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Open Thread with Icelandic Horse Herd

tigtog

These sturdy Icelandic horses with their gorgeous thick manes feature for this week’s Open Thread. Please natter/chatter/vent/rant on anything* you like over this weekend and throughout the week.

a herd of Icelandic horses on a grassy plain with a large rocky hill in the background

By Thomas Quine (originally posted to Flickr as Icelandic ponies) (CC-BY-SA-2.0), via Wikimedia Commons
So, what have you been up to? What would you rather be up to? What’s been awesome/awful?
Reading? Watching? Making? Meeting?
What has [insert awesome inspiration/fave fansquee/guilty pleasure/dastardly ne’er-do-well/threat to all civilised life on the planet du jour] been up to?

* Netiquette footnotes:
* There is no off-topic on the Weekly Open Thread, but consider whether your comment would be on-topic on any recent thread and thus better belongs there.
* If your comment touches on topics known to generally result in thread-jacking, you will be expected to take the discussion to #spillover instead of overshadowing the social/circuit-breaking aspects of this thread.

33 thoughts on Open Thread with Icelandic Horse Herd

  1. Congratulations to the two new Nobel Peace laureates – honouring two activists from neighbouring countries yet different religions and of such different ages who both care passionately about the welfare of children is the sort of thing the Nobel Committee should do more often. I’m especially delighted to see Malala Yousafzai honoured, and although I had not previously heard of children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi everything I’ve read today about his decades of work makes him seem a most worthy laureate as well.

    2. It really saddened me that, at the same time the Nobel committee was simultaneously honouring Pakistani and Indian activists, Pakistan and India were lobbing shells at one another across their shared border.

  2. In the middle of doing up our house so we can sell it. Crazy busy. If anyone has any tips on stuff we should do, it would be much appreciated.

    1. My sympathies, pheeno. I’ve broken both little toes several times over the years, just banging them into furniture.

      This weekend though, my gallbladder has decided to send me to hospital, and I’ll probably be having some surgery tomorrow. So I’m not going to be as prompt with moderation etc as usual – using the phone app is somewhat tedious.

      3. So I’m home without surgery as yet. They managed to get the acute inflammation down, and I had the option of hanging around the ward for a few days in case they could slot me into a gap in the OR, or going home and scheduling it as elective surgery in a week or two. I chose option B.

    1. I dont. Ghostbusters is one of my all time favorite movies and I’m sick to death of Hollywood rebooting my childhood instead of creating original movies. The all female Ghostbusters is pandering bullshit, using a popular movie to boost how much money it will make on top of tossing in an all female cast as a shtick. It’s easier than writing an all female cast original sci fi script and putting effort into creating interesting female characters. And instead of shooting the scripts of female writers who also have an all female cast, they do this instead.

        1. I’m right there with you, FWIW. But I also get tons of comfort out of familiar stories, haha.

      3. It would certainly be better to have an original script. One AV club writer made the extremely insightful comment that “Ghostbusters is a moribund franchise, and that’s just not acceptable at the moment”. Having said that though if we are going to have remakes, we may as well have all-female remakes.

  6. This week I’m going to try to start the process for getting bottom surgery. I have to see a therapist for about 6 months and be on HRT for a certain amount of time. It’s taken a while for me to decide whether it’s a good thing for me, but I’m convinced that bottom surgery will make a huge impact on my dysphoria.

      1. I’m happy too, but I don’t expect the process to go very smoothly. A friend of mine going through the same process has told me that the interviewers whom she is required to see have asked her really graphic questions like “How do you use your genitals in [sexual act]?”

        Since I’ve never done anything sexual with anyone, I won’t have any graphic details to disclose, but I’m uncomfortable with people who I don’t know well and who have power over me asking me questions about my sexuality. That kind of interrogation was part of the CSA I’ve experienced.

        Maybe one of my friends would be willing to attend the interviews with me. A TWOC friend of mine once stayed with me during an interview and it was really helpful. She checked in with me often and helped me feel less afraid. But I don’t want to pressure anyone.

  7. I submitted an application to make a short film for my city’s queer film festival. I really hope it works out, because the theme is heroes and I think you can draw all sorts of parallels between Superhero style vigilantism and street activism and I want to see more queer characters get in on the action

  8. Any Marxists and/or social historians in the house? Something is really stressing me out. Two months ago I discovered that my undergraduate school in engineering and my graduate school in education are inaugurating a joint program. I was skeptical that an authoritarian social darwinst culture steeped in every capitalist venture could be serious about teaching, but decided to attend their meeting to see if there was any hope. After booking a week long trip just to attend, I am finding no hope after all. The “joint program” is an attempt funded by a online education firm, pioneering a new schooling structure that will replace teachers with computers. Now we all know that the teaching profession has a high percentage of women, who are often unionized leftists who give capitalists a hard time. We also know that automation has a history of killing working class jobs. Social historians will also know that women have worked those jobs en masse during world wars, many in technological industries, only to be forced off of it by social propaganda to make room for “breadwinners” that are returning home. The overall picture in this joint program seems to a conspiratorial one, where capitalists are working to destroy a female/leftist profession. Step one they deskill the profession, making you think that teaching is just a set of simple rules. Step two they say that any robot can do it. Step three they perfect its means through channels that are cloaked in science and away from public scrutiny. Step four they succeed in demobilizing woman, scaring them into settling for less and kicking them out of a unionized profession. Dunno if anyone has thoughts on this, or is acutely aware that its already happening behind our backs and out our reach.

    1. Sorry, I can’t figure out which thing is the “authoritarian social darwinst culture”? Is it one of the schools, or both of them?

      Anyway, I have to disagree with the general notion of the post.

      I’m generally of the opinion that automation is the biggest win for socialism, not an attack on it. It doesn’t reinforce the capitalist structure, in fact It’s only a problem within the capitalist structure (where it devalues your human capital simply by providing competition, so you must acquire machine-capital just to keep up). The downsides fade away in a truly socialist society, and in fact automation can be a key motivation for transitioning to socialism. My view seems to be not uncommon: http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/2cxdh1/what_is_socialisms_answer_to_automation/, http://socialistwebzine.blogspot.com/2009/09/automation-socialism.html, http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1965/no-725-january-1965/automation-perspective to name a few examples from the top google search results for “socialism automation”.

      Specifically for education, I’m skeptical of any short-term plans to completely replace teachers. Printed textbooks were a human-free technology much earlier, and they supplemented rather than replaced teachers. Although I think for some subjects, and for some students, it probably would be better. Different people have different learning styles, after all, and I know I preferred to learn from the Text, and there are others still who struggled in school but became autodidacts. But for some people and for some subjects, we seem to be a long way from replacement.

      I’m also extremely skeptical of any suggestion that computer teaching is tantamount to a conscious conspiracy to disenfranchise women. Among other things, automation is being applied everywhere, to both female and male dominated jobs, and to both unionized and union-free jobs.

      I don’t have proof handy, but I’d be mildly surprised if it wasn’t disproportionately replacing male jobs these days. Consider this (which is just Kansas City, but that’s what I could find at a moment’s notice): http://kceconomy.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/occupation-by-gender-chart.jpg. Of the female-dominated occupations, the two that strike me as being automated are:

      * Office & admin support
      * Food preparation

      Obviously education is on that list and that’s what you were talking about, so you can put that as a third.

      Of the male-dominated jobs, they all seem like they are at varying stages of being automated except:

      * Computer, engineering, and science

      That occupational category is causing all the automation and may expand with automation.

      I agree it’s probably disporportionately replacing union jobs, but again, I don’t have data to support that.

      1. I just came back from the workshop and something strange happened. The main entrepenurial peddler of new educational gimmicks is a staunch supporter of open source, whereas the main educrat seemed to be pushing for more behind-curtain tools for educational admins. I was a little baffled; historically my grad school was supposed to be the marxist voice among education researchers. Now a businessperson sits to the left of some of them, advocating open source free courses for female abuse victims in third world countries, while the academic is just going “tech tech tech”….

    2. For what it’s worth, the educational-industrial complex has been trying to replace those pesky humans — teachers — with something they can sell from a catalog for as long as I can remember (over 50 years.) Every few years they come up with a new set of gimmicks, the educrats start running around clucking like a flock of panicked chickens, and when the dust clears, nothing has changed, except for the bank accounts of the swindlers hawking these gimmicks. The modern “computerized learning” fad is simply a reprise of the “programmed learning” flim-flam of a half century ago.

      Unfortunately, the chaos introduced by the never-ending series of pedagogical “innovations” siphons off the teachers’ time and energy from actually teaching. Fortunately, it generally doesn’t seem to matter all that much — what children learn (or don’t learn) doesn’t seem, on the average, to depend very much on what pedagogy is used.

      1. what children learn (or don’t learn) doesn’t seem, on the average, to depend very much on what pedagogy is used.

        I take it that you haven’t graded college papers from the generation of students that has not been taught grammar in elementary school?

        1. No kidding, EG. I grade high school papers and teach classes for SAT English prep, and it’s the same thing over and over again: “What’s a participle? But my teacher told me -ing words are verbs!” AUGH.

          Pedagogy matters. Because of the neighborhood I work in, a bunch of my students are relatively recent immigrants from Taiwan and mainland China, mostly from big cities because their parents moved here to work in tech. Those kids have a great knowledge of the rules of English grammar, because according to one of my students, “They start us diagramming sentences in primary school.” There are obviously other areas that are harder for them, like how heavily idiomatic English can be, but overall they have a better grasp of grammar than my native speaker kids. I’m just old enough to still have been taught grammar in schools, but does anyone who worked in education back then know why American education made the shift away from it? Do grammar lessons make kids feel bad, or something?

        2. Gratuitous_violet, I might hazard a few educated guesses, as I am training to be a historian of education. The rules of grammar are not exact, but are numerous. In early days (19th century) not many people had a full mastery of it to be able to teach the class confidently. In education, its a repeated problem: unconfident teachers sometimes resort to rote teaching or worse to keep rowdy kids in line. In Canada at least, grammar was not in fashion for more than two decades before rote learning fell out of fashion.

        3. Being “taught grammar” is not the same as learning grammar. Unless an individual is highly motivated to change the language they speak (and write), teaching generally has no effect on how they speak or write.

          This isn’t just my opinion; it’s the opinion of people who study language (linguists.) Their conclusion is that the biggest influence on how children speak and write is their environment, mainly their peer group.

          That’s generally true of schooling. Unless the student sees a reason to learn what the school is teaching, they won’t actually learn it, they’ll just do whatever handwaving is necessary to get by. And if they _do_ see a reason to learn it, they’re likely to learn it somehow or other, even if it’s taught badly.

          The one place where school does make a difference is in exposing children to stuff they might not otherwise have encountered. If they then decide it’s interesting or otherwise worth pursuing, they will. If they don’t, they won’t. If the exposure is done badly — for instance, my experience with Shakespeare, poetry, and expository writing — it can sour someone to the subject for decades.

      2. I was never specific grammar rules and I’ve never had any problems. I’m in graduate school and I’ve written plenty of papers. It’s seems something that native speakers pick from reading and talking.

        I know plenty of elementary schools that struggle to get reading and basic math. I understand that just isn’t time for grammar.

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