Fred Phelps Must Die

Sooooooooo, yeah. I should be working, but it's been a bit weird the past few days so I thought I'd take a two minute break.

First of all, why have I heard so little about this?

The video's pretty horrible so be warned.

Basically, this Middle Eastern student was sitting in the UCLA 24 hour library when the police made rounds checking everyone's idea. I guess this is normal. In any case, he didn't have his on him, so they asked him to leave. He got upset, but agreed to leave, and got his stuff together as the cops went outside. Apparently then they came back in and started trying to drag him out, despite the fact that he was cooperating. So they tasered him.

Yep.

A crowd had formed by the time they tasered him a second time and they yelled at him over and over to stand up, but--hm--several thousand volts running through your body--hm--I imagine, yanno, standing up would be pretty fucking difficult. They ended up tasing him at least five times, and other students who tried to intervene were also threatened. The cops were actually threatening people who even just asked for names and badge numbers. The kid actually ended up on the ground and they kept right on tasing him.

And I don't know the whole story, but it sounds like UCLA covered it up? In any case, I'd heard nothing about it until someone brought it up in Persuasive Argument. The only reason people seem to know about it is because it's on YouTube.

Nice.

I actually saw this video twice. Our professor seems to be missing again, as he had his first unforseen absence today, by which I mean there was no pink slip on the door saying class had been cancelled. So we sat in there for the legal ten minutes (or whatever) and one kid actually pulled up the video on YouTube, since not everyone had seen it.

It's stuff like this which makes it hard for me to like cops, which I feel bad about, because I've met some cops and the ones I've met aren't all that bad. It's the few (or, let's face it, not so few) assholes out there who show up in public that give them a bad name. Rather like the Far Right fundies who give the entire Christian religion a bad name.

I've noticed, however, that the main difference between fundies of any sort and leftists are that leftists tend to have a sense of humor. Whereas I don't think it's physically possible for people like Fred Phelps or Jerry Falwell to laugh. Ever. At anything. It's probably a sin or something.

I say this because in Queer Studies today we talked about the Right backlash to organization and mobilization of gay rights groups in the 70's onward, and we watched this relatively famous anti-gay, 20 minute propaganda film from 1993, featuring three doctorly types and two "ex-gays" called "The Gay Agenda." Pretty much it just talks about how gays are all sex, that they shouldn't have minority status, that they're sick people, and that they're child molestors. You know, the usual. But seeing it from our standpoint--I mean, we're a freaking Queer Studies class--it was hilarious. You couldn't help but laugh at it, because their arguments are so pathetically invalid, so outdated, and so obviously biased and just plain ridiculous. Ironically enough, apparently one of the "ex-gays" in the video "reverted" a few years later. "Whoot, I'm cured! Oh, wait, no..." I noticed all the people talking in it were white, middle-class, middle-aged types. And they didn't once mention lesbians. Apparently there's no such thing.

So take it to heart--a sense of humor is what keeps you from being an ignorant dickhead.

Ahhh, I've just been in a kind of up and down mood the past few days. The end of the semester and the advent of finals is finally starting to hit me. I have four papers to write, one that has to all be in German, though at least for that I know what I'm gonna write about. I'm actually not entirely sure what's happening at this point with Persusasive Argument--every other time he's missed a class he's moved due dates back. This time is kind of unique, both in that it's the last paper, it's finals time, and it was an unexpected absence. No one seems to know where he is. It kind of worries me. I have a thing for Fiction I'm working on that I'm sort of iffy about. Queer Studies is the mother, two four-page essays, which shouldn't be too hard, but still. I have my poetry final finished (15 pages of poems...yipes) and Psych is just gonna be a cumulative test.

In other news, I have a job to look forward to when I get back to Cali, and hopefully a job to look forward to next semester. And a $167 check is headed my way due to Health Center incompetency. At least this time it benefits me (they charged me twice for fugging expensive meds).

Meh. Busy, tired, generally gehh.

R.I.P.

Forgot to mention this. My snail, Snake Plisskin, has died and gone to the great fishtank in the sky. He will be sorely missed.

Which also reminds me that in Poetry today, my prof was talking about how his hamster jumped out of its fishtank and broke its hip, so he took it to the vet, who made a little harness of some kind, and my prof gave the hamster physical therapy for some time, like stretching its hind legs. The hamster. Then it's head started growing weird and he brought it in for a CAT scan which revealed a brain tumor. A CAT scan. For a hamster. How do you even do that?

Spurred by a student reading a poem about a dying hamster.