Good news, everyone! The good folks on the RedditorOfTheDay subreddit picked our friend AnnArchist to be Redditor of the Day yesterday. He filled out a little questionnaire for the RedditorOfTheDay folks listing all sorts of fun facts about himself.
In addition to moderating the Men’s Rights subreddit and posting hilarious videos of women getting beaten up to the beatingwomen subreddit, AnnArchist (who is a dude, despite the name) also enjoys: Skyrim, bass fishing, sports talk radio, chicken tacos, and football!
His biggest pet peeve:
People who want to interfere with other people’s happiness.
His biggest worry about Reddit?
I just hope the community doesn’t grow so quickly that we lose the quality debate and discussion that has kept many of the users around reddit for a long time.
Over on ShitRedditSays, fxexular has helpfully catalogued some of AnnArchist’s contribution to the “quality debate and discussion.” Like his considered opinion on one female judge:
I hope someone kills her.
And his opinion of an alleged false rape accuser:
I hope she was harassed. Fuck I hope her house was firebombed. Lets be clear, I really will applaud anyone who does anything to her, be it slash her tires or slash her throat.
You can find even more of these charming nuggets in my post about him here.
In his answers to the RedditorOfTheDay questionnaire, AnnArchist reveals himself to be a truly sensitive soul. Here, he shares a painful moment from his past:
When I was a senior in HS and when my friend and I saw … the plane fly into the twin towers our first reaction was laughter rather than OMG thats a tragedy. Yea, we’re fucked up. I TPed my High School that night. I’m a horrible person.
Oh, and did I mention that he’s the creator, sole moderator, and basically the only contributor to the NSFW4 subreddit, devoted to posting pictures and videos too horrific and offensive to post anywhere else on Reddit?
Godspeed, AnnArchist! Thank you for making the world a better place!
NOTE: This post is almost entirely made up of sarcasm.
I like this point because it really illustrates that most people gather information for functional purposes rather than “general knowledge” or whatever. By and large we learn the minimal amount needed to “get by”– this is why there are horrifying stats about people not knowing the earth goes around the sun or neighboring countries on a map or whatever. In order to do the vast majority of human things (find food, have a shelter over your head, follow basic social norms for your community, find a mate, etc.) you don’t need that information. The first principle of figuring out what information any organism picks up from the environment and how they use it to decide things is pretty much this: animals are fucking lazy. And as you said, what counts as the appropriate information for surviving in society changes over time: carpenters don’t have to know how to use a bazillion hand tools anymore, most people don’t need to know how to tend a vegetable farm or how to prepare flour from wheat, being able to sew a man’s shirt isn’t a sign of being a marriageable woman, etc. And people from earlier eras would be totally confused by the huge number of electronic doodads we interface with to be able to do basic things like communicate and make purchases.
So by and large the information we know now is merely different information. If people know less practical information now, it’s only because modern society’s infrastructure works in such a complex, distributed sort of way that any one individual doesn’t need to know the whole process to make or do something. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, that’s just the way our very pragmatic brains work. I wouldn’t be surprised though that the average person does know more factual stuff & is a slightly better critical thinker though, because those skills are expected now in order to not look like a total doofus in front of everyone (which is a very important thing), and modern people have to navigate various kinds of media and sheer amounts of information that people from earlier eras didn’t.
I completely agree with you there, Ithiliana. It seems to me that if someone says that the classics improve people’s morality, it is a clear sign that they have not read enough of the classics. 🙂
This is particularly hilarious for me, because my area of obsession is Greece and Rome, and people are continually like “Classics! Good for you, but rather boring!” and then are surprised to discover all the buttfucking that is involved.
PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth: Last of the Mohicans is not even two hundred years old. Give it some time. 🙂
I understand that I’m speaking from a privileged first world perspective. But as I mentioned previously, much of the world has a broader access to basic education, particularly for groups such as African Americans here in the United States, women, etc. than in previous years. In the United States in the 19th century, 80% of African Americans were illiterate (according to a brief glance at wiki).
But critical thinking is a skill that is taught. So again I go back to education and the fact that it’s accessible to more people than in previous centuries (again, in many parts of the world).
I wholeheartedly agree that public education in this country is under attack by folks who would prefer their cogs to be less able to think critical and to question authority.
My high school Shakespeare studies definitely didn’t shy away from all of the naughty wordplay, and as I understand it, neither did my mom’s 30 years earlier. Though we never discussed whether Mercutio was queer.
“My high school Shakespeare studies definitely didn’t shy away from all of the naughty wordplay, and as I understand it, neither did my mom’s 30 years earlier. Though we never discussed whether Mercutio was queer.”
We discussed such! And iago. A lot. Heh. This is more “Drama club kids” than a particular class, but it was the same teachers so it all blends together. Anyway, my drama history/ shakespeare/ regular drama teacher hated bowdlerizing things for the kids, in general. I’ve loved Shakes since I was a kid and already knew why most of the dirty bits were dirty, though. Which is probably one of the reasons that teacher loved me. Heh.
my experience with shakespeare in high school was that they force you to analyze the text to bits and afterwards ‘reward’ you with the movie version, which to me seems totally backwards. they’re plays! they’re meant to be seen and enjoyed! i dont understand how you can appreciate lear (and to be fair, i don’t care much for lear) without understanding the difficulties of portraying the character, and that almost everyone who tries is going to fail.
shit, reading it first is probably what’s given generations of people the misapprehension that midsummer is actually watchable.
Indeed not. Few would question the stature of Tom Jones as a major work of English literature, but it’s first and foremost a deliciously saucy romp – and a score-settling romp at that, since Henry Fielding himself keeps popping up to abuse some long-forgotten rival or critic.
And Fielding only turned to the novel in the first place after theater censorship was introduced in 1737 – as a direct result of his own satirical plays, which openly mocked the governments and leading politicians of the day.
I wholeheartedly agree that public education in this country is under attack by folks who would prefer their cogs to be less able to think critical and to question authority.”
I think a lot of public education focused on “turning farmers into factory workers” as a model in the late nineteenth and on through the twentieth century… And I thik the structure of that model is still there. So… I think that it’s always been this tug of war between business and power and media interests and education that fits people for independent thought and action, and I think it’s a built-in war, not a conspiracy, but a tension and dysfunction at the heart of the system. . And we’ve got a lot to do to find the solution. I recommend Alfie Kohns and John Taylor Gatto’s work on the subject, especially.
Intriguingly, my school library had an amusingly bowdlerized version of The Decameron where the rude bits were in French.
Presumably, the assumption was that if you knew French, you were probably well along the road to terminal depravity anyway, and so there was little danger of serious corruption – but of course the net result of this is to highlight precisely which bits were considered unacceptable. It was particularly entertaining when it would slip into French for just one or two sentences.
(I have no idea why it was in French rather than the original Italian – maybe the English translator was working from a French translation?)
I’m gonna sound like a pretentious bragging brat for saying I was a chronically truant buyer of classics and reader of such along with comic books, aren’t I? Well I WAS!
Wetherby – Frenchified Decameron for the AWESOME!
@zhinxy: Sometimes my school was a little weird about teh gays. It had a very liberal student body (especially in my particular program), and tended to attract liberal staff. But some things, particularly those things associated with non-cis, non-straight gender and sexual identities, were fairly taboo. And yet, bowdlerization was frowned upon in other ways, and we tended to approach a lot of literature quite straightforwardly. Maybe it’s an Alberta thing? In any case it was a stupid thing.
As it happens, the teacher who I had when I was studying Romeo and Juliet in grade 11 was also my teacher in grades 9 and 12. She was an out cross-dressing lesbian, and certainly none of her students were confused about it. But when we were in grade 9, she was only permitted to term “partner” if she ever brought up her girlfriend, and couldn’t use any pronouns that would suggest her partner was female. Can’t let 14-year-olds know about the existence of lesbians!
I guess going to high school makes you mature enough to handle such shocking things as “sometimes women fall in love with women,” because she didn’t have to censor herself when we were older.
Viscaria: i’m glad to hear that — but suspect that your and your mother’s experience is the exception rather than the rule.
And I’d take a bet you’re not and have not been in Texas (excluding Austin!).
Last time I taught Shakespeare in a class, the only students who knew that women were not allowed to be actors and that the women’s parts were played by young men were those who had seen Shakespeare in Love. Not a single one could remember being taught that in high school (which may mean only they didn’t get a damn and forgot it right after the test).
The Japanese in WWII never had an intention of conquering and taking over the US. The goal of hitting Pearl Harbor was to destroy a significant portin the US’s very powerful navy (considered to be one of the most powerful in the world at the time). The political situation in Japan at the time was rather complicated, but there was not a sentiment or goal towards actually taking over the US. The goal in war with the US was to ensure that if the US went through with planned threats to go to war over Japan’s control of some resource territories and planned acquistion of others (in face of the US oil embargo) that Japan would not face such a military disadvantage in facing the US Navy. In fact, that the US’s aircraft carriers happened to be away that day is considered to have made a significant military difference in and of itself. That fight was over issues of an oil embargo and of control of non-US foreign territories, it was most certainly not the Japanese hoping to rule the US at the end. That line was just a bit of US propaganda panic,
Oh yeah ithiliana, I didn’t mean to suggest that my experience was universal 🙂 just that it’s odd reading everyone’s comments about bowdlerization when I never saw that in high school.
A good number of my mom’s teachers were hippies, which probably means something.
@Quackers wrote, “Even if you look at what passes as entertainment these days, movies and TV lack depth or really gripping story lines. Very few movies seem to do this well and many are recycled from other movies (see Avatar for example).”
I can’t recommend any recent movies I’ve seen, but I’m addicted to TV shows for a reason. Have you ever seen Deadwood? The Sopranos? The Tudors (okay, that’s a bodice ripper, but it was a good bodice ripper!) Game of Thrones? I’m really into Sons of Anarchy right now.
Oh, and of course FIREFLY!
The problem with one type of classics worship is the attitude that the GREAT works of LITERATURE will teach us to be MORAL and BETTER while the trash produced today will turn us into violent thugs.
That is of course utter crap, but that’s the kind of classics worship I abhor.
-OH, this. So very, VERY much this!
DSC is right about the Empire of the Sun and the plans for US conquest – Although, I should mention as a kid who grew up in HI that there WAS some talk of taking over the Islands themselves, (There always is, great strategic point, and some of the Japanese racial propaganda of the time considered Hawaiians related to the divine Japanese bloodline), and perhaps the Aleutians, on a temporary or permanent basis. (Kiska and Atu WERE occupied! – But that was almost entirely to divert attention from midway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleutian_Islands) But taking over the whole or even part of the – continental US was never on the table.
PS. That myth is largely dead, but the numbers of US forces expected to die in an invasion of Japan (Not that I’m saying that they would have been very low) has actually been steadily INCREASING in the popular imagination, the farther we get from the atom bomb. I recently heard a claim that it saved “millions of american lives.” and “Half a million” I’ve heard far more than once.
Game of Thrones is actually one where I think the TV version is an improvement on the books; it cuts out some of the slogging bits (kinda like Lord of the Rings) and the acting is actually super good. If anyone is holding out on watching it because they want to read the books first, I would say don’t feel that you have to.
I’ve also heard good things about Mad Men, and it certainly doesn’t sound like the kind of show that we would get a few decades ago at all, if only for how scathing it is of the period.
Is this not true? Lord of the Flies and The Iliad taught me everything I know about relating to the people around me! *stabs someone graphically in the face in an uncomfortably sexual way*
For what it’s worth, at least during WWII the US eventually helped out China by smacking on Japan so hard. That’s another facet of the war US students don’t hear about much, because it doesn’t directly involve white people hence booooring, but omg Japan might not have been a threat to us but they were huge dicks to their neighbors.
“Game of Thrones is actually one where I think the TV version is an improvement on the books; it cuts out some of the slogging bits (kinda like Lord of the Rings) and the acting is actually super good. If anyone is holding out on watching it because they want to read the books first, I would say don’t feel that you have to.”
A-MEN! The books drove me insane, the TV show is much better! 😀