Viva la Revolución

Have you any idea how grave a mistake it is to mar a young mind? And no, I’m not talking about beating children, or subjecting them to brutal work. I speak of an abuse far more subtle, a slow and lethal poison that seeps through the skull and corrodes the mind, threatening to squash the humanity out of the human heart.
I speak, of course, of the educational system.

As they join the ranks of schools, youths are force-fed an assortment of over-inflated values and priorities which constitute a forlorn and frightening mindset.

Indeed, youths are force-fed, binding them to a chair of eternal conformity. They’re teaching you all you need to know to go to college and get a job and a car and a family, so why would you bother looking for knowledge yourself? School has conveniently prepared a flimsy set of answers to the questions of the world, and bullies us into memorising them all. If we refuse, school sees to it that we are shunned as uncooperative, lazy, and misguided.

As if memorising answers flexed the mind at all. The most anyone could get from witless memorisation is a feeble semblance of self-discipline, which is rendered meaningless anyway as it cannot be applied to anything which has a worthwhile practical use.

—No worthwhile use? But how, if we just said that school will get us a job and a car and a family? Yes, it will. And that’s just fine. But see, the incentive process, for an average school-goer, goes something like this: You’re in school only so you can get good grades and get into college. And you would want to go to college just so you can find a job, and proceed to climb the interminable corporate ladder. And what’s at the end of all this? I dunno. No one really knows. It’s something extremely vague, like, oh, happiness. Or self-realization. Utter bollocks.

Not that I have anything against the white-collar life, or the working class life. What irks me is the neverending toil to a an end that is wholly meaningless. Working relentlessly simply to keep up with a difficult status quo holds no true significance and very little satisfaction. The small, hollow consolations it does offer are obtained at the tolling cost of losing something as dear as the mind’s potential, or the interest to tap it.
Such an existence is glaringly mediocre at best, and I wouldn’t call it worthwhile.

But of course, it is just this existence which our school system so champions, and urges us into. It is, perhaps, like snatching newly-hatched birds from their nests and forcing them to pilot bird-sized hang-gliders to and fro in embarrassingly straight lines, instead of allowing them to learn true flight.—Unnatural, criminal!

And then there’s the teachers, the great and ruthless secret police that holds up this rotten regime. The system is such that it not only allows ignorant people to teach, it calls for them, and they do their job magnificently.
There are some scarce wonders with something good to teach, but those few are, in someone else’s words, like drops of water in the desert. For the most part, entire class hours are reduced to either bravely enduring or dozing off to stupendously incoherent lectures ridden with fallacies and examples that hardly apply. Fascinating subjects are distorted into mechanical and thoughtless penwork. Overbearing counselors coerce you into taking SAT prep and registering on collegeboard.

And as opportunist corporate gluttons make millions by administering rubbish tests and other services, the students must suffer a watered-down parody of education in order to be able to support their businesses.

The system is deteriorated and doddering, severely entangled in faux-bureaucratical rules and regulations. Aptitudes are caricaturised and curiosities are squashed.
The very joys of life are rudely confiscated, one by one, as the system tries to take itself seriously.
And the very epitome and most cherished treasure of mankind—thought, of course—is mercilessly bastardised.

Come now, comrades, the system must be done away with. The time for revolution is nigh.
 

 

With that said, congratulations, graduates— you, who have braved classes and still retain a love for knowledge, are heroes; emerging triumphant against the perversity of the system.

Somebody Killed Little Susie

She turned the wooden tune about six times before the melody sprang forth. Humming to the rhythm, Little Susie swung her legs sticking out of the balcony, watching everyone walk in slumb’ry agitation, immersed in deep thought about money or something to the effect of economics and drinks. Needless to say, no one heard her humming, yet she carried on turning the wooden tune and humming.

One day Little Susie, the girl who sang with the tune at daytime and noon, appear’d dead next to the scarlet-coated flight of stairs. Father had left home, mother had died, and grandfather’s soul was a bygone memory Little Susie fought so hard to keep in living, along with her life itself. Nobody came too soon. She was there screaming, beating her voice in her doom, yet no one heard. It was not different from her cruel life in an isolated corner, where all of us put her and kept her there with our indifference. Every day, she turned the wooden tune, but nobody heard her humming pleas.

She lie there so timidly, in a fashion so slenderly, one cannot doubt the frailty of a little child. What to do when, upon screaming, nobody is there? A full hour pass’d ere we assembled on the child’s forsaken house, to see the girl who was dead. Suddenly a voice from the crowd said this girl liv’d in vain, with such agony and strain, half of us broke in tears, seething in pain, feeling the slippery scarlet between our hands. How much can one bear? How much time till one of us felt her despair? The days stroll’d by nonchalantly, neglecting Susie’s needs in her humming prayers.

Only a man from next door knew Little Susie; oh he cried, as he reached down to close Susie’s eyes. He blinded her vacant stare, bereft of life, with a white cloth that made haste to turn red, and lifted her with care, with the blood in her hair. We came too late. To scream while no one is there… To live whilst feeling there is no hope… to pray and receive no answer…. It was our fault, even the man from next door who knew Little Susie. Neglection can kill, when no one cares. And Little Susie fought so hard to live.

Oh mate, let us not kill Little Susie! Can you not hear the air muddled with prayers and cries of help? Do not push Little Susie down the flight of stairs. 

Vagrant Villanelle

Sombre walls gloom through the City at Night,
bereft of those dreams that have now long-dried;
their hearts, ponderous, are thick with contrite.

They fought and strove for Life with all their might,
trying to keep hopes that have now long-died;
sombre walls gloom through the City at Night.

Their psyche, eaten away by the sight
of indifference of what would betide;
their hearts, ponderous, are thick with contrite.

What abounds now is Good Will turned to spite,
as Good Will finds no more place to hide.
Sombre walls gloom through the City at Night.

City Life, bitter under the dimmed light,
ate away the hearts and made them subside.
Their hearts, ponderous, are thick with contrite.

Deep into the Night there is no respite
There is only hope for a turning tide.
Sombre walls gloom through the City at Night;
Their hearts, ponderous, are thick with contrite.

The Big Taco

After long hours at the look for codecs that would reveal the inner truths of an unsettling video file Anonymous sent you, you find yourself in a never-ending voyage; you realise that the universe, in its infinite forms, conspires against you. Your quest now seems the farthest from its conclusion. ‘When did standards go wrong?’ you weep in a cri de coeur. Nothing but silence answers back, slowly invading you with an eerie sensation.

Words of a Sentimentalist

Sentimentality is a criminally misunderstood notion.

Words like “love” have taken connotations so ridiculous and so tired that all beauty is gone from them. The word has become a blasphemy to its true meaning.

To the conventional person, feelings have become awkward, obsolete things, the consolations of those left behind, a trifle, a waste of valuable time.

The conventional person lives his life not only suppressing his emotions, but ignoring them with all his might. He is thus miserably defeated by them. What are psychologists, but those otherworldly saviors that teach him how to “cope” with his feelings, which he takes such trouble to eschew?

Reasoning without feelings should never be attempted, because the ensuing thoughts will be worth nothing. A machine can think objectively. An animal cannot think. What business does man have, then, thinking objectively or not thinking at all? There is no greater joy for man than the innocent hedonism of sentimentality. Everything is slightly more charming when ambiguous or misinterpreted.

The conventional person is boring, and this is an unforgivable fault.

Untitled Indignance

Nature, by definition, refers to any thing or doing of the natural world. From a scientific point of view, the natural world would be considered the rocks, plants, and animals that are found in our environment. To Emerson, nature is an everlasting component of life that is always molding our state of mind, portraying our feelings and affecting our emotions. Similar to what poets, artists, writers and politicians do, naturalists observe changes in their surroundings and try to explain them and put them to use for the rest of the world. In both ancient Greece and Rome, elements of nature have been portrayed as gods. What better admiration than to be considered divine? Even in our modern world, humans are constantly trying to recreate nature. Was the invention of the swimming pool not a more conveniently located imitation of an ocean or lake? Recreation centers hold urban versions of rock climbing and aerobic machines meant to impersonate hiking a mountain. This is a cosmopolitan’s way of connecting with nature between signing business deals and taking coffee breaks.

The Students Will Rise!

Education is put at stake by misleading evaluating procedures and curricula designed to suppress and maltreat creativity. Schools today manage to transform the eager youth into idle-minded minions of a null society. How has this happened?

The passive approach to education wholeheartedly schemes to bring the naturally inquisitive down. A textbook becomes the ultimate decision-maker, while students are taught to fear it rather than to be critical of its contents. Understanding, once the basis of education, is now undermined; replaced with memorisation. Passion starves, almost vanished, for there are no reasons to be passionate about. Subjects as fascinating as History and Literature are reduced to reciting definitions and dates; Mathematics and Physics educators overlook concepts and berate pupils for not obtaining the the right answer, the textbook answer. Learning metamorphoses then into a duty rather than a pleasure.

Peer-to-Peer, don’t queer it.

Open Source, as described by the Open Source Initiative:

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

Nowadays, many Open Source projects base their distribution on Peer-to-Peer technologies, which makes it easy and reliable. A relevant aspect in Peer-to-Peer technologies is that the network resources, such as storage space, bandwidth and computing power rely on users rather than on centralised servers to provide access to content. Thus, as more peers arrive and demand for content increases, the total capacity of the system also increases. This is not true of a client-server architecture with fixed server resources, in which adding more clients could mean slower data transfer for all users.

The internet as we know it is based on a decentralised packet-switched network, where communication can occur even with the failure of several nodes. In the same fashion, the distributed nature of Peer-to-Peer networks also increases robustness in case of failures by having redundant data over multiple peers, and by allowing peers to find the data without relying on a centralised server. Thus there is no point of failure in the system, making it extremely effective.

What this means for Open Source projects is:

• Inexpensive distribution and collaboration worldwide
• Reliable and robust framework for distribution
• Accessibility to information without mediator or censorship

Open Source tends to be an “information gift economy” of sorts, where there is no quid pro quo: the technology can be simply given away, as the actual cost of distribution of information is virtually zero; it is no other than the cost of the readily available internet. In this manner, the betterment, expansion, and redistribution of technologies are possible at close-to-nil costs. This is further encouraged because of the effective distribution methods.

Being much more efficient than the traditional methods of distribution, these networks also facilitate piracy and copyright violations. The Peer-to-Peer technologies have become the target of various industries, who merely blame the technology for the use it is given; without regard for any of the beneficial aspects inherent to it.

This is similar to saying that newer roads that substitute the old are to be blamed for whatever illegal merchandise is distributed through them, since the technology makes it “more available”. If this was the case, the interstate highways which are much more efficient than state highways would have to be blamed for what people transport through them; this is absolutely preposterous, as it would also slap senseless any legal activities carried out through them, such as the very essential trade and commerce.

Defenestration

Defined as the action of throwing someone or something out of a window, it describes the exact procedure the ITBS(Iowa Tests of Basic Skills) should follow.

Throughout the years, the Iowa Tests have proven useful for no more than measuring the ability of people in the U.S. and around the world to think like average American people: insubstantial, blindly nationalist and taking for granted what people around the world still fight for. These tests not only present a horrendous cultural bias, but also encourage feelings of supremacy over people from cultures different than the average U.S. citizen.

More than to standardise evaluations, this type of tests tend to generalise and reduce people and their abilities to mere numbers. Boosterish of textbook-driven minds, the authors of these preposterous tests promote the lack of imagination; and punish those who might have different approaches to coping with problems by subtracting points; making them appear below the standards of the numb society they strive for.

Today’s proactive approaches are once again challenged with the “If it’s not broken, there’s no need to fix it” ideology.