i'm all over this site with snide remarks about this or that. i'll pan anything you give me. i don't give a fuck. but it's about the music.
she may have a better career as an actress, but she legitimately looked mortified. i believe that. and i can only imagine the horrific, stupid bullshit she went through due to this. the bottom line is that people that go on the internet to bully little girls into a low sense of self-esteem deserve to be turned into compost. go throw yourselves off cliffs.
(and, yeah, the song is bad, but it's not measurably worse than any other modern pop music. totally overblown.)
i actually think this provides some insight into the ideas underlying abiogenesis. we think of proteins bunching together, a wall coming up that pushes out the outside world and then evolution within the cell. might it have been more integrated than this, with viruses existing around the earliest life forms and pushing the process?
nobody would suspect they would, but i'm not convinced they understood the options properly. disbelief is really hard to suspend. i'm sure what you'll hear is "rather than modify the climate, we should reduce emissions". if confronted on the reality that it's already too late, they'll probably say something about optimism, or maybe even cite a supernatural force. even those religious people that acknowledge the science seem to view catastrophe as a test of their faith. they've been conditioned to expect a happy ending.
if you could actually get people to understand that emissions can't be otherwise reversed, there is no optimism and there is no god? well, i think the results might shift. but, people are going to need to have something affect them personally before they'll get to that point...
in theory, local unions in africa or south america might be a good idea, but it's likely to come under a lot of threats from the americans, who would no longer be able to manipulate these events to take down economies in countries that they want to punish.
this is a quasi-historical text that both documents and justifies
the norman invasion of southern italy. unfortunately, as our sources
for this period are not very good, we have no option but to rely on
shoddy quasi-mythical histories and deductive logic to build an
understanding of these events.
malaterra begins by providing a rational explanation for the migration: some of the twelve sons of tancred d'hauteville
looked around their father's realm and decided that it could not be
split up in a way that would provide enough land (and slaves, no doubt)
for all of them. they decided that it would be in the benefit of all of
them to look elsewhere for new land rather than to engage in conflicts
with each other. this explanation of the norman migration south is
certainly appealing in it's logic, as well as it's biblical simplicity,
but does it hold up to careful scrutiny?
malaterra's narrative is actually really not that far removed from
the contemporary explanation of the viking migrations and invasions as
being driven by a combination of population growth and climate change.
yet, why would they feel the need to go as far as italy? if they were
truly such powerful warriors, why not subdue the land around them and
build a great empire? the text provides an answer, actually: god led
them to apulia. yet, i think that modern scholarship requires a better
answer than that they were led by god. if we acknowledge the consistency
between malaterra's explanation and the contemporary scientific
explanation, we still haven't answered the question of "why did the
normans go to italy?".
whatever the reasons for them leaving normandy were, they were
first accepted into the employ of the prince of capua (pandulf IV), who
paid them to attack the prince of salerno (guaimar IV)). in time, the
prince of salerno offered a higher wage and the norman mercenaries
instead attacked the prince of capua (in 1038).
so, the narrative actually breaks from the fictional background
fairly quickly - the normans came to italy not as conquerors looking for
land but as invited mercenaries in the employ of local aristocrats. the
wealthy italian (lombard in background) princes were probably looking
to build up their personal varangian guards to aid in defense and in
conquest. having viking mercenaries in one's army was fashionable
amongst the mediterranean despots of the period.
so, we can answer the question of "why italy?" with some
certainty - because they were lured into a mercenary army by the promise
of a steady pay check. it should also be noted that norman mercenary
armies were already established in southern italy before any members of
the de hauteville family arrived. so much for divine guidance.
the empire, of course, was very sensitive to the existence of large
barbarian armies on it's peripheral. in general, it would prefer to
avoid that altogether. yet, if these barbarian armies must exist then
self-preservation demanded they be played off against each other. see,
because barbarians are barbarians, it follows that they are easy to
control through appealing to their barbaric nature. this is the
fundamental axiom of greek military strategy over two thousand years
worth of history. as such, the normans were convinced to attack the
saracens in sicily, under the command of the general maniaces.
the diversion was initially successful, but it very quickly
backfired. the normans did attack sicily, but they also attacked
byzantine italy almost immediately afterwards. malaterra justifies this
by arguing that the greek general refused to share the booty from the
raid, but this is blatant whitewashing that is not at all consistent
with byzantine strategy and makes almost no historical sense. rather,
the invasion was called off by maniaces halfway through the conquest.
the causes of the called-off invasion seem to be well understood and
have to do with byzantine politics; the normans seem to have plundered
italy simply because they were brought back there before they got the
chance to plunder sicily. in any case, the empire walked out of this
episode in barbarian management with no greater control of sicily and a
new barbarian headache in southern italy that had to be addressed
immediately. several attempts to expel the normans were met not just
with failure but with greater losses; the byzantines eventually had to
admit defeat, and it was with this defeat that italy was lost to
constantinople forever.
the way things worked at the time was that if you didn't want to
pledge allegiance to the emperor then you had to pledge allegiance to
the pope (or face genocide). so, successfully expelling the byzantines
meant inviting a papal invasion. while the normans, under humphrey, are
said to have defeated the invading germans, they were also coerced into
the roman church's hegemony (and out of constantinople's sphere) by the
granting of a fief. see, when you defeat the church in battle that means
that it must acknowledge your newfound right to be legally inferior to
it. nor is there any debate on the subject - unless, of course, you'd
like to pledge allegiance to the emperor. the normans responded to this
by expanding their rule in central italy.
while humphrey was conquering the center of the peninsula, robert
guiscard was conquering the south of it. when he shifts the narrative to
the first of the two main characters of the text, malaterra brings out a
truth that may have been lost up to that point - with all the conflict
occurring between princes and churches, the italian masses may very well
have met the normans as liberators (which is something they had no
intent of being). when they rounded up the tax collectors and the
wealthiest citizens for torture and plunder, they may very well have
been cheered on. in the long run, however, the italian normans proved to
be cruel and unpopular leaders that were constantly putting down
revolts.
so, a conflict appears to be brewing between humphrey and guiscard.
if one happened, the text is silent about it - guiscard is said to have
been elected leader after humphrey died of an illness. see the pages on
tancred d'hauteville and robert guiscard. the second main character that appears is roger of sicily,
initially in an antagonistic role against guiscard, who was probably
not actually his brother. malaterra spins a tale about roger being upset
that he wasn't being taken seriously, but this isn't worth
deconstructing. rather, questions about the nature of humphrey's death
are relevant in the context of roger's alliance with geoffrey in their
apparent resistance to his rule, as are questions about both the nature
of the succession and the extent of guiscard's functional rule. guiscard
put down several revolts of various character, often with the aid of
roger.
in any case, roger and guiscard then unite in an uneasy alliance to
finish the conquest of southern italy (apulia and calabria) from the
byzantines, which led to guiscard accepting the title of duke from the
pope. interestingly, sicily (then occupied by arabs) was in the area
that guiscard was made duke over. what that actually means is that
guiscard was given the pope's blessing to invade and conquer the island.
this allowed him to eventually (the chronology is disputed) appoint
roger as count of sicily.
so, we see that the conquests of these norman warlords consistently
brought regions that were then lost to the papal sphere back into it.
this would continue into the crusades. while the chroniclers want to
present these norman warlords as independent agents, they seem to have
been highly manipulated as mercenaries within a three-way (muslim,
papal, byzantine) struggle for control of the mediterranean and to have
ultimately largely been proxies of the pope. malaterra is careful to
point out that the justification for the invasion of sicily was
religious, but this is probably only a half-truth. on that note, the
high number of norman warriors that were involved in the crusades is
worth pointing out. were the crusades partially a pro-active way for the
pope to rid himself of these barbarians, while trying to reclaim lost
lands in the process?
leading up to the invasion, there was further conflict between
roger and robert. malaterra again spins a story that isn't worth
deconstructing, but the crux of the problem seemed to be about primacy
and roger seems to have been the more popular ruler, despite the
church's apparent preference for guiscard (at least at this point). an
agreement was reached that gave roger more control over calabria, which
gave him a safe base to leave his family and to attack sicily from. by
appointing roger count of sicily, however, guiscard may have actually
been trying to eliminate a challenger to his own power by sending him
overseas. this reading is complicated by the alliance between the two
men, which led to the need for roger to continually come back to the
mainland to aid robert in putting down revolts. further, robert seems to
have accompanied roger on some of the missions in sicily. due to the
inefficacy of his brother's rule, roger wasn't able to complete the
conquest of sicily until after his death in 1085.
guiscard even went so far as to launch a failed invasion of greece,
with the aim of seizing the imperial throne. guiscard had "betrothed"
his daughter to marry the son of the emperor but the emperor was deposed
before the marriage took place, thereby taking guiscard out of the line
of succession, which was no doubt the purpose of the whole arrangement.
so, again, personal ambition aligns with papal ambition. the story
states that guiscard was winning in greece (and that the war was lost by
his soon-to-be disowned son, bohemund) until he had to go back to italy
to save the pope from an attack by the german emperor, but the
causality in that story is no doubt simplified to present guiscard in a
heroic light. rather, guiscard probably abandoned a lesser battle over
the title of eastern emperor for a shot at the greater title of western
emperor. note that he also had to suppress a revolt by jordan of aversa,
who had aligned with the emperor. malaterra immediately follows this
with a story of revolt by roger's son, also named jordan, that seems
more like a biblical parable than real history. the moral of the story
is to obey your elders (or have your eyes gouged out with rusty spears).
were there really two jordans that revolted almost simultaneously or is
malaterra quietly suggesting that they're the same story? jordan did
not live long enough to really distinguish.
the text finishes with a further description of further squabbles
that don't strike me as all that important. if i revisit this in the
future, i'll update. at this moment, i'm actually not very
interested....
overall, this text functions as a church-sponsored founder myth for
the italo-norman kingdom that pulled the south of the peninsula firmly
into rome's permanent sphere (in inherited form) and lasted right up
until the unification of italy. the idea of a "hauteville family" is
probably an elaborate fiction. several dozen random, roving pirates
fighting for control and plunder were packaged to the citizenry as a
divinely inspired aristocracy fighting for it's inheritance to uphold
the honour of the church. as it is primarily papal propaganda designed
to uphold what would eventually become a feudal aristocracy, it can only
be read highly critically. these people were probably not religious at
all, unless it suited them politically. generally, however, it did suit
them to align with the roman church. that's the key idea to pull out of
it: there was a very strong alliance between norman pirates and the
roman church to forcefully eliminate arab and byzantine influence in
southern italy and realign the area into a papal vassal state.
so, yeah. this was painful, and i'm not going to be doing it further for the near future. if it was just as easy as jotting down a few notes, but it always turns into a research essay...
see, i've got this ridiculous genealogy built that goes back thousands of years and turns into an anthropology site and then an evolutionary tree. i need to source it more carefully. there was a time when i thought demonstrating the continued existence of class by construction was a worthwhile pursuit. at this point, i think it's too obvious to really require it.
i still find it interesting. i'm not stopping this permanently. but i don't find it pressing. i want to get through the books on my shelf before i lose myself in this for the hundredth time.
i thought this would be quick. it wasn't, and i'm fully repulsed by it for right now.
so, that's what sorting through this old primacy source of the norman invasion of southern italy was about. it's about a 75/25 bullshit/history ratio. so, i kept getting distracted by....anything else. i would have been better with a secondary source, but i'm a pretentious ass.
i'll be back "on schedule" in a day or two.
this is the genealogical root, that splits into wisharts and italo-normans.
"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.
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.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Kardinal ZG
Senile Chomsky being a sanctimonious prick again....
John Thomas Casey
Guy is pretty annoying though I have no interest in watching....
Kardinal ZG
Yea well i do find sport event barbarous, but his main argument throughout his career was that people are stupid and america is imperialistic. Good job. Someone get him a chocolate medal.
jessica amber murray
chomsky has noticeably lost a step in the last two years or so. the first really clueless analysis i heard from him was around the beginning of the arab spring, when he seemed entirely unaware of the power politics circling around it. he hasn't really kept up since.
two things, though.
first, it wouldn't be obvious that america is an imperialist state if people like chomsky weren't pointing it out. coming out of world war two, that wasn't the dominant narrative. you sitting there and going "well, duh" is actually a consequence of his dissent (and the dissent of many others).
second, i think what he's actually expressing is a kind of muted optimism. i mean, he's a syndicalist. that's the exact opposite of the idea that people can't run their own lives. so, why don't people fight more for co-ops and collectives? worse, i think it's a huge error to reduce everything he's said to manufacturing consent (which he was the second author of), but, regardless, the book was really just applying gramsci's ideas of hegemony, which are pretty well accepted. it's a valid analysis. it's less about how people don't revolt because they are stupid (isn't that more what the french, say foucault, said?) and more that access to information is controlled in such a way to produce and enforce a narrative. the internet has maybe dulled it's effect, a little. i think we're due for a different analysis that draws on like huxley or something. but realizing that that's true (and still applies at least to television) is the first step in countering it. countering official narratives by citing facts is a much better way to characterize his writings in a statement. in a sense, anybody could do that. it's just a question of doing the research. but he's somebody that actually has, and has been read.
that makes him more of a historian than anything else.
the optimism is that if people weren't so controlled then they'd revolt, and that's in opposition to people who claim the proletariat is incapable of doing anything themselves.
personally, i think people are more distracted by labour and bills than media. what he's saying applies more to white collar workers than blue collar ones. it's a distraction, but more a distraction of the upper middle class. i don't know how much a super bowl ticket costs, but i doubt it's affordable to the average worker.
Kardinal ZG
Labour and bills for sure. But really, his work is super sloppy, he has no apparent methodology apart from mere finger pointing. His borderline conspiratorial position is really problematic too. What exactly is the 'they' that orchestrates all of this to keep us dumb with football? He confounds effect with efficient causality. Thats like a rookie mistake.
jessica amber murray
the director of the cia at one point (william casey) had a controlling interest in abc. there's massive overlap between government and media. but the "they" more abstractly is the capitalist class, and it's proxies in government. more specifically? i don't think it's meant to be thought of that way, although i'm sure chomsky could provide a handful of examples (which doesn't prove the existence of such a thing, but shows how it works). he's cited the cfr in the ford administration. there was the project for the new american century group in the 90s that's had a dominant influence on neo-conservatism. these kinds of bodies do exist. do they represent something bigger? i think it's just a model. i do agree, though, that personifying class is a pitfall, but it's a general problem on the left that goes way behond chosmky. half of marx' writing reads off like a conspiracy theory, referencing some abstract thing that only really existed in his head.
Giovanni Cristoforo Iacovella
and yet... there is to a certain extent a partial truth to his 'panem et circenses' observation...
without having to fall into delirious conspiracy theories...
jessica amber murray
i've actually argued this point fairly strenuously: if you start with whatever conspiracy theory and you strip out the supernatural or silly aspects (aliens, satan, lizard people, masons, illuminati, muslims - even communists during the red scare), you're always left with what is really little more than a marxist class analysis. take out lizard people, insert capital. instant marxism. two conclusions: first, is that if conspiracy theorists weren't so maddeningly frustrating to debate with, there would probably actually be a high probability of converting them into leftists. second, it kind of gets you wondering. it seems like they're all variations on the same theme, to create a ridiculous villain to hate on in place of capital. in the case of the illuminati conspiracy theory, and to the lesser extent the red scare, history actually corresponds fairly well with that idea of divide and conquer - which suggests that the real conspiracy is a conspiracy of capital.
but, yeah. leftists need to constantly be aware of this when they're talking about capital, or talking about class. it's an easy trap to fall into. i don't think that chomsky is particularly guilty of it, though.
Kardinal ZG
Not sure how many marxists adhere to this personified 'they' or that it reads like conspiracy work. For marx at least ideology happens idependently from any one specific human agency. The deeper problem might be that nobody is actually driving. As for the super bowl it seems more like a stupid cathartic social ritual (look we all have these) than an actual plot to make me stupid.
jessica amber murray
i've read a lot of marx that speaks of "the bourgeoisie" in terms of it being a monolithic thing, and gives off the impression that it's run by some kind of centralized body. in his case, that usually just meant a parliament, and he was usually just glossing over disagreements for the sake of brevity. sometimes, though, it kind of takes on it's own agency in a way that's kind of hard to swallow. i mean, i'm willing to interpret it as a model. it doesn't bother me much. but it's there.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
i'm starting to conceive of an idea of the crusades as being a papal scheme to rid themselves of these bothersome vikings. that's not inconsistent with the defense hypothesis as it initially applied (pushing the defense hypothesis doesn't negate the fact that viking raids eventually evolved into a highly profitable business (a type of proto-colonialism, really) or the fact that viking settlements were eventually co-opted by the church). it does, however, align the strategy with centuries worth of imperial policy that played tribe off against each other as diversion tactics. the roman empire could not have survived until 1453 without the use of these tactics, which the pope would have been well aware of.
there's some early hints of this. there was a norman invasion of italy around 1000 that resulted in over a century of just random, pointless fighting on the peninsula. of course, italy wasn't united as a nation until the nineteenth century. the south of italy was, for many centuries, a part of the eastern empire. in this period, sicily was occupied by arabs. so, this was the imperial policy: pay the annoying normans to attack the usurping arabs. that would have the dual purpose of getting them out of southern italy and "liberating" sicily from arab occupation. the next part of the process would be to "civilize" the normans. the end goal is the re-establishment of imperial authority over both sicily and southern italy. this particular policy was a failure, but there are far more successful examples of this kind of "barbarian management", especially in the areas around the black sea.
the italian normans revolted against the emperor and found themselves fiefs of the pope, instead (maintaining independence of both empires in this period was not a realistic goal; it was possible to play them off against each other, or to switch sides outright, but true independence couldn't actually happen). they ended up launching attacks directly on the emperor, and were eventually one of the dominant forces in the early crusades. but, from the papal perspective, these were all ultimately campaigns that were engineered by the papal emperor to extend the control of roman influence.
nor did the viking raids on europe ever really end. vikings resettled in the south and slowly "civilized", but there continued to be viking descendants that would "revert" to paganism and go back to plundering, for the simple reason that it was profitable. you could civilize some of them but not all of them. there needed to be a way to get rid of those that wouldn't assimilate.
if i'm pulling something worthwhile between the lines, it's really a rather brilliant tactic. it might not apply to the later crusades, or some of the more targeted ones (like the albigensian crusade). nor do i think i'm really colouring that far out of the lines. i'm sure i'm not the first person who has pulled the idea out.
but it does cast a slightly different twist on the history. reading through modern histories, i've been really disappointed. the narrative about religious piety is still there. it's only mildly rationalized. i get the impression that nobody really wants to jettison it completely, that historians sort of like the simplicity of it - or are perhaps even racist enough to continue to pick sides.
realizing the nature of the imperial policy is a step in properly secularizing the history. and it's just through simple analogy to the well understood manipulations carried out by fifteen hundred years of imperial policy.
i'll have more specific arguments on my page.
of course, it's also the same strategy of "divide and conquer" that the americans are using in the middle east.
i'll admit a peeve of mine has been, for many years, the way the crusades are presented in colonialist narratives. it's like history began with islam. the reality is that northern africa and the levant were colonized by arabs that don't have a history in the region before the year 700, and that the turkish invasions (and this isn't to discount a more substantial narrative of turkish colonialism over arabs and greeks alike) are even more recent. there's a thousand years of greek and roman history in the region, which contributed to a very real ethnogenesis of greco-syrians and others. the crusades were always thought of as a process of liberating the region from muslim rule, which was alien to the region; that is to say that it was the arabs that were thought of as invaders. further, suggesting that phoenicians and assyrians were arabs is disingenuous to say the least. the struggle over the region was between iran and europe. arabs were outside of this conflict, except in the sense that they were used as mercenary forces. and their geographical extent did not extend out of the arabian peninsula.
to an extent, that's a quibble. it's a peeve, but a quibble.
more substantial in context is the idea of the pope playing off what he would have seen as two distinct groups of enemies (vikings, or maybe germans more generally, and arabs) to reconstruct a historical empire. you have to collapse the narrative about the crusaders stealing muslim lands to get to that point - because the crusaders would not have acknowledged that the areas were muslim lands. and, unfortunately, they're right, because arabs are not indigenous to the area.
when there were revolts in the area during the roman period, they mostly had to do with heretical versions of christianity. egypt and the levant revolted repeatedly over something called "monophysitism" that i suppose is something roughly approaching unitarianism.
it's interesting to even note that a substantial number of roman writers just thought the muslims were heretical christians.
but it's not like there were arab revolts in the region under roman rule. arabs didn't live in these areas.
to be clear: what i'm reacting against is ethno-centric historical revisionism, i don't want it to seem like i'm replacing it with more of the same. so, consider two areas that were recovered by european forces: spain and sicily. people that know their history know that both of these ares were under muslim rule for a few centuries. but that's just considered a blip in time, a temporary result of the muslim armies over-extending themselves. spain is an integral part of any narrative of christian, western europe.
the reality is that, had the crusaders been successful (and the crusaders were not nice people concerned about liberating the area and enforcing human rights, as mentioned they were mostly viking mercenaries that were interested in plundering and setting up hierarchies that reported back to the emperor in rome, and they were resisted not just by the muslim population but also by the christians that they were there to liberate) the levant would be viewed largely the same way as spain - an area with a deeply embedded roman history that was temporarily occupied by arab muslim invaders.
nor is it like the syrian greek population just vanished. it's still there. lebanese dna is overwhelmingly "phoenician". and a lot of palestinians are ethnically "samaritan", which has an ethnic history closer to hebrew than arab. even the indigenous coptic egyptians are still out there, but they've been heavily colonized.
it's just a question of correcting the narrative. i'm not standing up for the crusaders. but the "poor muslims invaded unprovoked by rampaging europeans" narrative is just wrong.
it's more like "the pope playing off barbarian against barbarian in a failed attempt to reassert historical imperial boundaries".
born:
died: 1051
father: tancred d'hauteville[1] william and drogo seem to have probably really been brothers. they were present in italy by 1035 at the latest. drogo became count of apulia upon william's death and successfully repelled the byzantine invasions. also lord of venosa. he appears to have been murdered by the byzantines, but humphrey is also a suspect.
you know, i just tossed a bag of garbage that's been hanging from my wall for weeks and there was literally nothing in it but empty bags of doritos, and a few other random wrappers. so, basically the only garbage i'm producing is from eating doritos.
i'm therefore going to stop eating doritos.
so, if wikipedia publishes a book of wikipedia entries, is it a valid source?
"A theory is a purely mental image of how something should be. In other words, the thought in the dark (with eyes closed) comes first, and the comparison with nature (eyes open) comes later. If the imagined agrees with the real, then the theory is correct." - a pre-eminent physicist explaining why theoretical physics is in fact not a valid science at all.
science works through observation, not confirmation bias.
"why don't people take me seriously when i demonstrate that i've found the remains of noah's ark?"
well, it would be the same process. you come up with an idea, then you find evidence to prove it right.
actual science is supposed to begin with experiments, and then construct ideas from observing the results of the experiments. how many physicists out there are doing that? absolutely none of them.
instead, we get this childish pre-occupation with "theory" and an array of fools that will go so far as to tear you down for not having one. it's depressing, really.
all theory is nonsense.
destroy all theory.
revel in sensory observation.
i mean, honestly. that's the kind of thing somebody would say to discredit science. i hope he was misquoted.
From: Jessica Murray <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
To: the surviving uncle
well, the reasoning behind going to windsor is that the rent is cheap. i was having difficulty finding even a bachelor in ottawa for less than $800, although like any other market there's not always a lot of logic put into the prices. one week, there'd be something decent for $750, the next week the best thing would be a closet for $900. i'm not exaggerating. a few of the places i checked out were just absurd. there was a one room basement apartment on cooper for $850 that had two items in it: a fridge and a bed. but, you couldn't open the fridge because the bed was literally lodged between the front door and the fridge. other places would literally convert walk-in closets into bedrooms, then price the place as having an extra bedroom. the few places i was able to find that i thought i could stay in basically told me my income was too low (which is bullshit, but who wants to go to court over that?). i didn't really want to move, but the absurdity of the market in ottawa led me to giving up on being able to stay there.
i talked to a couple of people about it. i mean, i had to ask - "do you really think you're going to get what you're asking for this?". they explained it by the high student population in ottawa. algonquin's the same size as a university, now, and there's another college out in orleans that keeps growing. the general perception is that they can keep the cost of rent at absurd levels because some kid's parents will pay it to send them away, and that it's as much about getting rid of the kid as it is anything else. it's as good an explanation as i can come up with, although i think it would help if the city would force people that own abandoned property to develop (and there's a lot of it, like the old sears building on rideau, for example).
i don't know if you realize it, but ottawa is actually the most expensive place to live in ontario. most people would think toronto. and if you work out the average price, toronto would be higher. but ottawa doesn't have the low rent areas that toronto does. even vanier is being gentrified. i was actually strongly considering toronto, but i didn't want to make any snap decisions that would land me in a bad neighbourhood. i was really dissuaded from the idea by an experience i had hitching down to windsor. a trucker let me off the 401 at jane street, and i got picked up by somebody that thought i was a prostitute. i mean, ten minutes in the area and that happens - i think i'll avoid that city, thanks.
i was lucky enough to have some nice basements to live in growing up, and where i've moved is as nice as any of them. it's a very large two bedroom for $650. so, i've got a studio in one bedroom with my gear in it. i've got a den separated from the big living room that's big enough for a couch to smoke on. the kitchen could seat ten people. this place would probably be pushing $1500 in ottawa. it's that stark a difference. it comes with some down sides. last month, a house about five doors down got showered with gun fire and invaded and ended with somebody getting shot in the forehead. they're saying it was drug related and nothing to be concerned about. i'm willing to believe that, but it's not really something you want to be near.
overall, the area is sort of like chinatown in ottawa - specifically the strip south of somerset between preston and bronson. i'm a block from the italian district, and a block from the arabic district. which means i've been eating a lot of deli meat and a lot of hummus.
the landlord is also pretty good. it's a dude, rather than a company, which is probably a key factor in not needing any kind of co-sign. he's a middle age guy that spent most of his life as an electrician and inherited a chunk of money from a cement business. he bought this place so that his slightly autistic brother would have a stable place to live. he's renting out the other three units simply to pay down property taxes. it's not about making money for him, it's just about his brother. one of the things we agreed upon is no rent increases because odsp doesn't go up very often. so, i'm getting $1080 from odsp and paying down $650 for rent. given that i don't eat that much, and i don't have any other major expenses, i'm actually quite comfortable right now. so long as that stays steady, i should be good here pretty much forever.
nor is this area gentrifying. the commercial district is mostly boarded up. it's sort of surreal to walk down "main street" and encounter closed shops and boarded up windows. factories are still closing fairly regularly, putting more and more people out of work. people are continuing to leave, and there seems to be no end to that trend in sight.
so, you can imagine that the city is sort of dead. but, i don't really like to go out much or spend time with people, anyways. i'm extremely introverted, so the isolation has played into that in ways that are actually positive for me. pretty much the only thing i'll ever go out to is concerts. windsor? well, i've hit a few punk shows. but, windsor is a suburb of detroit, and everybody plays detroit (or, increasingly, a suburb of detroit). i haven't been across yet because the paperwork to get across the border nowadays is a headache. for example, i need to get a phone before they'll give me a card. i'm hoping to deal with that soon so i can go over and see some shows there.
overall, i'm happy with this. i think it was a good decision that's going to keep me stable for quite some time.
i've found there are very few legitimate constants in life that transcend time and circumstance, but, for me, one absolute certainty is that, wherever i go, and whatever type of people happen to be there, and however it happens to be managed, i tend to get compliments about my hair.
it's nothing, really. i blacked it months ago. i blonded it months before that. i reded it still months before that. and blonded it still further months previously. now, i haven't touched it in a little over a year. so it's just grown in to have blond highlights at the end, and a few different shades scattered in. nothing managed - if anything it's sort of dilapidated.
we will all consider the idea of dilapidated hair now and if it really makes any sense.
regardless, tonight somebody liked my hair. thanks. i guess. i was out to see a couple of concerts....
there's two themes for the evening. the first is the fact that windsor also has a dom. not just a dom, but a punk/metal dom. two examples are not enough to build a general theory, but i do wonder how many other cities have punk/metal doms. of course, i had to compare...
it's a little more up kept, but not by much. pool tables. the difference is really that the stage of this dom is downstairs, which gives it a basement show feel more than a bar show feel.
there's even a staircase you don't want to walk down at all, let alone after a few drinks - except it's worse, because it's outside and iced over.
it was freezing in there, and that's theme number two. it seems to have literally been not heated. i wasn't dressed for it.
see, this is where my subconscious dom expectation was no doubt a serious impediment. -10 is manageable in a sweater, if it means walking to the bus stop and back in between hours of warmth. in my mind, i thought "well, the heat is always on in the dom - when i get there i'll put the sweater around my waist". not this dom.
it's not a fashion thing. i'm there to hear the music, i don't care about that nonsense. it's just that carrying around a jacket at a concert is annoying. it makes holding a beer difficult, and it makes taking part in any audience participation impossible. i'd rather go in a sweater if i can.
-10 is admittedly the extreme point. -15 is not sweaterable.
unfortunately, the issue compounded itself. i could have easily handled a ten minute wait for the bus if i'd been inside for two hours, but i was actually getting seriously worried for a minute because i'd been shivering for several hours.
obviously, i'm ok, i'm not naked in a snow bank complaining about the heat (more like wrapped up in a blanket and still shivering a bit) but it was kind of scary.
anyways...
narcolepsy. two drinks over three hours will not render one drunk, but it'd been a while since i'd slept and the eyelids tend to overpower. i've stopped fighting them, under the agreement that they don't enforce an arbitrary 24 hour schedule on me.
one more thing before i finish this: the historic strength of punk rock (as a type of music, rather than an attitude) is that it gets your adrenaline moving. that's how you know you're doing it right. it's the characteristic that defines punk as a type of sound. it's the reason people throw themselves around everywhere. it's the reason green day and mcr and ... aren't punk. adrenaline. on the other hand, metal seems to focus more on testosterone. that's the chemical reaction they're really going for (and, yes, women can feel testosterone). there's overlaps and levels of mixtures and points where people get confused and other things. but a punk experience need not include any testosterone at all, so long as the adrenaline is high - and there has always and always will be (for as long as punk exists) a subset of the audience that is interested 100% solely in adrenaline, which happens to be the subset of the audience i'm in. i'm not interested in punk with testosterone, or exploring testosterone in music in general.
ok, that's enough rambling.
keep getting distracted, lol. ok.
so, the first full set i caught was this band called minors and it was better than i expected. it's local. the core of the sound was pretty generic, but they mixed it up with some ambient, droney type stuff - as is the fashion as of right now, i suppose - and also with some spastic punkish stuff. it's nothing particularly novel, but it's a little bit more eccentric than the average basement punk band.
white ribs is the band i went to see. the record is a pretty creative mix of lightning bolt with hipster hardcore and no wave. that sounds off the wall, but i'm playing it up a bit. they're clearly trying to look like lightning bolt, down to the masks, but they can't play like lightning bolt - and seem more interested in being weird.
the show was a little flat. it lacked the valleys of the record, and the audience didn't get it. small town. *shrug*.
the record they have up on bandcamp is interesting though, and i'd check it out if you like weird experimental loud shit.
bird death was spastic and incoherent, but it's the point. it's fun in small bursts, but i wouldn't go out of my way for it.
unfortunately, the bassist broke a string and the singer made an ass of himself while he was fixing it, but i was kind of more paying attention to the lumberjack that had been bugging me all night and was now going on about where to get meth. self-preservation was more important than paying attention to the singer being a douche.
anyways, there's nothing special here, but it does what it does competently.
i'm doing some research on this right now, and it's largely the conclusion i'm coming to. the reality is that charlemagne attacked them first. maybe they went a little overboard in their response, but it's not like the church had a good track record by the year 800.
if you look at the larger context, it wasn't just the vikings. even around the year 800, the areas north of the rhine and the danube were still mostly wilderness, inhabited by wandering tribes of various ethnicities. berlin wasn't founded until 1237, probably by poles, who migrated as far west as denmark. charlemagne fought remnants of iranian tribes living near belgium. the whole wide swath of territory from the atlantic to the caspian was just forests, small farms and huts.
...and they all worked together to fight the empire. it's tempting to almost build the context up of a world war, a clash of civilizations. i mean, that context is there. you don't have to look hard to find it. but it's usually presented in a colonialist narrative about how the christians came in and civilized the backwards barbarians.
but there's enough evidence to piece together a counter-narrative about a collection of intertwined peoples who were struggling to maintain their way of life.
i've never understood some of the viking tactics. i mean, it's one thing to pillage and plunder. it's another thing to burn down entire cities. the vikings specifically targeted churches and mosques. that's not plunder. that's war.
as an "advanced civilization", northern europe (including germany) is not much older than the united states is.
seems a little romantic, but the norse did in fact practice direct democracy. it would have looked sort of like the "loya jirga" you hear about in afghanistan, where the whole tribe gets together and tries to reach consensus. even in the norman invasions of italy, around the year 1100, they were still electing leaders rather than passing power through paternal links. it took papal hard power to put an end to it, and a dozen histories by monks to erase it.
born:
died:
ascendency: vikings
plausible descendency: d'hauteville family[1]
plausible descendency: de crepon family
hiallt is a legendary warrior that was said to be a friend of rollo. his existence is highly dubious, but the fact that the pope annulled robert guiscard's first marriage provides strong evidence for a close genealogical relationship between the d'hauteville and de crepon families. that's all there is to this link.
i've added the malaterra reference to rollo as a norwegian because it is interesting, but i'm a little unclear as to why it's been ignored. malaterra's history is wonky, no doubt. however, he was writing from italy at roughly the same time as the norman invasion of england, which makes him a relatively early source. he would have lacked any of the political motivations that dudo or jumierges may have had to connect the norman dukes to denmark. dudo is certainly known to have fabricated a few things here and there. further, 'dane' is an ambiguous term, in context. with malaterra, there's no reason to think he would have been expressing anything other than the understood knowledge of the time. as far as i can see, he's the best source we've got.
certainly, the malaterra reference is older than the sagas (as they exist in written form).
what i'm a little iffy about is if the translation is accurate. i suppose it could have merely been overlooked, it is after all an italo-norman history rather than a franco-norman history. but i'd have to collectively slap all historians of the period for missing this, if that's the case. so, could we get an expert check the translation? if the translation is accurate, i think this answers the question.
it doesn't, however, corroborate the sagas. not exactly, anyways. it simply fixes rollo's background as norwegian. i'll let the experts take it from there and get back to me on it.
actually, i checked the latin and it says "sea norvegia". that was translated as norwegian in the translation i've provided, but it seems to reference the orkneys and rolf ganger. can we get an expert here? is malaterra providing a latin corroboration of the saga narrative from far away italy c. 1099?
me
i've searched long and hard and cannot find anybody else that has seen any relevance in the fact that ptolemy places a tribe called the marvingi at the confluence of the rhine and the main. could this have anything to do with merovingian (and therefore frankish) ancestry? one may note that the fact that the franks did not retain germanic legends of descent from odin is unusual if they were indeed a german confederation, and further note that the dominant religious practices in clovis' time were gallo-celtic (arduina) in nature. then again, i suppose a gallic continuity hypothesis is just too simplistic, isn't it?
Til Eulenspiegel
It's not whether or not it's simplistic - it's whether or not this is in any WP:RS. If it is, no problem citing it. If it's not, please see WP:OR.
me
well, ptolemy was an ancient roman geographer writing from egypt. you need to be careful with him. what i'm doing here is throwing out a request for somebody in the field to address the issue, because i've never seen it addressed. i can't just jump from "ptolemy identified marvingi near the rhine" to "the marvingi ptolemy identified were the frankish merovingians", especially considering that the accepted scholarly opinion is that they were riparian (atlantic) franks. it's just that there are a lot of holes in the idea, and a lot of myths surrounding their origin. it's an idea, not an assertion.
Srnec
I made an edit to Merovingian dynasty with a source. Some other stuff comes up at Google Books, but I don't have access to those books.
me
thank you.
and just to follow up on this: gregory of tours (who is usually considered the better source, apparently) claims the franks originated in pannonia rather than belgium. this is generally discarded as "nonsense" because it doesn't fit other evidence, but perhaps that dismissal is a little too hasty and ought not to be total. there's a source here: http://books.google.ca/books?id=yhaSRVnI1Y4C&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=franks+from+pannonia&source=bl&ots=hBrvPEEJcY&sig=_iUp9GQb-EDmH6Mh-dmrXOUO1WY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=q_brUrmaKuS22gXU9oGQAw&ved=0CG8Q6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=franks%20from%20pannonia&f=false (sorry for the ridiculous link) that briefly deconstructs the myth as incorporating tribes that moved from the east into the frankish confederacy. it doesn't mention the marvingi explicitly, but it's consistent with the idea that a large of amount of the frankish ethnogenesis was composed of tribes that do not have an extended history in the low countries. it's still not direct evidence, but it's building up towards a hypothesis.
i'm going to leave this alone, now, in hopes that somebody picks it up as a research topic and reports back here about it.
...except to point out that there's a historical movement of alans from pannonia to france that fits the entire narrative and could have merged with a few german tribes along the way. it's discussed in a relatively recent book, Deutschlands unbekannte Jahrhunderte, Geheimnisse aus dem Frühmittelalter by Richard Schmoekel (i can't read german).
the seine vikings were considered to be "danes", but how literally true that is is up to some interpretation. the initial attacks on charlemagne's empire may have been in retaliation for trying to conquer the world, or it may have been due to climate, or it could be a combination of the two. however, it seems that the group of vikings that actually settled in the seine came to the region some years later via the "great heathen army" that annoyed england for much of the ninth century, and was eventually defeated by alfred of wessex. that would make this a mixed group of people, although the commanders were said to be ynglingas in descent from ragnar lodbrok. the conventional history is to think of them primarily as danes.
rollo may, however, have been a vestfoldian viking. this is lost to history. tancred was said to be an ally of rollo.
descendancy: rollo
descendancy: tancred
[1]: anglo-saxon chronicles, 880-920
[1]:
i know it's not as glamorous as descending from sea monsters, trojans or jesus, but ptolemy is very clear that there was a tribe of south (west) germans called the marvingi that lived near the confluence of the rhine and the main, pretty much perfectly positioning them to jump the river with the rest of the franks. remember that frank is an inexact ethnic term that translates to "free" (meaning not roman) and refers to a coalition of german, celtic, slavic, iranian and other peoples rather than a specific german tribe. ptolemy may have mistaken germans for celts - he wouldn't be the first southern geographer to do so. further, the connection is vague; as i'm presenting it to you right now, it's not in any better shape than the cimmerian suggestion (cimmerian looks like cimbri looks like sicambri). so, i'm not suggesting that ptolemy's map proves that the merovingians were of the marvingi tribe. yet, the geographic and chronological positioning - combined with the very down to earth nature of the idea - is quite enticing. it's something i'd like to present is an idea that requires further research. specifically: can we trace the merovingians to the confluence of the main and the rhine? because, if we can, ptolemy has a very simple and rational answer for us.
this is a little messy. it's generally acknowledged that vikings were mostly danes and norwegians. however, if the idea that they were aristocratic jarls is to be upheld then the sagas descend both danish and norwegian aristocrats from a swedish ruling class. for now, i place this here for convenience - i will eventually distribute the constituent pieces in more precise locations
descendancy: seine [dane] vikings
descendency: loire [westfold] vikings
appearance: c. 0
dispersal: possibly still alive?
ascendancy: swedes[3]
the ynglingas seem to have come from the area around the netherlands, before establishing themselves in the area around uppsala. from there, they conquered denmark and colonized norway. they also extended their sphere of influence deep into russia. the lines that flow from here are either mythical or convenient for the moment, but will eventually be explored more rigorously.
descendancy: dyggvi [2]
possible descendancy: radbardians
possible descendancy: vikings
[1]: the role of migration in the history of the eurasian steppe, andrew bell-fialkoff, 2000
[2]: heimskringla, snorri sturlson, c. 1200
appearance: c. 0
ascendancy: north germans[3]
i link the swedish aristocracy to the south primarily due to the fact that the new ruling line began with one "yngve" and the western germans were at this time known by the name "yngvaeones". if read correctly, the sagas seems to imply exactly what i'm proposing: usurpation by a new ruling elite. it all adds up to an invasion after -100 or so and from the south.
descendancy: ynglingas [2]
[1]: the role of migration in the history of the eurasian steppe, andrew bell-fialkoff, 2000
[2]: heimskringla, snorri sturlson, c. 1200
[3]: jason parent, 2004
[4]: the germanic invasions, lucien musset, 1965
appearance: c. -
dispersal: c. -
ascendancy: north germans[1]
the chauki were originally described as more closely related to the teutones and cimbri, but this is not helpful because we don't really know a lot about who the teutones or cimbri were. they were probably germans with a heavy celtic influence, and this would speak to a northern distribution and not a southern one.....
so, the chauki/saxon affiliation seems doubtful. the saxons would have invaded from the south, stayed in the north, and then gone back to the south.
[1]: the role of migration in the history of the eurasian steppe, andrew bell-fialkoff, 2000
[2]: the germanic invasions, lucien musset, 1965
