Battlepanda

Wisconsin

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 11:54:00 +0000

Today I took half a bottle of crappy Merlot I had hanging around, grabbed my guitar and took the dogs in a tow and headed to the park. I sat by the river and played and singed and screamed. And I wrote a song about the protests in Wisconsin. I really don't know why I caught this fervor. Intellectually, I know why unions can be a Bad Idea and how when you assume a perfectly competitive market they meddle with the efficiency of the market etc etc...but when I see the videos of the protests I see ordinary people fighting together fiercely for themselves, their families and for each other. And I could not not be moved.

If I feel brave enough I might just record it later.

UPDATE: Done

I know the world's not black or white
but that won't stop me from telling wrong from right
I'm not in a union but I gotta choose sides
between the fat cats and labor it's not hard to decide

So I'll stand with the teachers stand with the firemen stand with the nurses
stand with the common man...I'm going to Wisconsin (x4)

When we join our hands it's about more than bread
It's about dignity, it's how we hold our heads
We're in the depth of winter but no matter the weather
we'll stay warm if we stay together

So preach it to your father preach it to your mother
preach it with your sisters and your brothers...I'm going to Wisconsin (x4)

(spoken)I'm not really going to Wisconsin...I'm all the way in Taiwan. But
I'm sending you crazy cheeseheads all the love like the world sends you pizza from Ian's. And in the end we're all one world and one people...so people. Where
ever you are...please do what you can...do what you can...go take a stand!

So find them on Twitter
friend them on facebook
Like them on youtube
do what ever you can do

Open your eyes, we'll never be free
unless we stand in solidarity
Doesn't matter if it's Egypt or USA
You gotta stand up if you've got something to say

I say, go, go, Ohio
go AFL CIO
Minnesota I love you too
SEIU, keep doing what you do

I'll stand with you if you stand with me
we'll stand together set the whole world free (x3)

I'm sayin' UNION (x4)

go to Wisconsin...don't let the tea partiers have all the fun...go to Wisconsin...show them how a peaceful protest is done...go to Wisconsin...it's the first battle now the war has begun...go to Wisconsin...please stay strong until our rights have been won.

Behind the LOLs: Ireland forced to take EU bailout

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 17:10:00 +0000

This piece on the Irish bailout is very close to my heart.

Why? First of all, we explained the Irish banking crisis with leprechauns and Riverdancers. Illustrating economics and international relations with crude national stereotypes is an NMA specialty. But the real reason is because I got to slip in a reference to Father Ted, my favorite television sitcom of all time.

I love how many of the youtube commenters are mad about the broad use of "Oirish" stereotypes, yet there is simultaneously suspicion from others that this piece isn't "really" made in Taiwan because the specificity of the cultural references, especially the one to Father Ted. Seriously, we live in a globalized world, people! Folks move around and cultural products move around...there's nothing inauthentic about it.

Anyhow. Father Ted. Best show ever. Every episode is gold. But the clip linked below, which contains the relevant reference to the animated piece, is as good a place to start as any:

Down with this sort of thing!

The talented Mr. Battlepanda (also a big fan of Father Ted) contributed a fine portrait of Father Jack for the occasion.

Hu-Obama Battle Rap

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 11:56:00 +0000

Hi guys. Long time no blog. See, I have been too busy over the past year bringing you the LOLs as a part of the NMA team.

But this is something I have to share with y'all on the ol' Battlepanda blog because being a blogger is how I first got interested in politics and started paying attention to economic issues and international affairs and all that good stuff. Without this blog, I would never have written...the Hu-Obama battle rap.

U.S.-China Currency Rap*
(By Angelica Oung, Richard Hazeldine, Emily Wu with music by Shen-Yi and Action Zero)

Hu/Obama: We're both superpower economies
caught up in a battle over monetary policy
Hu: For social stability, we've got to export
Obama: And we're sick of being the consumers of last resort.

Obama: Times are hard in the U.S.A.
Listen up Hu, I've got something to say.
Help us out, you know what I'm talking about,
the RMB's too low without a doubt.

Now I ain't sayin' you're a currency manipulator,
but you ain't lettin' the Yuan float...float.
Protectionism ain't cool it's understood;
an undervalued Yuan inflates the price of US goods.

My dogs in the IMF are on my side,
we'll wag our fingers 'til you do right.
Until then won't you get some sense,
and stop beating up on Nobel-winning dissidents.

Hu: Shut up fool, you spin ain't genuine,
if the RMB goes up, your exports still can't win!
From the Mao to the Deng to the Jiang to the Hu,
you think you can keep on telling us what to do?

And the Nobel Peace Prize, ain't all that son,
even you've got one and what have you done?
Now the shit's gone down I'm gonna make it rain,
Norway, get ready for a smorgasbord of pain.

You're the one to blame for the great recession
so don't come round looking for concessions.
You're in no position to call me a sinner,
without Bretton Woods, you'd be Argentina!

NMA Anchor Girls: They're not enemies, but frenemies
with co-dependent economies.
For stability, China's gotta export,
and the US is the buyer of last resort.

Obama: That's right we're the world's reserve currency,
in times of uncertainty, they all want USDs.
So what if our fiscal picture's discombobulated?
The world's resources are dollar denominated.

And we paid with IOUs so if what you say is true
when the dollar crashes, what you gonna do?
And won't you learn to make toys without lead?
I bought your bargain kibbles and now Trixie's dead.

We're through with being polite!
We're getting ready for a fight!
Ma man Timmy G is gonna set you right.
*Go Timmy! Go Timmy! Go Timmy! Go Timmaaaaaaay!*

Hu: It's a trade war fool, forget your guns and rockets.
We've got it where it counts and that's money in our pockets.
Don't talk smack 'cos China's striking back.
We're gonna keep stacking those Wal-Mart racks.

Soon the Dollar will be out and the Yuan will be in.
Nothing will will stop the dollar's long-term downward trend.
But since for now employment is our top concern,
we'll keep the Yuan cheap until the economy turns.

Don't try to stop us, it ain't realistic.
Don't believe me? Read the statistic.
Capitalism is socialistic,
if you do it with Chinese characteristics.

NMA Anchor girls sing X3

*Some of the lyrics were slightly different in performance...I've given the lyrics as it was written.

Sarah Palin animated

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:35:00 +0000

Sometimes...I love my job.

The Grand Ole Par-tay

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:06:00 +0000

Guess which full-service Asian Animation powerhouse did a 1-minute piece riffing on how the Republican National Committee spent campaign contributions on liquor, Reagan paraphernalia and S&M lady bars? Yep. We did!

Incoherence of Republicans: Feature, not bug.

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:53:00 +0000

Don't try and appease the American people. Don't try and pander to their policy preferences. Don't try and guess at what direction they really want America to take deep in their hearts...because they, themselves do not know.

Jacob Weisburg of Slate makes the point rather harshly, but well.

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways clearly hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

With all this in the background, Weisburg warns ominously that the politicians who will thrive are those who can best "call for the impossible with a straight face." Like Scott Brown, the newly-minted senator of Massachusetts, someone who wants to call himself a deficit hawk while pushing tax cuts.

Your animated news...now in English

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:23:00 +0000

Are there any other Action News items on our page you'd like to see translated into English? I'd probably do it because, you know, it's my job.

Apple Action News: Jan 18th Taliban attacks Kabul

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:33:00 +0000

Latest from Apple -- the January 18th Kabul attack.

Based on this story from the WSJ

KABUL—The Taliban launched a coordinated attack on the Afghan capital Monday, paralyzing the city for most of the day as militants set off explosions, took over buildings and attempted to disrupt the swearing-in of new cabinet ministers.

At least 12 people were killed, including seven militants, and 71 people were injured—mostly by hand-grenade fragments—by the time the attacks were over, said Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak. Seven insurgents were shot dead in the fighting and an unknown number of other militants died in suicide blasts, he said.

Rapping up the economy

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:48:00 +0000

This is too good not to post.

The economist who participated in the project is Russ Roberts of George Mason University. No prizes for guessing where his loyalties lie when it comes to the battle between Keynes and Hayek. Having said that, the video was just amazingly informative and funny and even-handed. Well done to all involved. Except I think Keynes would have liked some male hotties in his entourage as well.

The Technostructure vs. the Techonomy

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:15:00 +0000

I just finished reading the New Industrial State by John Kenneth Galbraith. It's a book that manages to be dated and prescient at the same time. Unusually for an economist, Galbraith attempts to describe the world in a relatively unreduced fashion. t is inevitable that the economic landscape has changed much since Galbraith wrote The New Industrial State. But it's to his credit that he does not retreat into the comforting simplicity of widgetland. In fact, he is hilariously scathing in his attacks on the economists who choose to study the parts of reality that are amenable to being fitted to theoretical models while leaving out parts that might actually be rather important.

Classical economic theory holds that individual profit maximization results in optimal societal welfare as long as the state stands back and let the market do its thang. An interlocking wheel of assumptions is required to prove this happy state of affairs. Galbraith is very good at pointing out the places where the cogs of the wheels just don't fit.

Galbraith's description of what he calls "the technostructure" could not be more relevant in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 08/09. We need a reminder that in our capitalist system, it is not actually the capital that is holding the reins of our corporations. Galbraith patiently explains with wit and verve what, really, any fool with eyes could see. It is the managers who are in charge of the companies and the boards of directors are their tools. Stockholder power is immensely dilute. The individual interests of the managers are frequently not aligned with the the well-being of the company in the long run. Given the power, they will maximize profit for themselves, not the company. Food for thought when considering executive compensation. He's also very good at describing the insidious phenomenon of government and big business aiding and abetting each other. He does this with a fairly value-neutral shrug of the shoulder.

But looking around in 2010, it's also clear that the technostructure is not the whole story. For instance, General Motors, which Galbraith repeatedly uses as the example of an industrial titan destined to expand ever onwards outwards like a benign tumor, would almost certainly have faced corporate death last year without a bailout from the taxpayer. While technology is a bigger story than ever, a important part of the story is coming not from the established titans with monolithic research and development departments, but upstarts like Google who are aggressively poaching on the turf of bigger players. Who knows how things may shake out in the future, but for the time being, it seems there is a decent amount of game-changing afoot. The other staggering change since Galbraith's day, of course, is the increasingly agressive globalization in goods and services. The technostructure still rules a good part of our lives. But nobody is completely immune to competitive forces.

David Kirkpatrick et. al. coined the term "techonomy" to describe the part of the economy that is continually driven by technical innovations and entrepreneurial zeal. They cast the techonomy (including companies/entities as diverse as Google and the Federal Reserve!) as part of the answer to humanity's problems. I'm not quite sure about that, but it does seem to be a good addition to the vocabulary. GlaxoSmithKlein, GM and NBC seems to me very much part of the technostructure -- gliding along on corporate powess for better or for worse. Google, Zappos and the now defunct pets.com, on the other hand, belongs to the techonomy.

The Battlepanda on Conan! Sort of!

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:46:00 +0000

Yes, that is my voice you hear in Chinese over the animation. For the record, Conan, that animation is made in Taiwan, not Hong Kong! And the guys in the suits are Letterman and Kimmel.

Kimmel doesn't really look like Kimmel, 'tis true. I gave the animation department a face shot of him that doesn't really show his full figure so they didn't make him fat enough. As for Conan's hair, it's really not tall and orange enough even though I told the guys and gals in animation that's Conan's trademark. Apart from that, they did a great job on a turn-around time that is just astounding.

The animations themselves are getting great hits on youtube. The Chinese version, which is far more popular, just passed 100,000 hits. The English version is at a respectable 16,000 or so. Boing Boing linked to it, as did HuffPo, Gawker TV, DeadSpin and Defamer.

And now, I have a burning question for the blogisphere: Who/what would you like Apple Daily to animate next?

And sometimes the Apple eats you

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Life is a strange and wonderful journey, my friends. Who would have thought that I would get my new job thanks (probably) in part to Tiger Woods' peccadilloes? Remember the Taiwanese animated re-creation of the Tiger crash that got a ton of amused coverage in the states? Well, I am typing this in the office of Apple Daily as we speak! Since the Tiger slam video, Next Media Animation has hired me, trained me and started siccing me on some stories. What follows is my first baby -- a two-minute animated recap of the Conan O'Brien/Jay Leno flap. I've worked on other videos, but this is the first one I fully wrote and project-managed.

Our animation team is just...amazing. I cannot describe how sharp and creative and scarily FAST they are. And yes, I am biased. But I really think it's hilarious.

I am also biased in another way: GO TEAM COCO!

Gene and Angelica commands you to have a Merry Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:20:00 +0000

...or else.

I love you, NPR, but you're getting me down

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 04:34:00 +0000

As an NPR fan, this is just acutely disappointing to me. Ombudsman Alicia Shepard explains why NPR do not use the word 'torture' to describe waterboarding:

But no matter how many distinguished groups -- the International Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioners -- say waterboarding is torture, there are responsible people who say it is not. Former President Bush, former Vice President Cheney, their staff and their supporters obviously believed that waterboarding terrorism suspects was necessary to protect the nation's security.

It's nice that some good criticism of NPR is coming from another NPR show, the excellent and entertaining "On The Media":

BOB GARFIELD: NPR certainly has no difficulty calling murder “murder.” It doesn't call it “enhanced argumentation technique.” The terrorists call themselves “freedom fighters” but NPR calls acts of terror “acts of terror.”

ALICIA SHEPARD: Right.

BOB GARFIELD: In other respects, NPR hasn't taken a position against, you know, nouns. Why this one, in particular?

ALICIA SHEPARD: I think because it is a hotly debated topic...

In fact, Shepard has gone on three NPR-affiliated shows to explain herself -- OTM, Talk of the Nation, and Patt Morrison's show on KPCC. Even though I think she was not treated with kid glove on those shows, it does raise the question: why has she not yet gotten around to facing her most scathing critic, Glenn Greenwald?

Why so many female forensic anthropologists

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:39:00 +0000

I was listening to NPR the other day (actually, I'm just about always listening to NPR) when I heard a grisly but interesting story about a new 'body farm' in Texas where forensic scientists study how the human body de-composes by leaving them around the grounds and digging them up later. What struck me was that all the interviewees (a professor and three students) are female.

A little googling shows that this is not a fluke:

People are often surprised that in the UK, 98% of undergraduate students, approximately 80% of all postgraduate students, and nearly 90% of professional practitioners in the field of Forensic Anthropology are female. No-one knows why. There are some subjects that are deemed more attractive to women and forensic anthropology seems to be one of them. It may seem surprising, due to the harsh and often unsettling, never mind dangerous aspects of the work, but often the feminine touch is crucial. Forensic Anthropologists work in an area where science, politics and society meet, and they often require a delicate touch of diplomacy.

Now as we all know, there is also a huge phenomenon of crime fiction starring female forensic anthropologists. Kathy Reich's books is probably the best-known example. So what came first, the chicken or the egg? Did the fictionalization of female forensic anthropologists capture the imagination of young women? Or is there a broader compatibility (as the above quote suggests, between female attributes and forensic anthropology work? And why is the ratio so lop-sided? Are men discouraged from pursuing forensic anthropology now that it is a female-dominated field?

Racist Cola

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:31:00 +0000

Send in ten receipts for merchandise that will help you act like a racist douchbag

The latest Coca Cola ad campaign in Taiwan is just jaw-droppingly offensive. First, a garden-variety portrayal of Africans as simpletons who go "brrr" in a comically exaggerated manner when they crack into a coke.

You might think, well...OK, it's not really PC, so? For a market like Taiwan without much contact with Africans or much of an internal black population, is it really offensive? Let's face it, we all stereotype cultures/peoples distant from our own. Isn't it kind of unreasonable to import the kind of heightened awareness of race from the US and expect it to apply everywhere?

Then I saw this ad, which clearly and unambiguously crossed the line for me. It is of a local comedy celebrity called "Natto" (納豆), in blackface imitating one of the Africans in the ad. The ad campaign blog asked people to submit their own videos imitating the original ad in return for merchandise including a baseball cap with an afro on it.

This is not an isolated case of racist coke commercials around the world. Here's one from India, and one in Sweden.

In which I feel sorry for Ross Douhat

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:59:00 +0000

Ross Douthat wrote what I consider the best response to the latest mini-spate of books and articles bemoaning the death of romance as people become too sensible. In case you have been living in a mayonnaise jar, some lady named Cristina Nehring wrote a book called "A Vindication of Love" calling modern love a "poor and shrunken thing," you know, since feminism and stuff. In a somewhat similar vein, Sandra Tsing-loh got a piece for the Atlantic out of her divorce that is dripping with contempt for "the companionate marriage" and "male kitchen bitches."

Douthat points out that the Nehring and Tsing-loh's narratives obnoxiously projected the neurosis particular to their social background and personal situations onto society in general. And to illustrate his point, he mentioned a few spectacular example of romantic abandon in the news.

Maybe this reversal could start with some creative matchmaking across lines of class and politics. The dutiful, somewhat-boring husbands from Sandra Tsing Loh’s Los Angeles, for instance, sound like ideal soulmates for Kate Gosselin, the soon-to-be-single mother of eight.

And as for Cristina Nehring, who can’t live without being “derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love” — well, maybe someone should introduce her to Mark Sanford.

Now why am I feeling sorry for Ross Douhat for writing a funny and smart article I agreed with? Because so many of the comments in response his column were full of hostility and attacks that were all but non-sequitors. Ross is a conservative. His column made fun of Tsing-loh and Nehring as members of the liberal elite. The knee-jerk reaction is to fight back, it seems.

39. Ross misses a fundamental truth on the way to his weekly bashing of the Liberal Elite.

40. Conservative contortionism has reached new heights.

46. Those poor 'post-feminist' husbands. Because once again, it's feminism's fault. Are we feminists also to blame for turmoil in Iran, the coup in Honduras and the economic crisis to boot?

Do you know who is really dissing you, you liberal elite readers of the NY Times? Not Douthat, Nehring and Tsing-loh. Perhaps we just fail to perceive how grievous and misquided the insults are because it's coming from someone we perceive to be culturally 'one of us.' Women, listen to what Nehring is essentially saying...feminism killed romance and therefore is bad for women because we live for luuuuurve. Men...not only did Tsing-loh dismiss you as "kitchen bitches" for doing too much to help around the house, she dissed Cooks Illustrated. Which we all know is the bible of any self-respecting kitchen bitch of any gender or marital status.

What they are saying is not just a distortion of reality, but a reactionary's wet dream. People like Nehring and Tsing-loh are slapping us in the face with anti-feminist claptrap and because they call themselves feminists and are published in the Atlantic and the NY Times, we shrug.

Whoever calls them on their bullshit, conservative or liberal, is alright by me.

US Ex-pats for Healthcare Reform: Time to stand up and be counted

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:00:00 +0000

I have started a Facebook group called "US expats for Healthcare Reform".

Something struck me when reading through the comment section of Nicholas Kristof's recent column on healthcare reform -- so many of the comments were from American expats living in countries with Universal healthcare who were writing in with personal stories of how favorably "socialized medicine" compared to the healthcare they would have gotten/been able to afford back home. These are real people in different walks of life with first-hand experiences. They are eager to tell their stories, and I think their stories deserves to be heard widely by their fellow Americans who have not had the same frame of reference.

It looks like getting a decent healthcare system with universal coverage will continue to be a pitched battle for some time to come. And the most important arena for this battle is the court is the court of public opinion. I am enlisting all the expats or ex-expats or anyone who simply have experiences both US care and insurance and the care in a country with universal healthcare, like Sweden or Taiwan or Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea....the list goes on. Let's stand up and be counted, and get our stories together in one place that's accessible, and try to reach out to our fellow Americans.

If you have facebook, join the group and leave your story on the wall. If not, leave a comment at this post. Make sure you leave your name, the country where you got the care, some description of the kind of care you got and the cost and whether you were satisfied with it compared with the baseline of the coverage you got in the US. I have heard so many stories. Hell, I have a few of my own...but that's another post for another day.

US Expats for Healthcare Reform: because one day I might want to go back to my own country.

What is going on with healthcare reform?

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:15:00 +0000

Being in Taiwan and being distracted by other issues lately meant I've been out to lunch on US news and politics for a while. Thus when I started casually browsing the blogs for an leisurely early morning read I was shocked to see this item:

What’s the latest assessment from those closely monitoring health care reform? Prognosis negative.

“Health reform is, I think it fair to say, in danger right now,” wrote Ezra Klein this morning at the Washington Post.

“Attention fellow liberals who want health care reform,” wrote Jonathan Cohn yesterday at the New Republic. “You are in danger of losing the fight for universal health insurance. And it’s not only — or even primarily — because of the public plan.”

“Anyone else think the net result of health reform is going to be that insurance companies have even more political power?,” twittered Atrios this afternoon.

But...Barack Obama won! The Dems control both chambers of congress! Obama said healthcare reform is a priority and the polls show that the American people are behind him! We won! We won BIG, baby!

So how the...did we get to this place?!

The man once slated to head Barack Obama's health care system overhaul is now coming out against one of the chief components of that effort.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said on Wednesday that the Obama White House would likely have to scrap a federal public option for health insurance coverage if it wanted to get the votes needed to pass systematic change.

"We've come too far and gained too much momentum for our efforts to fail over disagreement on one single issue," the Senator and one-time HHS Secretary nominee said, according to ABC News.

Like Atrios said: "reform without a public option is actually likely to make things worse, pouring even more money into the corrupt insurance industry and giving them even more political power."

This is surreal. This is like taking a break with your team ahead by five runs only to find that they've blown their lead by the time you got back to the couch with the popcorn. Or coming home to find that everyone else in the household has been turned into zombies.

NonononononoonoNOOOO!

Taiwanese music videos of the damned

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:03:00 +0000

I've noticed a strange phenomenon in Taiwanese music video...in a disturbingly high number of the videos for love ballads ends with the heroine dying in a number of heart-rending and inexplicable ways. Bloodless car-crashes and wasting diseases reminiscent of consumption are popular exit strategies. Sometimes, the boy dies. But that's much rarer. Anyhow, I've been itching to test out this sweet free subtitling software called Jubler. What could make more sense than to waste a couple of hours downloading Jubler, learning how to use it, and then subtitling one of the sickest examples of the "She Dies" genre of Taiwanese music videos in English and sharing it with the world?

Wait, I have to be up in three hours to travel to Yilan and paddle a dragonboat? *headdesk*

Oh, make sure the subtitles are on when you watch it in Youtube, of course.

Why Smart Women are Unattractive

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:06:00 +0000

It's often said that "smart women are unattractive." Now I know why.

I recently came across Paul Graham's "Why Nerds are Unpopular" essay and, together with a discussion I had with some of my geek-ette friends about the lack of normal-looking women on the screen, a light-bulb suddenly went off in my head. It was total internet kismet, where two seemingly disparate pieces of information traveled to me from all over the world as electrical impulses and locked like adjacent puzzle pieces in my brain.

For those who haven't read the essay, Graham posits that "nerds are unpopular because they have other things to think about." They don't work hard enough at being popular because it simply takes up too much mental RAM. He also theorizes that American high schools are such cruel social ecosystems not because kids are inherently nasty or teenagers are inherently crazy but that the typical American high-school is basically a holding pen divorced from reality. If you haven't yet, Read it..

I copy and pasted the essay into Word and made essentially just three substitutions -- "smartgirls" for "nerds" (and "smart kids"), "unattractive" for "unpopular" (and "attractive" for "popular"), and "femininity" for "school". If you'd indulge me and think of femininity not as a state of being but an actual place, smooth over some of the bumps and generally carry the metaphor through in your mind, it is stunning how much of the essay still made sense. (I've posted the entire searched-and-replaced text at the foot of this blogpost)

Some totally unedited clips from the search-and-replaced version:

"Smartgirls serve two masters. They want to be attractive, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And attractiveity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary femininity."

"So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in attractiveity, why are smartgirls so consistently unattractive? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be attractive.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unattractive in femininity makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be attractive would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be attractive.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in femininity, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things."
Read more...

One particular aspect of the essay that really carried well in the search-and-replaced version is Graham's description of popularity as something that is cruel and twisted because it is a hierarchy that emerged out of a vacuum. It is form that emerged without function. It is devoid of connection to genuinely useful qualities that get stuff done in the real world, and as it is hierarchy that exists to be hierarchical, it is a zero-sum game. Just as not everybody could be popular, not everybody could be attractive. The way to claw your way up this kind of hierarchy is to be as conformist to the ideal as possible while pushing somebody else down. If a pill was invented tomorrow that will make all women instantly size zeros, the goalposts will shift to something else that is difficult to attain.

"Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that 'no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.' I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American femininity kids work at attractiveity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being attractive every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists."

Now that I'm older and I can look at things a bit more objectively, I can see that I was not dealt a bad deck of cards, looks wise, by genetics. In fact, my mother was always especially anguished by the fact that I could be pretty if only I tried. If I bothered. Made some minimal efforts to be acceptable.

"The main reason smartgirls are unattractive is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable."

"Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we smartgirls didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others."

One of the thing I find myself doing more and more is wearing makeup not just for special occasion, but during workdays as well. It was a hefty initial investment in terms of learning how to do this in a way that is becoming. But now, it is perhaps an extra 10 minutes before I head out the door in the morning and an extra five minute at night taking it off. I don't like it because I can't touch my face and the make-up remover always hurts my eyes, but it's OK. So why do I do it? Pure behaviorism. People are nicer to me when I look prettier. They think more highly of me. But do you know what's scary? When everybody starts doing that, then it's no longer enough. Then it becomes the new bare minimum. That's the way it is in some offices...you don't go in to work bare faced. There's no version of professional attire that doesn't involve tricky clothing items like tights and heels. As an individual woman, I can become more attractive. With a little more effort, I can move up the chain. As women, we are collectively spinning the wheels like a hamster in a cage.

"A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American femininity, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison."

The truly depressing thing about this exercise is when it breaks down. Graham talks encouragingly about how nerds find that their lives get better as they enter college and then the real world. The following quote is the unaltered original:

"Few nerds can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of attractive kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after."

Just wait it out, Graham advised. The world you live in is a bubble that is cruel and stupid and pointless. But one day you'll graduate from high school and life will get better. But...I don't get to graduate from being a girl. I am a permanent resident in this holding pen from reality where my Dad wanted me to lose weight so badly he told me once he wished I would develop anorexia ("just mild anorexia."). I don't get to move on from a cruel and stupid world where where few films pass the Mo Movie Measure (movies that pass have (a) least two female characters, (b) who talk to each other and (c) about something other than a man). Heck, I don't even want to live in a world where there is a need for a Mo Movie Measure.

I was always an lousy dieter, even though I would try to lose weight all the time (my mom started telling me aged 8 to start watching my weight). My size would fluctuate according to how active I was, but not (except for the briefest periods) according to how little I tried to eat. I've been frustrated, I've been disgusted with myself, I've been depressed about it (esp. since getting back to Taiwan), I've been resigned (my new year's resolution was not to diet because I always fail to lose the weight anyhow.)

But it's not until now that I feel like I'm connected all the dots. As incredible as it seem...I didn't want to be thin. Not enough to give up food, which is a continual source of joy in my life. I didn't want to be chic and well-put-together all the time...because I'm more comfortable in jeans and sneakers.

Don't get me wrong. I love being a girly girl. I love dressing up for a party.

I weep to think of all the human ingenuity and effort and and productivity lost over a big shell game played with fashion magazines and anti-aging creams. They say that women aren't as competitive as men. But oh we are. We're just competitive over the one thing that we're told over and over again through so many different mediums is the only thing that makes us matter -- what we look like.

Full text: Why Smart Women are Unattractive

Why smartgirls are unattractive
Orignally'Why nerds are unpopular'

When we were in junior high school, my friend Frank and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to attractiveity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same attractiveity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how attractive everyone else was, including us.

My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the attractiveity landscape.

I know a lot of people who were smart girls in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being attractive. Being smart seems to make you unattractive.

Why? To someone in femininity now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary femininity. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary femininity, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smartgirls make themselves attractive? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how attractiveity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smartgirls are unattractive because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them attractive. I wish. If the other kids in junior high femininity envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the femininitys I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in attractiveity, why are smartgirls so consistently unattractive? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be attractive.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unattractive in femininity makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be attractive would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be attractive.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in femininity, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most attractive kid in femininity, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.

Much as they suffer from their unattractiveity, I don't think many smartgirls would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Smartgirls serve two masters. They want to be attractive, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And attractiveity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary femininity.

Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American femininity kids work at attractiveity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being attractive every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't consciously dress to be attractive. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more attractive.

Smartgirls don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be attractive. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, attractive isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.

The main reason smartgirls are unattractive is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

Even if smartgirls cared as much as other kids about attractiveity, being attractive would be more work for them. The attractive kids learned to be attractive, and to want to be attractive, the same way the smartgirls learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the smartgirls were being trained to get the right answers, the attractive kids were being trained to please.

So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American femininity, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smartgirls can spare the attention that attractiveity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of attractive kids, they'll tend to become smartgirls. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around attractiveity than before or after.

Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary femininity, but this isn't their whole life, as it later becomes.

Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in femininity. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

Smartgirls would find their unattractiveity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unattractive in femininity is to be actively persecuted.

Why? Once again, anyone currently in femininity might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don't normally persecute smartgirls. Why do teenage kids do it?

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture smartgirls for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Another reason kids persecute smartgirls is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

But I think the main reason other kids persecute smartgirls is that it's part of the mechanism of attractiveity. Attractiveity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more attractive, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other attractive people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.

If it's any consolation to the smartgirls, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Because they're at the bottom of the scale, smartgirls are a safe target for the entire femininity. If I remember correctly, the most attractive kids don't persecute smartgirls; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.

The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution of attractiveity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear. The least attractive group is quite small. (I believe we were the only D table in our cafeteria map.) So there are more people who want to pick on smartgirls than there are smartgirls.

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unattractive kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high femininity she liked smartgirls, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unattractiveity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on smartgirls will still ostracize them in self-defense.

It's no wonder, then, that smartgirls tend to be unhappy in middle femininity and high femininity. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for attractiveity, and since attractiveity resembles a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole femininity. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.

For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new and harsh, and the specialization that would later gradually separate the smarter kids had barely begun. Nearly everyone I've talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.

In our femininity it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteen for me. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the femininity bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.

It didn't have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the time was that she was surprised. You mean she doesn't know the kind of things they say to one another? You mean this isn't normal?

It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.

Public femininity teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the femininitys I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.

Why is the real world more hospitable to smartgirls? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high femininity, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what femininity, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where smartgirls show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, smartgirls collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, smartgirls deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor.

As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we smartgirls didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle femininity. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it's good for smartgirls to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the smartgirls don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high femininity, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just femininity, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the femininitys, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of femininitys is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.

Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the smartgirls. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.

Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.

I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

When I was in femininity, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between femininitywork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at femininity on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.

What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many femininitys practically do stop there. The stated purpose of femininitys is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most femininitys do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smartgirls. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.

In my high femininity French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

There are certainly great public femininity teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn't fix the system.

In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most femininitys is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a attractiveity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American femininitys. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.

When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.

Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It's kill or be killed.

This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary femininitys. And it happens because these femininitys have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, and in fact didn't realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of femininity life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.

The mediocrity of American public femininitys has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

Like many smartgirls, probably, it was years after high femininity before I could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then. And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.

The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.

Smartgirls aren't the only losers in the attractiveity rat race. Smartgirls are unattractive because they're distracted. There are other kids who deliberately opt out because they're so disgusted with the whole process.

Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the femininitys I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks."

Freaks and smartgirls were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.

They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.

I'm not claiming that bad femininitys are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my femininity at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.

Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem.

The real problem is the emptiness of femininity life. We won't see solutions till adults realize that. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves smartgirls in femininity. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as you were? I wouldn't. Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the current system. It has come about mostly by default.

Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for femininity plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can.

Smartgirls still in femininity should not hold their breath. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won't be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in smartgirls' lives is probably going to have to come from the smartgirls themselves.

Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Smartgirls aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been smartgirls in high femininity.

It's important for smartgirls to realize, too, that femininity is not life. Femininity is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both.

In which I reveal myself to be an embarrassing fangirl

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:40:00 +0000

Inspired by Gene (my husband and an excellent digital artist), I bought a tablet for my computer the other day. Then I downloaded Gimp, which is kinda like photoshop but free, and started messing around.

Can you guess what I decided to work on?

The meltingly delicious cake of hate

noreply@blogger.com (Angelica) — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 04:38:00 +0000

I woke up this morning with the worst craving for pound cake. Not just any pound cake. Anita Bryant's pound cake. "Anita Bryant?!?," you say, "you mean that hateful homophobic hag who destroyed her career hawking orange juice by being a hateful homophobic hag?" Yeah, that one. Of course, when I first discovered the recipe in a cookbook years and years ago, I had no idea about any of that. I just made it and it was the best, meltiest, most flavorful and fine-crumbed pound cake I've ever had. It was way more work than any other pound cake recipe. You had to whip the egg whites and then fold it in the stiff batter and add cream. There is also the mysterious but soothing presence of mace. Actually, I didn't really know about Bryant's non-culinary activities until relatively recently. All I could think about when I read her wikipedia entry was "this is the pound cake lady? Srsly?"

I actually no longer have that cookbook, "Beat this" by Ann Hodgeman. But thanks to the wonders of the internets, I was able to dig up the recipe, with the original commentary that I read in the cookbook I had. It makes a lot more sense now: "It was written back in Anita's Florida Orange Juice days, before all the Dade County stuff..."

If you can bring yourself to overcome the provenance of this recipe, I do highly recommend Anita Bryant's Pound Cake. Call it the hateful hag cake if you like. I would go and make it right now if my oven here in Taipei isn't a glorified toaster.

Ingredients

2-2/3 cups sugar
8 medium eggs, separated, at room temperature, or 7 large eggs
1 pound (4 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 teaspoon salt
3-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cup light cream or half-and-half
1/2 teaspoon mace
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preparation
Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Butter and flour two 9-x-5-inch loaf pans.
Measure out 6 level tablespoons sugar into a cup or bowl. Beat the egg whites until they begin to form peaks; then gradually beat in the 6 tablespoons sugar. Place this sort-of meringue in the refrigerator until you need it.
In a large bowl, cream the butter well. Gradually beat in the rest of the sugar and the salt; then beat in the egg yolks, two at a time.
Add the flour and the cream alternately to the butter mixture, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients. Add the mace. Whip until the batter is as light as possible, about 10 minutes at medium speed. Then fold in the egg-white mixture and the vanilla. You'll feel as if you're trying to fold egg whites into cement, but persevere.
Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pans. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, or just until a cake tester stuck in the middle of the cake comes out clean. Cool on a rack for 15 minutes; then invert onto the rack and re-invert onto another rack so the cake will cool right-side-up.
"It should fall 1 inch after taken from oven," says Anita in the book. "This gives desired waxy texture."

Yield Makes two 9-x-5-inch pound cakes

Panda maulings on the rise

noreply@blogger.com (Brock) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 20:59:00 +0000

If you climb over a two-meter barrier into a panda enclosure, because they're cute and you want to cuddle them, you deserve what you get. From the BBC:

A man has been attacked by a panda at a park in southern China, after he climbed into its enclosure hoping to cuddle the creature.

The 20-year-old student had ignored warning signs and scaled a two-metre (6.5ft) barrier to get into the pen.

State media say the panda bit him on his arms and legs, and he had to be rescued by the animal's keepers.

"Yang Yang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him," he told Xinhua from his hospital bed.

Populism defined

noreply@blogger.com (Brock) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 04:11:00 +0000

Andrew Sabl at the RBC offers up a characterization of populism.

But in fact, populism — wherever it has existed, though it's much stronger and louder in the U.S. than in, say, Western Europe — is, above all, producerism. It's grounded in a moral distinction between those who do Real Work (agricultural, or, grudgingly, urban but physical) and those who use their abstract intelligence to exploit the real workers through useless tasks like finance or politics. As even its scholarly defenders note, populism is, down to its roots, anti-elitist, anti-intellectual, backwards — looking, xenophobic, and protectionist — and if some populists are these things to only a mild degree, it's because they're only moderate populists. (See Kazin's Populist Persuasion or Lasch's True and Only Heaven, or, most scholarly though alas out of print, Ionescu and Gellner's Populism.) It's all about rewarding those alleged to be honest and virtuous. Populism isn't quite as opposed to equity as it is to efficiency, but it's a close call.