About Author: Ben Nolan

Website
http://brutishandshort.com
Description
Ben Nolan lives and works in fucking Canada (Toronto).

Posts by Ben Nolan

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What looks from Toronto like mob rule in Quebec

By
Ben Nolan
– May 16, 2012

The Globe and Mail can eat a dick. Their lede:

The fight over a proposed tuition-fee increase in Quebec is about something else now. It’s about whether decisions made by a democratically elected government can be overcome by force.

Commence whining about teh violins of teh mobz:

It would be one thing if the student demonstrators chose civil disobedience, accepted arrest and tried to win over public opinion by attempting to expose injustice. But they are not doing so.

Umm… peacefully blocking access to a CEGEP by creating a non-violent human barricade is a poster for civil disobedience. they HAVE chosen civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is precisely what they’ve chosen.

Also, a huge number HAVE “accepted” arrest, whatever “accepting” arrest means.  Looking for solid source for these numbers, but according to wiki, 916 have had to so far. These arrests have been “accepted” even in the face of pretty extreme incidences of police brutality on the topic of which the editors have not a word to spare. Also, the several-hundred-thousand-body-mobilizing protests we’ve seen have been overwhelmingly peaceful — Wikipedia has the casualty count at TEN injuries. Throw on an additional 11 reportedly injured at the protest at the PLQ’s convention in Victoriaville last week and you get… 21. Twenty-one. Let that juxtaposition sink in: Multiple protests of ~200,000 people; twenty-one injuries. Just like The Day of the (fucking) Locust.

The Globe goes on to declare:

The hallmark of Canadian democracy is a peaceful settling of conflict.

O R E A L L Y ? (Bonus content! — A generally informative encyclopedia entry on the history of political violence in Canada)

Canada is just like every other democracy — the democratic process works great for the majority. For the minority… not so much. Canadian democracy — just like American democracy, just like Western-European democracy — isn’t working too well for the minority born after about 1980 who, to paraphrase the Globe — which is right, at least, in saying that these protests are about more than just tuition — need to shut up and accept that reasonable tuition, single-digit unemployment rates, a reasonable expectation to be able to buy a house, a reasonable expectation to be able to retire in reasonable comfort are/were all privileges reserved for their Boomer/Gen-X elders on whom we should now expect to have to depend and to whom we should be getting used to groveling.

Additional reason the Globe and Mail can eat a dick: They endorsed fucking Stephen “who needs a census when you can throw more kids in jail for minor drug offenses” Harper last election, lest we forget. We should care about such an editorial board’s opinion… why?

Also: Why is it so rare to see an acknowledgement that a 75% hike in tuition is a big, huge-assed hike in tuition — a big, huge-assed step in the direction of the utterly absurd rates demanded by American institutions driving the student-loan bubble that’s probably going to precipitate the next major economic crisis if Europe doesn’t beat it to it.  The future ain’t what it used to be.

Also: Another point that seems almost never to be made in the English language media is that it’s not even these, purportedly selfish and entitled students that would be hit by the planned 75% tuition hike. Those that’ll be hit hardest are those that will only start their post-secondary education five years from now. They’re doing unto their youngers as they would have their elders do unto them.

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Dean Baker shits on David Brooks so you don’t have to

By
Ben Nolan
– May 8, 2012

Link. Teaser:

I don’t know anyone who looks like cyclicalists that Brooks writes about. It would be good if he could toss out a few names for readers so that we know such people actually exist in the world and are not just Brooks’ hallucinations.Since the views Brooks attributes to the cyclicalists are sufficiently bizarre, it is hard to believe that such people exist.

For example, he tells us that the cyclicalists believe:

“the level of government spending is the main factor in determining how fast an economy grows.”

I have never come across anyone who had a view anything like this. I do know many economists, who argue that in a downturn more stimulus will lead to more economic growth, but this is nothing like the view that Brooks attributes to the cyclicalists. Does Brooks really think it is the same thing to say that more stimulus leads to more growth in a downturn and saying that government spending is the main factor determining growth in general? This is scary.

Krugman does too, without naming names.

3. Anyone who says something like “If deficit spending were the route to prosperity, Greece would be in great shape” should be immediately considered not worth listening to. People in my camp have repeated until we’re blue in the face that the case for fiscal expansion is very specific to circumstance — it’s desirable when you’re in a liquidity trap, and only when you’re in a liquidity trap. I know that some people like to project their own crudity onto others, but what they’re actually demonstrating is their own ignorance.

I don’t actually think Brooks is ignorant. I think he’s cynical and dishonest, which is worse.

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Why couldn’t it have been Dick Cheney instead?

By
Ben Nolan
– May 8, 2012

Also: Link (=his most recent interview with Terry Gross, the last minute of which is heartbreakingly heartfelt).

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Missed Connections

By
Ben Nolan
– May 3, 2012

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For the reading

By
Ben Nolan
– April 20, 2012

Meant to post this about a week ago, but what’r ya gonna do? The piece we were all waiting for narrating the creative and charismatic tension between Jay and Kanye through the Watch the Throne tour as a redemption story for the Jackass. Read it (you too, Tom!).

The Up series should be in the core 9th-grade humanities curriculum. Even if it meant bumping, like, Lord of the Flies (which I loved), I’d still think so. It’s fucking LIFE, man! Wish I’d seen it at 14. (For the uninitiated, it’s a documentary series that has been revisiting the same cross-class group of individuals from age 7, every 7 years, and ongoing– the next one’s 56-Up — testing the “give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man” iea). Here’s an interview with one of the subjects (the one who kindof jumped class to became a scientists at UW@Madison) (ty, Kottke!). Teaser:

While committed to the project, he says confessing all in front of the camera has never been easy. “It’s always very disturbing. It’s the fact that they don’t show you the way you want to be shown – but that’s not the main thing. They ask you some really disturbing questions. They stick a camera under your nose and ask – ‘Why did you choose your wife?’ – and then it’s shown to gazillions of people. I’ve learnt that the stupider the thing I say, the more likely it is to get in. You’re asked to discuss every intimate part of your life. You feel like you’re just a specimen pinned on the board. It’s totally dehumanising.”

This excerpt from a speech to J-Street by former Palestinian politician and non-violent activist Mustafa Barghouti about nails the problem of the West Bank for Israel:

What is apartheid? Apartheid is a system where you have two laws, two different laws, for two people living in the same area. If you don’t like the word apartheid, give me an alternative to a situation where a Palestinian citizen is allowed to use no more than 50 cubic meters of water per capital year, while an Israeli illegal settler from the West Bank is allowed to use 2400. How would you classify a situation where the Israeli gdp per capita is about $30,000 while a Palestinian’s gdp per capita is less than $1400?

Yet we are obliged to pay the same prices for products as Israelis do. More than that: We are obliged to pay double the price for electricity and water that Israelis do though they make 30 times more than we do.

Segregation of roads is another issue. This is the last place on earth, actually the first place on earth where people have been segregated with roads. I’m talking about roads in the West Bank, major roads are exclusive to Israeli settlers or army or Israeli citizens.

I cannot describe to you to the level of violation of human rights.. we’ve left to see Israeli army using dogs against our nonviolent settlers in the most vicious way. Which reminds us of what happened during the Segregation system here in the United States.

So the problem is very clear. Of course it is either two states or one state. But the reality is, What we are witnessing today with the passage of time is that people will be [left] with one or two alternatives. Either it’s a segregation apartheid system, or one democratic state system,. This is the choice we will all face unless some kind of a miracle happens and I don’t know what that miracle is.

Psychology may be about to debase its credibility as a scientific discipline. Some dude at the University of Virginia’s about to try to replicate every study published in three major psychology journals back in 2008. The popcorn’s in the microwave. Opening salvo:

“Ultimately it’s a waste of everyone’s time if I can’t replicate the effects,” he says. “Otherwise, what are we working on?

I feel like everyone’s been <3ing this TNC post on the opposition to racism as a rhetorical pose versus as an actual value (DeLong, Sullivan, LG&M among others), and it’s for good reason. Read it. And at least watch James Baldwin’s section of the video that kicks it off (starts at about 13 minutes in, and runs about 20, if I remember). Right now it seems to me to be the most powerful speech I’ve ever heard.

This NYT piece about the real-time socio-cultural dynamics resulting from the commodification of African tribal practices is provocative in what’s probably a good way. Even if not, it’s interesting and the writing is vivid. Teaser:

In the West we have a particular definition of authenticity and a mania for it as a standard for art, especially art that we envision as elemental, unmodern, unspoiled. We gauge genuineness in terms of age, rarity, uniqueness, history of use, motives for creation. But in Africa, as often as not, authentic is simply what works, socially and spiritually: for example, the way each Dogon tourist dance keeps a larger dance, and Dogon identity, alive.

What accounts for the more ambiguous outcomes of decriminalizing prostitution versus the unambiguously positive outcomes of decriminalizing drugs? In the case of prostitution, the legitimated commodity can suddenly demand expensive rights, supported by the power of the state, driving up the price of doing business compared to the still illegitimate competing commodities trafficked in illegally from abroad. At the same time, if you can decouple the sale from the identifiable-as-legit-or-not body of the prostitute (using the Internet), you’re a lot safer as a trafficker in the decriminalized jurisdiction — police investigators are disempowered as they need to procure some substantive reason that a given operation isn’t legit in an information void. This makes the decriminalized market an attractive hub for illegal traffickers with whose wears the legit, empowered, and fairly-paid prostitutes have to compete and often can’t. Here’s an NYT discussion of the topic.

Still, I think it’s a progressive step in a system in flux. Thoughts?

That’s all I got for now.

Happy friday, everyone!

Here’s another comic from the archives you may not find funny:

PS – Maybe the Red Sox just aren’t very good? (H-t Matt Eckel)

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What happens when you let white people come up with a style of dance…

By
Ben Nolan
– April 13, 2012

Don’t ask me what possessed me to Google “leiderhosen dance,” ’cause I really don’t know.

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Gawker found the Goatse dude

By
Ben Nolan
– April 11, 2012

Goatse, in case you’ve just today discovered the Internet, is a closeup photo of a man’s absurdly gaping asshole. Don’t bother Googling it.

Not sure why, but I couldn’t just NOT read the full, several thousand word post about it.

The first couple hundred words are skippable garment-rending about the grossness of the photo and what propelled its spread as a meme. Here’s where you should pick things up (about 20% down the page):

The mere mention of Goatse will bring a wince—or a smile, depending on the person—to the face of the initiated.

But for all that, the full history of Goatse has never been told. After two weeks of staring deep into the metaphorical and literal black hole of Goatse, it’s easy to see why.

Kirk Johnson’s bios on his many porn site profiles describe a bisexual man with a penchant for huge black dildos. He’s anywhere from 45 to 48 years old, depending on which profile you go by. He’s stunningly prolific. His profile on the adult image-sharing site Imagefap, which holds the most complete collection of his work, boasts 15,156 photos, all of which have been compiled over the last five and a half years. His videos of xTube have been collectively viewed more than 22 million times.

The writer never actually manages to get the Goatse dude to respond to his requests for interviews, but it’s an interesting article nonetheless.

PS – This quote’s a keeper:

“If you’ve seen enough of his videos you can kind of recognize him pretty quickly. ‘Oh, I know that butt!’” Grey said. “He’s kind of a slender guy but he inserts these huge objects to an incredible depth. I admire his capabilities.”

Update: I’m sure this has been said elsewhere and better, but I was thinking about the whole Goatse thing over lunch (as a phenomenon more than as an image, but to answer what I’m guessing your question is, yes, I do have a pretty strong stomach), and it occurred to me that Goatse perfectly encapsulates a really fundamental dynamic of the effectively anonymous, disembodied and uncircumscribed social forum that’s grown into our Internet: If you’re going to participate, at some point you’re going to find yourself staring, figuratively and/or literally, into the unnaturally distended asshole of humanity, and if you have the stomach not to look immediately away, you can’t help but notice that there’s nothing metaphysically scary up there. It’s just flesh. And being privy to that insight gives you a tremendous amount of (trolling) power over those who still imagine there is (something scary up there); who regulate their thoughts to avoid going to that place where, it’s been implied again and again to them from childhood, something really terrifying and true about us and our nature lives. Which isn’t to say there isn’t such a thing, but what Goatse tells us is that what that thing actually is is a metaphysical void — there isn’t anything magical or transcendently either repulsive or fetishistically attractive up there. Just pink flesh. A confrontation, I kind of think, that’s almost as sad as it is liberating. We’ve internalized that the heart’s just a muscle, and even that the brain’s just a bunch of greyish tissue. Now we know too that what’s up one’s asshole is just more flesh (and presumably shit some times, but shit’s just shit). Not even in there can we find anything divinely or demonically special about ourselves.

I wonder if our performed disgust isn’t just cover justifying our turning away from that abyssal truth.

Time to clench back up and get to the work I’m actually being paid to do.

(source: Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions")

(PS – I realized I should probably acknowledge that there are people out there, some of whom are quoted in the Gawker piece, who stare into peoples assholes and see something positively stirring there. I wonder how they’d describe what it is (prob shouldn’t go searching around, tho, on my work computer). The impression I got from the one dude is it’s at least in part a respect for a kind of virtuosity. Hm.)

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Bike messenger mini-documentaries…

By
Ben Nolan
– April 10, 2012

…make for an exhilarating (and sometimes sobering) waste of time:

Yak (who pulls some insane maneuvers). Lessons: Don’t race Yak. Don’t pick a fight with Yak’s friend unless you wanna fight Yak too. Don’t try to bike like Yak.

Unembeddable BBC short on Zo. Lessons: Look through the car to see the future.  When crossing, pedestrians, don’t dance, just keep moving.

Jumbo. Lessons: It’s always nice to find a new shortcut. You get tickets. Fight them and you’ll probably get them at least reduced.

Killer Mike. Lesson: Watching people bike in a drive-on-the-left-side-of-the-road context makes me uneasy.

Some messengers in Pittsburg & SF. Lessons: Everyone gets hit at least once. Everyone gets doored at least once. Don’t barrel through lights. Some people’s nerves get shot by the job. (This balances out on the sobering side of the exhilarating-sobering equation)

Kevin Bolger and Team Puma. Lesson: If you’re half+ crazy, you can do 59th to the Battery in 15 minutes on a brakeless track bike.

Toronto! Lessons: Women can be bike messengers too (in Canada, anyway). Couriers make about $25k per year.

Chris Jett. Lesson: Sometimes cinematographers, however talented, need to be reined in. This one’s a bit boring actually. But there are lots of pretty closeups on minutiae.

By some standards, I am nowhere close to reckless, AVTAR.

 

Update: This one’s pretty fascinating too — an oldie giving both the cabbie & pedestrian side in the cabbie & pedestrian vs. bike messenger war (with a few interjections from some messengers — one of whom seems pretty stoned, the degenerate):

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War-gaming the Death Star versus a Borg cube

By
Ben Nolan
– April 4, 2012

A bunch of different scenarios. The epickest one:

Here is what clearly will happen: The Borg beam over some scouts to investigate. Because the Death Star is so huge, let’s say it is only a few dozen scout Borg. Stormtroopers try to repulse them, and 2 Borg are killed before they adapt and become quite invulnerable. The Death Star predictably uses the superlaser to destroy the Borg Cube, which doesn’t have a chance to adapt because it is all over in one shot. Only a few components of the cube survive re-entry as they scatter and fall on the nearby forest moon; all the Borg humanoids are dead. All? Not quite: There are still a few dozen (-2) Borg on the Death Star. Those few dozen quickly begin Assimilating the Death Star and it’s crew. Because the Death Star is so huge, it takes a LONG time, but the Imperials are not known for the innovative tactics required to stop the onslaught. The battle lasts for months, but it is unstoppable. The Borg grows exponentially, despite reinforcements.

The story is not over yet, though. Fearing that the Borg will attack the galaxy, the Imperial Fleet fights the Death Star Borg Sphere but are repulsed by the immense firepower of the terrible weapon. During the epic battle, the once-perfect sphere takes heavy damage, giving it an “Unfinished” look. The Borg scavenge components that fell to the forest moon and the Borg are even able to rebuild their adapting shield, though the shield generator must stay on the moon.

The Emperor, cunning as ever, purposely leaks the location of the Death Star to Bothan spies. Then, in order to ensure that the attack succeeds, a crack legion of the Emperor’s best troops attacks the shield generator on the Endor moon. The Rebel Fleet hyperspaces in and is joined by the Imperial Fleet that was hiding behind Endor. While brave Imperial Stormtroopers battle the Borgized furry natives, they are eventually able to sabotage the shield generator. Luke and Darth Vader face the Borg Queen on the Death Star. During the fight, Darth Vader is tempted by the Borg Queen’s offer to remove his cybernetics and replace them with living skin. Darth Vader pretends to join her cause, but shows his true colors as he ruptures a tank of flesh-eating gas that consumes himself and the Borg Queen. Meanwhile, Luke leaps to safety. Rebel fighters, closely supported by TIE fighters penetrate the superstructure of the Death Sphere and destroy the main reactor. Luke carries the mechanical parts that are left of Vader’s body to a shuttle and escapes. Later he burns the remains as others celebrate on Endor. And there you have it folks. Sheesh, after that story, you don’t even need a Pat & Jay wrap up.

That’s about got it.

While we’re geeking, via Kottke comes “I’m Han Solo,” a Kinect dance track:

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This is what humans are like (NSFW)

By
Ben Nolan
– April 3, 2012

Norms among them vary, which freaks them out.

(Should probably mention that this is a documentary about the normalization of man-donkey bestiality in northern Colombia. It’s as much about how a stand-in for hip young people from New York deals with having stuck his nose into the whole thing. It’s also about an American sex therapist who’s an expert on bestiality and zoophilia helping that New York millenial deal with having stuck his nose into the whole thing. It’s also about how every party’s attitudes and behaviour make you feel about them, yourself, and your culture, but I guess that goes without saying.)

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