wrong to put whites in the roles of non-whites [she criticized a decision to cast Mickey Rourke as Genghis Khan in another film] but more than acceptable to put non-whites in the roles of whites. In fact she says it’s “racist” to object to putting non-whites in the roles of whites.

Which is a fair enough response - in spite of the fact that most of the arguments on the site are racist gibberish - given how terribly Bartyzel articulated the reasons for opposing the Rourke casting but supporting the Elba decision.

But Bartyzel is ultimately right, even if she goes about explaining it the wrong way. What it actually comes down to isn't color-blindness - as if that's possible or even desirable - but representation and power. We should support decisions like casting Michael Clarke Duncan as the Kingpin or Elba as Heimdall because a) actors of color are under-represented in Hollywood film and TV, and b) the source texts of comic book adaptations are often 50 or more years old, and so were made for all-white audiences and, predictably, feature all-white casts. (And, often, these are subtly racist texts that were produced for an explicitly racist audience. Reproducing those texts exactly, just for the sake of creating a faithful adaptation, means reproducing those racist politics or representation, too. Fidelity for its own sake is often a bad idea.)

Hollywood is full of these kinds of adaptations and full of films populated by exclusively or almost exclusively white casts. What Hollywood is not full of - aside from the films created by Tyler Perry and a few other films marketed specifically for black-audiences (films that often still manage to find space for white actors, mind you) - are meaningful roles for non-white actors.

I'll simplify it, even, and say that representation is power. It's empowering to see images of heroes that look like you, that you can imagine to be you, and disempowering to feel that you either can't identify with them or actively disidentify with the people who look most like you. There are plenty of white male superheroes, wizards, demigods, and so forth, and comparatively few black men playing similar roles - virtually none once you remove any that have been played by Will Smith.

Idris Elba isn't stealing from a scarce supply of white male fantasy roles, but he is contributing to a scarce list of black male fantasy characters. And that's valuable and interesting in a way that, say, Sam Worthington as Heimdall would not be.

Stealing a page from Pitchfork's book

If someone were to pay me to write a review of the Black Eyed Peas' "The Time (Dirty Bit)", it would probably go a little something like this:

Academic scandal and "political agendas": the controversy at U Toronto's SESE

My partner, Victoria, is a PhD candidate in the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. (It's a mouthful, yes.) Recently, it's gotten a lot of press here in Canada, most of it very angry.

The gist of it is this: a Master's student - Jenny Peto - wrote a thesis (one of those 150 or so page long essays that we don't expect anyone outside of our immediate family and committee will ever read) which - very basically - alleges that two "Holocaust education projects" instrumentalize the Holocaust in such a way as to "promote the interests of the Israeli nation-state." And someone blogged about it, which caught the attention of the National Post and Toronto Star, who promptly labeled her a self-loathing Jewish anti-Semite.

I don't want to talk about the thesis itself because I've only read the abstract. (That is, I don't know whether it is good or bad, though a friend of mine who has read it calls it "quite abysmal". And I'm saying that that's beside the point, anyway, for the purposes of what I want to cover here.) Hilariously, it's not clear that many of the commentators who have contributed to the discussion have actually given it a good look, much less read the whole thing themselves. Nor is it clear that they have any clear idea of the expectations that are attached to a Master's thesis - the demands for more interviews, research, etc. would turn this into the sort of massive, years-long project that no supervisor would approve and no MA student could complete.

The newest addition to this ongoing saga is a list of SESE's MA theses* that have been compiled by Werner Cohn, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. The list has been reprinted in the National Post, where Cohn claims that they are "so marred by political jargon and political preconceptions that they should never have been accepted." The theses, it seems, are "politicized" (whatever that means - what, in the study of sociology and equity, isn't politicized?), claims Cohn, and "consist of hate propaganda, possibly in violation of the Criminal Code of Canada."

(It behooves me, here, to point out Cohn's own possible biases and investment in the subject matter. If his personal website - which includes a lot of anti-Chomsky stuff, writings on Zionism, and writings on "Jews who hate Israel" - is any indication, he's probably one of the people who is politically implicated by Peto's thesis. This is an auspicious a key detail and its absence from his text in the National Post article is auspicious.)

Cohn claims that the abstracts he lists (because he didn't read 16 of the 18 theses - like i said, no one does) are "propound political agendas rather than detached scholarship" and "the politics of all eighteen are of one sort and one sort only: radical leftism", and that they "are so politicized that – again on a prima facie basis – I would not accept them as scholarly contributions". (To his credit, I suppose, he admits that it's possible - if unlikely - that he would change his mind if he actually read the things.)

Having read the list myself, I have a few observations to share, too:

If, on the basis of the abstract alone, this stuff constitutes "political agendas" and "radical leftism", then Cohn has either never read anything in the fields of equity and identity politics or else thinks that the fields themselves are not worthy of his attention. Some of the abstracts are pretty innocuous, except for the appearance of terms like "anti-racist", "Canadian colonialism", and the "white" Canadian nation-state. And regardless, this is not somehow a unique cross-section - this is typical of the work being done right now in sociology, race, and/or gender studies. My sense is that his problem is with the discipline, from which he appears to be professionally and philosophically detached. (And not "detached" in the somewhat problematic sense that one can ever be politically detached from necessarily politicized work, but "detached" in the sense of "he just doesn't know.") The National Post might as well have asked a mathematician to weigh-in.

Cohn uses the term "Neo-Marxist" dismissively on another blog, and I think it's a telling insult. Based on that article and the one in the globe - where he hides his own politics under the guise of "objectivity in scholarship" and "scholarly merit" (which he doesn't define - presumably, it is obvious to people like himself, who are ostensibly, if disingenuously, without politics) - my guess is that what Cohn is actually lamenting is his own obsolescence. At the risk of sounding too dismissive myself, Cohn's first published article is now 60 years old - presumably, he is made anxious by MA theses employing post-colonial and anti-racist frameworks that critique and reject what was once canon. That canon being the pro-Western, pro-white, masculinist, heterosexist sociological corpus that Cohn was trained with and - again, presumably - has contributed to. It doesn't matter what they were actually, specifically saying - he was probably ready to dismiss them simply for committing this sin.

Cohn also criticizes OISE for the "political uniformity" of its theses, adding that "no thesis that, for instance, urged a conservative viewpoint, or a Christian one, or, Heaven forbid, Zionism". But this is a red herring if I've ever seen one - those "viewpoints" aren't there simply because they're not up to the task. Imagine a classically liberal - ie. conservative, in popular parlance - analysis of gendered microinequities in the workplace. Could it even admit the possibility? How would it go about collecting data in any meaningful way? What kind of horribly reductive and limited vocabulary would it be forced to draw on? Could it even account for the possibility of systemic discrimination? Just what the hell would that look like? (You might counter with the suggestion that a conservative thesis would challenge the whole idea of microinequities. In which case, frankly, it shows its uselessness that much faster.)

[* Victoria's MA thesis isn't among them, though the temporal scope of his selections aren't clear, and so it's possible that she just fell outside his time-frame.]

The NBA, referreeing, and segue into Malcolm Gladwell

I don't remember hearing about this study, but apparently in 2007 some researchers found subtle racial-bias in the calls that NBA referees made from 1993-2003. And then, after being viciously attacked by the NBA for using faulty methodology, they used the data that the NBA supplied to refute their claims in order to confirm their findings. Cool stuff, and there's an article about the whole back story on ESPN.

The article references Malcolm Gladwell's Blink a lot, crediting him for popularizing the idea of implicit racism. (which, I'm guessing, was either derived from or unknowingly riffing on the idea of microinequity) I read the whole book, and I kinda hated it. There was no thesis, to speak of - he was writing about the power of implicit bias in the quick decisions that we make all of the time. Sometimes our bias is helpful, sometimes it isn't; sometimes we can retrain ourselves to affect it, sometimes we can't. If there's any central point, it's merely that these near-instantaneous, subconsciously-motivated decisions happen. And if one of my students had written this, I would have given them a poor mark for writing a 'grocery list' essay consisting of a bunch of vaguely related items that combine to make no larger point.

Adventures in TAing, case 9 (in a ? case series)

The exact process varies - sometimes I steal from Chuck Klosterman and use his "23 Questions I Ask Everybody I Meet In Order To Decide If I Can Really Love Them" - but I've always started the school year with introductions and some sort of ice-breaker question for my students. But I decided to be lazy this year (probably, in part, because this was the first time in 3 years that I had a one-hour tutorial rather than a two-hour one) and just do name and major.

Name. Major. That's it.

And in spite of this simple request, I probably got the most entertaining, aggressive, and bizarre introduction ever. (And I'm posting it here, now, only because he dropped the class.)

I'm _______ and I'm majoring in Business. And I want to get an A+ on the group presentation, because I got an F on one last year and my final mark in the class was a C+. But everything else was an A+ so they changed it to an A because I petitioned it. Oh, and my group hated me because I'm gay.

Added later: The student showed up once more and then dropped the class.

Two totally, completely, absolutely unrelated stories

#1

This story about the (ex-)casting director of the Hobbit's already a couple days old, but I wanted to respond to one part of what's been the popular response. It comes in the headline on Salon, actually:

A woman says she was denied a job as an extra for not being light-skinned -- was it wrong or just authentic?

Clearly, "authentic" is being deployed problematically, here. First, this is a fictional myth, and so the standard of authenticity is highly interpretive. But more importantly, "authentic" shouldn't be used to cover-up or ignore the racist politics of the source text. And, headline aside, Salon gets this part right:

The kerfuffle over "The Hobbit's" tactless casting call -- with its obvious and utterly unnecessary skin tone limiting of would-be applicants -- serves an uncomfortable reminder of the not-so diverse realm of the Tolkienverse. [...] As my colleague Laura Miller says, 'There's a criticism that there's a crypto racial thing in the darker-skinned orcs and the southern men.'

My only disagreement would be with the "crypto" part. Really? "Crypto" makes me think that it's subtle and/or unintentional. And I don't think it's either.


#2

This story, which is about the racialized casting of Victoria Secret models, is a bit older but hasn't, as far as I can tell, gotten as much play.

The Victoria Secret Fashion Show, which aired last night on CBS, opened with a complete line up of light skinned models.While dark skinned models were sprinkled throughout the show, they seemed to have lined them up so they could all be part of the “Wild Things” segment of the show [...] Yes, wild things… that included tribal dancers and all the models of color in the show.

I'm not aware of CBS or Victoria Secret's response to the complaint that dark-skinned models were uniformly exoticized - and that the white models were uniformly not - but I wouldn't be surprised if the same defense of "authenticity" were made.

There's a joke to be made about probes and *probes*, here...

Back during the summer, Toronto hosted the a G20 summit. Predictably, there was rioting and some over-zealous (to put it kindly) riot police decided to variously round-up protesters who, subsequently, they were unable to place at the scene of the property damage or else just physically clear protesters out of areas that, to the best of the public's knowledge, had been declared Protest Zones. (As it turns out, this had only been 'proposed', and no 'official' designation had been given.)

Which means that people sitting on the grass at the provincial legislature, who were under the impression that they were allowed to do so peaceably without threat of violence, suffered injuries as a result of stuff like this:


Hilariously/pathetically, the Special Investigations Unit just released a report that identifies not one culpable officer in this whole mess. I had expected, at the very least, at least a few "bad apple" scapegoats who could be offered up in lieu of having to admit that the problem was systemic - that the police were poorly trained/prepared, that their orders and actions were misguided on the whole, that they just plain did a bad job. (Because we'd never get that kind of admission.)

Instead, we got stuff like this, as described by the Toronto Star:

• "Officers declined to be interviewed for the SIU investigations, as is their right. That left the SIU in several cases unable to determine a specific officer at fault."
• "Because the officers all wore identical helmets and uniforms, it was impossible to identify which one is responsible for causing a fracture below Nobody’s right eye, said Scott. Two officers were identified as having something to do with the incident, but exercised their rights, declining an interview with the SIU."
• "'I did not think that it would be likely that police officers would come forward and identify themselves as having contributed to my injury,' [Norm Morcos, who suffered a fractured hand] said."

(There are other gems not listed in his article, like the problem of identifying officers who illegally covered up their badge, as the one in the picture above did. He can't be reprimanded even for breaching uniform protocol because, of course, he can't be identified. And that's that.)

Now over on Facebook, someone defended the right of the police involved to remain silent, since "Everyone is allowed to remain silent. Basic right of all people."

But this is fucked up.

First of all, if this were a criminal investigation, the cops who refused to be interviewed with respect to the allegedly criminal conduct of their co-workers could be charged with obstruction or accessory - because you don't have the right to remain silent when you have evidence of someone else's crime. If I had witnessed one of my friends bash in someone's head, I would be subpoenaed and compelled to testify - why should the police be held to a lower standard?

Second, this isn't a criminal investigation, anyway - it's a job review. And its purpose is to discern whether the people who we entrust to with our physical security - and who are given tremendous power and privileges to do so - are doing their job or else behaving in ways that are antithetical to it. And they can't. Because the people accused of bashing a fallen protester in the face with a baton, of refusing to let a one-legged man retrieve his prosthesis and instead demanding that he hop, or of kicking a sitting man in the back of the head - or, for that matter, the people who watched it happen - don't have to talk if they don't want to. And the SIU has no other recourse - if they don't freely choose to speak, the case goes nowhere.

So this blows my mind: if these police officers (and it's obviously problematic to focus on a few particular officers when the whole culture of law enforcement should be implicated, but still...) can't assure us that they're fulfilling their responsibilities, much less assure us that they're not acting in a criminally irresponsible way when they've been accused of doing so, how is it that they're even allowed to keep their jobs?

I hate trying to sell stuff online

We're moving in early January, and are using it as an excuse to get rid of some stuff that Penelope has outgrown: to start with, a Fisher-Price barn-door that plays music, an uber-expensive bouncy seat that she never really liked, an outdoor slide and swing-set (the Swing-Along Castle), and - eventually, once we figure out how to replace a surprisingly vital coin-sized piece that fell off - her original stroller, which she outgrew much faster than we had thought she would. (At 22 months, Penelope is taller than many kids who are twice her age.)

This being a poor time of the year to do yard sales in Toronto, I've taken to trying to sell this stuff on the internet. The barn-door went quickly, but it's proven difficult to sell the other things. I thought that it had to do with the pricing - I started posting each item at half its original sticker price - but I'm starting to think that the problem might the people who I'm interacting with.

Near as a I can tell there are at least 5 distinctive types of Kijiji/Craigslist shoppers, and some categories overlap with others:

1) The no-reply
Of the last five people to contact me about the Swing-Along Castle, all of whom ask me where I live and when they can pick it up, (and, sometimes, whether it's even still available) only one has responded after I've politely shared the requested details. One person even emailed me the same inquiry twice, evidently failing to realize that s/he was contacting the same person regarding the same toy. And s/he still never actually followed up.

2) The geographically-illiterate
I would that think a) selecting my location as City of Toronto, and b) even providing my postal code (which produces an arrow on Google Maps that lands maybe a half-dozen houses down the street from my place) would be enough to allow people to figure out whether it's worth the trip to come here and get whatever it is that they're interested in. But no. People will ask me, for instance, whether I'm anywhere near Whitby. If, by "near", you mean within 50km and up to a one-hour drive during off-peak hours, then, yes, I'm "near" Whitby. But you probably should have been able to figure that out, right?

3) The illiterate-illiterate
To be fair, some of the emails read less like the writing of someone who's illiterate and more like someone who is texting. For example: "pls pm the best price you could offer, tkx". But seriously? Just on principle, now, I don't want to respond to you. And some people just violate the basic rules of internet netiquette and grammar: "I'M INTERESTED IN LEARNING FARM.
IS STILL AVAILABLE?" If I say 'yes', will you stop shouting?

4) The negotiator
It's not that I don't expect some negotiating. But I find myself annoyed by the way that people negotiate. One email was just a number: "50?" Like, not even a 'hi!' And the first example in the previous category fits here, too - the person can't even be bothered to make me an offer. (Granted, my reaction probably also has something to do with the fact that I'm selling my baby's toys. It's not that I want them to value my emotional attachments, but I don't want them to feel devalued, either.) But these are relatively minor complaints in comparison to...

5) The perpetual negotiating machine
When I first posted the bouncy seat, I listed it for $90 - half of its original $180 price. And I got a really quick bite, too. Someone offered $80, which was totally reasonable, and asked me to reply "asap" with my details. So I agreed, and I did just that. And then I got a response that amended the offer to $70. Arrrgh.

My favorite pop song lyric of the moment

From Ke$ha's current single, "We R Who We R":

"And no, you don’t wanna mess with us/
Got Jesus on my necklace"

Reasons why this is awesome:
1) Jesus = ass-kicking power
2) She rhymes "mess with us" with "neck-uh-luss"

"Canada: Our time to lead: 8 Discussions We Need To Have"

The Globe and Mail, which fancies itself Canada's answer to The New York Times, has been running weekly features (the "8 Discussions We Need To Have" that are referenced in the title of this post) of ostensible national importance over the past month.

Luckily(?), these discussions are providing me with some pretty fantastic teachable moments for my students, who are learning about ideas of privilege, oppression, power, and politics. This is because the way the Globe is marketing this series is surprisingly (even shockingly) problematic: racist, sexist, classist... really, I'm just waiting for the inevitable homophobic discussion question.

The topics have been showing up on billboards throughout the city, and I've been writing them down or photographing them as I see them. Of course, I'm lazy, so I don't necessarily have those pictures in front of me as I type this. So with the caveat that I might get a word or two wrong, here's what's been discussed thus far, as captured on the billboards:

1. "Multicultural mosaic or mistake?"
2. "Do women need to leave Canada to be successful?"
3. "Boys aren't failing. They just need lower standards."
4. "Should our military be helping the good guys or killing the bad ones?"
5. "Your weekend or your career. Choose one."

So when I showed this to my students, I asked "who is the 'we' who need to be having these discussions?" And I told them that they couldn't resort to the knee-jerk "it's Old White Guys" answer, which, while correct, is lazy - with this short list, you can actually prove that it's old white guys through deductive reasoning alone.

One other thing to note, here, is that the 'discussions' are actually 'problems'. So part of the task of identifying who is having the discussion is in identifying who the discussion is about - who or what is the problem that needs to be remedied, presumably by someone else?

1. 'Multicultural mosaic' is a reference to Canada's framing of its officially policy on multiculturalism and immigration. Clearly, the people being addressed here are the people who would consider themselves neither multicultural nor immigrants, people who also feel entitled to decide whether Canadian immigration policy has been mistaken ('mistake' reads pejoratively, to me, as if to say that either assimilation or rejection are implicitly the other options). Only white, native-born, and English-speaking Canadians fall outside the scope of this discussion, so they're presumably the ones having it.
2. And...
3. ...both concern gender, and are far more revealing when taken together. As one of my female students asked, 'Why am I supposed to leave but we can fix things for boys?' The short answer is because boys are entitled to success, and expected to succeed, and women aren't. The long answer, though, would also have to consider that boys aren't failing in the first place - that, despite the fact that Canadian girls have performed better in school for over 30 years, Canadian men aged 25-40 still make 10% more than women of the same age. But to answer the "who's 'we'?" question, it seems like it's not boys or women, though boys would seem to be less of a problem (because their problem can be fixed) than women.
4. While not obviously speaking to the -isms in the way that the first three and the last of the five topics do, the military question is no less problematic. First problem: Who's good, who's bad, and who gets to decide? Dunno, though, presumably, it's up to the white guys who were having the previous three discussions. Second problem: Arguably, peacekeeping has never been only about 'helping the good guys', and in its current incarnation as "peace enforcement" is now admittedly even less so. So one of the two options we're given doesn't exist, and probably never has.
5. Is it even necessary to point out how ridiculously classist the question is? Just how many people even have "careers" at this point, and how many people can actually choose to not work on the weekend?

So the identity of the 'we' who need to have these discussions is, at the very least, as follows: white, non-immigrant, male, adult, middle-to-upper class. Like I said, it's the Old White Guys, but this way you can actually prove it.

(Edit: The sixth discussion is phrased thusly on the billboard: "Money can buy anything. Unless you have a lump in your breast." So we're going the classism route, again.)

A quick post-American-mid-term elections post

A voter in Virginia, quoted in the New Yorker:

"I'm a constitutional conservative and I do not ever approve of distribution of wealth, and I am not a socialist, this country is not socialist, we are founded on Judeo-Christian principles. I will riot in the street if I have to. I have never been so ashamed of the way Obama has diminished the Presidency. He calls certain people enemies. He doesn’t dress properly. He talks about certain networks. He is just what he is — a Chicago agitator."

1) "He doesn't dress properly."

He's too snazzy a dresser, I guess?

2) "I do not ever approve of [re?]distribution of wealth, [...] this country is not socialist, we are founded on Judeo-Christian principles."

What was it that Jesus said, again? "Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works"? That was him, right? Not someone else?

How NOT to sell your anchor

The above picture has been plastered on billboards around Toronto since the end of the summer, announcing the new host of the national news on Global TV in Canada, Dawna Friesen. And it is a terrifying choice. Let me list the reasons:

1. Anyone who's ever told ghost stories around a campfire, or watched someone do it on TV, knows that it's scary when someone's face is lit from below. And the strongest light source, here, is coming from below.
2. Friesen isn't smiling. One end of her lips is upturned, yes, but the other is still. She's sneering.
3. Her pupils looking unusually tiny and her irises look like blue steel. Her eyes just look cold.
4. I don't know exactly how to explain it, but she reminds me of Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns...
5. ...or a vampire. (Though that conclusion, given my first three observations, is probably easier to understand.)

The Scott Pilgrim movie

Thankfully, I liked the Scott Pilgrim movie more than I have the books. Some quick thoughts:

• Kieran Culkin as Wallace steals every scene that he's in.
• The recurring bed gag is great. (I'm not sure whether the bed actually increases in size every time Scott wakes up and there's another guy in it, but it certainly seemed like it did.)
• I'm not sure that Scott himself is more likable, but he's certainly less unlikable. In Wright's effort to streamline the story, he's dropped most of what made Scott seem like a directionless jerk (his personal life outside Ramona is effectively reduced to him being in a band, but in the movie a) the band is good, and b) so is Scott!) and compressed the timeline significantly, which makes him seem like less of a loser for never learning or growing - it's only been a few weeks! But this Scott clearly does learn and grow, even if the proof in the final battle scene is a bit precious and too explicit. I think Wright is also cashing-in on Cera's own in-built nice-guy type. But anyway... he's still a bit bland, but I actually want this Scott to win.
• The major goof, I think, is that Envy is built up to be this major nemesis, but she appears, she plays, she and Scott have a moment, and then she's gone for the second-half of the film. Weird. Would it have been too much if she was also under Gideon's control at the end, and was also part of the fight with Ramona and Knives? Maybe.
• Wright's version of the Nega-Scott battle - its foreshadowing, its placement, its hilarious and wholly appropriate resolution - is faaaaaar better than O'Malley's.
• I had trouble with the film's grammar in places, which wasn't like a comic nor was it much like a movie. There are spots where the scene and time change rapidly from shot to shot, to show that Scott is in a daze, but it left me completely disoriented and confused. Which was maybe the point, but I found it aggravating rather than appropriate.
• And it was nice to see my hometown in a movie without it being passed off as some other city.