The Internet in real life

I don’t have a lot of energy to write today, since I’ve taken on not only the proportions but apparently the personality of a manatee, but I just had to say – you know those people who get really angry on the internet and post very long frequently all-caps rants on blog posts?

I saw someone do that last night. In REAL LIFE.

It was at another Association for Science and Reason event (the home of the famous Mennonite Conspiracy Theorist. Though he wasn’t there) featuring Franke James, an artist who got royally screwed by Stephen Harper et al for a) being a climate change activist and b) talking shit about the tar sands. Franke gave what I can call a charming and, considering the subject matter, very positive talk, which I really enjoyed and was challenged by. The rest of the audience seemed to like it too.

The Q&A, however, was rapidly taken over by a scrawny guy called Wayne who started ranting about Hugo Chavez and how crappy solar panels are.

And didn’t stop.

I mean, if the person you’re hypothetically talking to you has to ask you three times “Do you have a question?” and then you continue to talk over her as she attempts to respond to you, dude. I know you’re angry, but step back.

And if you interrupt someone ELSE’S question by accusing the speaker of not caring about starving people (because we can ALL EAT OIL, GUYS), and THEN don’t stop talking until the organizers pre-emptively end the event, you really, really need to step back.

Anyway. I found it – well, I found it awkward and annoying at the time, but in retrospect very interesting. It was so, so clearly a transposition of internet behaviour into real life. Not that people didn’t yell at each other before we had Manboobz, but the repetition of talking points (Hugo Chavez! What is it with conservatives and Hugo Chavez?), the generally aggressive tone, the hyperbole, and the refusal to listen to THE PERSON ANSWERING YOU was so internetty. It’s like – do your dreams have camera angles? Mine do, probably due to the fact that I’ve been watching TV since I was born or so. An art form has literally changed the way we dream.

Now technology has literally changed the way we’re rude to each other.

What a time to be alive.

And I actually followed the rules!

Because I am completely insane, I decided to apply to the Montreal International Music Competition of 2012. Even though it takes place at the end of May/beginning of June, when not only will Ben be away on tour but I will have about a 3-month-old baby to look after.

But hey, it’s my last chance (I’ll be too old next time), so why not?

Anyway, the first round of the competition is – as always – a recording. Which I made in mid-November, being unsure as to how being massively pregnant would affect my singing (not too much as it turns out, but how would I know?). And yesterday I got the final mixes of the raw tracks.

The rules of the competition state that you cannot edit your tracks (as in, no splicing, no partial retakes, etc) – that each track should be a faithful representation of your live performance. I don’t know how they would tell if you hadn’t complied, but as I am trying to be a more moral person in preparation for parenthood I followed the rules.

And you know, the tracks actually sound really good!

So here is (what I think is) the best: the big aria from Lulu. Right-click to download.

Lied der Lulu

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Things I have done since last posting

- Bought a smartphone. So if you follow me on Twitter, be prepared to NEVER STOP HEARING FROM ME AGAIN.
- Moved into the new bedroom in the basement. It’s awesome! Unexpectedly – well, totally expectedly, since it is semi-submerged – it’s really dark and quiet there in there in the mornings, so the first couple of days we all slept well past 10. Even Madeline.
- Bought a new washing machine. Which Sears completely failed to deliver yesterday. They brought it all the way to the house then refused to wait 10 minutes while we took down a railing that was unexpectedly in the way. So I have to wait until Thursday to wash everything in sight. Insert pouty-face emoticon here.
- Got a waffle maker. I asked for one for Christmas, but no one got it for me, so I was forced to go all the way to Value Village and buy one for myself. Yesterday I ate little besides waffles. This was a mistake, because…
- Now that I’m roughly the size of a house I have been getting some fairly bad pregnancy heartburn. This is apparently inevitable if you’re as short and short-waisted as I am – everything gets sort of smushed upwards and you get heartburn. So my smug “I am awesome at being pregnant!” attitude is…not so true anymore. Though really, if the worst things that happen to you when you’re pregnant is some heartburn, rib-stretching pain, and insomnia, it’s not much cause to complain. It’s not bad as long as I eat small amounts fairly regularly and avoid certain foods. Waffles, though, seem to be an “only in moderation” thing.
- Sang in a STANDING ROOM ONLY new music concert. The show I did at Alliance Francaise on Dec 10th was, as I said, standing room only. They actually had to turn people away. This…this does not happen. Generally anything tagged “new music” is a success if you get 50 people out, a wild success if you get 75, and respectable if you get 30. But there were some mitigating factors: while technically “new music” it wasn’t at all weird; it was marketed as being for children; and most importantly, children got in free. If you were a Francophone parent it was an absolute godsend.
- Finished, but will probably never doing anything with the product of, another Nanowrimo book

And had Christmas and all that.

I’m not starting my so-called maternity leave for another few weeks, so my general malaise may prevent me from writing much, but I will try to get back in the blogging habit. Especially now that I have a smartphone. If my upcoming posts contain nothing but pictures of dogs or my weird-looking belly button, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Oh, and happy new year.

Complaining with Kay, Episode 67: Slow Catastrophes, Part Two

- I didn’t expect to take 6 months off podcasting!
- Couldn’t talk about it and didn’t want to talk about anything else, then inertia took over
- There should be a law against child of former president becoming president – it’s unpleasantly monarchical
- Our own slow catastrophe in Toronto: Rob Ford
- He appears to be slowly turning Toronto into someplace where you drive everywhere and then go home and watch TV and you have to pay for everything and poor people are totally fucked
- Someday I’ll look back at this time and think “It would have been a different world”…

Link.

An analogy

The police are like antibiotics.

I am very grateful to live in an age where a simple infection isn’t a death sentence. Likewise I understand that some form of policing is necessary to maintain civil society.

However, antibiotics have side effects, can cause problems more serious than the ones they solve, can accidentally create super-bugs that they are powerless to stop, or sometimes just straight up kill people on their own. Likewise, unrestrained police can stop being guardians of the public and become the thing the public needs to be guarded against.

So just like we need to ration our use of antibiotics, the police need strong external controls to stop them from acting like complete thugs and, oh, I don’t know, pepper-spraying unarmed non-violent protesters in the face or cracking the skulls of war veterans.

*

In spite of my love of detective fiction, I am not a big fan of TV police dramas (though I have watched a lot of Law and Order in my time). Almost every cop show at some point or another runs a plot that goes like this:

- Sympathetic cop solves heinous crime (child murder, human trafficking, what have you)
- But can only get vital evidence by beating up/illegally searching/otherwise violating the rights of the bad guy
- Who then gets off based on cop’s misconduct
- And this is a bad thing which adds to the cop’s existential angst, as well as reinforcing a belief in the inherent corruption and evilness of the world.

This type of narrative, where you see police misconduct through the perspective of the misbehaving officer (whose intentions are scrupulously pure throughout), and this is presented as the only way for justice to be done, functions as propaganda for police overreach. The protections that keep all of us safe from unjust prosecution are the villains in the story; you can’t help thinking how ridiculous and evil it is that a child murderer got away because of a stupid rule of evidence.

In real life, of course, there is no omniscient author who knows who really did it, and gruff but kindly policemen are fallible humans like everyone else, blinded by their own prejudices, willing and able to fool themselves as to the justice of their actions. As we all are, don’t get me wrong.

Only most of us don’t go around in riot gear armed to the teeth.

So think about that tonight, Toronto, when the police step into St. James Park. Don’t imagine yourself as one of the cops, bravely defending us from lawless communism (or whatever). Imagine yourself as one of the defenceless, unarmed, unresisting people, who have decided to take a stand for something they believe in. Even if you don’t agree with the protesters, imagine you are one of them – someone with an unprotected skull, face, and limbs, facing down someone in a helmet, gas mask, and armour. And then tell me that linking arms and sitting on the ground is such a crime – is such a threat – that it requires violent retaliation.

Get a haircut and a real job

Anyone else out there following either the #ows or the #occupytoronto streams on Twitter? Yes? No? What do you mean, you’re not on Twitter? It’s like Facebook, only you don’t have to be friends with boring people you don’t like! (Just kidding, Facebook friends. I love all of you.)

Well, I have been following them, especially since I’ve come down with a bad cold and am on Day 2 of Staying In Bed and Doing Nothing (with the help of two masters of that art, Madeline and Gus). About 25% of the streams are news about the occupations, relevant articles, calls to action, etc; about another 40% are retweets of the same; about 10% some kind of legitimate criticism; and the rest pure trollery.

I’m not going to post screenshots, because I’m writing this on my Android tablet and I’m not going to run the risk of rooting it just so I can take a screenshot (seriously, Google, PUT SCREENSHOT CAPABILITY INTO THE NEXT ANDROID RELEASE), but just go look for yourself.

Anyway, the troll comments seem to break down thus:
- Occupiers should just get jobs!
- Occupiers are hippies!
- Occupiers smell bad!
- Occupiers are smelly hippies!
- The whole thing is a union astroturf operation! People aren’t really sleeping there!
- The police should just go in and beat them all up!

And since Twitter is the natural home of the Gish Gallop, I will respond to each of these in turn. Here, where nobody will read it. Oh well.

Get a job! – Um, putting aside the whole “massive unemployment thing”, lots of occupiers do have jobs, and go to the occupations when they’re not working. There is this thing called “free time”, you know. Some people use it to watch Dancing with the Stars. Some people try to effect social change. Vive la difference!

Hippies! – What is this, 1965? How is this even an insult?

You stink! – This may be true for individual occupiers, but as a whole I have not noticed an unusual odour coming from Occupy Toronto. And I have the super nose of a pregnant lady.

Stinky hippies! – WTF? Are you four? First of all, you are making assumptions about the personal hygiene of the occupiers, then judging them based on that assumption without verifying it against reality. Not only is it not really true, it is completely irrelevant – because even smelly hippies HAVE CHARTER RIGHTS. Christ.

Ooga booga UNION ASTROTURF – this is the oddest one. Apparently dear old Ezra Levant went to Occupy Toronto with a thermal camera and concluded that most of the tents were empty, ergo this is all a nefarious plot on the part of CUPE to do….something or other.

I don’t know what percentage of tents are occupied every night, but it is true that not everyone spends every night at the park. That’s because of my first point: A lot of the occupiers have jobs, families, and other stuff to do. Ben has been sleeping there about 50% of the time, because as much as he believes in this he has to work, see me occasionally, and continue fixing up our house so it’s not a disaster area when the baby gets here. Plus it’s hardly some ringing denouncement of the occupation that some of its members sometimes have other stuff to do.

But if this is a union astroturf operation and I didn’t know about it, Ben’s cheque is way overdue, CUPE! Hop to it! We need a new washing machine!

I hope the police beat you up – Well, that’s nice. Haters gotta hate, I guess. I really hope the police *don’t* sweep in and beat everyone up, and I think I would feel the same way if this were the Occupation In Favour of Kicking Puppies and Stealing Candy from Babies. Because I’m one of those weirdos who doesn’t want to see their political opponents assaulted. Call me crazy.

The gist of the trolls’ remarks (except for the out-of-left-field union conspiracy thing, which is I think a response to the very real astroturfing in the Tea Party movement) appears to be: I hate the occupiers because they are worthless and disgusting people. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they keep talking about smells, even if they’ve never been in whiffing distance of St. James Park – for these people, the concepts of physical disgust and social value seem to be intertwined. (There is actual legit psychological research showing that exposing people to a foul odour makes them more conservative, btw.) It’s logically backwards – instead of looking at this movement, thinking it over, and coming to a conclusion about its merits, these trolls deciding the movement is valueless because the participants are valueless. And the participants are valueless because of their participation, which though nonsensically circular explains the baffling nature of some of the insults. Because if you were a good sort of person, you wouldn’t be occupying, so you must be a stinky unemployed hippie pariah who deserves nothing more than a good beating. And I know this even though I haven’t seen you, talked to you, or even smelled you.

There are legitimate criticisms of the Occupy movement. These are not them. These are a mishmash of weird essentialism, nonsense carried over from the 60s (seriously, can we stop it with the hippie thing? I wasn’t even a sperm in 1967 and I do not care about Woodstock), and straight-up authoritarian bootlicking. But like I said, haters gotta hate, so I don’t forsee them going away any time soon.

The Internet. It’s great, but jerks can use it too.

On inattention, wilful and otherwise

On the last post, Tim of Tim’s Cycling Blog comments:

Humans are NOT capable of the intense concentration and reactions that driving requires, humans should not be in control of vehicles moving at such high speeds. Humans are in such vehicles because of progress and peoples lives are acceptable loses in the push for progress in modern society.

I do not buy this for a second.

Let me illustrate this with an analogy: Whenever women complain online about men hitting on them cluelessly/offensively/creepily, the responses generally fall into three categories:

- Blind hatred (how dare you say I can’t hit on any woman any time I want! Stuck-up bitches! THOUGHTCRIME! GEORGE ORWELL!)
- Other women/non-sexist men saying “Wow, that sucks. I hate it when that happens to me/I had no idea you had to put up with that/I didn’t realize it came off that way, I won’t hit on girls in elevators again”
- Men apologizing on behalf of their sex by claiming that yeah, it’s awful, but men just do not have the social/emotional skills to approach women without being creepers or assholes, so you should take it in your stride.

The first one is straight-up misogyny, of course; the second the appropriate, empathetic, human response; the last not so sexist (except possibly against men) but still complete bullshit.

If men have such awful social skills, why don’t they routinely make inappropriate comments to, say, their employers? Their clients? Their clergy? Their prospective inlaws?

The most logical explanation is that men do, by and large, have perfectly adequate social skills. But a percentage refuse to use them when dealing with a social inferior, like a woman they want to have sex with.

Likewise, I don’t buy for a second that drivers are incapable of paying attention to cyclists or pedestrians. They are perfectly capable of seeing other cars, trucks, and stationary objects. Like those guys who would never say “Hey dude, what’s with that tie?” to their boss but will say “I find you extremely desirable” to a random woman just trying to read a book in a cafe*, some percentage of drivers feel free to ignore pedestrians and cyclists, because they are just not important.

Humans do have a limited capacity to deal with distractions, and it’s understandable that the speeding tonne of metal coming towards you is more of a pressing concern than the girl in the pink coat trying to cross the street. But if there’s something humans have an infinite capacity for, it is understanding, responding to, and reinforcing heirarchies. Forgive me if I think my invisibility has more to do with the latter than the former.

And honestly, if we with our poor little monkey brains can master the piano, build computers that fit in a breast pocket, and speak Hungarian (15 declensions, people), I think we should be able to manage to operate cars without murdering each other.

*Yes, this has happened to me.

The Time I Got Hit By A Car: A Funny Story

So the trucker who hit Jenna Morrison didn’t see her, and will face no charges.

I’m not a cop and I don’t have all the details, but fuck. Was this man visually-impaired? Was a bright light suddenly flashed in his eyes? Was he possessed by the Black Oil Alien from the X-Files and it was swimming in his eyes at the moment of impact?

I very much doubt it. In fact, I think I can tell you why he didn’t see her: he wasn’t looking.

But Kristin, I hear you say, your privileged hipster ass can’t even drive a car!* How would you know what drivers experience?

Well, I don’t exactly. But I can make an educated guess, based on…

The Time I Got Hit By A Car

This is a funny story, actually.

Let me set the scene: It was March 2004. I had just graduated from music school and was looking for some kind of job other than working part-time at Starbucks or playing the piano at ballet schools. One of the jobs I heard about was a half-time job with the Ontario Arts Council. It seemed perfect for me (though whether I would have been perfect for it was highly unlikely – at any rate *SPOILER ALERT* I didn’t get the job), so I put together the bullshittiest resume you can imagine and went to drop it off.

March is an iffy time of year in Ontario. Sometimes it is mild and spring-like. Sometimes it is dreary and rainy. More often it is basically still winter. 2004 was one of those long winters, so I was wearing my lighter overcoat and hat, both of which were fuschia.

I wish I had a picture of myself in that outfit, because it was AWESOME. I was a tiny pink dynamo with a fake fur collar.

Anyway, I was wearing this bright pink coat and bright pink hat as I walked to the OAC office to drop off my doomed application. It was in the Bay/Bloor area (still is as far as I know), a part of the city not known for its colourful streetscape. In fact, I’d say every single building between Queens Park Circle and Yonge is one shade of grey or another (except for the Prada store, which is beige).

So picture the scene: Grey buildings. Grey road. Grey sidewalks. Dirty snow drifts on the sidewalks.

Me in my bright pink hat and coat walking along the street.

So as I was crossing a side street (I can’t remember which one), a woman in an SUV was attempting to make a right turn onto Bloor. She was studying traffic very intently, probably looking for a gap. I was already halfway across the road.

“Surely she’ll stop,” I thought. “I have the right of way after all.”

But no. She continued to inch forward into the turn, still looking at oncoming traffic…

…until she made contact with my right hip.

I yelled and banged on the hood of the car. She reacted, fortunately, with shock and apology. I shook my head and moved on.

But think about it: It was broad daylight. I was wearing bright colours – in fact, I couldn’t have been more in contrast with my environment. I was obeying the rules of the road and watching where I was going.

And this driver still didn’t see me. Because she wasn’t looking.

Because she didn’t have to.

And it turned out fine, because it was very low-speed and the driver didn’t accidentally hit the accelerator or decide to run me down in a fit of pique. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a problem.

The solution is not to be more visible, because even if you’re visible they won’t see you. The only thing I could have done to be more visible would be to wear bear bells, which are hardly standard issue for urban pedestrians.

The solution is for drivers to watch where the fuck they’re going. And no, it is not too much to ask.

*I did learn how to drive a car, BTW. I just never passed the test. I’m planning on finally getting my licence next year so I can take trips out of the city by myself.

Hope for the occupiers

*Note: If your comment on this contains any kind of victim-blaming, cop-fluffing, or the word “hippie” combined with any derogatory adjective, I will ban your ass faster than you can imagine. I am not in the mood to be Little Miss Constructive Dialogue today.*

The NYPD raided Zucotti Park last night. They beat people with batons, intimidated the press, destroyed personal property, and even threw out the 5000 or so books from the People’s Library.

And now they are refusing to let the occupiers return in spite of a court order ordering them to do so. (There is another hearing at 11:30. Maybe another court order will be clear enough for the NYPD!)

…I don’t have a response to this. I mean, what do you say? I’m disgusted but not surprised? So I’m going to try to be positive.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland – it’s a brick-sized tome examining the divisions in American politics and culture through the lens of Richard Nixon. (It’s very expensive to buy as a book, but you can get the audiobook from Audible for about $15.) A good deal of it is about protests, urban rioting, and the police response. And a pattern emerges:

- Some fringe people with nothing to lose protest something
- Most of the population ignores it
- Those in authority overreact
- The situation escalates, leading to police action, generally of a brutal and oppressive kind; there may be deaths
- The mainstream press either straight-up supports the police or waffles 
- Repeat;
- Eventually enough real information trickles through – enough pictures of men with batons beating up women, enough iterations of a rich man in a suit decrying poor people as lawbreaking scum, enough impassioned slogans making their way into the popular consciousness – to tip the balance in the public mind
- The most mainstream, watered-down goals of the movement are accepted and even enacted, though the truly radical ones are pushed aside as impractical.

You’ll never change the minds of the 20-30% of hard-core authoritarians among us – those for whom the powerful are always right, no matter what – but you will change the minds of the wafflers and the don’t-make-a-scene types, as long as it isn’t too far.

I don’t have any religious beliefs anymore; I don’t have faith that any god will come in and save us, or magically change everything for the better, or that we can pray/meditate/Secret ourselves into freedom. But I do have faith in people. That if we work together and listen to each other and try really hard we can make the world a little bit better for each other.

So when the cops are beating you and destroying your stuff, remember – it’s not much, I know – remember that what you are doing cannot fail to change the world, even if it’s only a little ground gained with the maximum of amount of pain. And even if I can’t be there to take the blows with you, I and millions of others are behind you.

And I will totally bake you some vegan cupcakes and bring them to you in jail.

Sinking back into the pillows of obscurity

So I think my 15 minutes of internet fame are over.

Blog traffic is back to normal and while comments on the Driver Privilege Checklist are still trickling in, I am no longer responding (though I am monitoring for spam and abuse). I’m glad it got taken up and reposted by cycling blogs and was food for thought for a surprisingly large number of people. If you haven’t already, I urge you to read the comment thread under the original post, especially Quixotress’ objections – because while I obviously disagree with her, since I wrote the damn list, I think she made some good points and I’d love it if someone with the tools to do so did the kind of analysis she suggests.

If nothing else this experience has given me a newfound appreciation for all of my favourite bloggers, especially the troll magnets – David of Manboobz, Amanda from Pandagon, P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula – for putting up with the crap that they do. I only had to delete one or two abusive comments – fair criticism/honest disagreement is not the same thing as abuse – but even so I realized how extremely unpleasant it is to have random people spewing bile in your direction, something I had up til now mostly avoided.

So while, like I said, I’m glad the post blew up, and I still yearn for fame with every fibre of my being, I don’t think I’ll mind being back here in the Land Of Obscurity for a while. I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate it before – I think I rather like it here.