Your enjoyment of this post caused me to share my own example https://slrpnk.net/post/17989360

I bet you guys had far better parties

A friend’s boyfriend has a hot pink and glittery t-shirt that says “Alpha Male” on it, which I find hilarious

So the thing is with Oxbridge is that they are tremendously overhyped, in that much of their prestige comes from the fact that they’re self perpetuating prestige machines at this point — they have their pick of the best and the brightest, from all over the world, and their name holds a heckton of power in the research world too, resulting in somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy

Regarding lecture recording, I know that this wasn’t commonplace before COVID; disabled students who needed this for access reasons had to wade through a lot of nonsense to get that, even after it was officially a part of their support plan. Something I found very silly was that there would often be people(non students) who were hired by the disability service to attend the lectures and record the lectures for students with health problems that prevented their attendance, on a per student basis. It was an administrative nightmare, especially for the disabled students. They apparently pulled their shit together and did a proper rollout of lecture recording during COVID, for obvious reasons. People I knew were salty that it took a global pandemic to lead to change, but hey, progress!

Generally lecture materials such as PowerPoint slides would be available on the virtual learning environment (which I assume is the case for recordings too), but I think a big reason why you can’t find stuff online about this is that lectures are fairly “meh” quality, especially compared to other universities’ (now that I’ve seen the quality of undergraduate teaching from multiple angles). I speculate that the lack of availability of study materials from Oxbridge is because anyone who graduates has an incentive to continue to perpetuate the prestige that they’re now benefitting from, so it would be a bad look to be sharing lecture materials. I genuinely mean it when I say that if you could have complete access to the English literature section of the online materials, you’d be disappointed. No doubt you’d find the syllabi and materials useful, but I wager you’d be surprised to see how mediocre some of it is

Unfortunately, the real meat of the teaching at Oxford or Cambridge is something that’s far harder to record or share, and that’s the tutorials system. This involves a small group (2-4) of students discussing problems or essays with a tutor, usually in college. The tutors are often academics who are renowned in their field, so it’s really cool to get such in depth teaching from them. Tutorials would be weekly, give or take, and they would typically involve writing a multiple page essay for each one (and also do other work that was typically less frequent and more centralised). The pace of it was insane, and whilst I think the pressure can be good for output, I always hated how I never had time to go back and review or rewrite old work based on tutor’s feedback — the pace was just too frantic.

I fucking loved the tutorials though, partly because the tutor for my subject at my college was one of my favourite people I’ve ever met. I always came out of a tute feeling like I’d done a workout, but for my brain. I never really felt like I understood the material until I’d done the tutorial on it (ideally the tutorials are meant to be after the lecture content on them, but sometimes it didn’t work out that way, and you had to scrap by). The discussion aspect of the tutorials were especially key in the humanities, because it forces students to argue their viewpoint.

That brings us back to you, and the question of how one could emulate the effects of a tutorial (which would be tricky even if you had all the material). Even if you had a list of tutorial essay questions that you could work through, they’re not the kind of thing that are marked with a rubric. Even the official grade boundary guidance for exams are frustratingly vague, because they rely a lot on the experience of the tutors. Without someone like a tutor to mark your work and push your understanding in the tutorial after, it’s much harder to do that kind of in-depth learning. That being said, a key thing is producing something, I think. It was a hellish rhythm, but weekly tutorials were great at making me produce something. It was super uncomfortable at first, because I didn’t back myself enough to really try to put my own opinions through in my essays, but by being forced to argue my side, I improved. Even if you don’t have someone to mark work/discuss with you, when you read a piece of literature, try to formulate your own ideas and write them down. If you need some prompt style questions to get you going, then search for resources for particular texts online.

The discussion aspect of tutorials can also be replicated somewhat just with a reading group of motivated and intense nerds. Being able to access or create something like that may not be easy for many, but the format isn’t the big part — having external viewpoints to challenge your own is.

I can ask a couple of people who I know about if they have any old downloaded resources, even if it’s just exam question papers (because I realise that it’s useful for calibration purposes if nothing else). So I can ask the right people, what’s your current age or education level, and are there any particular areas of English literature that you’re interested in?

I will tell my friend that their problem is a lack of hallucinogens.

God, that’s a horrifying thought.

“preventing these kinds of shenanigans”

Yeah, Linux really does give you a gun and lets you point it at your foot if you want to, huh? I say this with the fondness and trepidation of someone who isn’t a Linux noob, but also no pro (yet)

You reminded me of this funny tweet

I agree, but I think the tone of the joke suggests that OP is at least somewhat self-aware

I sent this to a friend and they replied with this meme

They went onto to say “idk, each time I think I understand what Hegel was saying, I think a little more and get confused again”, which I think is (as the kids say) a tremendous mood

I feel compelled to note that this correlation doesn’t necessarily mean there’s straightforward causation either direction. That is to say that I don’t believe that conservatives are inherently less empathetic. Such a belief can hardly be scientifically tested but ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ it helps me to cope

I hadn’t thought about it quite like this before, so thank you for your comment

Oh yeah, it’s a great metaphor hat’s really taken off with disabled people. I really love how in the original story, the choice of spoons was convenient, and are just a placeholder for “arbitrary units”; the slight absurdity of spoons in this context means that when someone says “I’m running low on spoons”, it causes me to reflect on the entirely subjective and relative experience of ability and disability.

Edit: That is to say that whilst the person you’re replying to struggles to go to Costco when they’re low spoons, for a different person, going shopping may be something they find easier to do with low spoons.

It genuinely gladdens my heart to hear you say this, because it suggests that there is at least some length of genuinely caring about inclusion by the people in charge at your workplace; I have seen too many instances of corporations paying lip-service towards DEI whilst fostering a truly toxic workplace culture. It’s nice to hear a story from somewhere that’s different and that it makes a difference to how safe your workplace feels

I’m going to use TERFs as an analogy to explain what I think it is (and I do mean TERFs, not your garden variety transphones). There used to be a subreddit called /r/GenderCritical, before it got (rightfully) banned for hate speech. I had a look around there a few times, trying to understand their incomprehensible ideology.

At first, I only became more baffled. I saw so many stories that had the rough shape of “I am a women who was abused, victimised or otherwise oppressed by a cis man and/or men and that’s why I now hate trans women”. I just didn’t understand how those two things connected. I get that radical feminists tend to take a biologically essentialist view that undermines trans identities. However, I couldn’t understand why they put such effort into distilled down their bitterness and resentment into the vitriol to throw at trans women, as opposed to the men who hurt them (and the patriarchal systems that hurt them).

Over the years, I’ve come to understand that many TERFs have experienced trauma such that they feel powerless and small when looking at the actual cause of their systemic oppression (i.e. the patriarchy), so through a trick of transference, they direct their rage and grief onto transness instead. Fighting an already marginalised foe means that they get both the feeling of fighting something ideological that’s larger than them, but also they don’t have to confront how small they actually are when fighting against oppression (because each of us is small and helpless against systemic oppression; we can’t do shit without solidarity with other people). To be clear, I don’t consider this absolutely isn’t a legitimate excuse for someone to be an awful person; however, it does help me to understand why someone who calls themself a feminist would take such a stance (as much as I’d like to consider them “no true feminist”, I feel like I need to acknowledge the complex baggage of the term “feminist” if I’m to identify as one).

I think people who crusade against DEI initiatives are doing a similar sort of transference, where their real enemy is in fact Capitalism, but that feels like so impossible of a foe that they feel hopeless; it reminds me of that widely shared Mark Fisher quote about how it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And so they tell themselves that there must be some big, bad, insidious force at work, making organisations opt into DEI initiatives, and it must be the same force that’s responsible for the deep unease they feel when they look at the world, or contemplate the future their grandchildren have to look forward to.

In a sense, they’re right in that there are nefarious forces at play and the game is indeed rigged. The problem is that they’ve picked the wrong target and would be better served going after the oil barons and billionairess. In terms of my background, I probably have far more in common with the average Trump voter than I do the average Democrat, so I relate to the hopelessness that their misplaced rage protects them from feeling. The tragedy is that their ignorance hurts everyone, including themselves; None of us are free until all of us are free.

This is an excellently well made gif. Like, there’s only so many way that you can say “They’re all bloody Nazis”, so I do respect whoever made this gif for finding such an elegant way to put it in Gif form.

Reminds me of the Medtronic ventilators that got hacked to unlock them when Medtronic insisted on similar nonsense during the pandemic

I went to a nightclub last month that was a sex/kink-positive themed night, and the organisation was super LGBTQ. I made so many friends because it was the perfect environment to meet people who, as you describe, are at the point where they cross many social boundaries. It certainly is scary, but it gets easier when you meet delightfully weird people who are basically just goals.

Cissy

Ha, I like the pun

This sticker feels more a joke at how trans people are so often spoken about, than a joke at cis people.

But to try to answer your question more materially, sometimes I, an autistic person, make jokes along the lines of “neurotypical develop intense fixations on making excessive eye contact during conversation, and often become distressed if they are unable to”. That’s not much of a joke, but it’s enough to show what I mean. For me, part of the humour is that in reflecting the joke in a mirror, it highlights how the way that we talk about minority groups (such as autistic or trans people) is really weird and othering. This isn’t a “two wrongs make a right” thing, but more like using humor as a way to question societal norms.

I think another aspect of these jokes is that they function as “ritual communication”, which is communication whose purpose is to build, maintain and shape communities, rather than actually communicating things between people. That’s probably a bad explanation because I’m not learned in communication studies, but basically, a big part of ritual communication is building bonds by people within the same group. So in the case of my autism joke, part of it is ritual communication that more or less says “you, my autistic friends who are the audience for this joke, are valid and valued as you are”. Something that’s coming to mind is the comedy trope of people saying “[bad thing], amirite?”. It’s not funny because there’s not a joke being told, but it can still serve a social function.