You can be in on the popcorn eating part?

…that’s, well, probably a fairly reasonable reaction. I mean, I really do think getting slapped in the face by the universe a bunch of times can be a path to an awesome sort of education – if you’re in the right sort of starting place. But I mostly only apply that to a) myself and b) people I basically like but am really fucking annoyed at right now.

And Patrick really strongly reminds me of a few people in my past.

I am so incredibly glad that I survived my teens and twenties and don’t have to go back and do that again…

How does one go about teaching the most powerful human alive philosophy? Alison *IS* privilege, she never faces consequences for her actions. The board of the university is so scared of her they fired a previous professor over a disagreement, even when Alison didn’t ask for it or even condone the action. She can get on national television, threaten to kill a few hundred people and then walk into the highest security prison in the country and talk to Cleaver, no consequences. If you or I did that, we’d be in said prison, very quickly, with very little chance of ever seeing the outside of it again. The F she has doesn’t matter, if she decides she wants to take the next course she can just show up to it and politely tell the prof she’s in the class now, the prof will either back down or get fired based on previous precedent. If she decides that she’s done with her education and wants to graduate they’ll give her a diploma. Every limit she imposes upon herself is artificial.

Every limit except the ones where the outcome relies on other people taking actions of their own volition. In order to institute the kind of change she wants to create, she is going to need other people to act on their own volition. In order to do that she has to learn that their exist situations in which she wont have control over outcomes and what to do when faced with such a situation. Sure Gurwara’s being an arbitrary unfair jerk to Alison here, then again Alison lives in a world where the only kind of real challenge she will ever face (barring problems with other super humans), is the problem of social and societal backlash and rejection, and even that could be overcome with sufficient application of force. If Gurwara is really committed to the path he’s set out on, he’ll try and show Alison that 1. not all problems can be solved (she’ll never not get an F) and 2. at least start to illuminate some answers as to how Alison can go about achieving her goals.

“I can’t stand the ‘check your privilege’ response. It’s one of the worst inventions of my generation. I prefer to base a person on their merits and actions, not their genetics.”
The social concept of ‘Privilege’ has existed for over a century (coined by W.E.B. DuBois in 1903), and been a focus in academia since the 80’s (starting with Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege and Male Privilege” in 1988).
But it’s a good thing that it’s becoming a more common idea and topic these days, it’s something we need to talk about. Because it isn’t about how people shouldn’t be judged by their merits and actions, it’s about systems of oppression and opportunity.
Most of the people in the world, the vast majority, are already judged and condemned based on their genetics/heritage/physical state/mental state/etc. They aren’t the ones with advantages in society, but the ones with disadvantages. And more and more, they are exploring how the advantaged groups (the majority, the oppressor class) always have it better, and never need to thing about those who have it worse, let alone experience their lives. And as an extremely privileged person, it’s my responsibility to listen to them, understand how society has given me every opportunity while giving many others much fewer, and take that into consideration in my actions and my interactions with other people.

Priviliege is real. I’ve been there on both sides of the divide, which is something most people can’t experience. I believed in privilege, I thought I understood it. But when people physically assault you just for walking down the street as a visible minority? When you get the same microaggression a dozen times in a day? That’s a reality, a contempt for you, that you simply can’t grasp from the outside.

Nor is privilege or lack of privilege solely genetic. It can be, but it can also be completely unrelated to genetics as in the case of family wealth, the existence of a functional family structure, in the case of disability acquired via trauma or disease, class, region of birth, accent and so on.

I don’t agree with Izo and 3-I on a lot of things, but if Guwara actually gives Alison an F for that one test it’s not a good lesson.
If it is because of her powers and only because of that it would be actual discrimination.
He can show her in tons of ways how the world is unfair and that she can’t actually change everything without doing a real injustice to her. That’s a skill that any philosopher teacher worth their salt should have.
It just wouldn’t be legal or ethical to fail her on a single thought experiment simply “because she can handle it”.
Alison is still a student in this context and students should be judged by how well they know the subject and if they have made it their own.
Mind you, I still believe that Guwara won’t actually give her an F (or the rest of the class an A for that matter). I think he merely has a sense of humor that most people don’t get. It seems very East-European or Russian to me, lots of dark humor and straight up telling outrageous untruths to people’s faces to evoke a laugh.
So, i suspect it’s just a cultural thing.

You know, you don’t have to resort to insults to 3-I….

David: “Your comprehension has failed you right now,”

Picking who out? What are you talking about? My reply was to Izo’s post, no one else’s.

Izo said the Prof singled her out and made her the victim.

However, that is not true.

If you read back to that point in the story, he asked the whole class, and they all stayed silent…until Alison finally said something. Then he addressed her.

That was my only point when replying to Izo…which is why I stated that you misunderstood what I was saying, and what I was replying to.

I don’t think equating Alison’s rescue efforts and Feral’s martyrdom is particularly fair, but even if it was, are you saying that Feral doesn’t have a right to do what she did? Like, who gets to say that it is horrifying for her to sacrifice of her time and pain to save lives. The comic really didn’t come down on that side of things. I actually felt like the comic was critical of Alison for trying to tell her what to do.

Alison is getting a degree that is meaningless. No one will hire Mega Girl for her major. The world is overflowing with college grads who know what she is being taught. Alison will be hired, by her bodyguard org or anyone else, to fly and be invincible and allmighty. She is already proficient at that, and being lectured to by dudes won’t help her get better at it. While she is getting this degree, people are dying who she could help. That is a fact, and is a choice that she made. She has the right to make that choice, just as Feral had the right not to, but that doesn’t bring those people back to life.

I’m not saying that she needs to be 24/7 saving lives. She already does rescue work and occasionally fights super villains. She definitely does more for her fellow man than I do. She can read all the webcomics that she wants. Like I said, she doesn’t owe folks a thing. But, just as she has the freedom to do student cosplay and leave people in burning buildings, we have the freedom to roll our eyes at it. Alison’s time is poorly spent getting lectured to by Prof Guwara. She doesn’t seem to enjoy it, it isn’t accomplishing anything useful, and she is skipping out on super-heroing to do it.

She can’t become a student, at all, not really. The assumptions packed into “student” are “human student”, if you prefer “individual for whom knowledge is useful”.

Alison isn’t, in any real way, human. She doesn’t suffer as we do. The world bends us, but it bends before her. The privilege parallel makes itself, so I won’t go down that route.

Imagine that Alison follows the standard human track. She learns about some liberal arts major, graduates with a billion dollars in student loans and a worthless degree. Or, if you prefer, she goes STEM and graduates with a billion dollars in student loans plus the ability to pay them off in a few years. In either case, is her situation comparable to what it would be like if she didn’t have powers?

Those loans, does she have to pay them off? The cops who won’t arrest her for murder will show up to enforce a debt? She won’t succumb to the temptation to use her powers to make a few million dollars in an afternoon?

Those jobs, is doing them worth it to her? Should she write for a magazine, organize non profits? She c an already do those things, can’t she? People will publish anything she writes, because the hook of “Mega Girl on…” is going to bait clicks. She has already organized a nonprofit. She didn’t need business administration knowledge, she called friends and they were overjoyed to do it for the woman who punches nukes into the moon.

Look, Alison can’t punch poverty, but she also can’t college it. Nothing she learns in college will defeat poverty/sesxism/discrimination. This is obvious, because plenty of people have gone through college, and that trio are still reigning champs. The only way Alison can do anything about those is to take control, and college doesn’t change that equation.

Alison’s dilemmas won’t be covered in class. Her experience is not something that the various thinkers that she’s going to read up on will have covered. Is it nobler to seize control of the world with your magic gifts and impose your will, or allow injustice to continue? When the world seizes upon the slightest evidence of your preferences and magnifies it beyond all reason, are you culpable for the events which follow?

These are serious questions, but Alison is not going to hear about them. Will she learn math that she doesn’t need because she’s strong enough to brute force any problem? How bout physics that doesn’t apply to her? Psychology from people whose minds aren’t even similar to hers? Maybe some legal training for the woman who can commit felonies with impunity?

There is nothing in college for her. She can have all the money that she wants by acting as a crane for an afternoon. If she needs to learn something she can go twist Patrick’s arm until he explains it. If she wants social change she can go a variation on the Valkrye route.

It isn’t like she is having the “college experience”, where she makes adult friends. Her bud is in jail. Her crush is someone she saved from a burning building. Her peer, with whom she is doing a startup, is rich enough to own a factory, and her main problem is that she can’t get someone to stop buying everything that she makes.

By contrast, the ordinary students that she knows alternately anger(rapist party guy) or annoy her (roomates who kick her out).

The “school” part of Alison’s life is comparable to the mask that she used to wear while doing superhero stuff. It is part of the package, a motion that she is going through. It doesn’t make sense if you think about it for half a second. She’s rich, or can be at leisure. She’s above the law. Her occupations are unimpeachably moral and often downright crucial. She’s irreplacable, and generally beloved by thinking observers. Why does she need to spend her afternoons getting condescended to by the Dr. Guwara’s of the world? People burn to death for this?

College is a couple of things.

College is a place where you trade money (which Alison has as much of as she wants) for the ability to earn more money (which Alison already has). So, as an economic boost, it isn’t really necessary for her. Money and Alison is always going to be sort of funny, but suffice it to say that she certainly isn’t going to earn more because she gets a degree.

College is a place where you trade money for the “college experience”. You meet adult friends, experience a culture different from your hometown, etc. Alison isn’t really doing that. Her robot building buddy, her mind reading ex, the brutal criminal that she threw in jail…her shrinking scientist crime fighting buddy, these are her social circle. In terms of the actual college students she knows, they alternately bore and annoy her. She had to step in at a party to stop a rape. She got thrown out of her apartment. Her profs are uniformly jerks, etc. It feels safe to say that Alison isn’t having a good social experience here.

College is a place where you expand your mind, drawing on the experience of the past to get a sort of well rounded overall intelligence that doesn’t necessarily translate exactly to vocational skills. Foreign languages, humanities courses, etc. Alison doesn’t really live in the same context as these courses assume, however. Ring of Gygax thought experiments are all well and good, but Alison lives it. She is literally above the law. All men may be created equal, but Alison wasn’t. Nietsche’s thoughts on the ubermensch don’t really square with Alison’s lived experience. She isn’t just very proficient at a bunch of stuff, she is a force of nature.

College, for Alison, is a pretty crummy way to spend her time. She gets very little from it, and loses out on the opportunity to save lives, earn fortunes, organize lady protecting bodyguard organizations or whatever else she might get up to if she wasn’t trapped in a little room being lectured by a jerk.

She has the right to squander her time like this, of course. Everyone needs a hobby, and if she wants to feel like a student for a while (Cosplay, in this context, is probably the wrong word. She’s doing the thing where the mayor spends a night in the homeless shelter.), more power to her. But for her stated goals, college is a poor use of her time.

“‘…Mencius himself is widely regarded in China as the greatest writer among the ancient philosophers.'”

Wait, what?

He actually has higher stature in the west – note the anglicized name. It’s Mengzi, in Chinese. For various historical reasons, translating large portions of Mengzi – increasingly from photocopies of woodblock prints – made up much of the second term of guwen (“classical chinese”) and I think most of us were a little traumatized by the experience.* Two members of the senior faculty used to get into humorous debates about whether he was a “moral prig” or a “moral prude”.

Anyhow, no reflection on the idea that people are basically good, which, is, y’know, a thing. (And yes, my education is totally fucked. I think I’ve mentioned that before.)

* Admittedly, slightly more than half the class was fluent in Chinese, and tended to revert to that language, while other people were students of languages in which guwen had been the literary language and found this habit frustrating in the extreme. But I think we all agreed on Mengzi.

I’m totally being pedantic lass, but that actually wasn’t the point I was trying to make –

For whatever reason, Mengzi was latched onto by early western scholars of Chinese. So he’s often cited as being super important… in the west. In China… eh. I mean, he’s prominent, sure. But not super prominent. But I’ve *never* heard anyone claim he was the greatest writer. (I’ve heard people make the opposite claim, and many were native speakers, but still, there’s plenty of room for bias.)

He was super legalist. He was important to the Neo-Confucians – which is to say his alignment was something like lawful-asshole in D&D terms. Though, well, some folks like that sort of thing. For me, Zhuangzi if I want something to really chew over, and Sunzi for bedtime reading. (This is as much for style as content – Sunzi is incredibly clear and concise. I can usually read most of his stuff without looking anything up or struggling with the grammar, which makes it relaxing. The content… well, BingFa is usually translated as “The Art of War” though really “A Method of War” would be more accurate. Zhuangzi, on the other hand, while I love him, is just hell to translate.) The Zhan Guo Ce are also really great. Hell, there is no lack of great early Chinese literature. …not that I have enough brain left over for it most of the time these days. But it’s nice to keep my hand in. (Living in a zendo, with a lot of the core chan / zen material being in guwen means there’s always material.)

(Okay, there was a great bit in Mengzi there about taking only lightly from the forests and allowing them to flourish so they can provide with abundance – this is hand-wavey from memory – rather than over harvesting. I think that was the first chapter that I actively enjoyed translating.)

He failed to KILL her, but he is one of only two beings known with the capability to HURT her. And the other is herself.