Put down your fucking hand and shut the fuck up

I was actually going to write about the gays tonight but I decided against it while I was going through some coarse material for my studies. However, don’t be disappointed, I will in the near future, I promise you, be writing extensively on homosexuality and all its’ glory.

To bring attention to the theme under review I will explain to you how this topic came to mind. While filtering through some of my class-wide emails I come across a message from a young pupil of mine who seemed to not understand what was meant by having an assignment do BEFORE class began. And my answer to him is: what the fuck do you think that means? Hand in your goddamn, shitting, C-, piece of living kife in before the start of the boring fucking lecture. This Doctor IQ seemed not to be able to rap his mind around the concept of putting a piece of paper in the hands of the professor outside of the allotted time on his class schedule.

Excuse me sir you’re actually going to need to split the fucking atom or your genitals will be exposed to everyone in class – that is what is meant by handing in an assignment prior to the start of the lecture.

Why do people ask such stupid fucking questions? – “How do I hand it in?” – Shouldn’t you be more concerned with the actual content of your assignment than the obvious protocols for submission?

Another popular question concerning paper due dates is when people ask the professor “can I hand it in early?” To these people I say: “A: no, because you’ll be castrated if you hand it in early; B: get a fucking life and work on your assignment like everyone else by writing its’ entirety the night before it’s due; and C: are you an idiot?”

There seems to be many obvious questions being asked by people that are supposed to be graduating from a post-secondary school at some point in the future and will be a part of a responsible working and business class. You’d think they’d realize that there’s going to come a day in their lives when they are going to have to make a decision themselves without asking an authority figure for permission or advice on something blatantly obvious.

Another thing that gets my panties in a naught is when students ask instructors, or their peers, for information that can be easily obtained by accessing a central database that stores and delivers megatons of knowledge daily – this being the World Wide Web. I don’t how many times I’ve heard someone ask where and when something is due and/or the date and location of an exam or test. Did they think that this information was only available through word-of-mouth? The university doesn’t post exam schedules or coarse outlines you have to interrupt the lecture by inquiring the prof on such crucial particulars. This isn’t directions to a fucking party, this is information that is important and organized through the use of technology that has existed for the past two decades. “What day is the test?” It’s on this invention called “the Internet,” you’re actually supplied with what is called an “email address” by your university/college where you can exchange, post and obtain such trifling facts and figures. It’s not like the prof has memorized the exact room number of an exam that is not going to take place for another two months, or everyone in class knows the day of the week that the final assignment due date falls on. What am I going to pull out a fucking calendar in the classroom? Look it up, stupid!

This kind of paradoxically, hypocritically and ironically (as well as rather eloquently, if I may say so myself) brings me to my next case in point. Over and over again I’ve overheard random kids ask each other what the date is. “What’s the date?!” I should be asking you what millennium this is. Who the fuck doesn’t have a cellular phone, portable computer, or the sense of sight in this year of our lord, 2009? Check your fucking phone for the date! Believe it or not the technology exists for there to be a telephone-clock-calendar hybrid. And what do you need to know the date for anyway? You date your notes? If you’re writing on a laptop that shit is stored! Fucking dates? Who gives a shit?!

I am going to now conclude my exposé by taking a shit on all those flipping, annoying son’bitches that put their hands up every two and half seconds in class so they can squeeze a meaningless, ignorant and completely useless comment in for the whole god damn lecture hall to hear. These people can go fuck themselves. Remember in Full Metal Jacket when the whole platoon beats up that kid with soap because he made things worse for everyone? We need to do the same thing to kids that put up their hands too much. Seriously, they’ve got to go. I know every one of you who is in school has at least one of these bastards in each class and every one in that class hates that fucker. Let’s do it and let’s do it quick – gag these mofos. Our education is on the line, people!

After we’re done smothering these douches we’ve got to address the source of the problem. What needs to be understood is that the instructor is the leader and ultimate authority in the classroom. The teacher alone has the ability to refuse questions from hand-up regulars and/or request they’re shutting the fuck up. It takes some balls but you won’t get anywhere in life without a large set of semen producers.  If there is any training what so ever for college and university instructors (which I sincerely doubt there is) the first thing they should learn is when to tell people to be quiet. This goes for assholes that are having a box social at the back of the class, or the cocksuckers who put their hands up too much. Put those son’bitches in place, sir or madam.

Regrettably, I’ve noticed that a lot of professors actually encourage students to speak out and make comments during class. This is horseshit. Professors that are doing this are attempting to bring themselves down to the level of the common man by having a conversation with someone outside of the ivory tower they live in. As a tuition paying, fulltime student I’m not in class to hear some jackass with no diploma or degree talk about the issues under review, I want to hear the pompous dick that is marking my essays talk. There’s a reason why professors have a PhD. While they’re fully capable, and sometimes likely, to be wrong or bias in their teachings, the degree of reliability in their info is irrelevant. All I want to know is what is going to be on the test. I’ll write down that god created the heaven and earth with all its’ creatures in 10 fucking days a few thousand years ago if it’ll get me good marks on the exam.

Now, I know there are a lot of bleeding hearts out there that say students are under a lot of stress and it is a new and intimidating experience to go to university or college and people act differently or they may not be that knowledgeable of social norms and practices.  My rebuttal to that point is: when we have a consensus throughout the registered students of a class that a small minority are being an annoying douche bag, then these people have to go and we’ve got to feed them to the fucking wolves. It’s like in a zombie movie or story about a group stranded on an island or boat; if someone is going against the grain and holding everyone else significantly back we’ve got to through that mofo overboard. We must move forward. Furthermore, if it is just either you or I, you better be damn sure that it is going to be ME NOT YOU when the shit hits the fan! Put down your fucking hand, stop asking ridiculous questions, exercise some obvious courtesy for the betterment of this fellowship we call the human race.

 

The Logical Debate: An Endangered Species

I consider myself to be somewhat of a moderate and maybe that is why I am capable of realizing the pros and cons of state intervention and its’ consequences. It is becoming increasingly clear that political debate is less about arguing between bigger or smaller government/higher or lower taxes and more about propaganda, bullshit and an irresponsible ignorance of the facts. The reforms being debated in the US concerning health care, for which I support in its’ most substantial form, is an example of this loss of logic. Up here (in Canada) many post-secondary students this past week took part in what was called a “Day of Action” in the vain hope of lowering the cost of university and college education for those enrolled. During both of these debates there has been very little discussion of the actual pros and cons of government spending – and in the case of US health care debate if such monetary issues are mentioned they are terribly inflated by the rightwing of the political spectrum. Quite paradoxically during Canada’s Day of Action the protesters wanted tuition “lowered” but they failed to comment on how this would be achieved – logically higher taxes or a movement of funds from another area of government spending.

In the United States of America there is something like 50 million people without health insurance. The American “system” of healthcare provides for emergency room service, coverage for the very poor and the elderly. Ironically (or consequently, depending on how you look at it), the US government pays more per citizen than the Canadian government does in our system of universal single-tier healthcare. Any citizen outside of the system in the US leaves their healthcare in the hands of the free market. The problem is many of the 50 mil or so without insurance can’t afford the high costs of for-profit healthcare. So liberals in the US want to allow those Americans to have the OPTION to be covered by the government. Now, a lot of rightwing radical, lunatic, corrupt, unsympathetic, self-admitting ignorant folks in the US who are against such legislation are calling these reforms “Nazism” and/or “Socialism” and/or “Communism.” All these systems of government could not, and do not, co-exist within political and sociological reality, as we know it. Thus anyone who takes the above view against healthcare reform seriously is a fucking idiot. The actual possible flaws of such reforms are, logically, increased government spending, higher taxes for the rich and complications in the registering of the uninsured.  It’s not in any way totalitarianism, it’s simply liberalism and it has its pros and cons – both of which should be considered. Unfortunately there is no actual opposition to such legislation because those that claim to be opposing reforms actually have no idea what the fuck they are talking about and/or are completely corrupt. It is obvious such reforms are necessary and they would inevitably have their costs that are a means to an end and a major component of the progressive tax system that’s existed in the greater part of the Western World since the Second World War.

A similar debate did not take place during the mentioned Day of Action last week. Students across the country protested the cost of what I think is college and university tuition. Not only did the protestors not layout how students could pay less for post-secondary education they were incredibly vague and failed to really stand up for any political cause other than not wanting to pay for something. Firstly, the student slogan was simply “drop fees” – what kind of fees? Tuition fees? What about fees outside of tuition that students are forced to pay as well? Where’s the money going to come from? The government aka our taxes aka the taxes students will be paying by the time they graduate with the jobs they got because of their college diploma or university degree?

The Drops Fees campaign was a part of a bigger movement entitled “Poverty-free Ontario (or Canada I can remember…)” which would lead one to believe that the protestors think of students as poverty stricken. I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb here to state that there is a bit of a difference between me & the guys I party with on weekends and the smelly hobo with the empty Tim Horton’s cup outside the grocery store. Priorities need to be organized a little better than to assume that all students in Canada live in poverty and should be treated as if so. Also, the students who aggressively advocate for “lower tuition”, along with the great majority of the organized far left in Canada, never disclose their actual political contentions. There is nothing wrong with being a social democrat or even a socialist but there is something blatantly insecure and hypocritical about not being able to use those political terms to describe oneself or advocate for higher taxes on the rich along with its’ twin component of more public spending if that’s what you believe is best for the country. Obama and some of the Democrats in the US have the scrotum to discuss higher taxes for the wealthiest of Americans in order to provide assistance for the poor.

I would like to make clear that I am not against the lowering of student expenses. I am a student and a lot of shit I pay for is expensive especially considering it’s impossible to earn a decent living while studying. However, I don’t support blanket legislation that would simply cap tuition and allow for any increases to be covered by the public purse. Firstly the drop out/failure rate needs to be considered when further subsidizing education because all the money spent on students who don’t complete their program is more or less a complete waste of taxpayer’s funds. Money would be better spent in the opening of government funded student loans to include those whose parents are high income earners as well as increases in spending for scholarship offers to students who prove to keep a high grade point average.  While these measures are costly they are fiscally much more responsibly than throwing taxpayer’s money at the hundreds of thousands of students that register every year regardless of their intentions to complete their studies. Secondly, tuition itself is only one part of what students pay when they register for school. If tuition were capped and further subsidized universities and colleges could still charge students enormous fees for what post-secondary administrators could independently deem outside of tuition. This is a very serious issue that gets little or no attention from political elites and student activists alike. It’s obvious that public money would be better spent in weeding out corruption at the university/college level and administering better efficiency than simply “dropping fees.” Students are getting fucked, that is for sure, but we need to know which orifice is being penetrated and understand how we can better block that cock.

Sadly, the above arguments and obvious observations were very much absent from the signs, banners and literature that were part of the nationwide student protest. It should also be noted that education is a predominately provincial issue thus students with signs at Parliament Hill in Ottawa might have got some questionable looks from politically informed observers. Furthermore it is very doubtful that the Prime Minister (even if it was within his, or his government’s, power) looked out of his office on the Day of Action at the protestors situated on a place of grass that is occupied daily by shouting sign-holders with grievances they want the government to handle and thought “today we’re going to listen to this group!” People go to Parliament, Queens Park and any other legislatures everyday to rally. It is no longer consequential to protest in this way, unless the numbers are significantly substantial, because rallies are a dime-a-dozen in this day and age.

Now I’ve attempted to shine a snippet of logic on two very different debates that many people, for some reason or another, are very passionate about. Pertaining to the first issue discussed we have people in the US that want the government to have a bigger role in providing healthcare with the funding of more taxes on the very wealthy and/or a relocation of expenses. And those opposed to healthcare reform are unfortunately either propagandists backed by big medicine or overly nationalistic douches that will get behind anything that uses the words “freedom” or “USA” as long as it doesn’t involve black people or gays. And here in the greatest country in the world students take their turn at waving signs at politicians because they think they are paying too much to get the education that will allow them to become a part of the same hypocrisy that they protested when they were in school. Could either of these be considered a logical debate? I think not.