Education as Currency: Feudalism and Oppression in Harry Potter.

By Sam

The world of Harry Potter is a strange place. I know it’s meant to be wondrous and magical and all that, but behind the glamour you really have to wonder what the ultimate goal of their education was.

At school the children learn to transform objects, perform telekinesis, open locks, fight dark wizards and play some retarded sport where two guys chase a golden testicle around and try to convince the other players that they actually matter. Who designed that education curriculum, and what were they trying to achieve?

Duh... potato?

Perhaps the founders of Hogwarts -- or the Ministry of Magic, or Dumbledore, or whoever set out the education system -- didn’t really have an end-goal in mind. There’s a pretty good case to be made that their train of thought didn’t go any further than “Magic is cool, therefore we should teach magic.” However, that sounds unlikely to me.

This is a society that’s run by a government with the organisational nuance to keep an entire civilization secret from the mundane world. You’d think they’d have pretty tight reigns on the education system. In fact, we know they do: in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the Ministry of Magic disapproves of what Dumbledore is teaching and proceeds to step in to appoint a new teacher, Dolores Umbridge, all despite his protests. No consultation, no arguments. This is a private school, and yet the government has the power to hire and fire staff with relative impunity. With that level of control you have to wonder why the education system is so woefully inadequate.

Wait, you might be saying, for a magical world it’s a bit of an overstatement to say that an education in magic is "woefully inadequate".

The thing is, I’m not saying that the students shouldn’t be taught magic, but that by teaching magic to the exclusion of all other subjects Hogwarts is leaving its graduates hamstrung when it comes to social mobility.

Crucible of incompetence or pressure cooker of idiocy?

Why “nice guys finish last” is a pack of bitter lies.

By Sam

I'm a nice guy, and there are so many nice girls. Why won't any of them date me?

Based on my experiences with girls this is something I believed all through my teenage years:

Nice guys don’t get the girl.

Or possibly the reverse:

Awesome girls end up with douchebags.

Actually, come to think of it, I probably believed it well past my teenage years, but you can’t really blame me. If you’re a guy it seems to be irrefutably true on face value. We can all point to at least a couple of experiences. For me it was stretched across six months around the beginning of my final year of school. There was this girl. She was smart, she was beautiful, and she had a wicked sense of humor. I spent months listening to all the problems she was having in her life, especially the problems with her not-good-enough-for-her boyfriend. Eventually they broke up and she got a new boyfriend -- and yes, I got to hear about him too. Lucky me.

That was my own personal experience torn from the pages of my private life. So why does it sound like I just cut and pasted it from the comments section of any decent relationship website? Because it happens to a lot of guys, and I mean a lot of guys. It happens to a lot of guys to the point where I would say that, unless you're the god-king of seduction, the first time you’re the pathetic platonic friend to a girl is the when you truly become a man. It’s like a girl’s first period, only with less blood and more unfulfilled teenage angst.

I see girls who are with douchbags. I see nice guys who get no girls. This seems to be a fairly clear-cut phenomenon with plenty of evidence to support it.

As I was saying, for guys the “girls like douchbags” rule seems to be fulfilled everywhere you look. Go to any club on a decent Saturday night, pick the hottest girl there and see who her boyfriend is. Yup, he’s the guy in the muscle tee who appears to be simulating anal sex on his best friend. Wow, why do women always end up with guys like that?

But there’s a flaw in that thought process, it stems from the way we guys can ignore any aspect of a woman in favor of her physical attractiveness.

It’s not that women are attracted to dick guys. Stupid people are attracted to stupid people. However, more often than not stupid people are also incredibly, incredibly hot. Be honest here, when you see a mind bogglingly attractive girl you don’t give a crap about her as a person. You couldn’t care less if she was so evil she stomped on puppies and so stupid she couldn’t count to one on a banana. It’s natural. When a guy sees a toned body in a slinky skirt all those bits of his brain that do the thinking divert power to the boobies cortex. That’s just life right?

Well, sort of...

The thing you forget is that the reverse holds true for her view of you. I think it’s probably a safe bet that you’re not a tanned, muscular Adonis with rippling muscles and eyes as blue as the deep, deep ocean, so how do you expect to compete with her tanned, muscular, idiot boyfriend with washboard abs? With about as much hope as you’d have trying to wrestle a moving bullet train, that’s how. She doesn’t want you for the same reason you didn’t want her ugly friend: you didn’t tickle her man-boobies cortex. If you rate a woman’s overall attractiveness based on her physical appearance I’m not here to tell you’re wrong, whatever works for you, but you have to give women the same leeway to choose a man's physical attractiveness over all other factors. Anything else would make you a hypocritical bastard, which doesn’t really fit with the whole “nice guy” thing.

I may not be an Adonis, but I’m pretty good looking, and girls still don’t want me. They go for guys who're the same level of physical attractiveness and are dickheads. Surely that’s a pretty good indicator that it’s the dickness that’s doing it for them?

The Very Thirsty Caterpillar

By Sam

 

Not on my watch.

We live in a cynical age; an age of recessions, racial tension and media spin. Once valuable children's books, like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, are being left behind. What sort of lessons are they teaching the nation's children? That caterpillar's become butterflies? Not your caterpillar sonny. Your caterpillar is becoming a chartered accountant with a wife who hates you and four kids with ADHD - and that's only if you're lucky. I think it's time we reimagined these out-dated children's books, and gave them a more realistic snapshot of contemporary society. I think they need to know what life is really like for little caterpillars these days.

The Very Thirsty Caterpillar

In the light of the moon lay a drunk caterpillar.

On Sunday morning - bluuuurg - the caterpillar awoke with a hangover and threw up on his clothes. He started to look for some booze.

The Best of the Best

 By Sam

It was 4:00pm and I was already passed out on the couch in a pool of my own gluttonous vomit. Chunks of partially digested pizza slid across my shirt and down towards my belly, as my body tried desperately to wheeze in enough oxygen to keep my pathetic carcass alive. It was fighting a losing battle against the half-kilo of cheese I had just stuffed down - and on - my face.

The gurgling sound of my snores was punctuated by the shrill ring of the telephone. I awoke with a loud obscenity, hitting the floor like a flesh wrapped sack of cheese, which was exactly what I was. I envied no man.

"What the hell?" I screamed at an unreasonably loud volume. "Who vomited my pizza all over me? And who pooped in my pants?"

The phone continued to ring, its insistent tone cutting through the fetid air.
"Why is there noise?" I shouted. "Jack make the noise stop!"
"No!" came a muffled reply from across the house. "Not until you take a bath, or at least stand out in the rain or something."
"No can do!" I replied seriously. "I need to keep up a certain level of filthiness to drive away Delta Goodrem. Seriously, she just won't take no for an answer."

"Delta Goodrem... the singer."
"Yeah sure!" I replied truculently. "Delta Goodrem has been stalking me because I'm so hot. Anyone who says that it's actually a bus driver named Frank is either lying or mad."

The Stuff of Nightmares

By Sam

I have a lot of pathetic nightmares. It's unclear why. Perhaps it's because I have a terrible diet; perhaps it's because I'm an atheist; perhaps it's because I'm the reincarnation of a Mayan priest. We'll probably never know. Whatever the cause, I've had some fairly weak nightmares in my time. Where some nightmares cause you to bolt awake in the dead of night, drenched in terrified sweat, these ones tend to quietly shake you awake and whisper "what the hell is wrong with you?". To illustrate my point I have decided to list four of the crappier nightmares I've had, along with an interpretation of their meaning by noted dream therapist Dr Velveeta Vandersplat:

Fridgepocalypse

I once had a dream about an evil fridge. It started with this one ominous fridge standing on its own, but as soon as I blinked there were suddenly fridges on either side of it, stretching as far as the eye could see. It slowly dawned on me that I was standing in a gigantic circle of evil sentient fridges. Also, we were in space

What it means (Dr Velveeta Vandersplat):

This dream tells me that Sam harbours a deep seated fear of modern technology. He has carried this sense of mistrust with him ever since a betrayal in his childhood. Most likely he was molested by a cartoon character, or possibly an electrician. Maybe his brain is just telling him it thinks he's really fat.

Animal Love

By Sam

 

If you had to fuck an animal, what animal would you choose? It's an important question that has plagued philosophers for centuries.

Now I know that some moral whingers will get all prudish on me and be all like “wah wah wah, sex with animals is wrong! They're dumber than we are, and they're ugly!” but I submit to you that their protests mask their hypocrisy. Some really ugly people look a lot like animals, and no one seems to protest when they have sex (as long as it's in the dark); and the police don't arrest people for having sex with Lindsay Lohan, even though she clearly has the brain of a parakeet.

It would be shallow of us to deny the pleasures of love to someone with Mickey Rourke's looks and Lindsay Lohan's brain, but the instant you label them with pigeon hole terms like “mountain gorilla” or “chimpanzee” suddenly I'm going too far. Well, I will be silent no longer. If we are to break the shackles of an unjust society it must be through open minded philosophical examination. To that end I present to you a list of five animals that you might consider having sex with, along with the pros and cons of my experience having sex with each:

French Poodle

Voulez-vous coucher avec moi pompoms?