I just got a message from the facebook group for students staying at UofC over the summer; I never go, but I still get the messages. Something just seemed wrong with this one:

Subject: Chicago Coalition for the Homeless Party (Open Bar)

SUMMERFEST: benefit for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. There will be everything from:

Free food and drinks (including OPEN BAR)
Games and music
Awesome raffle and silent auction prizes, like gift certificates to high-end restaurants, memberships to museums, tickets to shows at places like Second City and the Metro, airfare and hotel stay at a spa, and so much more.

Maybe is is just the phrasing, but I always think there is something wrong when a disconnect between the charity and the supposed benefactors exist. Sure it’s for college students, but that doesn’t fix it. There is a decent episode of Dilbert that “delves” into this problem:

Really, I just found the message amusing, but something is definitely wrong.

I wasn’t sure what to think when I heard that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were returning to the air but with completely improved shows, As most people know, the writers’ strike knocked the late shows off the air, and like many, I felt the hit most with these two shows. As tonight’s shows pointed out, the writers are not exactly salt of the earth blue collars fighting for basic workers rights. Of all things, it is probably not the worst picket line to cross. Still, I found it a bit surprising that Stewart and Colbert joined the other late night hosts in going back. I really didn’t know what they had in mind. After tonight’s show, I am mixed….

Of the two, I thought Stewart handled it much better. He implied that he really didn’t want to be doing the show. For ’solidarity,’ the show’s name was changed to A Daily Show.  He focused most of the show on the details of the strike and ripped a bit into the producers. I particularly liked his bit on Viacom suing YouTube (so Google) for 1 billion dollars, comparing them to a child for choosing such an absurd sum. It seems like a fairly accurate portrayal. Even with all that he did about the strike on his show, it still seems wrong. Clips still went up online, and though I cannot check, I am sure the episode is available for download on iTunes. Doesn’t really show support for the studios if from their perspective, they are just making a hit show with a smaller budget.

I thought the way Colbert handled it was almost offensive. He spent a fair amount of the show sticking to his usual act. He stuck in character and went on about he is being perfectly consistent by breaking the picket lines. He spent a while showing how no writers meant no written material. No shit. In short, he didn’t use his relative job security to make any criticisms. It was just business as usual. It seemed like many of the jokes and rips he made were borrowed from Stewart. I really found the show surprising and disappointing.  Colbert did his time on Second City, and he always seemed to be able to rip into people far more than Stewart. Colbert, go back to Strangers with Candy, where you had some principles.

The late shows were all suffering as a result of the strike in ways that will leave permanent. I watched them because I happened to be watching Futurama and South Park on Comedy Central before they came on. I got used to not watching it, and I wasn’t really missing them after a week or so. If they hadn’t gone back on the air now, the shows might have gone under as well. It seems like their motivation for going back on the air was to save the show. All the writers striking are risking their jobs and their shows too; I don’t see why they should do differently.

Without immediate work to do, and without a desire to do any, last Friday I decided to go see Beowulf in IMAX 3D at the only place in the city limits of Chicago playing Hollywood movies on IMAX: Navy Pier. Besides the other people in the theater, a particularly obnoxious group of tourists/Chicagoans, the movie was great. I can’t imagine that this film will do to great on DVD; unfortunately, the film seemed to demonstrate that the art of films in 3D has not moved far beyond waving random things around in front of the screen. Granted, with the amazing CG on IMAX 3D, I enjoyed the experience of watching it, but I have to agree with the many critics who point out how much more shallow this movie is compared to the original poem, as much as I like Vikings in any context.

Anyways, as the title of this post suggests, I wasn’t so satisfied with Navy Pier. Friday was in fact the third time I have sworn never to return to Navy Pier as well as the third time I have been there. I suppose it is little more than a tourist trap, but I think that gives it a little too much credit. The main problem I have with it is that I can’t think of anything that is actually there. There are plenty of crap shops there, but if you really want to get pointless Chicago junk, you are about a ten minute walk away from the most trafficked part of Michigan Ave (the so called “Magnificent Mile”, as I have never referred to it as). Why anyone would want to go to Navy Pier instead of Michigan for shopping is a mystery to me. There are boat tours that do down the Chicago river or go around Lake Michigan, but the benefit to these seems to be that they in fact take you away from Navy Pier to something more interesting. When it is not freezing cold outside, there are vendors along the paths. In the summer, I can understand the attraction to a point. On the one hand, you are on the lake, which is nice, but it is still kind of like going to Disney World for a drink: you just don’t do it. Likewise, the ferris wheel is all but useless outside of summer, given the freezing temperatures and gusting winds. As I wondered around for I while, I noticed that there was a sign that said something about how the ferris wheel was brought to you by McDonald’s, complete with there slogan, “I’m Lovin’ It.” Beyond the ferris wheel and the IMAX theater, there is the Chicago Shakespeare Company’s theater, for reasons that are far beyond me. If you have a kid who needs to go to the children’s museum (I am doubtful of the quality), then it might make sense, but all in all, Navy Pier is a worthless piece of trash. The restaurants are all chains of course, which adds to the pointlessness of this place. Again with Michigan so close, I don’t know why anyone would want to go the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company or to the McDonald’s of the future (complete with the generic science museum plasma ball). After I got my ticket, I wondered over to Billy Goat Tavern for lunch–always a good time. To an otherwise great city, I consider Navy Pier to be a pretty horrid blemish.

I have had quite a busy week! Last Thursday, I went to another panel that I helped run. Fortunately, I only had to make the poster for this one, so I was able to escape any stress yesterday. We had funding from Campus Progress, so we could afford decent advertising, hence the colorful posters. We covered the campus, but mostly people who came did so because they were members of the ACLUofC or were friends of members. It was an interesting panel, so the low attendance really was a shame. I guess advertising can only go so far with these things.

The panel featured Wendy Doniger, Lauren Berlant, and Richard Shweder. For the ACM AI panel, we spent a decent amount of time hammering out the format, so I thought it was pretty funny when the panelists for this event just worked everything out themselves five minutes before the panel. I guess the general format of an informal panel is not that different from most classes in the humanities.

There were a few points I found really interesting. Shweder discussed institutional neutrality for a while. As he discussed, the motivations behind the principle are very similar to those behind the first amendment. Apparently, a first amendment scholar was the principle’s primary architect. Basically, the principle creates an autonomy between the university and the students and faculty; the university refuses to take any political stances so that no one is ever silenced within the university community on any issue. The primary goal of the institution of a university is to promote free academic inquiry in general among its community and to support This principle came up most recently with the university’s decision not to remove its investments in Petrochina, which has questionable ties to Sudan, despite the efforts of student groups like STAND (see the Maroon articles “Divestment decision to come next week” and “University’s divestment decision has major holes”). Shweder agreed with the university’s decision, affirming that a university should only look at financial factors when making decisions about its investments. He went on to bring up the issue of how a department should decide how it allocates rooms. Apparently, there was some incident some time ago where some group at Northwestern invited the head of the US Nazi party, and the president refused to let him speak on campus. A group at U of C then invited him to speak. It is not that many people agree with him here, but there are many who would be interested in someone with such an extreme view. The one thing that I found a little odd was his dislike of IRBs, since they give institutions the power to limit what members of its community can do. He said that he has examined the facts behind some of the infamous experiments that lead to the the creation of IRBs, such as the Milgram experiment and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and found that the horrors of these experiments are not actually that horrible. I find that hard to believe, but I still think that IRBs have some merit. In terms of research studies, people are an asset, so it is in the institutions interest to protect its merits within these communities. Studies that get bad press harm everyone within the institution; appearance matters. This discussion raises the unfortunate difference between policies like institutional neutrality and the first amendment as idealized freedoms and the enforcement of them given financial realities. Cindy Cohn, legal director of the EFF, raised this same point when she spoke at the law school.

Lauren Berlant made a few points that stood out to me. She talked about how her and other professor’s goal in discussion classes is to cause people to disagree and to discuss. Since she teaches gender studies classes, there is often an expectation that everyone is going to take a liberal stance, so students are wary to take anything but a standardized liberal viewpoint, even if they are not aware they are doing so. She wants to create controversy, even if it means arguing a stance that she doesn’t agree with. She also shared an interesting observation during the panel about students at the U of C: no one asks questions. I have observed this phenomenon and know it quite well. She said that first years can’t stop speaking in classes usually, but most students by first year barely say anything for fear that they will say something that sounds dumb. It can really be painful here. I don’t think some degree of self-censorship is bad; I remember hating my humanities class first precisely because so many people just talked about absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, I, and I guess others too, feel the lesson taught is to just shut up and listen. I wish there was a happier medium.

See Also

• ACLU Academic Freedom Poster - Poster for the event. Graphically, I was quite pleased with this posters turnout.

I have always thought that the social dynamics of digg were a little odd to say the least, but I have never been able to put my finger on it. I don’t know quite why I even browse digg, but I do; at least some of the posted stories are interesting or useful. Digg is one of the few high traffic sites I have seen where headings like “BREAKING,” “AMAZING,” or some other word in all caps is somehow considered acceptable. I guess the most noticeable dynamic though is the pure sensationalism. It is hard to believe half of the stories posted. Sure, the Internet is famous for bullshit, but “web 2.0″ + pure bullshit seems to be in a category of its own. Perhaps digg is simply the combined expression of Internet culture, but I believe it is a force far darker.