"His presumption of innocence can only be built on the presumption that ... her words are not evidence."

well, yeah. by definition, actually. an accusation is not evidence of that accusation, and thinking in such terms creates a very muddy position, logically, that's actually kind of scary. but, orwellian scare mongering aside, it's really an attempt to use words (and not a very good one) to try and replace a presumption of innocence with a presumption of guilt. that's what is really going on there.

....because, after all, his presumption of innocence *is* the presumption that her words are not evidence. right?

i got deleted by somebody for pointing this out. which is whatever, but i wasn't really pushing that point. that much, i thought, was so obvious as to pass without debate. i suppose not.

it's not the first time i've seen somebody get very emotional about this, though, in ways i'm not able to understand.

...and, so, what i was interested in is whether or not the presumption of innocence is something that people actually support? do you actually believe in this idea? or would you actually rather a presumption of guilt?

well, i think it's more just a perspective. really, an arbitrary one. either option could be presented as a null hypothesis. but i'm getting the perception that people that lean towards the assumption of guilt care less about process and more about retribution. that is that they don't care about the presumption of innocence, they just demand "justice". in the end, that reduces to a very different concept of justice - a procedural concept vs. a kind of violent, retributive blood lust. and that may go a ways to explaining why arguments so quickly collapse into nonsense and name-calling. it's not about discourse, it's something more primal than that. further, i suspect there's a correlation between people that want to tweak the presumption of innocence and people that want more punitive sentences. i wouldn't expect that the people arguing for the presumption of guilt would be in favour of rehabilitative or restorative justice systems. i'd suspect there may even be a correlation with support for capital punishment.

i'm just drawing obvious conclusions, though. i realize i'm not going to get a real discourse. people seem to be afraid to take this position because of the perception that it's considered tyrannical. it's not that obscure, though. i've read essays in favour of it. i had a textbook last year that presented it as a debate (to my amazement). i've seen it work itself out in cases, and on analysis in the media. it may actually be the dominant view in some places. i mean, it's a "new right" position. so, some people might find that scary. but the new right has been pretty successful. if you're agreeing, it's less that you're evil and more that you're just a conservative. conservatives are real people. there's no inherent shame in that.

so, while i happen to be on the liberal side of the argument (the presumption of innocence), i realize it's sort of arbitrary and am not going to demonize people that disagree with me (even as i realize the same level of respect will unfortunately not be returned). rather, i think it's more important that this social shift is discussed properly as it happens so that people understand what's going on and have the chance to react, respond and adjust to it. it's a pretty big shift in social attitudes! and that's neither left nor right, it's just democracy.

really, what i'm interested in is re-separating the ideas of evidence and accusation. then we can be honest about which null hypothesis is being used.

when i think of people that confuse evidence and accusation, i think of joseph mccarthy, john ashcroft and the early puritan colonies in massachusetts. it's not the same thing as assuming guilt. but the intellectual subversion it creates is more dangerous than just being honest about legal philosophies.

immediate impression of new cloud nothings single

deathtokoalas
i hope the record sounds less like late 90s radio pop, which usually makes me want to throw things through windows and vomit all over people.

bunzigga
yeah honestly...like there are hints of it throughout their music but i can tolerate it

deathtokoalas
well, one of the things i grew up listening to was "pop-punk" like weezer, nirvana, early offspring, bad religion. i loved that sound. it was catchy, but it had a really gritty edge to it. you could kiddy mosh while you were singing along to it. it was just super fun...

....but i have very specific and not-so-good memories of mainstream rock music just going full suck around '98, when mainstream "punk" (it was already pop at this point, but it still had an edge) got so sappy and stupid that it was basically nkotb with power chords. if course, if you didn't like that you could listen to a lot of homophobic stupidity like limp bizkit, or become a sad emo kid, instead. thank god for the arrival of post-rock at roughly the same time. but i always missed more traditional mainstream type in-your-face rock, and about the only place i was getting it for years was the white stripes (and then the thermals for a bit).

i found their last record really hit a sweet spot there, mixing the infectious catchiness with enough grit that it was still undeniably "rock music". i'll admit it hit me in a quarter-age crisis. wasted days ticked off all those boxes. this thing, i don't know...it's crossed the line for me...

but, you're right: it's not a total discarding of their previous sound, it's just honing in on their more marketable side. and it's a single. that even makes sense.

like i say, i'm hoping it's just a single to push the disc with. but, i mean, this is a path that's well charted. the "green day rise to fame" phenomenon is highly emulated. they may lose me in the process, but i'm old, anyways. further, as an abstract musician that will probably never sell a cd in my life, i find it hard to blame anybody for hopping on to that path and just going with it.

it would still at least be nice if the record rocks a bit harder than this.

Bootiee “The Human” Shorts
post rock arriving in the late 90s?

deathtokoalas
there may have been earlier precedents of questionable relevancy (in hindsight, it's hard to think of a band like tortoise as 'post-rock', despite how they were earlier synonymous with it), but post-rock first started building a real audience around '98 or so.

(i should also point out that i was 17 in 1998, which was old enough to start getting into more serious music. for me, that was a convergence in my maturity level developing with a new form that was starting to gain more popularity. i thought siamese dream was pretty awesome in '94, but i would not have had the patience to get into the genre foundations of post-rock, despite enjoying it now. let's not try too hard to prove me wrong :P)

(deleted post) 

deathtokoalas
(i've deleted an extremely offensive post from bootiee shorts and blocked him. instead, note the following.)

fwiw, '98 was a terrible year. between the skaters threatening to beat me up, the friends that deserted me because i had something other than sex on my mind and the gender identity crisis i was going through, it's a wonder i made it out of it alive.

people need to learn to pull their heads out of their asses.

so, back to the point - this is music that reminds me of the people that used to beat me up in high school, rather than music i used to connect to while getting beaten up. it's a bit of a disappointment. i hope the disc is a little less boring.

Solace Creat
I find it ironic that you relate more to, or prefer, the 'in your face' music and were also beaten up in highschool.

deathtokoalas
the mid 90s were weird. everything was mixed up. i get the impression that things have restabilized since, with metalheads and jocks beating up punks again (although the names may have changed a little, and the lines may have blurred, the three distinct subcultures seem to have reconstructed themselves). but the sort of weakening of jock rock in the 90s (whitesnake and skid row became green day and blink 182) didn't eliminate the basic "jock beating down freak" relationship. the fashion just changed, that was all. that being said, i wasn't listening to slayer, either - and they were the really violent kids that would literally assault you with skateboards and steal your shoes. the jocks didn't really know how to skate, but the metalheads did.

it was weird. i have specific memories of listening to bad religion in my headphones while snaking through back alleyways trying to avoid the skate gangs in slayer and pantera muscle ts. all the stereotypes were just wrong during this period.

punks were always the kids that got beat up, though. that's a constant from the mods forward. it's a big reason why the anger and insolence of punk has always appealed to punks. and, arguably, the release is why it was created in the first place.

that whole tough guy bro poseur shit that the metalheads have nowadays is a hip-hop thing that came into rock culture in the 90s.

Solace Creat
I would classify myself as a metal-head, but I don't think I agree with you. Well. I guess I wasn't in highschool in the 90s, or middle school...But: All of the metal heads I've known are very open, inclusive, and passive (perhaps with some anger issues, but I don't think it's a general rule that they're aggressive). I view them much more as rebels than jocks. All the jocks did listen to hip hop, rap, and blink 182 stuff, but I don't think any of them were into metal. If anything, at my school, there was more aggression towards Mexicans. There were often fights dubbed, "Whites and blacks versus the Mexicans". The jock group was still technically a clique, and they made fun of whomever in a much more light-hearted way than I think is generally portrayed in the media. Though, the fights were also a bit more individualistic, rather than groupy. The basic principal of the social herd was the same, (people hung out with people with their interests) but I don't think there were active rivalries between 'cliques'; at least, not that I was aware. The entire school was much more inclusive than, say, the 70s-90s cliche. I think the cliques are much less defined, nowadays. Who knows. Maybe I was oblivious. This song does sound a bit like punk meets mainstream '(indie) rock/pop', with the punk turned down heavily. I think I get what you mean, now. The opening is like the start of a punk song, then it falls into the more...poppy shit. I would say it lacks more of the punk eccentricity and spirit.

deathtokoalas
the root of the subculture war that took place from the 40s to the 80s (and got all confused in the 90s) was the rebels/rockers/metalheads on one side and the mods/punks/teddy-boys on the other. it's a fascinating thing to check out. there were actual riots between "metalheads" and "punks" at stones and hendrix concerts. there was a crossover there, so they were brought into contact. and you couldn't ever have something like a sabbath-who tour because it would just be bloodshed. people would literally get killed.

throughout it all there was another subculture a little more underground that worked it's way through in complicated ways: beat culture. burroughs, kerouac and the like. they had an influence on both the hippies and the mods, and, later on, a giant influence on "alternative rock". (and the hippies turned into disco fans). that style of emo spoken word is literally just beat music. i know most young metalheads would shudder at the suggestion that they have anything to do with emo or alternative rock, but the stoner and doom styles of metal nowadays are culturally beat music, rather than in the biker/rocker/metal realm. a lot of it even traces through boris and melvins and back to punk rock like blag flag and swans. that is to say that it comes from punk. i've been to enough doom and stoner shows to know that these kids are not metalheads but punks. that was kind of what i was getting at with the labels changing. on the other hand, the kids i see at legion shows nowadays tend to give me the creeps. to me, they look like they should be wearing slayer ts.

...and there were always places where things merged. i mean, the musicians themselves mostly don't have time for this stupidity (although it's actually true that black flag used to get into actual fistfights with l.a. metal bands that would go down to find them to beat them down - both motley crue and guns 'n' roses are known to be among the many bands that rollins and friends had to physically defend themselves against.). while that was happening, there was a lot of music in the 80s that mixed punk and metal. what the kids call "hardcore" (rather than black flag or dead kennedys) and "metalcore" nowadays musically comes from that mix of metal of punk, rather than one or the other. culturally, though, it's more "metal" than anything else i can see. and, again, with the shifted labels.

so, it's not really reasonable to look at what you see around you and connect it back to 80s metal. i know the marketing might want you to, but you really can't. rather, you've got four types of youth subculture:

1) kids into sports, competition and capitalism. they're usually rich. they need to be dominant and will beat down anyone who challenges their alpha standing. jocks. douches.

2) macho types that hate anything effeminate, from hippies to queers to women and will beat it down out of genuine *phobic hate. bikers. metalheads. rockers. skinheads. assholes.

3) nihilists, mostly. anarchists, not pacifists. punks. mods. some emos. they tend to get beat down because they speak out and/or because they "look gay".

4) beat culture. pacifists. poets. surrealists. sonic youth fans. trent reznor was the archetypal 90s beat icon. they hate everybody and tend to avoid conflict by staying apolitical.

you can kind of combine 1-2 and 3-4. but, as mentioned, nowadays you're more likely to find beatniks and punks at a doom "metal" show and metalheads and jocks at a "hardcore" show.

Solace Creat
Ah. Nevermind, gotcha. I tend to group all of metal within the subgenre of melodeath for some reason. Still, I haven't known any jocks into any kind of metal.  

deathtokoalas
that piddly malmsteen shit is really 90% prog. they just took their image from metal, really. historically, that goes back to stuff like yes and genesis, which is very much on the beatnik side. the modern parallel to what i'd call "metal" is what the kids call "metalcore". they're very confused - they think it's some kind of hardcore, when it's really the evolution of thrash.

Sam Kernodle
A while ago there was a download for the whole record when they played it live in Boston. It wasn't the best quality but it sounded really like their last album.

Aldo Hanel
the rest of the record is a lot different, don't worry

Ned Blackburn
if only 90s radio pop actually sounded like this and you weren't just exaggerating for effect

Olm8Cuz
you're sexy and I'd probably fuck you if you were down?

Solace Creat
Well. This took a turn.

deathtokoalas
possibly obvious implied sarcasm aside, and it might be a little weird to expose this on a random youtube comment, but i identify as something called 'asexual' - in addition to being transgendered. it's actually been nearly ten years, and i'm not in much of a hurry to get back to it. so, it's a very broad, general 'no' with absolutely no chance of wavering on it. sorry.

Solace Creat
You don't see many asexuals these days. While I personally identify with the term 'asexual', I do think it's more of a psychological suppression rather than an actual orientation. Though, that's a bit semantic.

deathtokoalas
there's no such thing as sexual orientation. any human can be conditioned to be attracted to anything. if media decided to run with it by spreading the proper kind of images attached to the right kind of stimulus, we could have people sexually attracted to trees or airplanes or anything else. we could have an entire class of people that are only turned on by aromatized plastics. this has been demonstrated using pavlovian methods: orientation is highly malleable and entirely plastic. as it is, we live in a society where both genders are highly sexualized. that's both why hypersexuality is the current trend and bisexuality is becoming the new normal. we're constantly being conditioned to interpret both genders erotically, and slowly learn to respond through arousal - just like pavlov's dog salivates on the ring of a bell. it follows that people can avoid that conditioning by avoiding media, people and culture. i don't want to pretend that's a conscious choice on my behalf - that i'm avoiding the conditioning - but i happen to prefer spending time by myself, and as a result haven't been conditioned. the fact that i don't watch any tv (none. ever.) is probably a dominant factor in my lack of sexual interest. not watching tv or films or much of what's popular on youtube means i haven't been through that conditioning of what is really pornographic media that saturates the lives of most young people. so, i'm not suppressing anything, it's just that the conditioning i've been through has been very weak because i'm not interested in the culture that enforces it. there's also a feedback cycle inherent to that that leads to ever decreasing sexual interest, which means that once you get into the asexual "zone" it continues to self-perpetuate itself.

Olm8Cuz
touche my friend, touche.

David Gorczyca
responding to your initial comment - i really like the band but they sound softer and softer on every album.

Solace Creat
I don't know if I believe that. I also don't know if I don't believe that. As in all things, I would be more apt to attribute sexual orientation as nature as well as nurture. If the gay gene is found, that'll settle that. Until then, it's a moot point, though I could see that as being true. Pretty sure that a sex drive isn't a result classical conditioning, though operant conditioning may play a role. Perhaps the way people go about it is influenced by society, and while there is programming involved, it's more biological, imo. It's instinctual; otherwise, the human race probably wouldn't exist. If that were the case, then, myself, watching an abhorrent amount of television would be more apt to adhear to the aforementioned conditions. However, I'm not really asexual. If Kate Beckinsale or Natalie Portman showed up at my door ready to go, I'd have a difficult time saying no. So, I guess I just prefer not to go through all the complications of the ritual dating game, but I do value being close with someone. Also instinctual. I really think that since the base drives are instinctual, if someone doesn't adhear to those instincts it's a personal choice or a psychological...I don't want to say issue, but...complication of some sort. Of course, I guess this is all pretty semantically. I just don't believe that 'asexuality' is really a thing; in addition, if sexual preference doesn't exist due to the above criteria, then neither does asexuality.  Though, I can appreciate the disgust or aloofness towards the typical courting rituals. They're pretty ridiculous.

deathtokoalas
there's no evidence of a gay gene. it's been used as a legal argument because american case law is exceedingly illiberal when it comes to certain things. arguing that gay people have no choice but to be gay has at times been the only available argument to prevent them from being punished. the legal argument has been "it's not their fault". it's been successful enough that it's taken on this sort of popular perception. however, it's not at all a scientific position and it's really almost certainly wrong - despite it's historical usefulness in court. i'd argue it's actually more liberating to think of sexuality as a choice than as something genetic. homosexuality is not an incurable disease, it's a decision that people should be given the right to make freely. but i'm actually taking a middle position in arguing in terms of unconscious conditioning - it's malleable (and this is demonstrable), but the result of uncontrollable stochastic events. i didn't mean to be too specific about the type of conditioning. if operand plays a role, it's probably in normalizing heterosexuality as "natural", i.e. in rejecting homosexuality. that would be strictly cultural. the type of conditioning i'm thinking about is something very chaotic that doesn't follow any kind of exact rules or patterns. but there are studies that demonstrate the malleability of it using classical conditioning. have you ever had a dog hump your leg? i don't think we're more complicated than that. the dog could be conditioned to become aroused at the sight of your leg, to the point it loses attraction to other dogs. the biological urge creates the arousal, but it clearly doesn't specify a target. if it did, there wouldn't be gay people at all, and dogs wouldn't hump your leg. anybody who's ever had a penis knows they don't always react to a clear stimulus. how that biological urge is shaped is where the complicated, stochastic conditioning comes in. to suggest it's hard wired really strikes me as entirely ludicrous; most people will agree that they've gone through phases in their lives where they seem to be aroused by almost anything at all, and should a phase of the sort intersect with an experience there's a substantial chance it could become habitual. it's a mild shift in mindset. rather than seeing us as evolved to fulfill a biological function of sex to reproduce, and deviating from that being pathological or defective, i see us as primitive creatures that will mostly fuck about anything we get the chance to - human or not. i go back and forth between thinking that our hormones are too stupid to understand the difference between a member of the opposite sex and livestock, and thinking that this indiscriminate level of persistent arousal is actually an evolutionary trait. that is to say we've evolved to fuck anything and everything we can, without being picky about things like function, gender or species. the suppression is mostly in "heterosexuals" denying "homosexual" urges, and that's entirely cultural. one of the ways to understand all this is just to look at human history. sexual orientation shifts with culture, both ways. in classical greece, virtually everybody was openly bisexual. but sex was an act that was very connected to class. for example, a man who owned slaves was expected to penetrate them as a statement of dominance and ownership. yet, a free man could never be penetrated by a slave or by another free man as that was a sign of submission. a lot of the taboos we have around sexuality come from these sorts of cultural things, rather than anything biological. and they can be easily traced by anybody with the time and patience to do it. also, as an aside, asexual isn't a lack of attraction in the sense of being impossible to arouse. it's just a disinterest in sex. some people that identify as asexual maintain sexual relationships. it's just not what drives them.

Bertie Wooster
good god.  i guess you spend the time you free up not being sexually-attracted writing ridiculously long, completely bullshit comments on youtube.  outstanding life choices you've made.   the idea that sexual attraction is completely conditioned and isn't tied in anyway to the procreation drive is the most hilariously anti-science thing i've ever read, making the average creationist look like a biology phd.  

deathtokoalas
i didn't say it isn't tied to the procreation drive, i've pointed out that this mechanism is imperfect. the creationist ideal ought to be that non-standard sexualities are some kind of abomination. if you think of life as a perfectly created thing by some divine force, that makes sense. modern science, on the other hand, introduces a lot of error. newton, for example, would be considered a creationist today. it's maybe ironic that his clockwork universe was used as an argument against god, because he actually saw the perfection of his system as being an argument in favour of it. but, we know now that things aren't so simple - that there's all kinds of error terms brought on by random events. it's the randomness that presents an argument against creation, even as it collapses the perspectives of classical science. extrapolating this (now not-so) new understanding of the universe to biology is admittedly an argument against darwinism in it's strict sense. i'm an evolutionist, but i have a lot of problems with the idea of natural selection and think it's ultimately destined for such a drastic reworking that it will find it's way into the dustbin. i'm more inclined to lean towards genetic drift as a sort of "background radiation" that explains most evolutionary change, and natural selection as something rare that must be rigorously demonstrated rather than philosophically assumed. if i'm right, that's ok; that's how science works. put bluntly, you're stuck in the nineteenth century, dude. for example, one could consider the dawkins-gould debate. is the rate of evolution constant or fluctuating? i'm over-simplifying, and dawkins would correct me, but consider the medium. gould has pointed out that there are large jumps in the fossil record that seem to contradict the idea of constant change. but, maybe the answer lies outside of this paradigm. as the climate is changing, we're seeing evidence before our eyes that hybridization is more common than we thought. a model is developing whereby changes in climate lead to recombination of related species - hence coyotes and wolves are recombining into one species, and there's some evidence that grizzly and polar bears, as well as lynx and bobcats, are going through similar hybridizations. with these hybridizations, we see the kind of morphological changes that gould has pointed to for evidence of dramatic jumps in the speed of evolution. i don't want to mislead you, here: i'm presenting a highly contentious hypothesis. yet, as more evidence builds to corroborate it, the end result could very well be that they are both wrong and that natural selection really is micro, while macro is driven by hybridization events. is this perspective not more consistent with a chaotic universe than the modern synthesis is? in the question of sheer survival, ask yourself this question: is a species that highly specializes it's reproductive behaviour to carefully sexually select more or less likely to pass on it's genes than a species that just fucks everything? are genes more likely to pass on when they are held back to certain traits or when they're just playing the odds? is survival of the horniest not a rational proposition? why does your dog hump your leg, anyways? you can see it all over the place. all kinds of species produce hundreds or thousands of eggs. advanced mammals cannot reproduce like this; it just requires too much energy. but, the equivalent strategy is to just fuck at every possible opportunity.

the actual science on the topic seems to indicate that humans are born horny, but without any innate preference one way or another. i would think that, if left to develop without any kind of gender coercion, most humans would mature into bisexual creatures that are driven by what could only be deemed "barbaric" levels of lust towards just about anything - humans, animals, whatever is around. one of the defining characteristics of civilization is the ability to repress that lust. the freedom for women to walk around half naked is a long way from the rape of the sabine women. it follows that attraction to the same sex can be exaggerated or minimized, as can attractions to the opposite one, but that neither is exclusively hard-wired in anybody at birth. sexual tabula rasa....

also, fwiw, i do enjoy this quite a bit more than i would enjoy any kind of conventional existence. i'll never understand why people take such narrow perspectives that they have to criticize people for not living up to some contrived ideal. maybe there are people on this planet that would rather spend time alone on the internet. that's a personal choice. i don't criticize people for wasting their lives and their minds on sex; learning a little bit of mutual respect for other lifestyles would do you (and others) some good.

Solace Creat
You make convincing points. My understanding of the word 'asexual' was off, then, at the very least for the purposes of this conversation.

umjim
Everyone is arguing and I just want to know what your deal with Koalas is..?

deathtokoalas
their despicable cuteness necessitates their imminent destruction.