Settlement salvation
Now that the bickering is done and the SFSS is really, really sorry they used their own referendum rules and not those of the Canadian Federation of Students, there is the prickly little issue of a giant lump of money just sitting in a bank account waiting to make our SFSS dreams come true.
A primer for those with lives: the Simon Fraser Student Society used to be part of the CFS, a student advocacy group that lobbies for student issues and offer services to members like Travel Cuts discount trips abroad and student price cards. Of the opinion that the CFS had become a bloated, corrupt money-sink, SFSS leaders of days gone by posed a referendum to defederate from the CFS in 2008. After weeks of lobbying that included a robust ‘Yes’ campaign led by former president Derrick Harder and an equally robust CFS ‘No’ side comprised largely from out-of-province advocates, students voted 67 per cent in favour of defederation. The CFS contended that the referendum was illegitimate by its own bylaws, and took the SFSS to court for back dues. The SFSS collected what fees would have gone to the CFS in case a trial decided against them. That case settled on December 23, 2011 after more than $450,000 in legal fees.
We don’t know how much we had to pay the CFS to settle due to a gag order attached to the agreement, but the fund totalled around $1.1 million as of the last SFSS annual general meeting. The pressing question is now how to spend the savings leftover from the proceedings, and the fees that created it in the first place. It is no less than the discussion of the next 10 years of the Simon Fraser Student Society.
I was poised to caution electors about the eventuality of the “lockout election”, an entire cycle dedicated to the rehashing of the labour dispute that split the campus in two, but suddenly, like it is won’t to do, money has changed everything. With projected solvency and sudden wealth comes new problems.
The original argument was that the services provided by the CFS could be better and more responsively provided by the SFSS. It’s put up or shut up time, and I’m sure battle lines will be drawn over whether or not to strike the fee from student’s liabilities or to use the money for better services. The former will sound better on paper, but the money in the bank and the fees to come should almost certainly be used to bring the SFSS into the future it so richly deserves.
There will be candidates in the next SFSS election who will equate fiscal responsibility with saving students the price of a lunch in fees, but they’re missing the point. Suddenly, the wildest dreams of properly funding SFSS services and expanding others is within reach. Imagine a health plan suddenly not struggling more with each passing semester. Departmental student unions with a budget enough not only to stimulate interest and participation, but to actually hold events of note. Making the Women’s Centre, Out on Campus, and other student spaces deservedly palatial. Heck, maybe we can even get to work on that student union building everyone thinks is a great idea but we never seem to get around to. The world is our burrito.
Overnight, what is possible for the SFSS was changed by the settlement witht he CFS. The next decade may prove to be the most integral since its inception. Whether we choose to make frivolous purchases and cuts, or make the SFSS a place where students can come together, solve problems, and make SFU a place people actually want to be will be the legacy of this board and boards to come. The CFS defederation gave us some of the most petty, divisive, and vicious years of politics in our university’s history. It’s time to set that all aside and make lemonade after years of lemons.
21st Century Democracy – The changing face of democracy
It started in Tunisia late in 2010, it spread to Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, soon it made its way west, into the streets of New York City and across the globe, and by the end of 2011 it had reached the frozen streets of Moscow.
2011 could be named the Year of the Protests. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement and the anti-Putin demonstrations in Russia, people took to the streets for what they believed in, call- ing for change, the end of dictatorships, and the end of corruption.
This year of protests fol- lowed a significant growth in the number of social media applications, such as Twitter and Facebook, which allowed for a large group of people to organize themselves and share their experiences with thousands of others. This is a significant development, not simply because it changes the way people communicate, it may change the way democ- racy itself works.
The concept of democ- racy is not a new one, having been fashioned by the an- cient Greeks 5,000 years ago. From then on it has evolved, at times slowly, and at times has been completely ignored. The Magna Carta, the Decla- ration of Independence, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man all influenced the cur- rent form of democracy we hold dear as it became the post World War II standard for liberal democracies.
But this standard may not stand for long. The changes we are currently experiencing may turn 21st century democracy into something different than what was in the past hundred years. This is not to say that the changes will be drastic,
that a sort of post-democracy system will emerge. In fact, most people may not even feel these events as they unfold so naturally. Evolution, after all, is not a sudden change, but a slow gradual process, natu- rally making its way until it be- comes the norm.
The reality is that the sys- tem we currently have in place is not self-sustainable in the long run, not with the society that we currently live in. An increasing number of people have more access to more in- formation than ever before, and that leads to a sense, and at times, a reality, of empower- ment. Like the events of the Arab Spring showed, once the reality is plain for all to see, it can no longer be contained.
For hundreds of years, rul- ers and politicians have had the assurance that, if they were careful enough, they could hide what they did not wish people to see. Not so in an age of 24/7 news, social media, and Wikileaks. People have understood that they have the power to hold those in charge accountable, and they are wil- ingandabletodoso.Aswe move forward, politics may be- come increasingly more trans- parent, with people making an impact not simply by voting, but also by fact-checking and calling out what they believe is wrong.
As stated before, this will not be a revolution as much as it will be an evolution. The younger generations are in- creasingly accustomed to a cer- tain degree of information and this will slowly make its way into our democratic system, creating greater transparency, accountability, and in the end, better representation
GAP display breached no agreement with SFU
In a recent Peak article, Lila Saber condemned SFU Lifeline, the university pro-life club, for bringing the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) to the Burnaby campus. She also criticized the university administration and the SFSS for not shutting down or blocking the display.
According to her, GAP is too graphic and offensive to be shown unobstructed in public and she does not “understand why the university thinks that groups like [Lifeline] have a right to space at SFU and a right to violate the safety of others.” She accuses Lifeline of contravening an agreement with the university administration regarding the arrangement of signs as well.
To clarify, there was no agreement with the university administration for the club to contravene. We submitted a set-up plan (which we followed) to the administration, which allowed a path through Convocation Mall behind the signs so that people could avoid them. This plan was rejected by the administration on the grounds that students could come upon the display inadvertently. They requested that we obscure the signs in some way, much like saying we could have our freedom of speech on the condition that we whispered. We declined to submit another plan because to comply with demands to obstruct our display would be to accept an infringement on our right to free speech.
We do have the right to free speech. That is why groups like ours have a right to space at SFU. Under the Constitution of Canada, everyone has the right to free speech and the right to freedom of assembly as long as those assembled do nothing illegal. There is no right, however, not to be offended.
The university administration was not wrong to allow us to continue our display. If they can be blamed for anything, it is for allowing other students to censor us, as this sends the message that the best way to win an argument is to silence one’s opponents rather than to prove them wrong with logical arguments. It is true; we do not have a right to threaten the safety of others. However, as we did not threaten anyone’s safety, that has no bearing on whether we should have been allowed space or not.
Ms. Saber is offended because she thinks that abortion and genocide are not comparable and that those who take part in GAP “are appropriating those experiences to serve their own agenda of demonizing women’s control of their own reproductive capacities.”
If the pre-born are not human and abortion does not kill them, then she has every right to be offended. However, the pre-born are not just blobs of tissue. They are also not part of their mothers’ bodies; they are distinct individuals with a separate genetic identity. Basic biology, and honest scientists, tells us that all members of a species that reproduces sexually begin their lives at the moment of fertilization. For example, Dr. Jerome LeJeune, a professor of genetics at the University of Descartes says, “After fertilization has taken place, a new human being has come into being.” There is no convincing evidence to the contrary.
Webster’s New World Encyclopedia of 1992 defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, racial, religious, political, cultural, ethnic, or other group defined by the exterminators as undesirable.”
Induced abortions, those which intentionally terminate pregnancies, are, by definition, deliberate. There is a system in place to facilitate them. In Canada they are legal throughout the nine months of pregnancy, tax-payer funded, and available on demand. Even teenagers can have abortions without the knowledge or consent of their parents.
Some people try to justify abortion by saying that mothers’ circumstances can make having children undesirable. Abortion targets the unwanted unborn, whether inconvenient, handicapped, or female. These factors lead us to the conclusion that abortion fits the definition of genocide.
If we are wrong and the pre-born are not human, alive, and therefore valuable, then we offend people for nothing. If we are right, then our society is tolerating the mass killing of innocent, defenseless human beings. We would rather risk offending than tolerate such an injustice.
Our long, national nightmare is over
It all seems so distant now, but there was a time when no decision was made by the Simon Fraser Student Society — no piece of legislation tabled, no money spent, no program approved, no poster drawn — without first calculating how it would harm the Canadian Federation of Students. For anyone who served in student politics during those fanatic days, as I did, it was thus more than a little anti-climatic to hear that the long-running divorce proceedings between the SFSS and CFS had come to such an abrupt and amicable end last week.
Rather than the long, multi-week trial many had been anticipating — a trial that would have allowed everyone to vividly relive some of the most controversial years of SFU student politics — students were given a curt, four sentence press release. “[I]t is agreed that the membership has ended,” said one of them. We have resolved “all outstanding issues,” said another. There will be “no further public statements regarding this matter.” So that’s that.
From 2007 to 2008 I served two terms as head of SFSS elections, during which I ran the now infamous ’08 separation referendum where SFU students voted 67 per cent in favor of leaving the CFS. To broadly summarize a complex situation, the vote I organized obviously violated a number of CFS laws, though my SFSS bosses at the time argued that holding a vote with imperfections was still preferable to holding no vote at all — the position the CFS seemed to be favouring.
Why SFU students hated the CFS so much in those days is hard to generalize, since the anti-CFS movement was a fairly broad coalition of students of varying political, personal, and petty motivations who had made common cause of a common enemy. The conventional narrative, however, was that Canadian Federation of Students was simply this lumbering, useless behemoth that wasted enormous amounts of student money on dumb projects and wasteful bureaucracy — and was appallingly secretive, undemocratic, and crooked to top it off.
It’s more than a little disappointing, therefore, that the SFSS’ out-of-court settlement with the embattled lobby group remains so mysterious and unaccountable, since leaving the CFS was supposed to help expunge this sort of stuff from SFU politics.
There’s an obvious cost-benefit analysis to be done here: for the last three years, the SFSS has spent untold thousands of dollars on legal fees in their vain efforts to get the courts to recognize the validity of my referendum, and now they’ve just unloaded many thousands more in some manner of huge CFS payout. When the final bill is tallied up, will we have spent more money leaving than we would have spent staying? Even if you hate the CFS with a fiery passion, that’s not an unreasonable question to ask.
In theory, I understand why the SFSS board agreed to keep things so hush-hush. I personally didn’t think the SFSS’ legal defense of my referendum was ever that strong. Unreasonable though they were, we did not follow CFS rules to the letter, and “close enough, Your Honour” is not a particularly robust argument. The possibility of losing an expensive multi-week trial, and being forced back into CFS membership after so many wasted years was a frighteningly real possibility.
It also appears the SFSS board may have played the CFS to some degree. SFSS financial documents are a matter of public record; there is therefore simply no way the SFSS can award the CFS a massive financial settlement without it someday appearing as a line item in some future budget. Coupled with the likelihood of leaks, a vow of perpetual secrecy surrounding the most high-profile student politics spat in modern B.C. history seems like the kind of empty promise only an organization arrogant as the CFS would ever believe possible in the first place.
Still, tempted as one is to declare SFU’s long national nightmare finally over (a nightmare many of today’s SFU students will have no memory of whatsoever) there are still a lot of questions to be asked.
The CFS may be gone, but the distasteful spirit of mystery and intrigue that so often surrounds student politics at this school remains.
New Year’s resolutions (the ones you should have made)
The new year is a time for contemplation, for reflecting on the year past and on what we desire for the future. It’s a time to make resolutions and become better, more fulfilled human beings. I like to think positively, though, and think of it as a time to become a more awesome person. Really, who wants to better themselves through proper nutrition, regular exercise, or spiritual enlightenment like all of those normie, fuddy-duddy resolutions? When I am an old fart, I don’t want to look back and say that I lived a balanced and healthy life — I want to say that I did everything I could and was a total badass about it. Duh.
So with those sentiments in mind, here is a list of resolutions that you should probably consider if you want to be a true success story in this book called life.
Be more sassy
Sure, there is something to be said for being ‘kind’ or ‘patient’, but it’s not really that memorable. Sassiness is what is going to make you those new friends in 2012, and even land you that job on the prime time drama Jersey Shore. Resolve to snap your fingers more, sway your hips, and bring your best sass-mouth to all of your social gatherings.
Drink more Jager
Jager has a lot of good things going for it. First of all, it is more expensive than your regular ol’ Pabst Blue Ribbon, so the classiness metre is going to shoot through the roof when you’re stumbling through a party with a bottle of this fine alcohol under your arm. Second, you can make bombs — Jager Bombs! (You see what I did there?) Finally, when someone inevitably mispronounces it, you have a free pass to say you’re cool like Jagger and bust some sweet rooster moves. Win, win, win.
Create the new McGangbang
If you even have to ask what a McGangbang is, you are a bit of a lost cause on this one. (Alternatively, you could look it up on Google and bring yourself up to speed; we’re not in the frackin’ Dark Ages, you know.) This build-it-yourself sandwich is still a mystery to even some McDonald’s employees, but it has frankly become boring and tame in the world of fast food connoisseurs. We want something new (and definitely something bigger), and I have a sneaky feeling that you should be the awesome human being to create it.
Learn to pick locks
Don’t you play Skyrim? How totally cool would you be if you could actually pick locks? (The correct answer is really cool — like, way cool.) Really, it is the first step to fighting dragons. And you do want to fight dragons, don’t you?
Win a milk-chugging contest
They say that it is impossible to drink four litres of milk without vomming — which is why you should get out some tarps and garbage bins (you know, for cleanliness’ sake) and make it your mission to prove this myth wrong. Once you have completed this goal, consider padding your resume with this accomplishment. Employers will appreciate your determination and lactose tolerance.
Be a couch potato
You know, being lazy can be hard work sometimes. Avoiding responsibilities, personal hygiene, and basic needs like hunger can be a real workout for the body and the mind — which is a good thing, right? Really try to flex those underused muscles this year. Begin with just a few hours on the couch each day, then build up to multi-day marathons of not getting off the couch. Pro-tip: think about investing in a mini fridge and a catheter if you really plan on taking this exercise seriously.
Go on a Kraft Dinner diet
You know, it has become really cliché for university kids to live off of instant noodles. I say break that stereotype by raising your standards to instant macaroni and cheese. Unlike instant noodles, it provides essential protein in its dehydrated cheese packet. Plus, when you’re trying to impress a fella or a lady, you can pretty honestly tell them that you know how to cook. (After all, you do have to mix multiple ingredients together).
Text more often
The holiday season usually reacquaints us with old pals, whom we (truthfully or otherwise) say we would like to keep in better touch with. What better way to do this than to fire a few texts their way every couple of hours? And why stop with just old friends? Tighten the bonds you share with your close friends, family, and — most important — Facebook friends by constantly working those thumbs on your baby cellphone keyboard. Texting should probably take precedent over lame activities like going to class, eating, and real-life interacting; it is the fruit of any healthy relationship.
Read less
There is nothing that you can learn from a book that Google can’t teach you faster. I repeat: nothing. So why bother reading at all? Newspapers, textbooks, novels, biographies, and encyclopedias — none of these compare to the speed of the inter-webs. In an effort to become more smart, knowledgeable, and even more intelligent, consider using all of that time you would spend reading Googling. And God forbid you ever read a poem again.
The kids aren’t alright
KELOWNA, B.C. (CUP) — Teenagers are awful. I have no idea why we as ‘young adults’ would want to be associated with them. Looking back at teen-dom, I don’t really like anything about it. In fairness, I don’t like anything about most ages, or people, or things, but teens are noticeably terrible.
It’s not like I’m one of those geezers who goes on about kids today and their Face-books and their rap music and their skateboarding and their Fruit By The Foot and their Pokeymans and their Gossip Girls and their X-Box Lives and their LeBron James and their Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part One and their Call Of Duty Modern Warfare and their The OC and their Anger Birds and their mountain bicycles and their You-Tubes and their My-Spaces and their Beanie Babies and their baggy pants and their tight pants and their Britney Spears and their rollerblades and their cyber bullying and their Pizza Pops and their sweat-wicking technology and their who-hoobers and their clam-tinkers and their floo-floobers and all the noise, noise, noise!
Still, I can’t help but shake my head whenever I see anyone between 11 and 17. I’m sure my generation was nowhere near that bad. Of course, you don’t really notice what kids are like when you are one. Meanwhile, some types of wacky youth behaviour have been observable for ages: Bieber Fever is hardly any different from Beatlemania or any other teen-idol craze.
So I’m trying to figure out if kids today are actually more tasteless, more self-centred, more ignorant, more annoying, or more generally awful than they were five years ago (or 15, or 50), or if it’s just my imagination.
What’s worse?
Obviously, young people aren’t any biologically different than they used to be, so any explanation for a difference in kids today will be tied to cultural or technological shifts. I should give some examples of why I dislike yoots so much lately.
There are plenty of specific little things. Just in terms of visuals, teens can be pretty heinous: LBs wear about thirteen different bright colours in one outfit, while LGs think it’s okay to wear furry Snooki mukluks with denim jackets with hoop earrings with ripped leggings with Lululemon with a side-shave haircut and don’t realize that this is like mixing oil and water or dividing by zero.
There are numerous other things that teens like and I hate — Uggs, dubstep, fake tans, Dane Cook — but I know perfectly well that more people than teens like that stuff too.
The real problem I have with the youngsters is not really with particular objects and symptoms, but with what the whole mess seems to represent. But I’ll get to that in a bit.
What got better?
First, I should give credit where credit is due. Here are some things that I think have improved about youth culture in the past year or two:
The whole Disney purity-core thing seems to be on the downswing. I’m no fan of sleaziness and sluttiness, but I definitely feel that if you’re a teenager the point is to rebel a bit and challenge the boring socially accepted conservative order. It seems unnatural for teenagers to think being goody two-shoes (shoeses?) is cool. I’d rather see hesh skate rats blasting Odd Future than identical, inoffensive middle-of-the-road Stepford kids smiling along to the JoBros.
What else? I did think kids were probably less homophobic than they used to be, but Rick Mercer tells me otherwise.
When does cool get claimed?
I can’t help but feel that it’s a waste and a lost opportunity every time something comparatively classy and interesting becomes incorporated into the youth mainstream in a superficial, neutered form. Maybe you think I’m just being a textbook hipster, feeling revulsion the second something I like goes mainstream.
Yet I think there’s a legitimate point behind that revulsion. Accepting something alternative and critically well-regarded into the mainstream should be a triumphant discovery, providing ‘the masses’ with a chance to show that they’re more intelligent, more tasteful, more human than marketers have treated them. Instead of this result we see the mainstream defanging and corrupting a quality text and placing it alongside inferior products — without indicting the legitimacy of those products by comparison — it is understandably a failure of the critically lauded text’s potential to do substantial, positive cultural work.
It’s a convenient fiction among plenty of people that the masses — teens especially — are duped by marketing and availability into liking shitty things. If they were only exposed to the good stuff, we lament, then music/movies/TV wouldn’t be so terrible. This does have some truth to it — labels and studios push whatever is the easiest and the surest bet to sell. But we have a wonderful internet where people have plenty of opportunity to look up a huge percentage of all the digital entertainment being created in the world.
There’s only so much we can blame radio, print, and TV as those mediums become increasingly less relevant and no longer hold a monopoly over content transmission. There are certainly successes — Adele, acclaimed cable TV shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, those TED Talk things that white people love. But I think, to some extent, people — especially young ones — just don’t want ‘the good stuff’. People like the mild, cheap high of shallow or simple entertainment and culture.
There’s nothing wrong with that — in moderation. The problem is that taking the easiest option every time, like always just giving the old teeth a half-assed light brushing, eventually builds up into a problem of unhealthy teeth. Plaque, gingivitis, cavities. Literal bad taste. So you go grab Listerine, floss, and fancy toothpaste — but if you employ those just as half-heartedly and superficially as you did the brushing in the first place, your teeth may look a bit better, but you still don’t have a healthy mouth or healthy oral habits.
In fact, with youth it’s more like they’re merely slapping on some Whitestrips. What I’m saying is that teens appear to be getting better — more cultured, less obnoxious, less vapid — but it’s just a superficial illusion. They aren’t engaging with what particular classier, more-legit things represent — they’re merely appropriating the trappings, the symptoms, the signs. This fools us and themselves into thinking they’ve improved, and we can abandon the issue. Everyone can happily convince themselves that kids aren’t soulless, artistically barren computer jockeys.
What caused the change?
I’ve obviously been generalizing in this article. I know that there are plenty of awesome youngsters, and that there’s a huge variety among teenagers — just as there is among any group of people — but there’s no denying that there are general trends we can see among this particular age cohort and subculture. It comes back to the question of what exactly is it that has made kids today any different from their predecessors? The most obvious answer is technology. However, it’s simplistic and often ridiculous when people directly blame things like Facebook. The fault is not in our screens, but in ourselves.
In Marc Prensky’s 2001 article “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” he explains that people under a certain age are natives of the digital era, while older folks are immigrants clinging to old ways, or “languages”. As a result, the two exhibit strikingly different behaviour, learning patterns, and even brains.
Technology simply allows us to do more things, and when we have more options, we are more free to pursue whatever appeals to us most. The Internet allows people to curate their experiences, eliminating what they dislike and engaging with only what they like. Paradoxically, the web’s onus on the consumer to find their own entertainment and information results in it enabling users to insulate themselves from alternative choices just as much as it exposes them to those.
When we have the ability to constantly be presented with only what we like, there is no incentive to search high and low for new interests or to engage especially deeply with even your pre-existing interests — why put the investment into reading anything in depth when there’s always a next thing waiting for you to skim?
I talked to UBC critical theory professor George Grinnell about these issues, and he explained that this resistance to patient critical thinking extends further than just your average 15-year-old kid.
“I do believe that now, more than ever,” he said, “[we in our culture] need to exercise what Nietzsche calls ‘slow reading’ or what so many of my students identify as the alienating experience of thinking patiently and seriously about culture and its work upon us. One need look no further than the sort of blow-hard ‘journalism’ of cable news to see how aggressively thought and reflection is discouraged.”
Grinnell also pointed out the tricky premises we’re operating under: we’re postulating that youth are relevantly different now than they were, in some way, and we are grouping individuals by age to the point of ignoring other factors like class. He suggested that the instant-gratification desire is prevalent throughout our society, though we see it perhaps most readily in youth.
“I am reminded of Zizek’s comment that ‘enjoy yourself’ has become one of the overweening imperatives of Western culture for us now,” Grinnell said.
Zizek also theorizes that in ideology, “[people] know what they are doing, and yet still they are doing it.” People recognize certain problems with the dominant ideology but continue to participate in it. It seems likely that most young people today recognize that plenty of entertainment is crass, unimpressive, and low-quality. People no longer love and approve of the majority of texts they are engaging with, but don’t have enough of a problem with it to rebel against it — which, I have to admit, is fair enough.
What was it replaced with?
Meanwhile, quality simply isn’t necessary in the essentialized contemporary world of entertainment. Content in verses is superfluous when people only come for the hook. In the article “The Party Track About Partying”, Nitsuh Ababe explains his reaction to the Black Eyed Peas: “The group is to pop music, roughly, what a Fisher-Price figurine is to a real human being . . . everything’s reduced to blank, rudimentary outlines, almost a placeholder for the original item. It’s like a simple pictographic representation of the pure idea of being someplace where there’s alcohol and people feel freaky and it’s time to party, et cetera.”
Producers have realized that any factor of a cultural product that does not directly improve its success enough to justify the necessary effort is unnecessary. If musical ability is not directly related the success of a product then the effort to produce that element of the product is extraneous and there is no incentive for it.
This factor, along with technology, suggests that it is not teens themselves that have changed so much as the context in which they are able to operate. They now have an avenue to be as lazy as they want, and to embrace talentless art and entertainment. Previous generations did not have the ability to do so, though they likely would have. When there were fewer options for entertainment, you really invested in the ones you found that you liked.
When you didn’t have something more gratifying at your fingertips, you had less of a problem with doing something somewhat boring for an hour or two. In terms of art/entertainment, it was simply that the early Beatles happened to be talented because that was necessary to make music at the time. The screaming girls weren’t there because they studied the early Beatles’ chord progressions.
The availability of gratification is much higher now, and the selling of cultural texts is more naked, essentialized and cynical, and together those create a context such that teens today have the ability to be ‘worse’ in a way that previous generations would have taken full advantage of if they had been in a similar environment.
UBC sociology professor Chris Schneider explained, “I don’t think it’s the youth, per se. I think it’s the conditions in which we all reside . . . and we don’t recognize those conditions.”
What was wrong?
So at the end of the day, what did turn out to be wrong with the youth? Well, they’re pretty entitled — which stems largely from their parenting. They like vapid things — because entertainment companies realized that quality has only ever been marginally necessary for a popular product. They don’t engage critically with things because, well, North American society in general doesn’t engage all that critically with things. They have no attention span and don’t engage deeply with issues or cultural objects because we have the technology to constantly distract and amuse us. We see all these more pronouncedly in our youngest generations because these conditions are all they’ve known.
So what is wrong with kids these days? It seems like it’s just more blatant versions of what’s wrong with everyone these days.
Bar Room Anecdote takes Disturbing Twist
By Gary Lim
Senior Tavern Correspondent
VANCOUVER (B.C.) – Onlookers watched in stunned silence as what began as a jovial bar room anecdote by one Steven Miller, 22, took off on a strange dark tangent last Thursday night.
Long-time server at Abernethy’s Pub and Grill, Sharleen Halcord told The Peak that Miller had been a long time patron of the establishment. “He was a real good customer. Every Thursday night he and his friends would be in that corner booth.”
But the usual party-hardy atmosphere of the pub was shattered when an anecdote by Miller took a dark and jarring twist. Second year UBC law student Tanvir Singh was there, here is his chilling first-hand account.
“I was sitting at the table next to them waiting for my boys to show up, they were laughing, drinking, and basically bro-ing the fuck down. They were that kind of drunk where you talk shit, but are still sober enough to be somewhat coherent. Man, you should’ve heard what they were going off about. ‘What deadly animal would you replace an arm with’, ‘Which famous historical figure would you most likely punch in the face?’, ‘Given that our individual consciousnesses are part of the universe, then what does it mean that we are the universe experiencing itself?’
“But then the conversation somehow turned to the topic of summer break and then camping. So they’re swapping camping stories when that one guy [Miller] who had been relatively quiet up to that point decides to start talking.
At first I was only half listening, he was talking about going camping with his family. Then he started talking about ‘the compound’ and the leader the ‘Great and powerful Dave’. From his tone they probably thought he was joking. Then he started chanting.
‘Blessed be to the Great Dave, he who hath brought tamed the lightning in sky and leashed it to the fence of barb-ed wire to protect us from the outsiders.’
‘Blessed be to the Great Dave who hath provided us with the nourishing gruel to grow strong, but not too strong. Blessed be to the Great Da-’ and so on.”
And he just kept going, he was obviously pretty passionate about the whole thing because at this point he was at a near-shout. The bar was dead silent now. A couple of people laughed to try break the tension and he just glared them down.”
The RCMP are still looking for David Shamborski, alias “The Great Dave”, any information on his whereabouts that leads to his capture could fetch a reward of up to $10,000.
Stuff We Hate
Stuff We Hate: Parking
When I first enrolled at SFU was excited to get my U-Pass so I wouldn’t have to drive downtown and park. There would be no more circling blocks looking for a spot, no more fumbling for change, and no more pretending that the homeless guy was a speed bump.
That was over four years ago. Apparently my dumb brain used those four years to convince itself that driving downtown was somehow “convenient”. Well guess what. Just like the situation with dead cops in Gotham City, things are worse than ever. There are parking meters that are in effect until 10:00 p.m.! If I have to wait until 10:00 p.m.to park my car for free then I’m already going to be pretty drunk. Then I’m going to end up getting arrested for drunk driving, and that’s obviously some kind of trick.
What do you want, City of Vancouver? Do you want a couple more hours of parking fees or do you want me to be sober behind the wheel. Ball’s in your court, Gregor.
By Colin Sharp
Stuff We Hate: Silent E
No I’m not talking about notorious underground rapper Silent E nor am I talking about that new rave drug exclusively for mimes.
I’m talking about the English language writing convention of putting the letter ‘E’ at the end of a word to change the preceding vowel sound from short-form to long-form. That shit just rubs me the wrong way. I mean just the other day, I was making a grilled cheese with my new frying pan, in walks Silent E (drunk, as usual), all of a sudden I’m holding a frying pane and my sandwich is gone.
Don’t even get me started on what that asshole did when I lent him my van for a weekend.
By Gary Lim
Stuff We Hate:Caesars
All Caesars are bullshit. Unless triggering vomit is considered a good thing, then the salad is terrible. The cocktail is powerfully awful.
I was once served a Caesar garnished with a crisp piece of bacon instead of celery. Somehow this Caesar actually had the ability to make the bacon kind of gross. Let that sink in. It made bacon gross. Even Little Caesars Pizza is a mistake. Isn’t it a bad omen that even though the company name includes the word pizza, the slogan is still “Pizza! Pizza!”? Is it that hard to convince people that this food can be classified as pizza?
I get that people like all of them, and everyone is allowed to like shitty things. Just don’t try and convince me otherwise. All Caesars suck. Well . . . Julius Caesar wasn’t too bad, except for that stupid haircut. What is that style called again? Oh yeah. A Caesar. I rest my case.
By Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger
