Mostly Leftist Politics

1. in subjects where students are more likely to get jobs on the bottom of the social ladder or in academia (HA courses), like education, nursing, social sciences, or cultural studies, the marks of students are pretty much the same no matter what their political ideology. in economics and business (HE courses), however, which tend to train people for leadership roles in the private sector or for government bureaucracy, left wing students are penalized for their views.

2. when controlling for students’ ability through SAT score, professors who identify as republicans tend to give lower grades to students of colour than those who identify as democrats, both of whom also give higher grades to white students

My name is Mikey Peattie and I am a transgender student at Lake Dallas High School in Corinth, Texas. One of my teachers, Dr. Fionn Corcoran, is the first openly transgender teacher in our district, and possibly in the greater Denton/Dallas-Fort Worth area. In the month or so since he came out, he’s faced not only discrimination from students, but from his employers and fellow teachers as well. I made an LGBTQ+ safe space sign for his door, and before his coming out, it got ripped down maybe once or twice. Following his coming out however, the sign was torn down almost daily, and I would just keep making more in the hopes that maybe it would last for more than a day.

When all the smaller posters were torn down time after time, we decided to make a bigger poster, this one with the names and numbers of various suicide and LGBTQ+ hotlines on it, and even this one has been torn twice in the past week, both times by the same two students. Though these students were caught on camera in the act, their behavior was swept under the carpet as them just “having their own views,” and Dr. Corcoran was subsequently told that they may be forced to write an apology note and make a new sign, but that was it. The fact that these kids, and others, repeatedly tore down signs that were intended for nothing else but to make a certain group of people feel safe and accepted clearly shows the atmosphere of hate and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric that is present at Lake Dallas High School.

Earlier this year, the Gay-Straight Alliance that I am Vice President of put up around 20 posters around the school. It was subtle, and simply just had the name of the club and the meeting dates. By the next day, only about 4 remained, and within another day, they were all gone. Even when I saw someone tear one down right in front of me, and reported it, the student was simply required to write an (anonymous) apology letter to the club, one that was clearly scripted and took him maybe 10 minutes.

These occurrences, which could be characterized as hate crimes, show the staff’s indifference towards the safety of its LGBTQ+ staff and student body. Dr. Corcoran, despite being one of the most highly qualified and considerate teachers at the school, has been reprimanded for situations that any other teacher could find themselves in without the administration blinking an eye. They are systematically trying to push him out, without causing a scene that would ruin their image.

I and many others have stood by for too long letting this kind of abuse occur, and have finally had enough. We write to you hoping that media attention will force our admin to provide a safe environment for its LGBTQ+ students and staff, and make our school a better place.

Despite the fact that even the staunchest supporters of Article 13 were asking for it to be dropped from the final version of the EU Copyright Directive, that didn’t happen. In the final trilogue negotiations between the EU Council, the EU Commission and the EU Parliament, it appears that the agreed upon “compromise” is basically as bad as we feared. It will fundamentally change the entire nature of the internet. And not in a good way. As we recently discussed, the only way this makes sense is if the goal is to have the law be so bad that big internet companies feel forced to pay their way out of it.

And it appears that’s what we’ve got. MEP Julia Reda’s summary of the final deal highlights many of the problems with both Articles 11 and 13. Here’s the mess with Article 13:

And with Article 11:

The final version of this extra copyright for news sites closely resembles the version that already failed in Germany – only this time not limited to search engines and news aggregators, meaning it will do damage to a lot more websites.

Reproducing more than “single words or very short extracts” of news stories will require a licence. That will likely cover many of the snippets commonly shown alongside links today in order to give you an idea of what they lead to. We will have to wait and see how courts interpret what “very short” means in practice – until then, hyperlinking (with snippets) will be mired in legal uncertainty.

No exceptions are made even for services run by individuals, small companies or non-profits, which probably includes any monetised blogs or websites.

If this becomes law, I’m not sure Techdirt can continue publishing in the EU. At the very least, it will require us to spend a large sum of money on lawyers to determine what our liability risk is – to the point that it might just not be worth it at all. Article 13 makes a commenting system untenable, as we simply cannot setup a filter that will block people from uploading copyright-covered content. Article 11 potentially makes our posts untenable, since we frequently quote other news sites in order to comment on them (as we do above).

This is, of course, the desire of those supporting both bills. It is not just to close the (made up, mythical) “value gap.” It is to fundamentally change the internet away from an open system of communications – one that anyone can use to bypass traditional gatekeepers, to a closed “broadcast” system, in which key legacy gatekeepers control access to the public, via a complicated set of licenses that strip all of the benefits and profits from the system.

Not only will this do great harm to the general public’s ability to communicate freely over the internet, it will do massive harm to artists and creators – especially more independent ones, who will be effectively blocked from using these platforms to connect directly with their fans. Rather they will be required to go through “licensed” intermediaries, who will demand a huge cut of any money. In other words, it’s a return to the pre-internet days, where if you wanted to become a professional creator, your only options were to sign away all your rights to giant conglomerate record labels/studios/publishers.

It is incredible – and incredibly disappointing – that the EU is moving towards bringing back such a world, but that is what the latest agreement means.

There is still a chance to stop this from becoming law, though it will take a lot of effort. As Reda explains:

We can still stop this law

The Parliament and Council negotiators who agreed on the final text now return to their institutions seeking approval of the result. If it passes both votes unchanged, it becomes EU law, which member states are forced to implement into national law.

In both bodies, there is resistance.

The Parliament’s process starts with the approval by the Legal Affairs Committee – which is likely to be given on Monday, February 18.

Next, at a date to be announced, the EU member state governments will vote in the Council. The law can be stopped here either by 13 member state governments or by any number of governments who together represent 35% of the EU population (calculator). Last time, 8 countries representing 27% of the population were opposed. Either a large country like Germany or several small ones would need to change their minds: This is the less likely way to stop it.

Our best bet: The final vote in the plenary of the European Parliament, when all 751 MEPs, directly elected to represent the people, have a vote. This will take place either between March 25 and 28, on April 4 or between April 15 and 18. We’ve already demonstrated last July that a majority against a bad copyright proposal is achievable.

The plenary can vote to kill the bill – or to make changes, like removing Articles 11 and 13. In the latter case, it’s up to the Council to decide whether to accept these changes (the Directive then becomes law without these articles) or to shelve the project until after the EU elections in May, which will reshuffle all the cards.

If you’re an EU citizen, this next bit is important. Now is the time to start speaking up:

This is where you come in

The final Parliament vote will happen mere weeks before the EU elections. Most MEPs – and certainly all parties – are going to be seeking reelection. Articles 11 and 13 will be defeated if enough voters make these issues relevant to the campaigns. (Here’s how to vote in the EU elections – change the language to one of your country’s official ones for specific information)

It is up to you to make clear to your representatives: Their vote on whether to break the internet with Articles 11 and 13 will make or break your vote in the EU elections. Be insistent – but please always stay polite.

Look up your representatives’ voting behavior at SaveYourInternet.eu

Call or visit your MEPs’ offices (in Brussels, Strasbourg or their local constituency)

Visit campaign and party events and bring up the topic

Sign the record-breaking petition and spread the word, if you haven’t yet

Together, we can still stop this law.

Okay, literary theory wank incoming: cosmic horror is often characterised as the horror of nihilism, but – at least in the early incarnation of the genre in which Lovecraft wrote – it’s not particularly nihilistic. If anything, it’s the opposite of nihilist, which is where the trouble comes in.

In a nutshell, early cosmic horror fiction proposes a universe in which both the presence of a God or gods and the existence of a grand plan or cosmic purpose can easily be demonstrated, both empirically and mathematically. The problem is that the grand plan in question has nothing to do with us. Early cosmic horror’s Big Idea™ is that everything we know and everything we believe is objectively wrong; the proof of this would be childishly simple, if only we understood a few basic things about how the universe works. Our very existence is a blasphemous aberration, and the only reason the Powers That Be haven’t wiped us out is that we haven’t yet proven ourselves worth the minuscule effort that would be required to do so. That’s where the old “reading the wrong books makes you go violently insane” cliché comes from – not because of some alien mind virus, but because a correct understanding of the nature of reality inevitably leads to the understanding that the only morally justifiable course of action is to destroy ourselves.

As horror premises go, that’s a real doozy, and on the face of it Lovecraft’s totally right: that would be horrifying if it were true. The killing irony is that Lovecraft’s particular brand of white supremacism, with its firm grounding in racial pseudoscience, is constantly telling us that all this is literally true. “Your existence is aberrant and if you were capable of basic moral reasoning you’d kill yourself immediately and save us all the inconvenience of doing it for you“ is early 20th Century scientific racism’s literal thesis for everybody who isn’t exactly the right shade of white.

(Which is not to suggest that this brand of thinking isn’t present in modern white supremacism in some capacity, of course; I’m just focusing on the stuff Lovecraft would have been aware of.)

In reality, technologies are frequently discovered, lost and rediscovered, often multiple times, and frequently in parallel. A Dark Age in one region may be a time of rapid technological development in another region, and it’s not uncommon to encounter evidence of ancient civlisations using technologies a thousand years out of whack with the “proper” order of discovery… where “proper” is defined in terms of the order in which those technologies were discovered in Western Europe - there’s that Eurocentrism again.

I mean, just to give you an idea of how flexible the order in which technologies are developed can be and how ultimately wrong-headed the notion of linear technological progress is, there are Central American civilisations that had indoor plumbing, central heating and hot and cold running water before inventing the wheel. Some of the First Nations in what is now Eastern Canada had sophisticated climate models and reliable weather prediction - including functioning barometers and other simple meteorological instruments - before they figured out metallurgy.

violets are blue

if you oppose my reforms

I’ll fucking proscribe you

treason is great

who wants to conspire

Cicero’s a lout

as tribune I’ll banish him

Violets are blue

I’d like nothing better

I learned to hate myself for being transgender before I knew I was transgender. I laughed at the jokes in stand up comedy routines, and prime time sitcoms, and animated comedy shows, and in the movies, and in books, and in games, laughing at trans women for existing, about “men in dresses”, about people who “got their dicks chopped off”, and I learned to think that was worthy of ridicule.

And then a day came when I felt a pang of envy at what my female classmates were wearing and I repressed it, and felt guilty, and a day where I felt incomplete because I had no breasts and I repressed it and I felt disgusting And a day when I realized the only images of romance that made me feel anything showed two women together and I repressed it and I felt like a monster And a day when I realized I felt sick when I looked at myself in the mirror after every shower before work and couldn’t bear to look at my own face, and I hated myself. And then there came a day when I hated myself so much, and I thought I could never understand why, and so I just wanted it all to end. And it was just a miracle that I swerved my car back into my lane in time.

And all of it started with a joke that I heard on TV, and then kept hearing from all the voices from the ether, over and over and over, worming an idea into my mind before I was old enough to realize I was absorbing it, the idea that a man in a dress is funny, and that changing your body parts makes you a freak, and that women who have penises instead of vaginas are liars and hurt men. And they’re still making these jokes. And somewhere out there right now, just like all those years ago, there is a little girl in a t-shirt and cargo shorts with buzzed off hair watching the TV, hearing that joke and absorbing it without knowing it, who will someday have to pry herself apart to tear it out of her head, just like I did.