This should be a postcard:


Brinda Karat, newest member of the Communist Party of India - Marxist politburo

I don't know much about the CPI-M. I'd imagine they're responsible for a lot of the stagism that plagued international Communist politics.

(stagism = Communist Parties believing socialism is 'premature', and that they have to build an independent capitalist nation - whatever that is. In practice this means allying with bourgeois parties, clamping down on class struggle in the interests of unity and getting ignored, sidelined or massacred, depending on the circumstances.)

However, I love that picture and agree with the sentiment. (Read about Karat here.) It's funny how communism is denounced as a 'western' philosophy, when there are far more communists in developing countries than anywhere else.

Dancing with cats



I am stupefied. This is a real picture of someone dancing with their cat. And I don't just mean picking up your kitty while your favourite song is on the radio. This is "channelling feline energy" through dance for aesthetic purposes. Check out the following Discussion on Music for Cat Dancing. Watch the video of the flaky rich woman balancing a cat on her shoulders to music. And it gets better.

This is part of an institute, the Museum of Non-Primate Art, or MONPA. It's an actual museum in rural England (where else?) where they study animal aesthetics, such as "the artistic expressions of the mole (tunnelling patterns in cross section), stallions (pyramidic dung piles), and a variety of birds (flying formations as performance art)."

If you're hard up, they're looking for researchers to "Consider psychomotor disturbances including cerebral dysphoria and cephalagia in immature Spanish cats following flamenco shoulder dancing."

That's dancing the flamenco with a cat on your shoulders.

This is a product of oppression - almost all the cat-dancers are women, fulfilling the stereotype of the middle class woman searching for spiritual solace & connection in an empty, materialistic world. And yet, this is quite possibly the most ridiculous response to oppression I've ever encountered, sublimating frustrated human creativity into a fantasy world where all the animals are just like us.

Rather than studying the intended aesthetics of horse-shit, what about spending the millions of pounds this institution has on young people who have no access to art?

I'm a vegetarian & cat-lover. But I'm also a speciesist. Humans are more important than animals because we have a social division of labour, that allows us to apply our tremendous intelligence towards tasks beyond any of our individual capabilities. Those cats, on the other hand, would devour their masters if they were mice-sized.

Read the science behind cat-dancing. A dance composer's music "creates an instant mood and style that spans mystic orientalism and feline passion in rich swathes of impassioned color."

Here's another definition of orientalism, from Edward Said:

"The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West.

Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive."

Where the west is rational & progressive, the east is mysterious & exotic, the home of spirituality, music, energy and apparently, "Tibetan cat charmers" who spend their time trying to get cats to dance. As if I needed another reason to hate the Dalai Lama.

All the pseudo-scientific jargon ('biomusicology') is just a screen for the cat-dancer's real agenda: "It is this dualism which enables his unique brand of biomusic to so perfectly facilitate our current collective inter-species ascension into higher dimensions."

This is wrong. These people are deeply pathetic - giving human agency to animals, anthropomorphizing their only companions in a way to stave off the loneliness of their sorry little lives. They're being manipulated by unscrupulous charlatans, feeding off a spiritual escapism that runs from human creativity (betraying a deep despair and antipathy towards other people - and, because these cat-dancers are human, themselves). Worst of all, the cat-dancers fit neatly into a racist typography that views brown people as inscrutable, closer to nature and animals.

This is funny, but I'm laughing at these people, not with them.

Guys don't make passes at a girl who surpasses

I think, in general, this sentiment is true. Men are socialized to ignore their feelings; thus they have no connection with their real Selves, and have to stave off insecurity with achievements, among them book-learning. Scratch a male grad student and you'll find a quivering mass of jelly, crying out "I know Derrida & Habermas & Heidegger & Baudrillard! Love me!" Women who are smarter than men threaten their fragile self-concepts. Although I find a well-educated communist woman quite sexy, I've never dated one, so who knows, I might be intimidated as well.

Geek in love

However, this doesn't hold true with my French teacher, whom I've definitely got a crush on. She's funny, she smiles readily, she enunciates clearly. She dresses well - different layers & colours that a lot of Quebecois women pull off but would be ostentatious on anyone else. She's intelligent & progressive and smiles whenever I say something leftist. She has brown hair streaked with blonde that she wears in a tight ponytail and on occasion lets fall tantalizingly over her shoulders. She's so sexy, and she has the cutest wrinkle across her forehead. (And I'm proud to say this isn't based on finding her accent 'cute', because I've only heard her speak French.)

I think there's tension between us - awkward eye contacts, she gets upset with me if I don't concentrate enough, and she uses me for examples in class. But who knows; it could be all in my head. I will keep you posted.