Month: February 2015

Well hello. I didn't mean to keep you waiting.
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Welcome back. For those that do not follow Gin and Tacos on the facebox, allow me to explain.
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No, the outage was not intentional.

The host of this domain name, Network Solutions, started bombarding me (and I presume other customers as well) with spam-like emails at the beginning of the year, making a concerted effort to sell various add-ons, "upgrades," and expensive marketing and promotion gimmicks. As any normal human being would do, I ignored it. Approximately two weeks ago they send an actual email along with the daily burst of spam and I had the random luck to notice and read it before it went to trash. This email stated that some part of WHOIS information was inaccurate (as is the case with approximately 99% of the registered domain names on the internet) and ICANN was going to enforce the shutdown of the domain name if I did not rectify the problem by Thursday, Feb. 19 by calling Web.com (Network Solutions' parent company) salespeople immediately.

I saw this for what it was – an effort to extort customers into calling so that we could have every superfluous marketing scheme and add-on service on Earth pitched to us. And they did this under the guise of the situation being beyond their control. It's not us! It's ICANN! We'd love to keep your site running but in order to make that possible you MUST update your WHOIS by calling Sean in the Web.com Sales Department immediately! Finding this tactic both insulting and silly, I simply went online and updated my WHOIS information. By Feb. 17 it was completely up to date and 100% accurate.

Well, they shut the domain name down on the evening of Feb. 19 anyway. I'm starting to suspect that despite their intense apparent concern, this really wasn't about ICANN or maintaining the integrity of WHOIS at all. It's almost as if they shut it down – and yes, I am completely paid up in advance for domain name registration with this company – because I didn't call to take their pitch about paying them to run sidebar ads on Facebook for me.

I called and navigated the most Byzantine web of automated menus to date before finally reaching a call center and being put on hold. Since this no doubt affected many other customers, I waited on hold for 53 minutes on Friday morning Feb. 20 before I had to give up due to, you know, having to do the job I get paid to do. Trying again on Friday night and wasting another ridiculous amount of my finite existence, I finally got through to a gentleman named Steve who, judging by his heavy to the point of obfuscation Bengali accent, might not really be named Steve.

Bengali Steve promised to "escalate" the problem and reactivate within 24 to 48 hours. When that did not happen, I called again on Sunday evening and went through the Sphinx's riddles again. This gentleman – Dylan or something equally implausible – regretted to inform me that Bengali Steve had meant 24 to 48 business hours. Meaning that this Time of Healing could not begin until Monday morning.

I got very busy as the week kicked into gear and when I checked in on Wednesday afternoon to realize that service had not been restored I did not have time to call immediately. But I did on Wednesday evening, spoke to yet another gentleman of the Subcontinent, and was told – go ahead and guess – 24 to 48 hours.

Beginning Thursday morning, however, I decided to go Full Retard on Network Solutions, emailing every email address I could find, sending Facebook messages to their account, posting repeatedly on their Facebook timeline, and calling as many numbers for Web.com's Atlanta-based office as I could find. I didn't care if I got a secretary, an IT professional, or the goddamn janitor. I spoke to several people, making various promises to wow them by demonstrating what could fit up their anal aperture with the application of sufficient force, and got transferred around like a furious potato. Finally some young man who clearly had to deal with hundreds of other angry customers over the past few days stayed on the phone with me until the problem was resolved. His explanation was that while I thought I had updated my WHOIS information, I had not included a fax number so ICANN forced Network Solutions to shut me down.

He said this in a tone that indicated that he he was under an obligation to pretend that he believed it. He was far too tired and irritated, though, to try to sell the farce. The upshot is that sometime Thursday afternoon, service returned.

I am going to rest and count my blessings tonight. Then tomorrow morning I will transfer my DNS to another company and begin the multi-day process of shitting repeatedly in a brown paper sack that ultimately will be mailed to Network Solutions. So, that is Gin and Tacos' tale of woe. Welcome back. If you use NS, please cancel your services with them immediately; swear at them creatively and profusely for good measure.
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Look, we all know that conservatives aren't funny. The question of why they aren't funny, however, is considered only rarely. Here is the shortest answer, which has the added benefit of also being the most correct: they are not funny because they don't understand irony. Irony, misdirection, and the unexpected injury (pratfalls, objects striking someone on the cranium, etc) are the three foundations of comedy. The inability to comprehend irony is the reason that all satire written by modern conservatives is beyond awful, reading like something written by a council of 12 year old boys. Irony does not come naturally to a mind that endorses principles like constitutional literalism, biblical fundamentalism, and a cornucopia of economic theories that are demonstrably untrue.

When we see news items like the Oklahoma Legislature banning AP History courses, we are horrified but we also think it is funny. It is not funny like a whoopee cushion or a pie to the face, of course. It is funny in the sense that right-wingers are too stupid to see the irony in their own actions or how much they resemble the groups and ideologies they identify as enemies. Evangelical Christian fundamentalists do not grasp how similar they are, for example, to Islamic extremists.
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And right-wing culture warriors and historical revisionists will never be able to see how closely their mission to create their own version of reality mimics Stalinist communism. In an effort to ward off the evils of things like socialism, these dipshits are reaching into the bag of tactics employed by the ultimate in socialist boogeymen.

Isn't that what we always accused the Soviet system of doing – and not without some justification? They censored their media, altered history to suit their ideological preferences, and generally created an alternate version of reality that fit their worldview.

I've written before about the Soviet concept of "New Socialist Man," the creation of which required:

A total re-imagining of the world – its history, its culture, its religions, its conflicts, and its societies – was to take place in the framework of a radically ideological system of education with the goal of producing the New Socialist Man. He would understand politics, art, economics, and every other subject from the Correct (i.
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e. Socialist) perspective. As is the case with every revolution, the Soviets and Mao's China understood that a new culture can only be instituted by destroying the old, and destroying the old can only be accomplished through dictating a new historical reality through re-education.

It was the kind of system that would – to throw out a random hypothetical – ban history textbooks that contained any information contradictory to the official party line. It created "unpersons" who literally ceased to exist, erased from photos and the collective cultural consciousness. It relied on the valid belief that one's conception of reality outside of direct experience is limited by the information available.

Of course, the average Oklahoman is too ignorant of history and reality to understand any of this. To grasp the irony of a situation requires a basic level of awareness that is absent here.

After nearly seven years of getting brownie points with their base by opposing literally everything that Barack Obama supports it is hardly worth mentioning the GOP strategy of obstructionism anymore. Oh, Obama proposed something. I wonder if Republicans will come out against it. The drama.

Nonetheless, I am getting a real kick out of seeing right-wingers jump on the anti-vaccine bandwagon.

Because if Barack Obama is for something, being against it is automatically a brilliant political strategy. Whereas the vast majority of the electorate stopped paying attention to this shit sometime during Obama's first year, this one might come back to bite the GOP in the ass. Not only is there some theoretical limit to how much stupidity the voting public will endorse, but Republicans appear to be miscalculating both the size and the nature of the anti-vaccine "movement." Badly.

Pictured above: The dumbest shit you will ever see.

Try as they might to make this some kind of individual liberty vs. Big Gub'mint issue, the vast majority of the American population is not wild about the idea of their kid getting whooping cough. And some voters are old enough to remember seeing some of their schoolmates hobbling around in clunky braces and with canes after polio waylaid them.
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The anti-vaccine position's popularity has been inflated by the strength of the reaction against it. This isn't climate change, an issue on which 40% of the public can oppose it based on motivated reasoning alone.

This is not a popular belief.

Some Republicans seem to realize this, which is why they are hiding behind contorted arguments like "I think everyone should get vaccinated but I don't think the government should be able to force you" which, when one considers that the second clause in that statement negates the first, is the kind of thing that a high school aged libertarian might think is clever.

"The opposite of whatever the black guy said" has been a pretty successful strategy for the Republicans thus far, at least among their core supporters. This time, however, their knee-jerk opposition is going to blow up in their faces. If this becomes even a minor issue in 2016 the candidates are going to rue the day they said the word "vaccine.
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In light of new research pointing out what we already knew but didn't want to admit – that colleges and universities in the US are wildly underreporting sexual assaults on campus for the sake of PR – I have a public service announcement. This fact shocks about half of the people I've shared it with over the years.

Lots of University Police are not police. It varies by campus but more often than not, even at some massive state schools, the university cops are not real cops. They lack full police powers and they are essentially the university's private security guards (although in most cases they can be called upon to do things like traffic control for the Real Cops). As employees of the university they have a vested interest in keeping the crime rate low.

One way to keep a lid on the crime rate is to prevent crimes from happening. Another is to actively discourage victims from reporting crimes to the Real Police. When a student interacts with the campus cops, she may be talking to someone who cannot file charges against anyone or, in extreme cases, arrest anyone. The "investigations" performed by these sorta-cops aren't actual police investigations. They're a university administrative procedure, in essence. They are an internal investigation to determine whether the case should be given over to the Real Police for a real investigation.

For some reason I always thought this was common knowledge. Lately I've learned that it isn't. This has a huge impact on victims of crimes on campus; sexual assault certainly isn't the only thing they try to keep a lid on. There is a strong incentive to understate the number of robberies, assaults, and instances of property damage on campus so that Mom & Dad will sleep well knowing that their snowflake is safe. At one previous institution, the student paper (of all things) revealed that an epidemic of students being taken by taxis to remote locations and robbed was being given the silent treatment by the university police, who on that campus are not sworn officers.

Whenever I read about one of the alarming number of high profile rape cases on campus these days, the first thing I do is google the police department of the school in question. A small amount of digging will reveal whether they are campus police or Police police. This piece of information goes a long way toward explaining whatever miscarriage of justice is at the heart of the story.

A tale from a relative-of-close-friend who teaches Special Education.

For narrative simplicity let's call him Don.

In many high schools now, policies exist to push students on the path to college. Don's district requires every student during junior year to choose a few colleges (2 or 4 year) as target schools for continuing their education. Even though many of them may not want to attend college or would not be able to do well there, the students are universally put through this "college preparatory" routine. I suppose it makes parents and legislators feel better to think of every high school student being funneled toward higher education.

Don's students, in general, are severely impaired. Many cannot read. Most cannot do basic things like eat a meal or use the bathroom without substantial assistance. A reasonable goal for their education would be to acquire basic literacy and develop some skills that might enable them to live with some degree of independence. And every year, Don must usher all of these students through the charade of choosing a college and making post-secondary plans. The mantra of College For Everyone extends even to them. Everyone means everyone.

This is an extreme example but an instructive one. "Go to college" is so widely considered the answer for everyone and everything that it is even applied to students who literally have zero chance of doing it successfully.

One of my colleagues recently said something that summarized a lot of the frustrating things about teaching in a way I haven't been able to verbalize before: our biggest problem is not that the students are "entitled" or lacking skills (although either of those things may be true in some cases) but that they resent being there. It varies across institutions, I'm sure, but currently I deal with a student population that seems to have a great deal of resentment.

They come from wealthier areas and some of the best high schools. They have basic academic skills.

But they don't want to be here. They don't want to be in any college. College – you might want to sit down – might not be for them. They resent the fact that their parents essentially forced them to go. They resent having to put enough effort into courses that do not interest them in the slightest to get grades good enough to keep the ire of their parents at bay.

This puts a lot of things into proper perspective, at least for me. These are kids who have no idea why they're in college.

They went because everyone at their high school was going to college and because Mom and Dad refuse to suffer the shame of having a child who did not go to college. There's no intellectual component to it – some of these kids are very smart, some are not. But they have in common a lack of desire to do what they're being asked to do.

That's tough to deal with. We can deal with students who lack skills, because skills can be taught. We can deal with laziness, as motivation and desire can be improved upon.

But I, we, have no remedy for students who are only in college because they were caught in a vortex of parental wealth, social pressure, and the belief that college is for absolutely everyone. It shouldn't be an insult to say "Hey maybe college isn't your thing." It doesn't mean "You are not smart enough for college." It means maybe you should do something else with your life that would be more to your liking and more productive for you.

It's fine. Join the Navy. Learn how to fix something. Pseudo-apprentice at a small business with the goal of starting your own someday. Or just get a normal-ass job and live your life. It beats wasting five years and a ton of money trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

I couldn't put my finger on the nature of the general malaise here, and I think this is it. It's not anger or even boredom. It's the kind of resentment one senses in a roomful of people who have been forced to show up for jury duty. It's the predictable result of forcing teenagers – a demographic notable for its sulking skills – to do something they don't want to do. Nothing personal.