it's always so hard to tell when bros yelling at each other are being serious or not. you've gotta give it three or four back-and-forths of "come here, bitch", "i'm over here, bitch", "you wanna fight, bitch?", etc before the volume either goes up or down enough to figure it out and, consequently, you know whether to shake your head at their misogynistic attempts to verbally jostle each other into a joking submission or get out of the way while they pointlessly harm each other for entirely trivial reasons.

silly bros.

ok, be honest - how many of you know that north african pirates used to plunder the atlantic coast of europe in order to capture slaves, women and money? that there was a "european slave trade"? that cities like lisbon, london and amsterdam were victims of attacks?

how many of you know that there was a "slavic slave trade" across eastern europe? well, maybe you've realized that slave is etymologically the same as 'slav'. that is to say that the english word for slave is identical to an ethnic term that means 'slavic speaking'. slavery, in english, is etymologically a white concept; slavic speakers live in eastern europe: czechs, poles, slovaks, serbs, modern macedonians and bulgarians, ukrainians, russians...not romanians and hungarians but most other people around there...

but, how many of you know that the mongols used to capture slavic slaves in the areas around russia, poland, the ukraine and transport them either across asia or across the black sea (to the turks) to work as slaves? that there were polish slaves working under the yuan dynasty? that slavs were slaves because they were enslaved by east asian peoples - turks and mongols?

beyond the muslim turkish colonization and enslavement of the white slavic eastern european peoples, how many of you know about the janissary system? this was a particularly brutal type of turkish colonialism. they would go from village to village in eastern europe, kidnap the kids and then raise them to be soldiers - that they would send out towards the next set of villages. each generation of captured children would be the next generation of imperial soldiers, to carry on the crescent's reign of terror. they were finally stopped in vienna. austria. check out a map. that's western europe. on the other side, they were stopped (much earlier) near tours by charlemagne's grandfather. tours. check a map. that's fucking northern france!

so, something that happened during the middle ages was that europe was in the process of being colonized by imperialist muslims and mongols. first by arabs on the west coast, then by turks (with the help of capitalist venetians, mind you) in the east. after the colonization period stagnated, there were still slave raids along the coasts until as late as the early 1800s.

the only point i'm trying to make is about *knowledge*. how many of you had any idea of these things? remotely?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_pirates

we're obsessed with denying the positive effects of mental difference to try and induce greater productivity amongst atomized individuals. conformity. we should be obsessed with constructing systems that allow for full freedom of creative exploration, leaving mundane modes of existence to machines and opening up *social* pathways for greater creative productivity.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/11/22/creativity-madness-and-drugs

i kind of like the idea of life repeatedly evolving on planets on the cusp of destruction. humans < nature < universe.
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/5832/signs-of-life-on-dying-planets

http://mitsha.re/1jBicXK
https://phys.org/news/2013-11-physicists-quantum-cheshire-cats-paradoxes.html

yeah. it's been clear for years that we need to not dump most of what we dump. but that provides for a level of inconvenience that the average north american won't stand for.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=only-half-of-drugs-removed-by-sewage-treatment

i've been sort of freaking out over parasites recently. nice to see a reminder that the relationship is sometimes symbiotic.
http://phys.org/news/2013-11-scavenging-fungi-friend.html

"science doesn't work because scientists aren't doing science". true on some level. but not the argument some would present it as.
http://www.nature.com/news/psychologists-strike-a-blow-for-reproducibility-1.14232

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/symbiartic/2013/11/25/good-microbes-make-good-pets/

yeah. lots of things would be solved by understanding gravity. like gravity.
https://phys.org/news/2013-11-proton-radius-puzzle-quantum-gravity.html

maybe they’ll share the data with us imperialist pigs.
http://www.nature.com/news/china-aims-for-the-moon-1.14243

http://phys.org/news/2013-11-moon-nasa.html
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/11/25/how-to-erase-bad-memories/
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/66/12/10.1063/PT.3.2212
http://phys.org/news/2013-11-japanese-firm-luna-solar-energy.html
http://inhabitat.com/japanese-corporation-plans-to-turn-the-moon-into-a-massive-solar-power-plant/
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/12012013/article/scientists-push-back-the-clock-on-early-human-finds
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/11/24/chinese_netizens_applaud_beijing_s_aggressive_new_defense_zone

played? right…..
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/25/how-amnesty-international-was-played-by-the-egyptian-junta/

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/11/25/chin-n25.html

are the arcade fire substantive artists?

Nor Easter
Arcade Fire are an embarrassment to art.  They copy, they imitate, and they do it with disgusting pretension.   They have NO new ideas.  Hope they all die in a fire soon.

Futur Incertain UncertainFutur
The Beatles started up copying some of the american rythm & blues, the same with the Stones. Madonna ripped off some of Blondie'S stuff and most of the disco era. Gaga is stealing her (?) ideas from just about everyone.....Motown sound came from a blend of blues and rock, Jazz came from Blues and on and on.......so, tell me what in this is true original music without any influence at all?

deathtokoalas
+Parhasard57 the same criticism applies to all that crap, though. there's been heaps of original music released in the last 50 years (some of it by the beatles, after they grew out of their mop top phase) but it contradicts the logic of capitalism to try and sell an unfamiliar product so it gets virtually zero promotion. case in point: madonna actually came out of a really creative music scene. the second most popular band in that circle of people was sonic youth, who you've probably heard of. have you heard of swans? jim thirlwell? lydia lunch? glenn branca? john zorn? it was all there at the same time, it all could have been marketed, but one was an easy product that appeals to base desires and the rest challenged people to reconsider their preconceptions of what music even is.

but, the great composers all die penniless and unknown. so it's not like this is anything new.

Futur Incertain UncertainFutur
+deathtokoalas I agree with most of what you wrote; and I know and/or heard some of the bands and artists you mentioned, heck you could have included many more but the point being about Art. I never thought someone would get up one morning and say: hum, today, i will write music that is Art. All those musicians do what they feel and wish to play, with basically one goal in mind: go further as a musician, or explore the limits of what they like. It is not easy for me to explain my train of thoughts since I speak French usually. And let's keep i mind how Art is not objective but rather subjective, in music as well as in painting.

So, all this to say that, although there are forms of music that are tasteless and formated that will please some, but there is also some music that MAY not achieve the status of true or pure art but may contain a vast sum of qualities. You see, many are praying Warhol as a genius but to me, it's «meh».

The bottom line being: nobody will never come up with a bunch of songs that will please each and everyone because as i said, it is a subjective medium, what is art to you may be shit to someone else. It's an endless debate.

oh, as far as «the great composers all died penniless», yeah some did but I believe Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, RAchmaninoff, Liszt and a few more did not do so bad.....Or Zappa for that matter.

Robert DeCreon
+Parhasard57 It's interesting you say that, because I think Beatles and Floyd were actually pretty original, altough of course they had their inspirations, they took it all from LSD and their incredible mind. Why do you think Beatles is considered the best artist ever? Because of their inventions to the music.

deathtokoalas
that's right. the arcade fire do not belong to the same category as the beatles or floyd. their early material is better compared to something like the beegees, and they seem to have recently entered an abba phase.

you're allowed to enjoy the product, but it's not art. and it's not fair to artists to think of it as art.

Trevor Johnston
+deathtokoalas I am sick of the beatles as "the best band"  Best band of their time but they were basically pop themselves with there melodies and simple playing.  Its music, its what you like, every body has their favorites.  I listen to Floyd but I find most of the beatles stuff simple, except there later experimental stuff.

deathtokoalas
+Trevor Johnston i pointed out a few posts back that i mean the material after and including revolver. early beatles up to that point is not creative and does not qualify as art. it qualifies as a successful product, but the reason it was a successful product is that it wasn't challenging.

but, no, it's not subjective, and i'm really fucking sick of fucking lazy capitalist idiots refusing to have the intellectual courage to acknowledge what is creative and what isn't. it's not interchangeable. it's not equivalent. it's not all fucking product designed to turn a dime to trickle it's way up the supply chain. it's not simply what butters your toast. there is a very clear, objective difference between producing for the sake of creativity and producing for the sake of profit.

again: if you want to listen to bland, cloned-over capitalist garbage then there's a million bands like arcade fire out there for you to explore. just don't call it art. please. it's not worthy.

Robert DeCreon
I'm not saying that Arcade Fire shall belong to a category like Beatles and Floyd belong to, but they are not like the Beeges or ABBA. Do you even know the meaning of the whole album? It's art, specially in this awful time that songs have no emotion or lyrical meaning.

deathtokoalas
i think the beegees/abba comparison is pretty good, actually. these bands were massively popular in their time and are mostly forgotten today. that will be the legacy of the arcade fire.

but if you want a more precise comparison, i'm going to draw attention to two bands: u2 and my chemical romance.

a few years ago, mcr swung out of being a bon jovi cover band and released this awful thing that was some kind of attempt to merge sgt peppers with the smashing pumpkins. reflector draws heavily from the black parade in the sense of stealing it's concept from sgt peppers.

musically, though, they've pulled a sort of ultra-paradoxical phase on u2's post-modern 90s phase. when u2 did the zooropa tour, it was a tongue-in-cheek parody on popular culture, a satire of over-the-top consumerism. the arcade fire have taken that sound and stripped it of it's irony. on one hand, it sort of makes bono look brilliant, in hindsight. but it all draws together the conclusion that this is designed solely to move units, rather than to say anything worthwhile.

Futur Incertain UncertainFutur
+deathtokoalas Dear Koalas.....I have to say I've rarely read such self-indulging comments. According to you, only you and a few others are capable of real Art! Wow, talk about being full of yourself . If I follow your saying, anything that is not like what you do is shit! You sound more like a jealous musician envying anybody's success. Here's the thing: Art is not restrain to sheer creation...it is also a matter of perceptions, communication and expressions. Visual arts are so diversified, it would be prententious to point only one form as being THE one. Same goes with music. The very first goal of music is to communicate either a message, or a state of mind, or an opportunity to explore some personnal ideas. To negate anything not complying with your own taste, is a proof of a limited mind....the same applies to those pissing on anything they don't get. All you,ve been writing here is a total lack of respect for anything YOU don't like......no wonder your band is not doing much.......talking TO people will bring you more than talking DOWN to someone. Good luck, anyway.

Robert DeCreon
+deathtokoalas Please don't take this as rude, but I'm glad your opinion it's just minority. You're saying like it's fact but it's acutally just a selfish declaration that you try to convince other it's a fact. Again I have to ask you: Do you know the meaning of this or the whole album? ABBA, Beeges, MCR, Bon Jovi or whatever other band you cited there (no ofense to someone who likes them) aren't capable of doing such thing. You're only showing at every comment you say that you're wrong and that you have no idea what art really is. You're thinking that art is the same that POPULAR, and POP things these days are only shit. So if Arcade Fire made sucess these days I would be surprised, because people have no capacity to recognize this as art from so much shit they have in their minds. Please don't think i'm a cunt after all these things I have said, I'm trying to be lovely at best way possible. If Arcade Fire weren't popular in a past time  then you could say they are equal as Beeges and ABBA.

You're seeing the music in a intelectual level. Don't do that, music isn't supposed to be seeing that way, yet feeling it with passion. AF doesn't need to a new Beatles to change people's life or something. I'm just happy that they have the courage to put something like that  in market against all others pop artists and still being considered in the top 10 albums of 2013.

Futur Incertain UncertainFutur
+deathtokoalas One last thing: your self-indulging mind seems to confuse taste with critics.....Your point of view is one about taste not what is Art. I cannot beleive you pose yourself as a music «critic» on your post.....to do so, you need to be impartial and able to recognise qualities in most musics made. Anything else is a matter of personnal taste and yours seems rather limited.

deathtokoalas
+Parhasard57 you've misunderstood me. i can cite a lot of art i don't really like. early kraftwerk would be an example. stockhausen, to a lesser extent. schoenberg, for sure. i find this stuff prodding and boring, but i realize it was created to push boundaries and not to move units. it consequently qualifies as art; my reaction to it is secondary. your reaction is pretty standard, though: conscientiously or not, you've taken the capitalist perspective of leaving the value of art up to markets and then accused me of trying to restrict the market. no. i'm rejecting the concept of art as a product altogether by separating out that which is meant to make money from that which is meant to be creative.

in broad terms, my perspective is closer to the historical norm whereas you're conforming to the existing neo-liberal anomaly of reducing everything to a price tag. i don't want to really think in those terms, though. i want to think in terms of a post-capitalist paradigm where the exchange of currency for art is abolished. in this proposed future post-lefist understanding of art, collectives like the arcade fire would for the most part cease to exist because they'll have lost their profit motive.

deathtokoalas
+Robert DeCreon if i was criticizing a robert johnson track, i could see your reaction making sense. i could even see it making sense in reaction to something like nirvana. but, this is hardly gut-wrenching music that is going to move anybody on an emotional level. i mean, that's ultimately the basis of my criticism: this is a cold, emotionless product. it exists purely on an intellectual level in the first place, so that's the right way to deconstruct it.
   
Robert DeCreon
+ deathtokoalas Your comments are just... idiot. You keep citing Robert Johnsonn, Kraftwerk, Schoenberg, and many others things that it seens like you're trying to show that you're a badass intellectual who studied music and knows what you're talking about yet you are just playing fool here. If you were only saying "I didn't like this album" or "I don't like Arcade Fire" it would be okay, but you keep saying nonsense things instead of just speaking, let's say, casually. Youtube it's not a fucking professional critics...

“How can I stay in any field and continue to prove theorems if the fundamental notions I’m using are problematic?” asks Peter Koellner, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University who specializes in mathematical logic.

yeah, i hear you. i didn't even make it that far before i gave up. i mean, i switched to math because physics was clearly bullshit, only to find out that math was also bullshit.

worse, nobody seemed to care. "bullshit or not, i still get paid, right?". fuck this, give me my guitar....

i think they need to take a step back with the axiom of choice, actually. it needs to be weaker: an axiom of countable choice. once they do that, a lot of this debate gets sort of meaningless.

and as far the "continuum hypothesis"? well, note the name. hypothesis. hypotheses are to be determined using empirical methods, not converted into axioms. the undecidability of the statement seems to somehow verify this, in a strange kind of way.

so, we should be constructivist about it. if we can build a set with cardinality between that of the reals and naturals, then one exists. if we cannot demonstrate the truth of the negation, we should remain agnostic. the addition of new axioms may be verified for other reasons, and may have an effect on what can be deduced, but should not be affected by one's intuitive/arbitrary views on the truth of the continuum hypothesis.

and to stick with that step backwards, we should be constructivist about our choice functions. these abstract choice functions strike me as entirely incoherent nonsense. and they lead to ridiculous conclusions that are observably false.

if you're following this, you're going to think i'm some kind of completely dour wet blanket that seeks to rob mathematics of it's beauty and enjoyment, or something. not intentionally. i just don't think mathematics should be operating in the realm of fantasy.

if i'm going to operate in the realm of fantasy, i'd rather do it through sound.

i've alluded to this before, but i'll come out flatly and state it. i think that before we can get anywhere further with axiomatic/deductive thought on an abstract level we need to take some very complicated measurements of space as it exists outside of the earth's atmosphere. once we've done that, we need to empirically model the space we actually inhabit. we then need to construct our axioms based on an empirical understanding of the world around us. it is only then that we can come to any kind of fruitful discussion about how mathematics relates to the world that we live in.

in the meantime, there's two approaches that i think are worthwhile.

1) we need to restrict ourselves to very limited, finite, constructivist assumptions if we wish to apply anything to reality.

2) we should undertake a systematic evaluation of all possible positions, and catalog them as possible models. we should then explore the possible consequences of *all* of them. we can philosophize abstractly about how things might be, but until the data comes in we can't know how things are.

mathematics is not as out of touch as philosophy is, but it's not much further evolved. we have to understand the limits of this type of reasoning and get ourselves out of the nineteenth century.

we also have to understand that the necessary modelling is going to be fraught with difficulties in the attempt to apply as few assumptions as possible.

another thing that empirical study can help us understand, besides the shape of space, is whether or not space is quantized. if the answer is 'yes', mathematics need to go back to the drawing board.

(translation: it would answer the question about the continuum hypothesis (yes - our model of space in it's construction) in a way that would explode the whole field.)

there isn't really a mechanism. to me, that's the big problem - i don't see any theoretical reason to think that gmos would be more carcinogenic. there are some other low probability mechanisms (gene transfer), but nothing that makes sense on a 'causes tumours' level.

unfortunately, this is going to turn the gmo resistance (which has some valid arguments mixed in with it's invalid ones) into a conspiracy movement. it's been teetering on the brink for a while. big agriculture will be fingered as a villain, suppressing science for profit.

just like they suppressed tesla's free energy and cars that use water to split off the hydrogen on the fly.

the inevitable result is marginalization. and using logic is not a useful tool to combat it, as it just means you're standing with the conspirators.

http://www.nature.com/news/study-linking-gm-maize-to-rat-tumours-is-retracted-1.14268

not a convincing response.
http://gmoseralini.org/criticism-no-mechanism-for-the-effects-observed-has-been-established/

yeah, these things are freaky.

my grade 5/6 teacher (i went to a very small elementary school that had one split 5/6 class with the same teacher both years) had a thing for playing old time radio. we got to listen to the original war of the worlds and a bunch of other things. one of them was a story of fire ants advancing on a village in south america from a first person perspective, and the carnage that ensued when they ravaged it. that's something i won't forget....it was both educational and scary as fuck....

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bizarre-fire-ants-create-rafts-survive

you're all missing the point, and it isn't a particularly marxist study, either; if anything, it's upholding the idea that dystopia is a more realistic end than utopia.

what the study is stating is simply the old adage that money cannot buy happiness. happiness is tied up into purpose. so, when basic needs are met, people lose meaning to existence. if you want to see this in action, you don't need to go to an orwellian fabrication or mid 80s poland, you just need to go to an american suburb and observe the average teenager in it's natural environment.

one could perhaps argue that the solution to the ennuie that bourgeois comfort produces is labour. marxists and neo-liberals would actually agree on this point.

...or one could accept the existentialist position and recognize the inherent futility in the utilitarian project of maximizing "happiness". apathy for all!

https://phys.org/news/2013-11-economic-happiness-sweet-gdp-person.html

i mean, take it to a basic biological example everybody understands. you put a tiger in a wildlife sanctuary and bring it food, it's miserable. it wants to hunt. it has a biological imperative to do so.

humans are not as predatory creatures, but the same basic concept applies. we need to have some meaning. some challenge. some reason to exist.

this is what i wanted to see:

In practice, kits are paid off after about 18 months and subsequent electricity is free to the new owner.

here? grids are going to be more efficient on a production level, but only better on a cost level if they end up socialized. we can take that jump to the best of both approaches if we want to do it. in some places, it's happening. i don't know how likely that is in africa, but considering they're using kerosene i'd have to question it.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pay-as-you-go-solar-energy