Saturday, August 29, 2020

i see that kind of thing and my only reaction is that red lights start flashing, and sirens start swirling, and giant words flash in front of me:

DANGER

DANGER

BOOK BURNING. RELIGION. DANGER.

DESTROY.
they've taken away their own voice.
we need to talk about inequality, and the correlation between race and poverty. clearly.

but, not in the context of the destruction of art - it's a non-starter, and i won't engage with people that behave like that.
we've been through this before, and it is the single most serious threat to civilization: religion.

when people gather and start arguing for book burnings, or any other destruction of history or art, they need to be mowed down with drones and bulldozed into the lake.
"but i don't want to save the art. i want to erase it from history."

then you're a dangerous menace to society and need to be stopped before you bring us back to the dark ages.

i have no solidarity for any group that prioritizes the destruction or defacement of history or art.
there is no excuse for destroying art of any sort - books, statutes, etc - and it makes me infinitely less interested in what they have to say when they engage in it.

they just look like a bunch of ignorant christians.
i may support a democratic discussion to move statutes out of parks and into private collections or museums. i have no particular attachment to a statue of john a in a park.

but, the destruction of art has no place in a civilized society or a civilized discourse, and anybody that insists on engaging in the destruction of art de facto removes themselves from the discussion, and renders their voices irrelevant.
they need to stop doing this.

it makes them look like uncivilized savages.

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/statue-of-john-a-macdonald-toppled-during-defund-the-police-protest-1.5084561
this is a baby step from a government that nobody expected to care much about actual people and should be welcomed with cautious optimism. but, the devil is always in the details and we should all wait to see the legislation before we react.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7306116/ontario-rent-freeze-could-mean-more-evictions-critics-say/
ok, i'm not being totally fair; it wasn't just rand, there was grisham, clancy and koontz, as well.

i enjoyed the grisham and clancy, but found the koontz a little weak.

i'd rank the best king works higher than all of it, both in enjoyment and technically, which i know is likely to get some push back. but, i actually like king's writing style, and think he was maybe misunderstood by a lot of stuffy people.

i'd expect he'll be revisited by academia in a more positive light, in time.
was stephen king a "horror writer"?

no....

his best works are actually science fiction, clearly, and that's the best way to understand him. he also dabbled in various types of drama, which allowed him to write substantive social commentary into his works, and his books are deeply psychological in the sense of getting into the heads of everything from rabid dogs to people with paranormal psychic abilities, but he's a science fiction writer, first and foremost and that is how history should remember him, as one of the most important authors of the 20th century.

the horror side of things mostly comes out of unfaithful film adaptations, much of it just plain out silly. and, if you're trying to understand king via the shining, you're really missing out. a lot.

a common theme in his writing is the idea of self-control, and i think that's what i remember pulling from him, as a child, more than anything else: good dogs that don't want to be bad and scold themselves for it, kids that can't stop themselves from lighting things on fire, adults that can't stop themselves from altering the future, etc. there's good lessons for kids, there, whether it's intentional or not, about grappling with concepts of actus reus and mens rea. 

i was maybe on the young end of things, but these are actually good books to give young teens to read, despite the reputation otherwise.
i actually did not know that shawshank was the top rated film at the imdb, or that it has been there for a long time. i'm just learning that now.

i used to watch a lot of films with my father & stepmother, and the way this would work would be that we'd pick up two films at the blockbuster - one 'normal' film for the two of them to watch, and that i'd usually skip, and one 'weird' film that i usually ended up watching by myself, after my dad gave up halfway through.

i picked out shawshank 'cause i'd already read it, and the stephen king billing was enough to keep the stepmother interested enough to sit down and try and watch it (she would normally prefer the kind of films that do better at the box office). i'm not sure i have a second example of something that they both managed to get through.

in fact, it was probably my father's favourite film, post-1990, at least. certainly, i can't think of any other film he would reference regularly, excluding things like stallone flicks.

the fact that the three of us could agree on it at the time says a lot, as we really couldn't agree on much of anything. but, it was more than that: if you had polled us at that time, in 1994 or 1995, we would have all ranked this as one of the greatest films ever made.

i'm glad to see it get the recognition that it should have gotten in the first place.

'cause, sometimes things are obvious, even if the world can't see it.
archive.org saves the day, again:

https://ia800700.us.archive.org/25/items/Popcornarchive-theShawshankRedemption1994_qkw5d/Popcornarchive-theShawshankRedemption1994_qkw5d.mp4
and, i'd recommend the text highly too, as you can see.
actually...

shawshank is exceedingly topical right now, with all of the talk of prison reform and racial conflict.

you don't get much more classic than this film. really. if you haven't had the chance, due to age or oversight, spend the time with it, in whatever way it is that people watch movies, nowadays.
i remember watching shawshank with my family, years later, and none of them realizing it was a king film.

and, i'll never forget the dropped jaws when i uttered those lines:

it's not as good as the book
there was a collection called the bachman books that i would have liked to hang on to, and had the running man & shawshank redemption in it. i also wish i had hung on to firestarter, the dead zone and cujo.
the weirdest thing is that i doubt she even read most of them.
my sister became very bizarrely propertarian over the books, for years afterwards. it is true that i gave them to her, if under duress, but nobody else accepted the validity of the gift. my mother vehemently insisted that she would hang on to them until i moved out and got my own place (i was 14.), but it didn't work out that way.

i do believe that taliban jackie discarded the bulk of them, in the end, when the sister tried to bring them into the house, which was foolish on her behalf.

and, i learned many years ago that arguing over ownership of the books was not helpful - and really should have taken it as a red flag of my sister's character, all of those years ago.

if you ask her today, she'll still insist they belonged to her, for no reason that anybody else can discern.
i didn't meet taliban jackie until i'd been walking for years, thankfully.

but, i basically grew up railing against this.

these were books that i bought when i was like twelve or something at the drug store with money earned via allowance, and still have, remarkably.
when i moved from my mom's to my dad's, i ended up "giving" my king collection to my sister (who stayed there) because my stepmother complained that the books smelled like smoke. then, she bought me a pile of books by ayn rand to replace them. yup, taliban jackie.

i never made it through atlas shrugged, because it was so fucking dry; it wasn't until years later that i even realized what i was even reading, or what she had tried to do.

i kept a couple squirreled away, though and still have them: the tommyknockers, it & the stand. in fact, they're sitting on my dresser, right now.
i was like 16 or 17 or 18 or something (i don't remember) when harry potter became a thing, which is the age you avoid things like that.

if i was an immature 15 year old, i could have maybe gotten into it, and if i had kids in my 20s, i could have found myself reading it to them. but, 16-18 is the age where you tend to avoid "children's books" pretty viciously.

i was also the kid that looked towards the older people in the room and really didn't like the younger people. so, i was the last gen xer, even then; i was interested in underground 80s rock music, and trying to build friendships with people in their 20s, rather than trying to connect with people my own age. even at the age of 20, about the year 2000, i realized i was dealing with a generation gap, or on the cusp of something, with people that were almost the same age as me. i'd go work on projects with kids in my class, and realize i related better to their parents than i did to them.

but, i had a handful of friends that were outcasts and rejects, and they tended to prefer the company of people younger than them. so, i remember hearing people talk about it. i never interpreted it as anything more than a children's story, and never developed an interest in it. i'm not exaggerating - i never even cracked one of them open.

even as a kid, i went for the classics. i wanted something more profound, and had no interest in literature for young people that just struck me as a waste of time. so, i was reading like joyce and asimov and stuff, rather than rl kline or whatever else the kids in my class were into.

the closest thing to a contemporary popular novelist that i ever got into was stephen king (by 1995-1996, i had read pretty much everything he'd written up to that point) and i was well aware that nobody my age was reading him.

so, i vaguely even know who she is, and i haven't the remotest interest in her opinion, at all.
the first time i remember reading about the gaia hypothesis was in asimov. foundation's edge. i was very much just a kid, but it got into my head, and i've wondered about it a lot since. nowadays, i wonder more if the real life force is the sun, rather than the earth. the ancients seem to have made a lot of sense to me, more so than the modern religions ever have. and, if the sun dims enough to save us from our own stupidity....

but, i want to react to the idea that geo-engineering is just an excuse, because we may be nearing the point where it doesn't matter anymore.

it's similar to the argument i have with myself about isis, because i bloody well know where they're getting their guns from. so, how can i sit here and argue that we have to stop this using western military might when i know that they're getting the weapons from us, and in fact doing our dirty work? and the reason is that the other option, a new fundamentalist caliphate in the middle east, is just a non-starter. the amount of suffering that would cause is too great to even contemplate. so, you find yourself supporting this struggle that you know is unnecessary, because you just don't have another choice. the intent may have been to terrorize the iraqis into specific concessions, and that may have been horrible, but now they've got us by the crotch and we just have to give in. it's the old story of blowback, and the deficit of good options to deal with it once it sinks in.

so, he's right: geo-engineering should be a non-starter.

but, we might not have a choice, and it might already be too late to avoid it.

https://theanalysis.news/interviews/regenerative-agriculture-and-massive-planting-of-trees-is-our-only-hope-earl-katz/
again: there's no science underlying the idea of closing the border. testing in canada has been lower than virtually anywhere else in the developed world, and the official case loads reflect it, and it appears to have been intentionally done to manipulate the data, but the mortality rate is not substantively lower, when adjusted to population levels. we're not doing much better, at all. if it's a little better, it probably has more to do with the fact that we have unfettered access to care, at least in theory.

but, everything's canceled in michigan anyways, and the summer's over, so it's too late to matter, now.

i'm not likely going to want to go to detroit until the spring, anyways.

i'm just hunkering down for a long winter....
this landlord should be thrown in jail, and his assets should be donated to the tenants.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/halifax-fairview-adam-barrett-apartment-landlord-removes-doors-1.5704306
i have never read a word jk rowling has written and i do not care what she thinks.

that is all.