3/5ths Compromise

I've been reading a lot about social studies lately, because I'm in the middle of a class about social studies, and reading things like The Young People's Guide to American History by Howard Zinn, and trying to think critically about race.

The 3/5ths Compromise was a compromise between the North and the South over how to measure the population of slave states in order to decide how many representatives those states would get to the senate. Northern States felt slaves shouldn't be counted: they couldn't vote, after all, so counting them would ultimately increase the voice of the whites that were capable of voting. Southerners felt they should get the full count of slaves, since they were part of the population of the state.

Ultimately they decided to compromise slightly in favor of the South, meeting just slightly right of halfway between the two positions. In 1787, when the Compromise was passed, each Congressman represented about 34,000 people and there were about 700,000 slaves in the US, so slave states basically used slaves to increase the voice of their voting white men by an additional ~12 votes. In South Carolina, where slaves represented about 51% of the population, 60,000 white men found themselves represented 207,000 people with their votes.

A modern criticism of the Compromise seems to commonly hold that its framers viewed black people as 3/5ths of a person, and that THAT is monstrous. But it was white slave owners that were arguing that slaves counted as a person, purely for their own political benefit, while white non-slave-owners argued that they should count as zero... again, for their own benefit.. Nobody in this story is a hero, but the side I find myself agreeing with is also the side that would have counted black people as zero.

Which is a weird opinion to find myself having, after a critical examination of the facts.

Questions and Thoughts for 1/23 Readings

Munslow

1) Instead of beginning with the past, we should begin with the representation. Does this mean recognizing the inherent unreliability of contemporary narratives in sharing the "true events" of history, and should bear in mind that history, ultimately, is written by writers?
2) History is written by the winners.
3)

A) I like the interpretation of history as a class of literature. Given how difficulty it is for us to untangle what actually happened with things we actually experienced, delegitimizing history as being things that "actually happened" is pretty awesome.

Past Present and Future Conceptions of Adolescence
Nancy Lesko

1) Is the colonialist/ageist comparison valid, or are there just parallels that allow for likening two things, like apples and red spheroids? Does the savages as children / children as savages paradigm actually cut both ways? How is a teen distinct from a child for these purposes?
2)What the heck does she mean when she talks about teens trapped in time?  The abstract idea of teens is trapped in time because teen necessarily describes a series of ages. But the transitional barrier between "child" and "adult" appears nebulous and indeed has mutated somewhat since the publication of this paper.

3)

A) The expansion of dependency continues to happen as the necessary access to adulthood becomes more complicated: deeper and more complicated webs of accreditation is necessary to wield ever shrinking pools of qualification.

This appears to be an economic quality as well as a colonial conspiracy: a growing population overwhelmingly seeking high powered slots.

Class Struggle in the Avatar: Legend of Korra

The Equalists vs. Benders social conflict growing in Avatar: Legend of Korra reflects a pretty big question I had with Avatar the Last Airbender: how benders commanded no special apparent social standing in spite of their massive natural advantages. AtLA was very good at establishing that bending was a practical art and a form of combat. These powers are even casually introduced, with waterbending used for fishing, airbending used for flight (obviously) and earthbending used to (get this) deliver mail. They're useful and practical and they fit into the whole world, and it's easy to think that somebody who can move tons and tons of earth or water  with a gesture would reap benefits from the natural consequences of their inborne abilities. A master earthbender could gather a lot of wealth by doing in seconds what mundane people would need years to do, and even if no privilege is accorded, there has to be some wealth that accumulates, and all wealth eventually becomes privilege.

Anyway, that divide doesn't happen at all in AtLA, but it shows up centrally in LoK. Non-benders suffer in a million ways. The police are benders and answer to a council of benders that--even if they're elected--appear to simply represent the four bending nations, rather than any sort of geographic or culturally distinct group within Republic City. All the crime we see except for expressly Equalist activities are performed by benders. As Equalist activity begins to spread in the city, the council responds by cracking down on non-benders and five minutes in one episode is the closest we get to a relatable non-benders other than Asami.

It's hard to sympathize with benders, too. Amon's little junta somehow goes off without (apparently) killing anybody at all, but every time a bender loses their bending everybody reacts like their were brutally murdered and their corpse desecrated in the street. I understand that it must be culturally appalling, like a roving female circumcision gang or something, but at the same time the bulk of the Avatar's world are non-benders who seem to survive just fine except for all the cultural oppression they suffer at the hands of benders.

The show even takes some effort to sort of hide the inequality they wrote into their own script: rather than an angry mob of non-benders sympathetic to Amon's cause, aggressive acts by Equalists are with like one exception carried out by  uniformed Equalist footsoldiers. The entire thing is framed as a squaring-off between the plucky hero and a military force, but the plucky hero is a tool of the establishment looking to maintain the status quo. Think about that for a minute. Realistically the Equalists look like a popular movement--all those footsoldiers aren't professional soldiers, they're freedom fighters.

Korra kind of sucks as the avatar, too. She is briefly faced with the reality that benders have privilege and threatens to punch the guy who tells her. Watching one episode, her rage for the injustice of imprisoning non-benders is there, but it doesn't look like she'll do much until her bender friends are arrested, too.

Cultural Intolerance

Recently I was accused of being intolerant of "Arab culture" on the basis that I believed that honor killings are wrong. Typically speaking, an honor-killing means murdering a young woman who violates a cultural taboo, such as wearing forbidden clothing or talking to a boy from outside her family. They're apparently very common in the Middle East and there is a fear that they're becoming more prevalent amongst the Middle Eastern diaspora.

I was surprised at the allegation, and immediately had to analyze it. Now, the offenses that typically lead to a woman being targeted for death are not just commonplace, they're almost natural. Expected. Part of healthy social immersion. Some of the "crimes" didn't just seem out-of-place, but the seemed patently unfair. I remember a news report from my childhood where a woman was raped and her family retaliated by killing her. One man explained simply: she shouldn't have been raped, and if she was raped, it's her fault.

The victims are exclusively female; because the rules are gender dimorphic, it is impossible for a man to commit a crime with an honor-killing as its sentence. That was offensive to my sensibilities right out, and I was given pause. Of course I'm going to disagree with someone being punished for something I consider to be a normal human activity, but then, I'm also going to insist that someone doing something I consider to be a crime be punished.

In one breath, I'm accusing the woman of being innocent and the killer of a crime. What they consider execution and thus an act of justice, I consider a murder. Now, it helps that I believe all forms of execution to be murder and that only the most exigent of circumstances could possibly pardon any form of killing but defense of the self and the explicit and immediate defense of others.

But what makes my cultural assumption (that killing a child for talking to a boy is wrong) any more accurate than the assumption that not worshiping Jesus is wrong? How do I weigh my personal intolerance against a broader scope of intolerances? The answer came in the best way I could have hoped for: an evolving liberal culture that frowns on honor-killings. That way, I can dismiss the honor-killing culture as a negative offshoot, a rotten branch of individuals to be weighed against the virtuous culture that I happen to agree with.

But at the end of the day, I decided that I just had to weigh the facts and decide when it's okay for me to be intolerant. This is one of those times.

Christmas Horror

I was thinking of Halloween scares. Around Halloween, everybody has the same ideas. Werewolves and zombies and mummies, oh my! Halloween things aren't terribly scary because they're known quantities. You can rattle off a number of facts about any of them.

People fear the unknown and the unexpected. Which brings me to what actually got me thinking about Halloween the day after Christmas: Santa Claus. I owned an animatronic Santa Class that would pretend to read from a book while the tape deck in his grandfather clock played. The tape is replaceable: you can install whichever tape you want.

Recording his regular tape with a little extra screaming would be a great Halloween trick. A room in a Haunted House, decked out in complete Christmas gear, but with some disturbing juxtapositions. Plus, it ruins Christmas. Good times!

How To Write A Comedy Article, According to Someone Who has Never Written Comedy

So you want to write a comedy article? Break into the glamorous lifestyle of an internet comedy writer, maybe to impress the ladies, maybe to make a little scratch? Holy shit, that's actually a good idea. I mean, seriously, ladies love funny guys, right? And nothing beats a little scratch. Like, right between the shoulder blades. Well, as long as we're talking about what a great idea it is

Brainstorming

When you're looking for something to write about, high school English teachers, laid-back college professors, and Robert Brockway all recommend the same thing. Write what you know. Find something you know a lot about, that you care about, and write the shit out of it. That's great, and ordinarily I'd agree, but writing is a lot of work. Do you really want to taint something you love, something that fills the dreary hours on your endless slog towards your inevitable death, by associating it with the self-loathing all forms of employment create? By turning this beautiful, pure thing into a job? No way, man, fuck no. So you have to write about something you hate. That's the only way to ensure you never associate the pleasure of thinking about Pokemon with the agony of your editor burning you with cigars for not handing in your article on the mating habits of Pikachu on time. Unless you're into that, I guess, but I don't think that guy is going to appreciate you getting off on his cigar burns. Plus, if you want somebody to listen to you on the Internet, hating everything they love is probably the best way, and any press is good press, right?

Research

Why do you have to do research, again? I thought I told you to write about something you hate. How can you hate something if you haven't already researched it properly? To truly hate something, you should know everything about it, so you can properly appreciate how it's terrible and inferior to whatever it is you love. Well, I suppose if you really have to write about something, and you think research is absolutely necessary, I would recommend a library, I guess? You might remember them from grade school, those fear-scented places where elderly women would extort your allowance because you supposedly didn't return your books on time, even though they said they were "Free, to take home and everything." Don't go to your grade school library, though. You're writing Internet Comedy and I'm pretty sure it's illegal to smell like a brewery on school grounds. No, you'll have to go to the public library. If you don't know where it is, I'd recommend following a homeless guy that looks like he needs to go to the bathroom.

Libraries: They're like if Wikipedia and a music festival port-a-potty had a baby.

Haha, holy shit, you actually followed a homeless man? He probably went down to the trainyard to eat beans over a burning oil barrel or something, right? I'm pretty sure that's what homeless guys do. Wait, do they even have trainyards still? Is that a thing? Just a sec, lemme Google the nearest trainyard.

Oh! Shit, right, Google. If you want to do research, Google is your guy. They have everything on there. You probably could have just gone on there right away, instead of following a penniless indigent down to his bean-eatin' hole.

Boners
You knew it was coming to this. You're writing a comedy article, not an article for National Geographic. Boners are the wellspring of comedy, and any aspiring comedy author should be able to appreciate them and manipulate any paragraph to accommodate at least one reference to them. In fact, truly talented writers will spend anywhere between three and six hours just manipulating paragraphs every day. Talk about dedication. Also, balls. My sources tell me there is nothing funnier than describing something with an apt testicle metaphor, so try to work them in too. For maximum effect, I find that describing them as being dangerously swollen and also made from some sort of industrial metal works nicely.

Writing

This is easily the least important part of writing a comedy article. Having selected a topic you hate, and learned all the possible reasons to hate it, draft up an outline. It doesn't have to be complex. Mine was just a drawing of a writer I made with some spilled scotch on the back of my riding lawnmower. Once your outline is finished, work from it directly and don't ever change it, whatever you do. This is your baby, and changing it is a sign of weakness and also possibly sobriety, and you didn't write this article while drinking scotch on the back of a riding lawnmower to look like a sober weakling, did you? Plus, changing things is a lot of work, and I don't think anybody got into writing to do a lot of work.
Next, you bring living, breathing sentences into the world. Every single word is like a baby. No, wait, I said "sentence", so I guess a word is like... an arm or something? Anyway, it's a part of a baby, that you're birthing. It's your art. Your art-baby. Remember to read your outline while you're doing it, so you know what to do next. You better do it fast because scotch evaporates really fast and you're going to be thirsty before you finish.

Editing and Spellchecking

It took about six hours of repeating "editing and spellchecking" while rubbing my chin pensively in the doorway at Bookworld, but eventually I learned that this is "the process of correcting and revising a text", and that it is possible to pensively rub a beard right off. Also, that clerks at Bookworld will do anything to get someone with a bleeding chin-wound out of their doorway. And I mean anything. Anyway, I'm pretty sure they have people for this. People whose entire job, in fact, is to edit things. So make sure to make a ton of spelling mistakes and stuff. These people depend on writers like us to make mistakes for them to correct. Now that I know about this, I've gone back and peppered my article with spelling and grammar errors, just to let them know I care. A couple well-plaecd spelling errors should ingratiate you with these editor guys, and they'll be so grateful they'll definitely ensure that your work gets published.

Enjoying your Internet Fame

Now that you've been published by a reputable vendor of Internet Comedy, it's your job to take that check for $50 and turn it into more comedy. Many creators may recommend that the surest paths to Internet comedy are alcohol and unique pornography, but that's too passe. Some fringe guys might recommend upping the ante with hard drugs and anonymous sex, but anyone can do those. You want to be a unique, shining star, right? I would recommend upright sobriety and clean living. Shave every day, and only have sex in the missionary position. Trust me.