Up, up, and ever up

The latest Prince
column
is up. Click for discussion of overindulgent course ratings.

OMG!!!!!111!!1!!! Redux

Second in a series.

Another instance of
trolling
at Princeton! The
Prince
reports that a controversy has marred the contest for the ’06
presidential race:

It all started 1:39 p.m. Sunday, when Matt Mims ’06 sent an email
to Quadrangle Club’s email forum, requesting recipients to look at one
of Thompson’s recent campaign emails.


Mims specifically pointed out one sentence in Thompson’s email
—- “Let’s get chris lloyd Out of office” —- and argued that the
capital 'O’ in “Out” was a deliberate jab at Lloyd’s open
homosexuality, “telling us that this is a reason we should vote
against him.”


Within a few hours, a dozen emails were sent to the forum on the
topic, including one from Thompson and several from his friends,
who vigorously defended him and questioned Mims’
logic. Eventually, the flurry of emails died down, but feelings
are still raw on both sides.

Alex reminded me that this is a reprise of the alleged “fniger”
controversy on Slashdot, as
recorded
by Trollaxor.

Lastly we must not forget another thing that’ll cause
all-around general trolling mayhem on Slashdot: [Slashdot chief
editor Rob] Malda’s detestable spelling habits. The one time he
was commenting on a story about disabling the finger server on UNIX
systems, he misspelled finger as fniger. WHOA. The whole Slashdot
community was up in arms over what was percieved as a barely hidden
racial slur. To “stop the fniger server” was taken to mean that blacks
shouldn’t be using Linux!!! What an idiot Rob Malda is, whether or not
the “fniger fiasco” was intentional. 5/5 of all story submissions that
day were trolls, and the signal to noise ratio mutated to 4:1
(troll:legit) for 3 days straight after.

It’s also the second
time
in the space of a few weeks that the Prince has covered trolling. Is a
trend emerging?

Absolute links

After the n-th person mentioned it to me, I finally changed the
relative links in the RSS feed to absolute ones. If you still can’t
see the images or click the links, drop me a line.

Perennial-ism

6
April 2004: My biweekly column: “...perennial Prospect apologist Zachary Goldstein…”

7
April 2004: Zachary Goldstein’s letter to the editor: “...Prospect’s
perennial gadfly, Joseph Barillari…”

It boggles the mind to think that some people have the gall to call the Nass “narcissistically self-indulgent.”

Bestiality at Princeton

The latest
column
is up.

A former eating club officer (who asked that I identify him only as
such) came up with a rather subtle critique:

The “beasts”, who you advance as the unsafe drinkers at
Princeton, seem to be to be a fairly unconvincing straw man to
someonef who has held an officer’s post at one of the clubs. They
seem, from your description, to be unequivocally male, and aggressive
males at that (and even, with a little reading between the lines, it
seems they are probably members of fraternities or sports teams).
They also seem to be approaching their “animalistic” drinking with at
least some knowledge of the consequences, and doing so on a regular
basis. I must admit that in my experience, I have dealt with such
“beasts” to some extent. But I would argue (purely based on personal
anecdotal evidence, but I’m not sure that’s avoidable) that these
“beasts” are NOT the people likely to force this debate to a crisis
by dying of alcohol poisoning. These people generally have a fairly
large support-network of more-or-less similarly minded beasts who
have been through this before and have some knowledge of what to do.
They also, by repetition alone, are fairly likely to realize at least
an approximation of their own limits (perhaps through being McCoshed
or PMC’ed) and are less likely to repeat the stunt (If for no other
reason to avoid serious disciplinary measures). Of course these
beasts are problematic and possibly at least low grade threats to
themselves and others, but I don’t think they should be the focus of
a dialogue with the goal of preventing a death due to alcohol
poisoning (nor, in my experience, are they only athletes or
frat-boys, but that’s another matter). This is not to say that they
shouldn’t be the focus of dialogue (they should).

I must admit that I didn’t consider the distinction between people who
are likely to drink themselves to death and people who vandalize and
befoul the campus. Intuitively, they are disjoint sets. However, even
if I tarred two different groups with the same brush, it does not
follow that only one group should be the focus of attention: both
ought to be.

(I should also note that I wasn’t thinking specifically of men, or
even of fratboys and athletes when I wrote the article — I can think
of many anecdotes of non-men, non-fratboys, and non-athletes getting
drunk to the point where excreting in the wrong place seems like a
good idea.)

If you’re at all interested, I can go into detail about
the demographic which I feel is most likely to die of alcohol
poisoning, but I’ve spent enough time on this for now. I’ll just
leave you with a parting note that I really wish someone would inject
into this debate: When I was first a club officer, I felt that I could
call the proctors to take care of a dangerously intoxicated student
with impunity, and this was borne out by experience. By the end of my
term, the precedent had been set that calling the proctors for a
dangerously intoxicated student could result in charges being brought
against the club officers. This creates a serious dilemma for club
officers who are attempting to deal with a borderline student.
Especially because in most cases said borderline student has a group
of friends who are arguing that they will take him/her home and take
care of him/her. And also because Princeton students don’t react well
to the idea of having these charges on their record. If someone dies
of alcohol poisoning in an eating club, this entirely new dilemma will
most likely be a strong contributing factor.

This is regrettable. I’ve heard that the University’s policy was not
to charge students if they called the proctors for a fellow student
whose life was in danger from overindulgence. But that certainly
doesn’t stop the Borough Police from hounding the intoxicated party
for details when he or she gets to PMC. I’m also hesitant to say that
they shouldn’t press the student for details —- although
professionalism dictates that they ought to, at the very least, wait
until the student has sobered up a bit before interrogating them.

From the mailing room floor

I just came across a piece of writing from sometime last year. It was
deemed “highly inappropriate” for Tiger Magazine when I sent it to the
mailing list. Fortunately, this website has no such standards.

The Mouthpiece answers your questions about Princeton, part I.


	
Q: I mobilized hundreds of undergraduates to put up thousands of
posters around the campus advertising our lecture, “The Joys and Toys
of Gay Sex.” But some thoughtless reactionary Limbaugh-listening Nazi
Neanderthals tore them all down! Who was it, so we can send the
Rainbow Squad to their door?
        Sincerely, Debra B.

	
A: Debra, The unposterings you witnessed were not random acts of
homophobia. Nor they motivated by the self-denying same-sex urges of
the members of the campus Greek system, or even by Tory writers.

	
No, the truth is far more sinister. These teardowns all point to one
sinister organization. There is one group at Princeton who cannot,
absolutely cannot, abide homosexuality. They rue the day when
Princetonians elect not to be fruitful and multiply. They curse when a
Princeton man refers to his “boyfriend” in a non-ironic fashion. When
they see a Princeton woman wearing a pink triangle, they grind their
teeth. And nothing irks them more than watching students flounce
along the campus walkways.

	
This isn’t the Robert P. George Society, though they’re a close
second.

	
The individuals responsible for tearing down your posters are the men
and women of Annual Giving. Every Princetonian who gives up breeding
for butt-loving deprives Princeton of their most effective alumni
chokehold, namely the question implicit in every AG letter: “If I send
in the cash, will that improve Junior’s chances?” If “Junior” is
really a washed-up 22-year-old performance actor from upstate New York
who Dave Princeton ’98 met at a circuit party, where do you think the
AG letter’s going? Straight into the wastebasket, where it can
languish beside an empty tube of K-Y.