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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • I can corroborate that it gets crazy even in courses expecting high literacy. I had the painful experience of teaching a 3rd year course in communication studies that was part of the media production stream. It required writing preproduction documentation and a script. There were a lot of questionable attempts but there’s always a range of interest and skill, right? One student, and let me remind you this is third year at a university, I called into office hours. I’m a fan of poetry, so I just had to be sure that she wasn’t cleverly lampooning Gertrude Stein in some ironic way. Sadly, no, she just had no fucking clue how to write ANYTHING coherent. Amazing.





  • This is laughable with respect to the far right in BC, who are masquerading as small-c conservatives.

    The discourse of outrage that’s promulgated throughout social media is full of unsourced, proven lies. How do we know? Because they get airtime and volume, and are examined and debunked.

    In traditional media, the arguments for the unambiguous bullshit that gets aired are clearly founded in emotional, unscientific rhetoric, and mouthpieces for this bullshit are confronted and then immediately dissemble into a related issue backed by equally unsubstantiated emotional bullshit.

    Note that I am using the dictionary definition of bullshit here.

    Inevitably, when people complain about bullshit that is rather obviously propaganda built for oligarchism but hiding behind populism, some toady pops up to claim that true objectivity should put the opposing viewpoints on equal footing, and those that were educationally deprived of critical thinking skills will applaud.


  • Various external forms of ratfuckery from Alberta culture leaking into the ripe compost of BC bigotry : KlownKonvoy fans running rallies, the Take Back Alberta crowd running various astroturfing schemes, funding flowing into rural communities for campaigning via Harper-derived organizations, and as one NDP campaigner pointed out, intense “microtargeting” in social media in a divide-and-conquer approach which was successful.

    People are unhappy about the economy and are blaming local conditions; combined with anti-Trudeau tribalism it’s all very emotional and truth doesn’t mean anything.