1: A deeply troubled, hand-wringy narc.
The clincher was that Sister Mary Margaret slipped him a nickel bag after class. What was he supposed to do?
Ive always had a feeling that Stanley was an FBI plant.
A nun is Jay-Z's 100th problem.
I'm pretty sure I did something like this entirely of my own volition at least once. I was never good at telling people to do their own fucking work.
If I spell something wrong today, it's because I don't want anybody copying me.
I'm not sure how I feel about a teacher enlisting a little kid to catch another little kid, but you can't fault her for entrapment. It was a fair cop.
her plan: I would spell all the words incorrectly, allowing her to confirm whether Joe was copycatting my answers; lest I worry about the incorrect answers, I would be awarded a 100% for the test.
Did you have to correctly spell all the words incorrectly in order to earn your 100%? I.e., were you docked points for each correctly-spelled word?
If not, you should have spelled them mostly correctly anyway, to help your friend. You could say you thought they were wrong.
Also, how fucking stupid was your friend? You, presumably a good student, spelled all the words incorrectly, and he still didn't pick up on the fact that you were cooperating with law enforcement? If the teacher had selected a few particular words, and given you particular misspellings to use, that would have given basically as clear a picture of any cheating and would have been far less detectable.
The correct thing for Stanley to do would have been to tell the kid to copy off someone else for that particular test, thus thwarting the nun's plan and enhancing third grade solidarity.
I mean, he didn't know how to spell a single goddamn word on the test?
13: I was marveling over this aspect of the plan, too, but I'm pretty sure I'm remembering correctly and I was to spell all the words incorrectly, not just, say, #2, #7, and #9 or whatever.
12 is funny.
6: I got 99 problems plus a snitch-plan nun?
Did he write "Stanley" for his name?
16: Of course not. He copied "Stannli" letter for letter.
In 9th grade biology, the guy who shared a table with me brazenly copied my answers on every quiz and exam. On the last day of school the teacher called me up to her desk and asked me to comment on the fact that all of our tests had the same answers. I ratted him out on the spot. He then got called up and chewed out, and failed. He confronted me later, not hostile, but incredulous and a bit hurt. I calmly explained that he put himself in the situation by copying all my answers without putting any variance in it, which he sort of accepted, but not really.
A few years later, he got busted for small-time coke dealing - narced out yet again - and did a year in an Alabama prison. He's now trying to make it in Hollywood as a director, but his films suck as far as I can tell. Nonetheless, we remain friends.
13: More likely he had very low confidence in his preferred spelling (or just wasn't thinking at all). So if Stanley got a different answer, by golly, that must be the right one!
Another example of how cheating is bad for the cheater too.
18: Half-assed copying without enough original thought to even hide the source will work fine in Hollywood. Give it time.
I love how chatty little kids are. I buy loads of bracelet sized glow sticks and hand them out like crazy to the kids in the areas I patrol. A few weeks ago couple of our guys were looking for a dude with a felony warrant who tends to stay at his parent's house. They're talking to the family on the front porch and right in the middle of all the older family members giving the whole "no, we haven't seen so and so and have no idea where he's at" one of the little kids in the house runs up and gleefully tells everyone how wanted guy is hiding in the closet.
Remind me not to even mention what I think about the neighbors around my son.
OT: If you want to hunt cats, you'd better hurry.
24: A neighbor of mine who is an elementary school art teacher says he uses the following line at Open House, "If you promise not to believe half of what you hear about me from your kids, I won't believe half of what I hear about you."
21: Oh, man, I hope no one took it out on the kid.
Half-assed copying without enough original thought to even hide the source will work fine in Hollywood.
In the trade, we call it "similar but different." And we request it.
I was never sure where the line was drawn in all the classes where the official rule was "you are encouraged to work in groups on the homework, but you must write up the result on your own." I mean, if you're all gathered around the same whiteboard or passing around bits of paper to work together, people are inevitably going to have some identical wrong things written down now and then, without apparently violating the rule.
And I spend the time I used to spend watching TV and movies making puns on the internet.
29 maybe should have gone in the other thread. Would it be cheating to ask for credit for it in both threads?
Oh, man, I hope no one took it out on the kid.
As far as I know that didn't happen. It's pretty common for the family, while feeling like loyalty obligates them to not rat him out, to still be relieved when he gets arrested.
be relieved when he gets arrested
Because he's often hiding in the bathroom?
I have a relative who was turned in by his parents when they figured out he was holding up stores. Getting him set straight was more important than keeping him out of prison. He did time and went on to become a hospital administrator.
And the last part isn't a joke, though it was probably 30 years later.
I would spell all the words incorrectly, allowing her to confirm whether Joe was copycatting my answers; lest I worry about the incorrect answers, I would be awarded a 100% for the test.
The teacher-nun was being more clever than we give her credit for regarding Stanley's 100%: his task was to misspell every word, thereby demonstrating (er, sort of) that he in fact knew what the correct spelling was in every case.
What would have happened had Stanley spelled just some words incorrectly we don't know, but Stanley may have been too young to consider messing with the teacher-nun so cruelly.
I'm confident I could misspell any word, even those whose correct spellings I might get wrong. (At least in English. I might fuck up and accidentally spell something correctly in a foreign language. Especially a non-romance language.)
You have a point; and it just goes toward your 11.3 upthread, I guess. At least the kid had the excuse of being in 3rd grade, which is more than I can say about those apparent adults offering insanely incomprehensibly stupid reasoning for refusing to accept Obama's long-form birth certificate today.
My favorite so far: "It says "Certificate of Live Birth." It doesn't say "Birth Certificate.""
I'd like to read more on the psychology of conspiratorial thinking. The problem is that whenever I do, the author will eventually come to an example of a conspiracy theory that I'm actually inclined to believe is true.
I'd like to read more on the psychology of conspiratorial thinking.
Yes, but I hadn't even gotten to that point, to be honest: that graces the current phenomenon with more ... validity? ... than it's worth. I've been stuck at the "How incredibly stupid are you to think that Certificate of Live Birth doesn't mean Birth Certificate?" stage. I'm completely dumbfounded.
Most conspiracy theories that one might feel may be true aren't a matter of actual documents and proofs there on a table in front of you, but of much more elaborate, and vague, interpretations of longer-term stings of events, involving speculation about who had motive, the ultimate outcome, and so on: I'm thinking of JFK assassination theories or 9-11 theories or Iraq invasion theories, where there's a lack of clear evidence one way or another.
But I don't know what you're thinking of. I'm also just in the throes of astonishment at some of the responses to the birth certificate thing.
"How incredibly stupid are you to think that Certificate of Live Birth doesn't mean Birth Certificate?"
Some people had been saying that the short, not-real-enough birth certificate was merely a "Certificate of Live Birth," but that the One True Birth Certificate, when it appeared, would say "Birth Certificate."
In the trade, we call it "similar but different." And we request it.
A friend from college claims that in SE Asia they call it (in this case referring to knockoffs of consumer electronics, etc.) "same same but different".
Seriously, people?
It's not about conspiracy theory. It's not about stupid people. It's about saying "nigger, nigger, nigger". And it always was.
46: Although I agree that that there is a lot of truth in that, seeing Bill Clinton be the target of similarly bizarre (but non-racial) attacks leads me to the conclusion that racism is just a convenient conduit for the required attack on a Dem president in this case. Hillary would be under some other kind of siege, but whatever it was it would also be getting massively disproportionate attention. And it would be equally nutty.
I take some small delight in thinking about the aspiring sleuths of the lunatic fringe poring over the birth certificate late into the night with furrowed brows.
Stanley's a narc!
Not only that, he's apparently Obama's mother.
A friend from college claims that in SE Asia they call it (in this case referring to knockoffs of consumer electronics, etc.) "same same but different".
I've heard this too! About Indonesia, I think.
49: I won't link, but before noon there were long earnest "typewriter characteristics"/the "K"s are different comments at Free Republic.
A friend, having a laugh on the Facebonk: "Just how stupid does Obama think we are? Everyone knows there was no such thing as PDF's in 1961!"
48. Well, Clinton was our first black president, right? But yes, you're correct. The savagery of the right-wing tribal affiliation requires the most hostile attack that can be brought to bear. If HRC had won, Glenn Beck would be speculating on-air about her vagina dentata, and asking why she hasn't released the medical report including photos of her junk to prove it didn't have teeth, and if she did release those photos, he'd claim the teeth were retractable.
Huh. Come to think of it, anthropologists should study Republicans. They could learn a lot contrasting their behavior with that of humans.
46: It's about saying "nigger, nigger, nigger". And it always was.
Yes.
48: seeing Bill Clinton be the target of similarly bizarre (but non-racial) attacks leads me to the conclusion that racism is just a convenient conduit for the required attack on a Dem president in this case.
Disagree. Arguably the volume of the attacks was the same (but I don't really recall it that way). The weirdness factor of the attacks on Clinton was very high, sure. But only Obama - or should I say, only the sight of black skin in the White House - brought out the full scale neo-confederate reenactment, complete with nullification and threatened secession. The quality of the attacks is maybe as loud (but again I don't ever recall a Summer of Hate during the Clinton presidency, certainly not during his first year), but of an entirely different tenor. I suppose the noise machine uses the same basic operatives and they, together, can only make so much noise, and they would make noise no matter what, but I don't recall them punching the 'let's bring back slavery' button like that. And the economic attitude is far far more deranged.
54: Well, Clinton was our first black president, right?
Clinton was our first black Republican president. Colin Powell wept.
max
['Firefox 4 is fairly neat but lord it is a pig.']
Who was your most trustworthy moral role model in primary school? (If Nun, write None.)
(this joke stolen from Sellars & Yeatman)
I'd like to read more on the psychology of conspiratorial thinking.
just today i read a study in my rss that said people believe constiracy theories because they would particiapte in them/machiavielian personality.
doesn't really shed much light on birthers
it could be i don't read much mainstream meadia, but has the scandal/-gate level of attacks been much lower on obama? i remember a large portion of hte anticlinton stuff being about that kind of thing
55,56:Anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano on 19th century ethnography:
In all three instances the events described are subverted by the transcending stories in which they are cast. They are sacrificed to their rhetorical function in a literary discourse that is far removed from the indigenous discourse of their occurrence. The sacrifice, the subversion of the event described, is in the final analysis masked . . . by the authority of the author, who, at least in much ethnography, stands above and behind those whose experience he purports to describe.
This means you, max
The quote in 60 is from When Tengu Talk by Wilburn Hansen, an early chapter about Hirata Atsutane's use of "ethnography" in his project to create a chauvinistic and racist Japanese identity
The way that is done is to fit people, facts, events, and accounts into a pre-existing self-serving narrative, creating your own identity by othering, disregarding the subjects of study own interpretations and narratives of their experiences and affects.
Huh. Like the Teabaggers. You are them, max.
yoyo and ham-love are better in 54 and 59
I have watched the conservative scum do this stuff since before McGovern and the "Commonist" anti-war and civil rights movements. Every Democratic president or candidate was shoehorned into a bullshit self-aggrandizing narrative that was usually as ridiculous as Dukakis "softness on criminals" or Kerry's cowardice in battle. The particular attacks usually seemed mostly ad hoc and opportunistic, and served a secondary (or primary?) purpose of enforcing right-wing identity. As H-L says:
The savagery of the right-wing tribal affiliation requires the most hostile attack that can be brought to bear.
Faced with an embarrassment, Dukakis in the tank and stumbling on the raped wife question, Kerry's "ready to serve" clumsiness, Clinton's adultery, and Obama's obsequiousness before right wing attacks, Democrats, emotionally wounded, are attempting to renew tribal identity with their strongest emotional attack/bond:"We are the anti-racists, we are we are."
The point isn't really whether the teabaggers are racist, they are. The point is how badly some Democrats need them to be racists, need the narrative to be about race.
62
The point isn't really whether the teabaggers are racist, they are. The point is how badly some Democrats need them to be racists, need the narrative to be about race.
Even a stopped clock ...
People who need racists are the luckiest people or all.
Bob's 62.last in the "Hillary wins" alternate universe: The point is how badly some Democrats need them to be sexists, need the narrative to be about gender.
When will the Democrats learn to run white, protestant males?
Richard Seymour a leftist whom I respect, focuses on racism and colonialism
Another by Seymour
FDL ...reminds us of the Southern Strategy and Lee Atwater.
As a child of the 60s, I remember Senators like Richard Russell and Jogn Tower being stone racists, but I also remember them being huge problems (and headaches for LBJ) on defense spending amd militarism.
There were so many aspects to the "Southern Strategy". Dixie was the most anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-union, anti-welfare state part of the country. Dixie was the most militarist. Dixie was the most conservatively religious. Dixie was the most authoritarian "law-and-order." Dixie was the most misogynistic. Dixie had an unusual kind of country gov't, emphasizing local autonomy. All of these were insanely useful to the right wing of the Republican Party.
Al of these could be very useful points of attack for the left, were in the 60s, and are marginally now. But one aspect of Dixie was chosen above all the rest, and obsessed upon, so much so that the utility of the other possible narratives were degraded and have almost disappeared. So that we now have a bankster-loving corporatist safety-net-cutting miliaristic police-statist weak on women's and LGBT issue asshole in the WH.
This is, frankly, a sickness in the Democratic Party. I am not sure how or why it happened.
66: The point is how badly Bob needs Democrats/liberals/lefty bloggers to be perfidious and deluded, needs the narrative to be about his moral and intellectual superiority.
67:When will the Democratic Party run fucking economic liberals?
69:My own biased narrative that I filter everything through is socialism and class war, apo, and you know that.
1968? But Johnson was a huge asshole.
They do run economic liberals. They just keep getting beaten, usually during the primary stage. There's plenty of criticism to be leveled at the Democratic Party as an institution (and god knows I'm willing to level it), but when only a third of Democratic voters call themselves liberals, that makes it a tricky needle to thread, right?
There's plenty of criticism to be leveled at the Democratic Party as an institution...
Both of the Democratss running for our county executive office have loudly proclaimed their willingness to fight to keep our property tax system as unfair and regressive as it currently is. This position is shared by both Republicans running, except one of them is about to face trial for defrauding an old lady. He has his problems, but you can't really fault him on inconsistency.
Where does he stand on the all-important puppy-kicking issue?
He's fine with it as long as you don't have pointed shoes.
To be fair, he hasn't been convicted of defrauding anybody yet. To read between the lines, his trial was set for the week before the primary and he was successful at getting it delayed to inbetween the primary and the general.
I mean, if he had a good defense, you'd think he'd want to get the thing out of the way.
68: Dixie sounds like a medieval hell. You know how we're always talking about middle eastern "countries" that were just unrelated territories cobbled together by the british? About that...
The best defense is a good offense, and (allegedly) defrauding old ladies is pretty damn offensive. Good job, candidate dude.
He's not just a candidate. He's on the council right now.
There's plenty of criticism to be leveled at the Democratic Party as an institution (and god knows I'm willing to level it), but when only a third of Democratic voters call themselves liberals, that makes it a tricky needle to thread, right?
Is anyone familiar with historical trends on that? "Liberal" has been something of a bad word for basically my full lifetime, but how many democrats self-identified as "liberal" in, say, 1950?
Part of the motivation for my question is that I've wondered how much the causation runs opposite the direction you've suggested: is the Democratic party a pitiable mess because only a third of democratic voters self-identify as "liberal", or do only a third of democratic voters self-identify as "liberal" because Republicans have spent decades demonizing the word and democrats have done basically nothing to push back against that demonization (with most individual politicians giving the demonization an assist by shying away from the word themselves).
Speaking of which: nevermind voters, how many Democratic politicians call themselves liberals? Is it even a third?
82: The erstwhile "liberals" in Congress are now progressives.
82 is sort of my guess, with the complicating factor that 'liberal', as an identifier, gets despised from the left and the right -- there's a very narrow area of politics where someone's far enough left to embrace being 'liberal' rather than 'centrist', but not left enough that their instant reaction to 'liberal' is to think 'useless sellout'.
79: You know how we're always talking about middle eastern "countries" that were just unrelated territories cobbled together by the british? About that
Hey, don't blame us. We always thought that South Carolina should be a separate colony from Massachusetts. It was you guys who decided to roll with the whole "One Big United States" concept. If we'd decolonised you properly instead of, ahem, having to leave in a hurry, we'd have been sure to partition you into lots of separate little bits so you could have happily feuded with each other instead of having to pretend that all you got along. (See: India, Cyprus, Ireland, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Germany, etc.)
Further to 82: Which means that I think all those surveys about how many people identify as liberals versus conservatives are meaningless -- not that the American populace is a seething hotbed of stifled leftism, but asking them if they're liberals isn't going to produce useful information.
Having an empire is like the quickest way to become a huge asshole. We get it now!
86: They aren't meaningless if they are done right. Most people don't have enough knowledge to have an ideology, but you can tell quite a bit by asking somebody if they like "liberals*." Affective judgements are fairly predictive and usually firmly held. Plenty of people hate liberals and support some liberal economic policies without ever connecting the two, but if someone things get called into focus, they'll usually stick with the affective part or figure a way to make a plausible case that this one thing is different.
*Or whatever.
85: Germany
Tried to slip that one in, eh?
Or should 89 be "Or is it 'liberals.*?'?"
88: Meaningless was an overstatement, but it's complicated enough that it shouldn't be taken literally (which you're not doing, of course). The affective distaste for 'liberals' among a big part of the population is a real thing, and a real problem for getting leftist policies passed, but it shouldn't be read as 'most of the country is ideologically committed to policy preferences incompatible with leftist policies.'
it shouldn't be read as 'most of the country is ideologically committed to policy preferences incompatible with leftist policies.'
I didn't say that. However, I think it is a problem that most of the country can be turned off of (or at least put on the defensive with respect to) a position that they might otherwise be inclined to support just by characterizing that position as "liberal".
Oh, it's a huge problem. It's just really hard to tease out how much of it is about policies and how much is pure messaging.
I wasn't thinking of it as a political problem but as a survey research problem. Measuring people is confusing work.
Ah, the canonical shower/grower problem.
90: yes, Germany was partitioned. By Britain. Not just by Britain, admittedly, but we were involved. And the bits ended up feuding with each other.
Having an empire is like the quickest way to become a huge asshole. We get it now!
Asswards The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way.
Anyway, people keep saying that the Democrats/liberals would win more if they did better at messaging but the details of how to do that are very much not obvious to me. Pointing out that people are more supportive of something if you call it by a different name is not the same thing as showing how to get more people to support something. Causality is confusing.
96: One simply stretches it by hand, right?
the details of how to do that are very much not obvious to me.
Yep. Saying that 'messaging' is part of the problem doesn't mean that I have any idea how to fix it, or that I think that fixing it would be easy even if I knew how.
99: Attlee and Herbert Morrison personally insisted on abolishing Prussia as an entity - not just partitioning it, but completely striking out anything with Prussia in the title from the constitution of a future Germany, breaking up the territory, and shutting down all Prussian institutions. 'rm -rf /germany/states/prussia/'
102
Yep. Saying that 'messaging' is part of the problem doesn't mean that I have any idea how to fix it, or that I think that fixing it would be easy even if I knew how.
Elected Democrats and their official mouthpieces need to be more vociferous and forthright and not aim for milquetoast compromises from the start. They need to stake out bold positions and then actually achieve some of them, or at least convincingly make an effort. Using "liberal" vs. "progressive" vs. something other adjective is a red herring; left-populism would be both popular and right these days, so calling it "fnord" would still work as long as it gets implemented. Stronger party discipline would also make a huge difference.
Unfortunately, the above paragraph contradicts its own advice on every single point. So we're left with hoping that elected Democrats and their official mouthpieces get the message somehow and agree with it but don't wonder about its provenance. By mitosis, perhaps, or telepathy.
Obviously, good and/or popular policies are important too. But as far as messaging goes, it's impossible for members of the public to both give good advice and demonstrate it.
84
82 is sort of my guess, with the complicating factor that 'liberal', as an identifier, gets despised from the left and the right -- there's a very narrow area of politics where someone's far enough left to embrace being 'liberal' rather than 'centrist', but not left enough that their instant reaction to 'liberal' is to think 'useless sellout'.
People to the left of liberals may be noticeable on the internet but I suspect they (like libertarians) are a negligible portion of the electorate.
I don't think that the Brits can credibly take the main credit/blame for the demise of Prussia. The Russians and Poles took half of core Prussia and rather thoroughly de-germanized it. (East Prussia, West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and a goodly chunk of Brandenburg: all gone) Even the graveyards were bulldozed. The Russians then kept the other half under their control, albeit still populated by Germans. The part the Brits had under their control had always had a rather ambiguous attitude towards the whole Prussia thing, think for example its most prominent Weimar and BRD era politician.