I hate people sometimes.

[hermionesviolin]

(1)

A lot of really good authors are being seduced by slash. Posted in a slash forum no less.
queerasjohn has a great response, though:

"I don't like reading stories about black people. I think it's awful that authors I like write stories about black people, and I wish they'd go back to writing stories about white people!"

Offended? Yeah. Pardon me for being offended when people replace "black" with "gay", and "white" with "straight".

(2)

Daily Hampshire Gazette April 28
Fox News May 2
Fox News May 5

Dude, my daddy didn’t tell me the story made the blogroll. It only made the Jolt on Monday. I’m not sure what to think about the fact that bloggers have just been posting the info, not really commenting on it. Smithies have been debating it (because we didn’t do enough of that prior to and directly following the vote, right?) because it is OURS. This is the first time i have ever seen something represented in major media that was “mine,” and it’s scary, because the media messes things up so much and you don’t really understand until you know firsthand of what they are “reporting.”

Fox News Tuesday night. I wish i could have seen it. I hear bad things.

Also, i am so incredibly disgusted with Melissa Parham. Every once in a while she has something intelligent and rational to say but mostly i have been finding her incredibly obnoxious, immature, belligerent, etc.

Let me ‘splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

There are people who are biologically female but who identify as male. (A common way of talking about things is that sex is biological but that gender is socially constructed.) Smith College only admits female students to its undergraduate program. However, there are many students who identify as transgendered who attend this school. SGA (Student Government Organization) President Lindsay Watson proposed that the SGA constitution be changed to replace all female pronouns to “the student.” The SGA is supposed to represent the student body, and there are students who are uncomfortable being referred to by female pronouns. I and many other people are happy to point people in the direction of resources if they are uneducated about trans issues, but so many people get spastic about this being an all-women’s institution and can’t get past “This is going to lead to Smith accepting biological males” and “If they identify as male, what are they doing at a women’s college?” and act very stubborn and immature and make whiny remarks about being over-PC and pandering to minorities and it makes me want to throw furniture.

(3)

When i talked about The Matrix i meant to mention the Neil Gaiman story related to it.

People have bitched about this because he supposedly thinks fanfic is derivative and bad and stuff, yet look at him writing it. Um, to those people? Fuck you with a spoon. He was asked about fanfic ages ago and here’s the relevant portion of his response:

it's a good place to write while you've still got training wheels on - someone else's character or worlds. I remember, as a nine-year-old, writing a Conan-meets-some-Ken-Bulmer-sword-and-sorcery-characters. And it's fun to head over into someone else's playground: I've written several stories over the years set in other people's worlds (including an episode of Babylon 5); and if I don't miss the deadline, I'm meant to be writing a Sherlock-Holmes-meets-the-Chulhu-mythos story very soon.

People debated the training-wheels metaphor a lot after he posted it, but he’s certainly not saying there’s anything wrong with it, and if you’d actually read his response you’d see that he freely admits to having written it himself.

And as for the aforementioned story itself, he says:

Warners set up the whatisthematrix website and put comics and short stories up by various people to help promote it. I was one of the people. They sent me the script and some photocopied storyboards, and I read it and wrote "Goliath", which they then put up on their website, to help promote the film. It's been up ever since. So it was definitely written for the movie, and based on the world of the movie, or at least, what I took from it from that first script.

(4)

I had to read this article multiple times to understand what exactly Gabriel Garcia Marquez was saying.

While Latin America's revered left-wing intellectuals are abandoning Mr. Castro in horror at the recent crackdown on dissidents, Mr. Garcia Marquez continues to stand by the Cuban leader, an old friend. [my note: um, back up a statement like that please]

The 1982 Nobel Prize-winning author, whose novel "Autumn of the Patriarch" has been acclaimed as the classic account of the Caribbean strongman, refuses to join the likes of Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano in condemning Mr. Castro.

The Colombian writer defended himself in Tuesday's edition of the daily newspaper El Tiempo after U.S. feminist writer Susan Sontag told reporters that it was "unpardonable" for him not to have spoken out over the recent Cuban crackdown.

"I don't answer unnecessary and provocative questions," said the author, whose sympathies for the Cuban revolution go back decades.

Moral support from such respected figures as Mr. Garcia Marquez is highly valued by a Cuban government whose material resources have dwindled since the Soviet collapse.

"I myself could not calculate the number of prisoners, dissidents and conspirators that I have helped, in absolute silence, to emigrate from Cuba over no less than 20 years," Mr. Garcia Marquez, 76, said in his defense.

"As to the death penalty, I don't have anything to add to what I have said in private and publicly for as long as I can remember: I'm against it in any place, for any reason, in any circumstances," said Mr. Garcia Marquez who lives in Mexico and Los Angeles.

Mr. Castro in 2002 wrote a glowing review of Mr. Garcia Marquez's recently published memoirs.
"In my next reincarnation, I would like to be a writer, and, on top of that, I'd like to be one like Gabriel Garcia Marquez," the communist leader wrote in the Colombian magazine Cambio.

Daniel Drezner says, “So let me get this straight. Garcia Marquez's rationalization for his support of Castro is that he's fully cognizant of the totalitarian nature of Castro's regime?”

The key line, in my opinion, which really sums up the petition is:

The harassment against Cuba could serve as a pretext for an invasion. Therefore, we call upon citizens and policy makers to uphold the universal principles of national sovereignity, respect of territorial integrity and self-determination, essential to just and peaceful co-existence among nations.

This makes it the same as the Iraq issue -- we think that what the person in charge is doing is horrible, but we think we have no right to interfere. I understand the issues about U.S.-as-Policeman-of-the-world but i still have problems with it. Don’t human rights organizations argue for international intervention when nations are violating human rights? Does it become a worry that it will become too excessive only because America is the Second Coming of Satan?

Also, what about respect for the integrity and right to self-determination of the Cuban people? And is it just me or does “peaceful co-existence” sound like WWII appeasement policies?

And what’s up with stuff like Cuba getting re-elected to the UN Human Rights Commission?

(5)

This summer i want to research post-modernism (have ever since Issues in Queer Studies last Spring) and Marxism. Unlike some people, for all my adoration of the man, i vehemently do not want to be Michael when i grow up. A radical left Marxist? Make the Baby Elizabeth cry. I was thinking of my father likening me to Eugene Volokh recently and how flattering that is, so i guess if i were to say i want to be someone when i grow up i could say him, but it just doesn’t feel right. I was thinking about other people, like my father and my mother and Phyllis, whom i would like to be like when i grow up. There’s no one i want to exactly like (and i’m even excluding sex and sexuality here), though. I want to be the result of a combination of all the best in these people. I want to be me, the best me i can be. (Yes, i know, i think about this kind of stuff too much. I’m supposed to just say “Look at that person. I admire many aspects of that person. I want to be that person.” I prefer to look at this example as evidence that i have a solid self and am realistic about the imperfectness of other people.)

Steven Den Beste bashes scary leftist academia. I’m growing as tired of the bashing-of-the-left as i already was of the bashing-of-the-right. I am not going to have a comfort zone, ever. However, there was definitely a sick feeling of vindication at not being the only person who sometimes wonders if her English degree is only teaching her how to say nothing prettily.

I've been an English major. And the unfortunate tendency for those who are verbally fluent and spend four years arguing their opinion through footnotes and elegant phrasing rather than data, is to believe that a nice turn of phrase is as important as hard data. It informs the glib politics of many in the academy who often seem to think that the amusing bon mots of a Doonesbury cartoon constitute serious policy thought. And the reaction I get when explaining, say, rent control -- that somehow I'm just being mean, and that if I wanted to, I could make it so that imposing rent control improved the housing stock rather than destroying it.

Which is not to diminish the importance of literature and art. It's vital. But it's dangerous that our humanities students are so alienated from the scientific way of thought that they can't evaluate science on its own terms. You don't need to be able to run a study yourself -- but you should understand the limits of experimental design, how data is used to build a case, and the frameworks of almost-sciences like economics that will let you understand where economists pronouncements are likely to be pretty solid (rent control) and where they're likely to be personal opinions dressed up as facts (tax policy). We can't all be scientists, but we can, most of us, understand the scientific way of thinking. And since the scientific way of thinking is what's building most of the science that's building our world, and should be constructing the economic thought we expect to make us all richer, we'd better be able to follow it or we risk being led around by the nose.

I found it really interesting that Lee Harris says:

Marx’s uniqueness as a thinker of the left is his absolute commitment to the principles of political realism. This is the view that any political energy that is put into what is clearly a hopeless cause is a waste. Utopianism is not only impractical; it is an obstacle to obtaining socialism’s true objective, since it diverts badly needed resources away from the pursuit of viable goals, wasting them instead on the pursuit of political fantasies.

Having read that article i really wanna research this stuff, so i know what i’m talking about, and whether people know what they’re talking about.

I enjoy thinking about literature, thinking about words, dissecting plot arcs, all that, but i often feel like you can make something mean anything if you try hard enough and too often those interpretations have no value outside of “Look how cool I am.” I’m much more interested in changing the world. Changing how people think is a major part of that -- the cynic in me wants to rephrase that to “changing people so that they think.” So i’m really excited about taking Intro Logic and Intro to Micro-Econ. I am excited about The Harlem Renaissance and Garcia Lorca (as well as my 2 Oxford classes) only because the literature strikes me as interesting.

If my literature classes teach me to analyze texts critically, then they will have been worth it in a real world sense. If not, they will have given me an excuse to read lots of texts i feel i “should” have read.

College is all about the learning.

we never ask ourselves the questions
to the answers that nobody
even wants to know
-Everclear, "So Much For the Afterglow"

Comments

[zzrg.livejournal.com]

Facts and figures may explain why the world goes around, but what has always sustained mankind as he has huddled around the campfire at night with absolutely no protection from the universe has been the story. I do not think there is a reason for it. It just is. There is something in the human psyche that craves the story as much as the human soul craves loves, and it is not something that can be measured.
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Great literature is not just the science of saying things in a pretty manner; it is the exploration of words that have struck a chord deep in the common human psyche revealing as much about the nature of being human as any of the more empirical sciences will ever have a chance of doing.
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Peaceful co-existence vs. appeasement. When do we have the right to say that a religion or any cultural belief is wrong and needs to be discontinued? Is that any different than saying a culture’s political institutions are wrong? Are there a set of universal human rights? Or are there conflicting sets? But to answer the question, appeasement is giving into a form of blackmail; co-existence is respecting the right of self-determination even if we disagree with it. On one level you could look at it as moving from discrimination, to separate but equal, to integration. I believe that in the end there is a political Darwinism at work, sadly it is something that spans generations and no one generation will ever see the results.
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Changing gender references in the Smith SGA constitution? Please. Unless the current constitution discriminates in some way between people that call themselves she’s and people that call themselves he’s, then leave it alone. A constitution is a political document, not a social one. My point being that the pronoun of social choice for everyone could change tomorrow, but the meaning of the constitution would remain the same. If you get into a cycle of trying to keep the constitution politically correct when are you going to stop? You will be changing the constitution as often as the weather without ever changing its meaning. It seems like a waste of time of intelligent people that could be out doing real work to raise awareness or real issues.
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Time is the enemy of us all. I must go. Later.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

No no no, i wasn't dissing literature itself. I adore literature and think it can be incredibly powerful and i certainly think it's important. My complaint is with the institutionalized study of literature. I feel like way too much of what i do is coming up with obscure theories to apply to literature. Instead of just saying "This story is a powerful representation of one woman's experience at the turn of the 20th century" i have to talk about women as property and examine the structure of sentences and it feels like too often it becomes an exercise in b.s.ing.

When do we have the right to say that a religion or any cultural belief is wrong and needs to be discontinued? Is that any different than saying a culture’s political institutions are wrong? Are there a set of universal human rights? Or are there conflicting sets? But to answer the question, appeasement is giving into a form of blackmail; co-existence is respecting the right of self-determination even if we disagree with it.

So you're basically saying that human rights organizations shouldn't exist then. Also, i still have difficulty with the invokation of "self-determination" in this context, because it seems to me that the only people in Cuba who have the right to "self-determination" are Castro and the people he likes.

As for transgender issues. It's not as though we changed the constitution to contain obscure trendy pronouns like "zie" and "zir." We merely changed all female pronouns to "student." We are all students, but some of us don't identify as female.

[zzrg.livejournal.com]

I say this tongue in cheek, but how many students identify themselves as students? Are you insulting the scholars? Would you take away the rights of those that are not serious enough in their studies to meet the definition of students? (And what about learners, pupils, disciples, collegians, novices, docents, apprentices, etc?)
Think of how the definition of student has changed from the 17th century to the present day. Perhaps X would be a good pronoun to use in the constitution and around campus since it is encoded in DNA and thus the least word subject to change. Actually does not sound very awkward in normal speech. Of course, then you have to have a DNA test to have rights under the constitution. (Of course you could always say one is innocent until proven guilty.)
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I agree with what you are saying about literature, but it sounded like you were saying exactly the opposite. Literature should be about the exploration of the universal themes that the works evoke, and exploring the nooks and crannies in such works that have not been explored. I would be much more interested in a student making an intelligent argument about what the author was trying to get across than dissecting the work on an operating table.
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Should we have stepped in and prevented the Cuban people from sweeping Castro into power? Should we rescue them because they made a bad decision? If they keep making bad decisions, should we keep bailing them out? Should aliens, seeing the course we are on as a planet, step in and dictate to us how we should live because they know better? I am a great believer in human rights and do all I can as an individual to ensure protection of those rights. But I do recognize that my view of human rights is only my own view no matter how horrible I find practices in other cultures, societies, and countries.

One of the things that I think most people agree is horrible is ritual female genital mutilation (or circumcision). A female photographer won a Pulitzer for her photos of a circumcision. Did the photographer have a right to take those photos or to try to intervene and change the culture of the tribe? How many cultures have been wiped out because their practices were wrong?

Human rights groups should exist and should push their agenda. But they should push their agenda carefully. As always I believe the best place to start is with the way I as an individual treat the people around me, and I think that is the best place for others to start.

(I hope you know me well enough that I am being serious in my questions and mean everything respectfully. I agree with the essence of what you are saying, and I am less disagreeing than questioning.)