Abso-fucking-lutely

Abso-fucking-lutely

Down with those motherfuckers

TIL that the reason lead levels in children’s blood have dropped 85% in the past thirty years is because of an unknown scientist who fought car companies to end leaded gasoline. He also removed it from paint, suggested its removal from pipes, and campaigned for the removal of lead solder from cans.

via ift.tt

I think a major part is that we're often taught the opposite, that our opinion is insignificant. I got penalized on several of my highschool essays for trying to synthesize because I couldn't fit all my thoughts and analysis within a certain page limit. The best score I got was when I gave up and did what they wanted. They didn't want my insight, they wanted me to format it properly.

I wasn't rewarded for expressing my insight, so eventually I did the most barebones work.

And that's what got me a B.

I teach a lot of undergrads these days. About 3 years ago, I started dedicating a full two hours early every semester to a lecture and discussion about the history of the concept of plagiarism, because I was so annoyed that my students were walking into my classroom with the ironclad belief that they weren't plagiarizing when they were. Sure, the university had some official plagiarism guidelines that they could hypothetically read in a code of conduct somewhere, but they didn't. All they had was a vague memory of some teacher in Grade 8 telling them 'don't copy and paste from wikipedia' and a little learning from experience afterwards.

My hypothesis (which I was delighted to find is shared by Brian Deer, the journalist who broke the Wakefield story and who was the source Illuminaughti plagiarized in the hbomberguy video) is that the rise of automatic plagiarism checkers meant that, in the minds of many students, the formerly more abstract concept of plagiarism ('passing someone else's work off as your own') became a more concrete concept operationalized by the plagiarism checker. Under this concept, a text is plagiarized if (and, implicitly, only if) it is detected as plagiarism by the plagiarism checker. I have spent many hours with students sobbing in my office after I told them that their essays were plagiarized, and they all say that they thought changing the words around was sufficient to make it not plagiarized. Maybe some of them were lying for sympathy, maybe they all were, but I see no reason to not take them at their word. They think that what they're doing is dubious (hence the shame) but they don't think it falls under what they take to be the definition of plagiarism - the thing they can face sanction from the university for. They need to have it pointed out to them that there has been plagiarism for a lot longer than there have been automatic 'plagiarism checkers' and that as their professor, I'm the only plagiarism checker they really need to be concerned about.

It's really easy for me to get frustrated about this. It's frustrating to me that the American public high school system (the source of the majority of my students) has failed to prepare them to think about information, facts, and where they come from. It's frustrating that students can't be arsed to read the university's code of conduct and that the only way I know they have is if I read it straight to their faces. It's very frustrating to see the written scholarly word, a medium to which I have dedicated no small part of my life, treated like it's not worth anything. I'm frustrated to know that most students are not in my class, or in the class of someone else prepared to teach this lesson, so they'll go through their whole lives thinking that an uncited light paraphrase is enough to be worthy of credit. I'm frustrated that people with such a lax attitude towards information are my fellow voters. I once read a real fucking academic essay that was submitted for grades that cited a long quote from Arthur Conan Doyle that, when I traced it, was actually a quote from a fucking TJLC blog. That one isn't frustrating, I guess, that's just funny. It's not all bad.

I'm glad for the hbomberguy video. I hope it will make it easier to convince my students in future. It's too bad he didn't go into the academic context, but it's not like he was short on things to talk about already.

But this is a more general problem than just the video essay context shows. If we're not careful, the very concept of plagiarism can get eroded. I'm not a linguistic prescriptivist, either! If enough people start taking this new concept as plagiarism, that will be what it becomes. I think a world in which that notion of plagiarism is the relevant one would be a worse world. Don't let people erode the idea of credit. You're going to want it later.

The reason Joseph knew Mary didn't cheat on him is because he knew Mary was Trans and she was begging to god for Joseph to get her pregnant and god helped a bad bitch out

Mary was a trans woman

Share this to make Christians angry

Cringe started as a verb describing a physical reaction, i.e.: "I cringe when I see [x]."

Modern slang has turned cringe into an adjective describing anything to which a person might have such a reaction.

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This shift in language is illustrative of a shift in culture.

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For a while there, in the early 2000s, there was this big sex positivity movement and we talked openly about kink and queer sexuality and creating a culture of consent that broke away from traditional conservative ideas of moral respectability.

And now we are in the midst of this giant purity culture backlash, this giant push for rigid conformity all over the internet. Anything that deviates from the norm even remotely is ridiculed.

And this cultural shift is perfectly encapsulated in this singular linguistic shift, this verb becoming a noun.

The Revenge of the Pearl Clutchers

That's what "cringing" is. It's pearl clutching.

When the pearl clutchers turned cringe into an adjective, they turned a reaction into an accusation. The pearl clutchers don't want to take responsibility for their own kneejerk emotions. They want to blame YOU.

They are saying, "My disgust isn't the fault of my own backwards prejudices. It is YOU who are inherently disgusting. My inability to cope with even the slightest deviation from norm is not the problem here. YOUR refusal to rigidly conform is the problem. I am not the one who is cringing. YOU are the one who is cringe."

Fuck 'em.

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Take the word back.

Cringe is not something people are.

It's something judgmental assholes do.

Been looking at the Wish content on YouTube and Tumblr.

And I just....

There's a lot of things that baffle me about some of the criticism.

But the first really illogical thing I saw was about Magnifico and Amaya.

So let's talk about this. Magnifico first, because I adore him as a villain.

Magnifico adores his people. He doesn't want what happened to him to happen again.

He also is fearful of anything that challenges his power. This is most blatantly shown in his reaction to the light.

He does not know this is Star. He thinks it is a new type of magic. And he is scared of that. Not Star, remember, he doesn't know about Star yet. It's the idea of a sorcerer he does not know about.

But his fear is hinted at in his refusal to grant Sabba's wish. "It's too vague" is what I believe he said. Because he is scared of something he can't control. But he won't give it back, because then it could happen, even if it's a very slim possibility.

Magnifico needs to be in control. And he dislikes when that control is threatened, as seen in This is the Thanks I Get. On the surface level, it's about him being unappreciated. In actuality, the people threaten his control with their insistence on another wish ceremony. This causes him to attempt to reestablish control in any way he can, which leads to his descent into evil magic.

And with that choice, the choice to set himself on a path that would end in harming the people (and wishes) he had sworn to protect, he was past redemption.

Because he went too far. The dark magic is literally a symbol of the tipping point of his tightening control. It is the point of no return.

It is not a justification for his actions. It is not what 'makes' him the movie's villain. He was always going to be the movie's villain. That was obvious from his control of his citizens. No, it is a physical representation of how he let his paranoia take over and get people hurt.

He is no longer redeemable. He can't be reasoned with. While the dark magic accentuated and pushed his controlling tendencies to the forefront, it only built on what was there.

The dark magic is where he goes from 'victim suffering from control issues as a result of his trauma', to 'his trauma causing him to abuse others'. We know it's something that he can help because he was pulled away from it before and even admitted that he made a vow to himself. He could have pulled himself back before he hurt anyone. And he knew he would hurt people if he went through with it.

And he did it anyway.

That is what makes him a compelling villain, besides the magnetic effect he has every time he appears on-screen, is the ability to stop and then choose to proceed forward.

He is a wonderful mix of self-deceiving and self-destructive, and it is fascinating to watch on the big screen.