That quiz was more can you recognize famous land marks by the number of letters of the words in their name than by their floor plan.
Know who really needs guns for self-defense? Prisoners. What part of shall not be infringed do the wardens and guards not understand?
Huh. The floor plans of famous landmarks look like Doom .wads.
Just in case, don't shoot at the glowing barrels in the Pantheon.
In Texas, does the law just apply to public universities?
They seem to recognize the dullness of the quiz by making it simultaneously a game of Hangman.
Private universities can opt out.
Wow. Apparently the campus carry law will go into effect exactly 50 years to the day after Charles Whitman's mass shooting.
We've had campus carry here for a while now. What this meant this year was that we had a student who was acting unstable and making vague threats, and no one could do anything about the fact that he carried a gun until he was a little more specific because they were afraid to violate his rights under state law.
Mostly it just means that every couple years someone shoots himself in the leg outside the student union.
Here, it applies to public universities. Oddly, if you go down to the state capitol, you don't get to carry in your gun. We wouldn't want the lawmakers to feel threatened, after all.
It would take quite a shot for a guy with a concealable pistol to take out a rifleman in a tower. Your students better get practicing.
I don't know how I'd feel if I dealt with topics that tended to provoke and rile up students. Like, do faculty rethink how aggressively they'd challenge their students?
12: You'd have to put a trigger warning on your syllabus.
I've thought about Whitman several times in the last few years because of the picture I can remember of his arsenal, spread out on the ground. He'd had lots and lots of guns with him in the tower, the most dangerous being bolt action rifles with scopes. Even today those would be the most dangerous to do what he did, opening fire on people many stories below and possibly hundreds of yards away.
But most mass shooters today use firearms, or at least ammo clips then illegal, and because weapons as opposed to hunting firearms are for relatively close ranges, they're used at close ranges.
12: Even without controversial topics, I've had students get alarmingly upset or angry very, very fast. One of the scenarios that occurs readily to me is students commiting suicide immediately after bombing an exam or being caught cheating.
13: I lack the words to express my admiration.
One of the scenarios that occurs readily to me is students commiting suicide immediately after bombing an exam
This was a bit of a WTF until I worked out that you probably mean "failing an exam".
Finally, and this is admittedly more speculative, I would be surprised to see another Mulford Act situation, where minorities begin to exercise their Second Amendment rights and scare white people into restricting them. It takes a brave black man to engage in open carry in today's climate, but organized groups of black men? I wouldn't be completely surprised if it happens.
I'm not about to guess as to what the final outcome will be, but I expect to see protests involving minorities carrying guns. When you have black men and boys getting shot while carrying toy guns and white men marching in political protests with entirely real (but not fully automatic?) AK-47s, it's an obvious play if nothing less dangerous works.
9: Charles Whitman's mass shooting where basically everybody on the plaza who didn't immediately get shot went and grabbed their gun and started plugging away back at him.
I guess this is the thread to mention that one of my students (from a previous semester) shot someone at a party last month. News said the victim was going to be fine and my former student was being charged with attempted murder. Really makes me think twice about having a student come alone to my office in charged situations (grades, academic dishonesty, etc.).
If your former student shot someone at a party, you should worry about students in happy situations, not charged ones.
Really makes me think twice about having a student come alone to my office in charged situations (grades, academic dishonesty, etc.).
At the very least you want to have a TA with a rifle providing overwatch from a depth position.
Mightn't that be a little crowded, given the size of most academic offices? Or are we envisioning some kind of creative use of the HVAC ducts?
Here in Arkansas, *several* professors on our campus have been lobbying for open carry.
These are not -- how do I put this delicately -- they are not, for the most part, professors I would be happy to see walking into a faculty meeting strapped.
AND YET.
Add to that mix a number of students, who are not altogether stable, packing heat?
Yeah, let's talk about the causes of the Civil War, EVILution, Global Climate Change, and whether we shoulda got off the gold standard or not in class today. Sounds fun.
I probably should add that my dissertation director was, in fact, shot and killed in his office by a disaffected student in August 2000.
So, you know.
Disaffected:student::Disgruntled:postal worker
John Locke -- I shouldn't say he was my director; he was really just on my committee. He was my graduate advisor and early dissertation director. Once I settled on a topic, Dave Frederick was my director.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Arkansas,_Fayetteville_shooting
Someone needs to point out the error in Wikipedia - they referred to the graduate student as "disgruntled".
Anyone have any ideas how to get the gun control debate away from mass murderers? It's a bad argument in so many ways: statistically speaking they're a tiny fraction of gun violence, and even strict gun control measures wouldn't be the best way to handle them, and the fear of them leads to police overreaction and surveillance state shenanigans. A much more logical argument is simply the fact that places with more guns have more homicides.
But then, logical arguments based on facts never convinced anyone. Sorry if this sounds like being a know-it-all, but seriously, I agree with knecht - fatalistic pessimism. In addition to the culture stuff there's also the fact that there have been too many legal decisions at too high a level for meaningful gun control. The battle for sane government gun policy was fought and lost; we might as well focus on better funding for mental mental health treatment as a harm reduction strategy.
I just saw something somewhere (on Vox, maybe? I am ashamed) on gun ownership as correlated with suicide -- suicides tend to be impulsive, and survivors of suicide attempts often don't end up killing themselves, but people with access to guns tend to be successful when they try.
Our lege narrowly defeated campus carry this session, so we have another 2 years before it comes up again. There was a real constitutional issue too, which may also work in other states: the lege infringing on the prerogatives of the board of regents.
I guess in states where the board of regents is also stacked with nuts, this won't help.
Yeah, the student was disgruntled. He'd been there ten years and they still wouldn't give him a PhD.
More guns, easier access to guns = more gun violence.
Also, you know, I'm on university campuses a lot. I see how hot tempered students can get when we're having "academic" discussions.
Now imagine those students have guns.
Hell, have y'all ever been to a faculty meeting? I mean seriously.
We were talking about whether people should de-claw cats today in my class and I swear people nearly came to blow.
I am TOTALLY SERIOUS.
I was just trying to teach the five-paragraph argumentative essay structure!
All of a sudden people are screaming at one another!
(I'm lying about the five-paragraph argumentative essay structure. I hate that fucker.)
He'd been there ten years and they still wouldn't give him a PhD.
I managed to not get a Ph.D. in only four years.
It's true that there's little obvious hope for sane government policies regarding guns, or at least not until right wing paranoids stop controlling half the political spectrum and the second amendment gets seriously reconsidered. But the mental health stuff is and has always been a red herring that gun groups use to distract from the fact that guns are involved in gun violence. The link to (rare, not as important overall) mass shootings has more to do with "the sort of person willing to go for a mass shooting", which isn't necessarily one of our diagnostic categories (though certainly those people have something wrong with them*.)
The extent to which lots of guns lying around contributes to a higher suicide rate is pretty massive, and that's a huge percentage of gun deaths. But better mental health treatment isn't going to be especially helpful there since the problem isn't stigma/untreated problems/etc. The problem is having a gun nearby. So the harm reduction strategy that would matter for that one is just "don't have lots of guns all over the place."
And the remainder are mostly homicides and, I guess, a bunch of them actually could be addressed with some mental health harm reduction strategies (as in the case of domestic abusers and that kind of thing). But this would require expanding our idea of what counts as a mental illness to include things like "White Dude Entitlement Disorder" or "Stupid Fox News Paranoid" all of which would, basically, just put you back into arguing with the people who make "seriously restrict gun availability" a practical impossibility.
*And for the most part it's just a bigger version of a lot of homicide/domestic abuse deaths anyway of the last group anyway.
You're supposed to de-claw cats, otherwise they will escape and run wild like in Warriors.
This is only going to lead to more grade inflation.
Erin Hunter killed literature anyway.
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This post was instantly mesmerizing to me.
On the Run by Goffman, daughter of the Goffman, participant observation in the ghetto
...cause I was instinctively on her side. Of course you hide all the details and shred your notes because the LGM liberal types will moan about the racist prison system and then do all in their power to get black men who don't behave like white UMC liberals locked up for life. "Well, sure I hate racism, but they shouldn't steal, fight deal smack kill because the law is the law and order must be maintained blah blah."
And academics must also follow the strict rules of scholarship.
I could be rotting under life in prison from my youthful indiscretions and associations.
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I probably didn't express the above well, but I saw an irony in Goffman's book, title, subject matter about the alienation of subaltern living from the straighttime and the responses of the LGM poster and commenters, including the stiff epistemological rules for social knowledge. The alienated subaltern really cannot cross that line, cannot communicate with the squares.
I see bourgeois everywhere.
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Last one, cause related
Dramas for Cannibals on prison Shakespeare, from New Inquiry
To screen participants, Bates gave them a soliloquy from Richard II that begins, "I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world. And, for because the world is populous and here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it." She then poses the seemingly open-ended "What do you understand from the excerpt?" It's a high-stakes test for a prisoner in solitary. Though there's a range of acceptable answers implied, it's clear what the instructor wants him to say. The prisoners have to fulfill their role in the story by identifying with the Shakespearean protagonist.The syllogism goes like this: If Shakespeare speaks to universal humanity, and Shakespeare speaks to a prisoner, then the prisoner is human after all. The non-incarcerated can rest easier knowing bad guys get rehabilitated and punished. But this instruction isn't just a performance for viewers at home, it is educational. What exactly do jailers want their captives to learn?
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There's nothing like opiates for clearing away all the doubt and unpleasantness of life and leaving one feeling like everyone is your friend and everything will work out ok.
Did you bring enough for the class?
He was planting bugs in the offices of the LGM liberal types.
No, dammit. Stingy NP only wrote me a scrip for 15 Tramadol -- I got the good stuff (10mg Oxycodone) at the hospital.
57: The middle class can get legal drugs more easily. He should share with the proletariat.
59: Well, I hope you feel better. I only get over the count NSAIDs and they're wearing off.
So, what are people giving for HS graduation money these days? A friend's kid just graduated, from my alma mater, and I'm going to the party this weekend. Is $50 reasonable? It's not like we're related.
Yeah, it's just a sprain that I exacerbated by walking on it too much. I'm sure it will be okay soon enough.
$50 is fine if you're not the uncle or anything.
62: I think cash is acceptable still, if you don't have any oxycodone.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
We wound up riding the bus home together the other day, and he impressed me as either:
(a) a real straight-shooter with a good head on his shoulders, or
(b) an amazingly talented bullshit artist
So, either way, probably a good future ahead of him. And he got into some program for low-income kids (his mom's a bartender and theater person) where you get 2 years free at community college, then transfer to the U of M to finish your BA at somewhat reduced rates.
Just ask the kid, ever so casually, "Have you had dinner?" If they say no, give them a $25 Applebee's gift certificate.
I steal Tramadol from my arthritic dogs. Prefer to hydrodone, which for some reason increases my insomnia. Never ever seen oxy, did have some time release morphine in the house.
Bet y'all are wondering about life in prison, I'll make it easier, transported kilos (1? 5? bigger than a shoebox) of uncapped mescaline across 5 state lines.
Was there more? Not telling.
Crossed my mind that maybe part of the bourgeois sensibility, a way it differs from the subaltern, is that the bourgeois believe a) they can have knowledge, can tell "good people" from "bad people," and b) arrange their lives and social settings to minimize interaction with "bad people."
for many many definitions of good and bad.
Two forms of privilege the subaltern can't afford.
That would be, like, the reverse of the relationship between Des Essientes and the street urchin he elevates to addiction to the services of the most expensive prostitute in Paris. This kid works at a downtown restaurant that's kinda famous for its hauteur and eccentricity. I'm worried he will develop too many expensive tastes. "That man is richest, whose pleasures are cheapest."
"That man is richest, whose pleasures are cheapest."
Better not give him oxy, then. The first hit is cheap, but that shit adds up, long-term
.
America is great. It got my family promoted from subaltern to bourgeois in like two generations.
Well, maybe just subalterns who can drink without the actual bourgeois tut-tutting about "those people."
There is just no way I am ever going to read "subaltern" as anything other than "junior army officer", I'm sorry but there it is. Miss J Hunter Dunn, Miss J Hunter Dunn, furnished and burnished by Aldershot sun, what strenuous singles we played after tea, we in the tournament, you against me!
My subaltern always has his spongy hat swollen with rain and dripping dye down his face. Not useful.
Umbrellas clearly another form of privilege the subaltern can't afford. And he wouldn't be allowed to carry one in uniform anyway.
It's a big enough umbrella but it's always me that ends up getting wet.
That's one of those British words that's actually pronounced 'chutney', isn't it? I remember being told once that it wasn't sub-al-tern, but I can't remember how to say it.
It's not in The Chaos so who can say?
Subbletern. In the same way that subtlety is pronounced suttletee. Same stress pattern.
Spivak is good. The subaltern is not the aspirational oppressed, the one who wants to be bourgeois, but can't because she is a marginalized other skin color, gender preference whatever. Not someone who wants to work, get married and prosperous, raise 2.5 children, blah blah.
The subaltern is not, cannot, and possibly doesn't want to be part of the "hegemonic discourse," which includes all kinds of oppositions and competitions within a range...
...someone who doesn't share bourgeois values.
Spivak's classic example is the middle-class girl who willingly, and against the wishes of those around her, climbed on her husband's funeral pyre. Is there anything she could say to make you cheer that choice? She can't speak your language.
And thus with actual criminals. Too many in prison under bad crack laws and discriminatory enforcement, but they would be like us if they could. Doesn't everybody want that? (Of course there are folks with different values who are not subaltern, but the hedge fund trader has the means to communicate)
But what about the actual murderers, pimps, violent thieves, violent revolutionaries, the self-and other destructive? Can you hear them? Does their circumstances and history much matter?
The Shakespeare article above is pretty good.
Ajay gets it exactly right in 73! I cannot read subalterns as anything but the junior members of the officer class.
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I'm feeling irrationally furious about EVERYTHING. Is it too early for it to be an indication that the hormone pills aren't adjusted right? I started on them yesterday. I have been low-grade irritable to furious about everything since yesterday morning, and it's not my normal self.
How long am I supposed to give this before I draw any conclusions? How do I deal, in the meantime, with every little thing making me blow up?
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WHY AREN'T YOU GUYS HELPING NOW.
I don't understand not being irritable and furious.
But at least I'm rationally furious.
82 -- channel the rage into power. Make it work for you.
The surgery was only two days ago, surely it's too early for heavy lifts.
Voices in your head are callin'
But srsly, if its a huge mood change do tell a doc. I mean, there's also post-surgical emotion and all that endogeneous stuff, but if you're still furiosa in a week you'll want them to be sure when it started.
Maybe I'll call tomorrow. I hate this surgeon so much. He's the one that kept me waiting ~4 hours at the appointment a month or two ago for no apparent reason, and is a total good old boy who is pretty indifferent to bedside manor and things like "correcting the rx that he screwed up the first time". (A giant clusterfuck where his secretary was explaining to me that he doesn't answer his pages and might not come back to the office before 5 and so on. I hate everyone.)
Let your hate turn into a beautiful bird and fly into a jet engine's exhaust.
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Interview with Evelyn Everlady (Negroni Season)!
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I think even minor hormonal shifts can cause mood crap and major surgery plus hormone pills is probably going to amount to a pretty big shift, at least in the short term. But it is a good time to go seek out co-workers or other people you don't like and yell at them because later you can just say "Oh sorry it was surgery and hormone pills and that kind of thing ha ha ha I didn't mean all that stuff I said at great length and volume at all." And they'll have to act nice about it but deep down they'll still feel bad and/or self conscious.
I have bitten back so many mean FB posts about my lack-of-nurturing mother over the last day or two. She's totally fine. There have just been...details.
HEEBIE SMASH.
Maybe if you got and carried a gun you could rapidly solve the problem of people who piss you off.
The surgeon is in charge of post-op hormones? They don't send you to an endocrinologist? Seems ... odd. Possibly resulting in less than finely tuned treatment. I'd start complaining early and keep it up for as long as necessary. Even getting a missing thyroid compensated for is tricky, seems your situation likely more complex.
I think that I shall never see a killing so horrible as a spree.
Three cheers for heebie who is barren now anyways
Tuesday she gets a little sideways
Wednesday she feels better just for spite
Would an adaptation of 'YMCA' be too far?
He's the one that kept me waiting ~4 hours at the appointment a month or two ago for no apparent reason
Wow! that's arrogant. We expect a certain level of high-handedness from surgeons (they are the high priests of this, our secular age, after all), but making someone wait for four hours vastly exceeds the societally-approved level of arrogance for any medical personnel, including surgeons.
I was furious then, too. I had scheduled in enough time for him to run an hour late, and ended up having to cancel two classes and a meeting in that run-up to finals time where all the students already feel stressed out about getting enough of your time.
I second 103. Find an endrocrinologist. Surgeons think they are gods and know everything. They aren't and don't.
I can second the 'surgeons are usually knobs' view.
The idea was that he's the BRCA guy in San Antonio, and so I needed to have the longterm patient relationship with him. But I could do both. There is actually a local obgyn that I like a lot (switching from my previous obgyn) and I'd expect that obgyns would have a decent amount of experience with ladyhormones and tinkering with birth controls and so on.
Heebie, now that you're an insane crazy person, it's a good time to catch up on TV. You should watch iZombie -- it's as much like Veronica Mars as a show with that title could possibly be.
Heebie, you should definitely stop working with this surgeon, but you do need to see someone who is knowledgeable about BRCA. My surgeon worked with a gynecologist who specialized in hormone replacement therapy for women at high risk of breast cancer, and maybe yours could refer you to one?
On second thought, you're BRCA1, right? Then the hormones shouldn't matter: estrogen yourself right up, little lady.
I agree with not staying with a doctor you don't like. I did this when I had cancer, because I'd been told he was good, and it was a really bad decision. He thought he was good, too, and that this meant he could ignore me and my concerns -- what did I know, I was just a patient -- and he DID ignore me and my concerns, so I went about six years on the wrong dose of Synthroid, before I wised up and switched to a doctor who knew what he was doing.
Those were really bad years. Find a doctor who listens to you and who you can trust.
Ok, I'll see if I can get a different BRCA doc name out of him. If not, I can try to get a name out of the breast surgeon.
And right, per 116, I don't think the hormones matter much. Probably the local obgyn could keep an eye on that part just fine.
You should watch iZombie -- it's as much like Veronica Mars as a show with that title could possibly be.
They solve mysteries in a zombie high school?
I suppose they both involve bashing people's skulls.
Where did I hear about iZombie before? This is the second time I've heard someone compare it to Veronica Mars, so I guess I'd better start paying attention.
I've watched 4 episodes so far. It's definitely Veronica Mars-y: young blonde detective getting over a traumatic fall from grace through the use of wisecracking voiceovers. A key difference is that instead of class differences there's zombies. It's also just not as good as VM, though I am enjoying it.
Of course it's also made by Rob Thomas, so obviously VM is a natural comparison point. But one suspects it's also consciously VM-y, in that presumably his elevator pitch was "VM with Zombies."
Crossed my mind that maybe part of the bourgeois sensibility, a way it differs from the subaltern, is that the bourgeois believe a) they can have knowledge, can tell "good people" from "bad people," and b) arrange their lives and social settings to minimize interaction with "bad people."
This crossed my mind yesterday on my bus ride home. The guy sitting next to me on the bus was lambasting a guy sitting adjacent to him, accusing him of trying to hide from him because he owed him money. The other guy denied it -- saying he just got out of jail yesterday, and that he hadn't been avoiding him. At the same time as he was assuring the guy he would pay him back, he also brought up how pumped up he had become in prison (looking at his arms this was definitely true). And I thought to myself, "Gosh, I hope they get off the bus soon."
The #18 never gave me trouble like that. Trying riding it.
125: Well, it does stop near where I work. It wouldn't get me home, but I could go to Carriage Place and see movies for cheap.
Zaw's is probably closed, isn't it?
It was there in 1995 or so. Now that I think about it, it was gone by 2000.
This was back when Big Bear was a thing.
I learned how to pronounce subbletern correctly today! hoorah!
54: There's nothing like opiates for clearing away all the doubt and unpleasantness of life and leaving one feeling like everyone is your friend and everything will work out ok.
INORITE? it's a shame in a way that I'm tolerant of the pain medicine I get, but also obviously a good thing. I have to say I find oxycodone a poor second to demerol. it gives me the itchies without the 'I'm getting a thousand butterfly-kisses from sunbeams made of honey and xanax!' it's a good pain reliever, though. way better than tramadol obvi. maybe it seems lame because of its effective time-release composition, meant to deter crushing and snorting.
Great to see your commenting, Al, even if slightly disappointed it isn't actually about guns. And I'm probably the only person enthusiastic to learn that this thread had delved into that universally interesting subject, Columbus mass transit.
That 18 is a weird line, one I never knew about, and which may be new in the last 40 years. It goes all the way to the area in Dublin my parents used to live. I used to ride my bike there in HS when all land north of Sawmill was still in cultivation. A big farm owned by, yes, Big Bear.
The route carrying most memories for me is 03. COTA was formed in the late sixties when the previously-privately-owned Columbus Celina Coach lines were incorporated into the system. The NW Blvd route had been one of those. Buses were blue, not orange.
Subaltern was always a word in my vocabulary, probably from Canada. I'd never have used it in Columbus or in the US Army, although I did know how to pronounce it.
IV Dilaudid was pretty nice too. And IV Valium. Sigh.
This Tramadol really is kind of a joke though. It maybe takes the top 2% of the pain off, allowing for sleep, but other than that, no positive effects.
I need to find someone who's more on the pain management tip than my current GP.
FOR REAL with the tramadol! What on earth is the point! That was all they gave me post-op for about three solid hours of me woozily complaining that it wasn't doing enough.
It wasn't until my mom was in my room with me and advocating on my behalf that they gave me morphine. Fuckers.