Coat Check [chat]

Heart Coat Check Girl.

IU Strike: Complaining without Solutions

Students and Staff at IU Bloomington have planned a strike for April 11th and 12th.  This has received some attention from The Nation, and the strike, itself, has a tumblr page.  Because how are you supposed to fight the man without a tumblr page?  Combing through the tumblr one can find a plethora of grievances mixed with hopeful idealism.  As one image on the site articulates:

"The goal is to contest the administration's efforts to make IU a more exclusive, costly institution, at the expense of students and staff. We have already forced the administration to acknowledge these issues, but through collective action, we want to push further so that we can imagine together a different future for IU."

The goal of the strike is to contest, to push, to imagine.  As the demands page says, the goal is, "to foster discussion and encourage action".  There be discontent, and this discontent needs to be articulated.  What is curious, however, are some terms that are absent from the site:

- Solution
- Proposal
- Answer

They're as mad as hell.  They aren't going to take it anymore.  But fuck if they know how to get where they want to be, how they can solve the problem.  This is troubling.

For one thing, their lack of forethought, planning, and basic economic skills results in untenable demands.  Let's look at their six preliminary demands:

1)  Immediately reduce tuition and eliminate fees.
2)  Stop Privatization and outsourcing at IU.
3)  End the wage freeze.
4)  The university must honor its promise to double the enrollment of African-American students to 8%.
5)  Abolish both HB1402 and SB590.
6)  No retaliation for participating in or organizing the strike.

Notice 1 and 3?  1 requires that the University decrease the amount of money it take in.  3 requires that the University increase staff / faculty salaries, and so push more money out.  So, our helpful protesters have demanded that IU collect less money, but dole out larger checks.  My guess is that no math / econ students, or faculty, participated in the construction of that list.

Let's be clear:  Each particular demand, itself, is not troubling or problematic.  Having a strike or demonstration is fine and dandy.  Communicating unrest and voicing opposition to trends?  Go for it.  But there is a difference between criticism and constructive criticism.  Criticism is people yelling and dancing around wearing Guy Fawkes masks.  Constructive criticism is people articulating their grievances, and offering some fucking solutions to the god damned problem.  It's taking the step beyond mere vocalization of unrest, and striving for resolution.

This is the general problem with contemporary civil unrest, with campus strikes and the Occupy Wall Street movement.  They're great at complaining and not showering.  But when it comes time to sit down and articulate a practical solution nothing happens.  The people in the drum circle can imagine a better world, can articulate their imagined possible reality, but have no fucking clue how to get from where we are, to what they want to be.

It seems like that would be a critical step:  A woman in the drum circle stands up and says, "And here is my Excel document with cost breakdowns for how we can transition from the current economic paradigm to a more palatable system."  But that won't happen, because instead of learning economic theory and the inter-workings of University bureaucracy the fucker was busy learning to play a djembe.

My guess is that their website has not exhausted its server space.  So, if they had solutions they could have made a "How to solve the problem" page.  But they didn't make the page, so they probably don't have the solutions.

It's just like Hugh Laurie sang:

Here's my constructive criticism for the folks at IU:  Add some fucking solutions to your tumblr page, and have an idea of how to enact your economic demands.

Because you need more to offer than, "All we gotta do is.....(harmonica)"

April Fool's [chat]

April Fools 2013 Summary

Distributed Vernacular Acculturation Webs

I am working on an article concerning the development of para-legitimate verbal states focusing on the mechanisms of attenuation, ordinance, and initial bearing of ω class substrate tinges as a series of complex recursive metaphors regarding the malediction and chastisement of genial agents, blanket drapers, and Tolkien-based authentication mechanisms. Proposing to purport pitiable passages parsing as prepossessing paraphrase, periphrastic polyglots prepend presumptuous prepositions periodically penning poetical psalms. Wresting grist from meager life, solemn salmon seek the solace of spring sourcewaters, struggling.

Here's Tom with the weather.

Suzy Lee Weiss vs. Frank Bruni

How likely is it that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal got together to produce two related columns?

On March 29th, the Wall Street Journal posted this opinion piece by Suzy Lee Weiss entitled 'To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me', a rant in which Miss Weiss places the blame for her lack of college acceptance on the colleges.  The next day, we find this Op-ed by Frank Bruni, a rant about shitty parents.

It seems like the two articles may be related.

Miss Weiss feels that she is entitled to attend her ideal school despite her lack of extra curricular activities or strong SAT scores.  Mr. Bruni claims that, "the Me Generation spawned generations of mini-me’s", suggesting that parental narcissism may be passed on to the offspring.  Perhaps the mentality that prompted Miss Weiss to write her column resulted from the mentality to which Bruni points.

Bruni also observes, "You can eliminate the valedictorians from high school but you can’t eliminate them from life."  While parents heap praise and adoration upon their children, the world may not view them as precious snowflakes.  Once they leave home, children are assessed by the standards of their professors and employers.  Cue Miss Weiss and her lack of preparation for gaining acceptance to college, and inability to shoulder her own responsibility for her shortcomings.

What is also interesting are the comments for each article.  There seems to be universal distain for the Weiss piece and its theme of entitlement and perceived unfairness.  In contrast to this, many readers seem to agree with the Bruni piece.  A few people invoke the "you've never fucked without using a condom, so what do you know about parenting" trope, but generally readers seem to agree that shitty parents produce shitty kids.

It strikes me as odd that these two pieces appeared within a day of one another, that we find the disease on the 29th and the diagnosis on the 30th.

What is also odd is the reality of children like Miss Weiss.  I sincerely doubt that parents set out to raise shitty kids.  Yet we find that many parents utilize the strategies critiqued by Bruni:  children as snowflakes, children as equals, children with fucking iPhones.  No one wants to raise a spoiled brat, and yet persons constantly engage in activities that seem to result in spoiled brats.  We could explain that by narcissists producing narcissists, but whence that first generation?

I just thought it was interesting that these two articles appeared in two different publications on the same weekend, and it happened to be a weekend on which parents shower their children with candy.

Coincidence?

Venn Diagram of Irrational [chat]

Zero Punctuation: SimCity

The Escapist : Zero Punctuation : SimCity