In a stunning fit of bad taste and bad design, the Newark immigration & customs control has a terrible feature. Everyone landing at that airport gets filtered through a customs screening room, a large space with long, slow moving lines, and mounted dead center is a large television. It is tuned to CNN. My welcome back to the USA was Wolf Blitzer (spit) yammering about two things: emails, and polls. Good god, America, you are being poisoned by the media. Rather than policy, we hear only about trivia and the state of the horse race. Charles Pierce summarizes my feelings.
I am perilously close to perishing for the desire of wanting somebody to win the presidency on the merits. I am tired of polls and micro-analytics based on splitting the electorate into bite-sized pieces. And I am tired of pundits who don’t know dick about the people for whom they claim to be speaking. (Hi, Joe! Mika! Good ta see ya!) And I am tired of surrogates, all of them, and not just the crazy ones that speak for El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago, but all the people dealing in arguments and talking points and bullshit that passed their sell-by dates sometime around last Memorial Day.
One more week of this bullshit, but I do not expect to see an improvement after the election, since our media seem to be totally incapable of considering ideas and actions outside of their effect on Nate Silver’s numbers games.
So I got home some time after 2am, collapsed into bed slept a few hours, and got up to teach my classes. The first thing that greeted me when I opened my office door, unfortunately, was that I’d set the due date for lab reports for the end of last week, and you can guess what I found: piles and piles of papers slid under my door. That wasn’t so bad, though; I expected it, and it was the first major writing assignment of the term, so I’m kind of looking forward to reading them. What I didn’t expect, and that soured my stomach, was that the latest issue of the Morris North Star, our far-right student newspaper, was also stuffed under there. This is what I got to see:
Gag. Thud. Barf. I am so disappointed in some of our students for their lack of empathy, total absence of wit, and outright stupidity. I also heard that someone spoke up at a conservative forum on campus, expressing their fear of being seen as conservative at UMM, and they used as an example their certainty that they could never attend a class taught by yours truly, PZ Myers, while wearing a college republicans T-shirt. Little do they realize that at a small college like ours, where our teabagging students aren’t shy about expressing themselves on their horrible little rag, I already know…and it makes no difference in my biology classes.
Now if I were grading them on their sense of humor or their consciousness of their fellow students, they’d be failing, but I haven’t figured out a way to include those topics on exams about cell biology or genetics. Or if I could test them on hypocrisy — you know they’re not very aware when they can complain that they can’t wear a conservative slogan on a t-shirt (they can) because of ‘political correctness’, but at the same time than can run cartoons that ignorantly denigrate other students because ‘politically incorrect’ is a mark of pride to them.
It’s also the case that I can’t fail students for being assholes, unfortunately.
OK, one bit of good news. This was waiting for me in my mailbox.
Now all I have to do is catch up on my sleep, get over my jetlag, and have this annoying throbbing headache end, and maybe I can read it.
Maybe I should have my own tee shirt made up, a similar sign to the men, women sign.
Men, women, I don’t give a damn because I’m here to eliminate waste, not socialize.
Having utilized unisex facilities in Europe, I am quite firmly of that view. It’s a shithouse, not a coffeehouse. Pick a stall, do your business, give a courtesy flush when appropriate, go on your way. As such, I don’t give a damn who or what’s in the next stall, even if it’s Marvin the Martian.*
*Marvin, just do me the courtesy of making that earth shattering kaboom after I leave the restroom.
As for clueless pundits, well, there’s a reason I rarely turn on the idiot box.
Oh, excellent choice of casual reading material. I’ve added it to my Amazon list, lest I forget.**
**I’m always on the lookout for something good to read. :)
I just added to that list yesterday, while reading an excellent article on BBC about theories on the origin of life. So, next pay day will have a bit budgeted for a stack of books. :D
I imagine the writers of North Star have a bright future writing for Trump TV.
My favorite customs experience was flying into Manchester (UK). We went through passport control and then followed a sign for customs. It instructed us if we had items to declare, use the red door; otherwise use the green door. We had nothing to declare, so we used the green door and found ourselves standing on the sidewalk outside the airport.
This was pre 9/11so I imagine it’s not so jolly these days.
I came back to the US at the end of 2010, had nothing to declare at customs and just signed the form to that effect and left.
But, that was at Philly International Airport. Reagan International is like its own universe or something, a lot of differences than other airports in the US.
Enough so that I planned every trip, after one experience there, to entirely avoid that damned airport.
Not much has changed at UK airports since 9/11, except departures to the US now have a special area with additional security theater. Arrivals are mostly the same.
OTOH it shares one very salient characteristic with god….
@#1
When I was a college freshman in the dorms, all our bathrooms we co-ed* (this in the US). After the first few days everyone was totally fine with it, to the point where after that year, it seemed odd to break up bathrooms by gender.
*One floor (out of 3 6-story buildings) was designated as ‘woman’s only’ floor. That seemed to mostly exist to appease a certain type of parent. Once the kids were dropped off, that floor certainly was not woman only
@ 2 They would if Trump TV doesn’t crash under the weight of its hubris and ineptitude.
@#2, I’m thinking The Onion writing for Trump. Perhaps, that’s who has been designing his campaign.
Well, count your lucky stars you had some useless paper handy to catch the mess.
There’s no better way to misinform people than to over inform them with a Blitzerkrieg army gabbling endlessly about trivialities. Too much TV…and by TV, I mean any onscreen media. To be sure, I’m prone to the later with my habit of checking FaceBook, FiveThirtyEight, and Snopes every couple of hours to find out “what’s happened” since the last time I checked. I like to rationalize that those aren’t as bad as Fox but I’m fairly sure that’s at best a small difference.
Ha, I voted today. I’m already feeling a lot better, I can ignore the jibber jabber for the next week.
Wait! I would have thought you would be delighted to get a copy. Aren’t you supposed to write all over it in a black marker of some sort? I thought this was traditional up there now.
[ducking]
@azpaul3, assuming that the markup would be for submission to the editors of the paper, would it not be far more appropriate to use a crayon?
Just to keep it within the intellectual maturity level of the far-right.
But on the bright side, they can look forward to a promising career churning out shitposts and jpegs amongst the ‘pitters. Just as stupid, just as obnoxious, just as obsessive over you and your pesky progressivism.
You don’t mind getting up early to go dinosauring?
For those who are interested in the state of the only horse race that really matters (the “Race That Stops A Nation”, aka the Melbourne Cup) it was won by Almandin this year. Which I discovered from Google just now.
There are times when I fear for my Australian citizenship – if my parents hadn’t been born here, I’d probably have been deported by now…
@Holms #14, while I’ve had some problems with “progressivism”, those points were few and far between, as the effort was giving rights to all, rather than a few, which is anti-constitutional.
I’ve also learned a hell of a lot from those unrepresented or less than represented and honestly, I agree with the “cause” there.
I’ve never been big on removing rights from anyone, let alone denying rights to any group. It defies the very notion of our Constitution.
So, honestly, I lack an idea of your gripe. Can you cogently, precisely define your complaint?
Is it giving rights to those who already should enjoy equality, as defined in our Constitution?
Or is it simply a hatred of our Constitution in general?
I fully expect a pedantic response, just to ensure full context comprehension.
As our nation has previously considered the Constitution either based federally, to states or only toward white males, progressives moving the benchmark to actually define humanity, can you get the context of my disagreement with you?
@ 16 – Meg Thornton
“There are times when I fear for my Australian citizenship – if my parents hadn’t been born here, I’d probably have been deported by now…”
How so? Is there something afoot?
Holms wrote:
Alternatively, perhaps they can get employed by the Kremlin. Trolling to support Trump or trolling to support Putin, there is little difference.
The jump in Trump’s polls are really starting to frighten me :(
@Meg Thornton 16, the whole Australian competitive beating-a-horse-in-a-big-circle phenomenon is so incredibly alienating to me. It just seems like the most boring, backwards, pre-enlightenment entertainment I can imagine, baffling. One year, drunken horse cruelty fans got into my apartment lobby, and urinated all over the floor. Australian culture is just troglodytic at times.
As I’ve mentioned, I work at a junior high school in Japan. Today one of the social studies teachers asked me who the most popular president of all time was in America. I said probably Lincoln in general, but among conservatives, it’s Regan. He was absolutely incredulous. In Japanese too fast for me to get beyond the gist, he brought up terrible thing after terrible thing that Regan did. And I had to tell him that conservatives don’t love Regan despite all that but because of it. This is the same teacher who wanted an explanation for how educated people could vote for Trump. He’s just too nice a guy to understand how much us Americans love horrible people and hate reality.
I also avoid everything to do with the Melbourne Cup. I don’t even go to the lunch.
Don’t you see – these things have all been fortuitously arranged for you. You can use the Princeton Field Guide to work out what kind of dinosaurs wrote the North Star, then numb your brain into gentle oblivion by marking the student papers.
@Cartomancer #23
[insert standard “that’s an insult to dinosaurs” gag here]
gjpetch @20:
Maybe the Princeton Election Consortium will help.
I have the first edition of the Princeton Field Guide. Excellent work. Enjoy.
I really
needwant to get the second edition. Maybe with solstice money . . . .One of my Facebook friends — who is a nice guy in person despite being a hard-right conservative — recently challenged me with a whole collection of articles about “censoring of conservative views” and “people afraid to be seen as conservative on campus” including the “Coddling of the American Mind” piece from The Atlantic. I looked at a few of them, and while most could be dismissed as “Waah! I’m not being given a platform!” or “The campus paper declined to print my conservative articles. Coincidence? I think not!”, about one in five seemed genuinely troubling to me, including a case in which an American professor seems to have been fired for the content of sermons that he preached and a case from the UK in which a professor was told that he wasn’t fired for his views but for expressing those views publicly. Does anyone have access to some less conservatively slanted analyses of cases such as these?
Friendly #27
That was incoherent.
.
Next time:
use paragraph breaks
provide links