someone is wrong on the internet – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

This image has popped up at least four or five times in my Facebook feed in the last couple of days, and instead of starting the exact same fight in several different places I’m just gonna go ahead and start it here. I don’t know who the hell Joseph Sobran is, and I’m not about to Google him, but I’m pretty sure he’s either a moron or a racist. Because let’s spend just a few seconds thinking about what might have changed in American history and American culture since nineteen fucking fourteen.

Actually, no, let’s not even start with that; let’s start with the fact that it ain’t exactly hard to find high school Latin classes nowadays. Greek might be a trifle more difficult but it’s not like it doesn’t exist. And who was taking Greek and Latin a hundred years ago in what Sobran is stupidly referring to as “high school”? Rich white boys. Basically the only folks who had access to any postsecondary education of any kind at all in 1914.

Just to make sure we’re clear: “High school” as an institution in this country barely even existed in 1914. You got through sixth grade or so and that was it. Maybe the top five percent of everybody got further education beyond that, and if they did, they sure as shit didn’t call it “high school.” It was college prep, generally under individual tutors. You didn’t start seeing any real broad-based concept that people should attend school for twelve years until the late 30s or early 40s, and even then if you weren’t white and male and relatively well-off you could fuck right the hell off.

Brown v. Board of Education was in 1954, for Christ’s sake, which means we weren’t even trying to educate anybody in this country who wasn’t white until sixty years ago. And even then… hell, if you can’t remember the struggles over public schools in the sixties you have no business commenting on education in this country under any circumstances. If you are able to take a look at the incredibly vast way in which access to education has expanded in this country over the last hundred years and your take-away from that is “Durrr, people used to be smarter,” then you should not only throw yourself into a lake but you probably ought to never speak to me again.

Sub-rant: I’m also sick to fucking death of hearing about colleges and people affiliated with them complaining about having to remediate incoming freshmen. If only there were some mechanism by which colleges and universities could determine who was able to enroll in their classes! OH, right, they’re completely one hundred percent in charge of that. Raise your standards or quit fucking bitching. Assholes.

EDIT: Fuck it; I went ahead and Googled Joseph Sobran. Oh gee look I was exactly right: he was an anti-Semite (speaking of people who generally weren’t allowed access to higher education in 1914) and a Holocaust denier. So, great job, folks; this is an awesome guy to put dumb-ass quotes from on your Facebook page.

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(First things first: if you need context on the picture, go here. This post is gonna be sorta grab-baggy; it should make sense by the time I get to the end.)

Let’s start by griping about nonsense. Y’all know the song OPP, right? If you don’t we can’t be friends anymore. One of hiphop’s classic anthems; it came out when I was a sophomore in high school and therefore I will have it memorized until I die. The whole song is about infidelity, but because it doesn’t have any bad words in it and the writing is clever it got played at high school dances all the time. Combine that with the call-and-response and what you end up with is hundreds of teenagers hollering about penises and pussies in public with none of the adults noticing what’s going on. It’s wonderful. It contains this verse:

As for the ladies, OPP means something gifted
The first two letters are the same but the last is something different
It’s the longest, loveliest, lean– I call it the leanest
It’s another five letter word rhymin’ with cleanest and meanest
I won’t get into that, I’ll do it…ah…sorta properly
I say the last P…hmmm…stands for property

It doesn’t stand for property.

I was listening to the radio on the way home from school when I encountered a picture-perfect example of why I bloody fucking hate terrestrial radio: they played OPP, and they bleeped out cleanest and meanest.

They bleeped two words that rhyme with the actual name of a human body part that half of the human race has, in a song that is entirely about infidelity.

This makes sense on no levels at all, and makes me want to punch the shit out of everyone involved– like, “hit you until my hands break off at the wrists” level of pummeling. I goddamn hate bleeped songs. I feel like if you think as a corporate entity that you need to bleep part of a song you shouldn’t be playing it at all. Ideas are more dangerous than words, you stupid dumbasses. But this is a new level of stupid– even if I was willing to entertain the suggestion that the word “penis” needed to be sanitized from the airwaves, the suggestion that words that rhyme with penis should also be sanitized is so damn dumb that I’m literally in pain right now while I’m complaining about it.

Stop making me use italics, U93. I fucking hate you.

New item! I bring in the mail when I got home, and there was a flyer from our new wingnut Congresscritter in it. Jackie Walorski is enough of a discredit to humanity that I’m not even terribly interested in describing why; she won her last election largely on the backs of 1) redistricting; 2) the incumbent deciding to run (successfully) for the Senate; and 3) disgusting, pathetic accusations of carpetbagging against her opponent, who grew up here (I went to high school with him) and then moved from the area to go fight in Iraq and start a veteran’s charity in DC. It was literally true that he hadn’t lived in the area for several years, but his family still lived here and he spent the majority of his time gone on active duty and fighting in a foreign country. Even if I wasn’t against her politics– and believe me, I am– I’d think she was scum for that.

Which made it interesting to me that most of the flyer– the bit that wasn’t a slanted short questionnaire– was all about trumpeting her bill extending whistleblower protections to sexual assault victims in the military. Protecting rape victims isn’t generally something that Republicans are big on. Crowing about having done so isn’t either. Which leaves me to wonder if a) she’s trying to moderate herself a bit; b) she actually is more moderate than I’d thought; c) she’s just trying to look more moderate; or d) this is an interesting bit of microtargeting– since the flyer in question was addressed to my wife, and there wasn’t one in the mail for me. Generally when we get these sorts of things (and they come frequently enough) there’s either one of them for each of us or it’s just addressed to the household and not to either of us specifically. This one just had my wife’s name on it.

Hmmm.

Last but not least: I just got into an interesting discussion on Facebook about Mike Krahulik’s latest bit of dumbassery. (Be aware: if you don’t know who Mike Krahulik is, you probably ought not to read this part, as I don’t intend to provide a lot of context.) The person who started the thread was saying that he was done with Penny Arcade on account of not being able to support Mike’s actions any longer, and while I agree with him that the man has gotten incredibly tiresome in a lot of ways I’m not able to pull the trigger on that just yet. Which got me wondering about exactly what gets me to cut something I enjoyed out of my life on account of not agreeing with its behavior. I can think of four examples: Mel Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Dan Simmons, and Chik-Fil-A. In each of the four cases, I have previously really enjoyed their work (or their chicken; I hate Chik-Fil-A as a corporation but I will fight you if you denigrate their chicken. We can hate them for their politics but let’s not get stupid here) and am no longer willing to support them in any way because of their beliefs and/or behaviors. I kinda want to include Tom Cruise in here, too, but I was never really a fan of his so it’s not quite the same thing.

I guess the difference is hatred. Mel Gibson hates everybody. Card and Simmons and Chik-Fil-A are open in their hatred of gay people. I don’t think Mike Krahulik hates anybody. I just think he’s a sheltered geek with a short fuse, and spouting his mouth off about shit he knows nothing about frequently gets him in trouble– but I don’t think he hates anybody and I don’t think he’s trying to be an asshole most of the time. My Facebook friend made a good point that once you’re past a certain age you either need to get better about things or own your own bullshit, and he’s right about that– but at the same time I’ve fucked up in my own personal feminism in who knows how many different ways, so I’m not always inclined to jump down the throat of somebody who seems to be trying to get better about sexuality and gender issues. I’m just not sure how much more slack I’m willing to cut the guy if he’s not smart enough to figure out that “never talk about this shit extemporaneously, and have someone smarter than me read over my shoulder whenever I talk about it in print” is a sound policy.

Within minutes, a link to this article appears in my inbox. For those of you too lazy to click, it’s about how Not Intending To Do That appears to be a magical fucking power that not only insulates the Unintender from owning the negative results of their actions but causes others to defend them as well. It’s… right. It also includes the word “kyriarchy,” which means something bad, which is sad, because it’s a fun-sounding word and I’d like opportunities to use it in public.

Thinking about this more: the bit of me that wants to defend Mike is related to the bit of me that refuses to give up on certain kids (I can’t honestly say all of them) in my classes who are for one reason or another generally assholes but seem saveable to me. I think Mike’s saveable. I might be wrong, and he’s a grown-ass man with a long, long cultural reach and not a fourteen-year-old, but I think that’s another part of the difference here as to why I’m not willing to lock the door on PA just yet.