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Friday, February 7, 2014

i think the letter is too optimistic, actually. whatever their own plight, they're being used as tools to rile up militaristic hate against russia. when they no longer serve that use, or start asking questions that challenge that narrative, the media will blacklist them as radicals.

i hope they at least got paid.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26067971

ok, but the solution is necessarily structural. there aren't any good pesticides, and we can't grow the amount of food we need without them.

i suppose stricter regulations might help act as an incentive to build more indoor growing sites. but, i'd rather be pro-active. and in fairness this government actually has been pro-active about encouraging indoor growing.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/02/05/ottawa_agrees_to_review_23_pesticides_after_pressure_from_environmental_group.html

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21593408-publishing-giant-goes-after-authors-its-journals-papers-no-peeking?fsrc=scn%2Ftw_ec%2Fno_peeking
http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2014/01/13/worst-sugar/
http://nyti.ms/1cfRYWi
http://plos.io/OAwin
http://plos.io/1hnvgQN
http://plos.io/1filk9U
http://plos.io/1eAqImU
http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2014/02/03/opening-up-data-access-not-just-articles/
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/01/01/the-most-fascinating-human-evolution-discoveries-of-2013/?WT.mc_id=SA_facebook

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-new-method-to-measure-consciousness-discovered&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2014/01/earth-more-sensitive-increasing-greenhouse-gas-thought
http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2014/01/video-spiders-spin-electric-web

you can't run a case on a hypothetical, unless it's about a right. there's no legal action to prevent a hypothetical tort that's never been attempted (and probably never will be).

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=monsanto-critics-denied-us-supreme&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

i dunno about the gould idea, conceptually, but it's nice to see some research moving away from ideas of orthogenesis. rather than create a new abstraction and babble on about it, i'd rather interpret the results as evidence for the role of chance in the process.

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/sciam/math/~3/tW6msj4GHQ0/

is this an onion article?

because an abstract idea cannot be quantified, it is therefore flawed? lol.

hey, more empiricism is always better than less empiricism. if you want to understand specific things, studying them through observation is always a better idea than applying abstract ideas. yet, then you want to argue that evolution should be described mathematically? ha! it seems to me that it's the dudes in the article that seem deductively challenged.

but studies are always better than no studies.

my guess is they'll find that the reality is too complicated to model using anything other than game theory.

http://phys.org/news308815368.html

this discourse means absolutely nothing to me.

how about this: it doesn't matter if it's genetic or not (it obviously isn't in most cases) because i ought to have the right to choose which gender i want to be, and people that don't like that can fuck off.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-trans/

i've always found it odd that skeptics cite this to discredit climate science, rather than cite it to discredit newsweek.

....because we should all believe everything we read in newsweek, right?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

i find this is a much trickier problem than it's usually presented as. i do agree with the need to do something to pressure israel to stop the genocide, but i'm not sure a boycott will work, and i'm not convinced the accusations of anti-semitism are without merit.

that's not to conflate criticism of israel with anti-semitism. they're clearly two different things. but there's also clearly a line where criticism is masking something deeper, and i think it's pretty widespread amongst those who argue otherwise.

i mean, there are certain things a bds campaign could do that would be blatantly racist. they could start putting yellow stars over the office of jewish academics, or force visiting israeli academics to wear yellow stars so everybody knows to boycott them. i'm not saying that anybody is suggesting this, but it would be pretty racist.

what i *am* saying is that it's not hard to hear those attitudes thinly veiled behind more politically correct positions and that it's hard not to conclude that it's a factor in many - not all - of the people calling for boycott. this is actually particularly vile, because it co-opts a legitimate human rights problem.

i'm not saying this because i've been brainwashed by zionism or because i hate bds activists or any other diabolical reason. i'm saying this because i can hear the racist contempt in the tone of voice, and i don't like it.

i don't know what the answer is, but i know the bds movement tends to pull out individuals that i could not consider to be allies.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11432

Thursday, February 6, 2014

ugh.

we require only a miniscule fraction of the population to carry out the useful work that is required to make society function. of the population at large, there are more volunteers than there are useful positions. the jobs that people do not volunteer to do are mostly not useful - which is why people don't want to do them. for the few exceptions, we could rotate the labour around to the point where we're working a few hours a *year*. keynes suggested a few hours a week, but the technology is way beyond that point, now. i see no reason to think this reality of volunteers existing to do meaningful and necessary work because they want to will ever change.

what that leaves is millions of people that really have no social value beyond that which we contrive for them. what's the difference, in terms of social value, between working as a server or in a supermarket and living on disability? there isn't one. neither produces anything of any kind of value. while there's no doubt that a retail worker fits the definition of "nothing to sell but labour", they don't belong to the productive class. in terms of actual contribution in terms of producing something valuable, the reality is that they're just as "parasitic" as welfare recipients. a really disturbingly high amount of our workforce exists as an appropriating "middle man" between producers and consumers. the cashier at the grocery store is stealing profit from the farmer that made the food, while the sales person at the clothing store is stealing profit from the workers that made the clothes. so, proletariat by definition, but not proletariat in substance. a union of service workers is a bourgeois union.

when you look at the actual producing class, most of it isn't even on this continent. technological shifts may be in the process of relocalizing production, but it will not create new jobs (unless you count robots as people).

so, there is no longer a concern of the productive v. the unproductive. almost none of us are actually productive. what we need to do is find a way to distribute goods fairly amongst the unproductive, and that's not going to be possible until people come to terms, "en masse", of the uselessness of their daily existence. that is, we will not revolt until we understand how unproductive we really are, and how that makes us all equally entitled to the benefits of technology.

johnny cochran has reappeared to sue nasa for not taking it's own mission seriously.

i think the petitioner kind of has a point.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/01/unconvinced-that-jelly-donut-sized-mars-rock-was-just-a-rock-man-sues-nasa/

this is precisely wrong. randomness is a model that exists in your head to approximate reality, not a description of reality itself. you cannot "harness the power of probability". that's like saying you can channel the forces of the unknown.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/january-2014/physicists-harness-the-power-of-probability

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

"Spontaneous eruption of a canine after marsupialization of..."

that really made me burst out laughing. what? dogs randomly exploding after they've been converted into marsupials? how is that possible? what is this about?

it's a rather boring article about root canals. canine teeth. marsupialization means something to dentists that it doesn't mean to people interested in australian biodiversity.

"first, you turn the dog into a wombat. then, you'd better start running, mate."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20451790

i know it's probably not funny to you humans, but you have such bad senses of humour. on the one hand, you're fun to troll - i'll give you that. but, i wouldn't be surprised if i could get through an entire season of friends without even smiling, let alone laughing. YOUR LAUGH TRACKS ARE NO MATCH FOR MY SELF CONTROL.

no, honestly. it's mutual. really.

ignoring the mild misrepresentation of the data to make the article more dramatic (warming has not stopped, it's just become linear rather than exponential), variation between 98-02 could be masking the effect of the increase in warfare since 2002. again, i need to ask why nobody has considered that all the bombs dropped in iraq and afghanistan might affect the climate? i mean, we're talking about a lot of very powerful bombs, here. if the second world war is considered to be a cause of the cooling trend after 1940, it's unreasonable to not consider the recent bunch of wars in a similar way. it's certainly at least as valid as chinese pollution. somebody will eventually realize this....

....but, the idea that the ocean is eating the missing heat is not new. it's the dominant narrative, actually. the idea that the sun has had an effect on the general trend is usually not taken seriously (and shouldn't be, despite the sun's possible influence on the recent polar weather).

http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525

these pay-per-access journals have a limited future. their function was to select the best papers and explain them to the general public. their model has switched to free explanations and paid access to the papers. but, that positions them in a parasitic relationship. what do the scientists gain from this? if they were to revert back to their initial purpose, they'd be pushed out of the market by bloggers. that's what's going to happen.

so, basically, the world has changed and these science magazines don't really have a place in it. they need to go back to their mission statements and ask themselves how they can change their business model to continue to maintain a position of relevance.

http://www.nature.com/news/particle-physics-papers-set-free-1.14473

unless i'm missing something, the "mystery population" can easily be identified with refugees of the ice sheets, who lived in small pockets of melting in the northern hemisphere, hunted mammoths and generally make up the bulk of the cave man stereotype. the population would be ancestral to the kurgan groups that spread the indo-european population around the steppes. existing literature refers to these people as "nordic" and considers the basques, picts and others amongst their possible descendents.

http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-european-genomes-reveal-jumbled-ancestry-1.14456

i mean, i get that they're denying a strict separation, but nobody ever really claimed that separation existed in the first place. and the idea is well-established.

lol. i think maybe nature is avoiding the topic in the fear that ignorant people might label them racists.

the northern nordics were ancestral to the indo-europeans, but were not them. the southern hunter gatherers would have been displaced by the nordics that came in after the ice sheets melted. they themselves would have mostly been displaced by middle eastern farmers. the indo-europeans came after that. aryanism is something different altogether and certainly didn't make it's way into anthropology books written in the 90s. but people have a hard time keeping up...

anyways, unless i'm missing something, the mystery population is easy to identify.

as for eye colour, i've long argued that it's spread is probably not due to natural selection. you'll hear people say things about the angle the sun hits europe. that's weak, to say the least. and is an ability to adjust to sunlight going to overpower other traits? it's such a triviality, that i couldn't see it overpowering anything at all. how can people argue with a straight face that it increases survival?

i've seen a few arguments that suggest that the genes that determine eye colour are also genes that provide heightened immunity, and the eye colour followed as a coincidence of the immunity. i think it was for malaria, actually. that makes more sense to me, and correlates with the above ideas better. but i think this is controversial.

if you look at the spread of the mutation from somewhere in north-central europe, it just strikes me as entirely random. it looks like an ink blot that spread around by chance for no real reason whatsoever.

it's just genetic drift, in other words. but it's a type of variation that doesn't seem to have any kind of actual advantage. meaning, it's just the result of a genetic process that fucked up (genetic processes fucking up being the source of mutations and therefore evolution). there's not a reason it fucked up. there's no benefit to it fucking up. it just fucked up.

skin colour and skull size seem to be more complicated than that, but they're highly plastic. again, the correlation between sunlight and skin colour isn't nearly as strong as some may suggest. and, you really want to tell an african that they're less likely to survive in sweden? i'm not sure i could honestly apply that to an australopithecine. it seems entirely trivial.

so, genetic drift? i think it's a little more complicated if you go backwards a few millennia. in today's world, it's probably all there is to it. the sahara and the himalayas aren't the boundaries they once were. we could talk about systemic racism, but that's not readily biological (maybe the psychology has a biological explanation, but it's not at the level of selection) and it's only of questionable relevance at a reproductive level (consider jefferson for an obvious example). so, the only thing acting on skin colour today is drift, and that will be the foreseeable future unless something catastrophic happens.

there's a line of thinking that the soviet union collapsed mostly because people didn't trust the government. that trust became a social problem, so there was glasnost, and it failed and blah blah blah. would it be possible to emulate that in the united states?

well, first: is it the real reason the soviet union collapsed? no.

but, is the phenomenon easily emulated, regardless? i don't think americans have the same kind of intellectual or emotional investment in government. americans don't feel betrayed by a broken utopia, so much as they've resigned themselves to the inevitability of the state. the culture is just too different.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f93_1390833151

a lack of faith in the soviet union was admittedly a serious crisis for the state, due to it's central place in society.

a lack of faith in washington is just called monday morning.

that's not to say that undermining faith in certain systems wouldn't lead to social mayhem. if you could seriously convince the bulk of the population to divest from the markets, there'd be chaos.

but there's as much or more discordant language about government in any random speech by any random establishment republican candidate.

so, i'm calling this as a bad russian tactic that demonstrates a poor understanding of american society.

i like to see studies like this that explain evolved traits in terms of how we're imperfectly assembled. fighting against the creationists and intelligent design people is really as easy as pointing to the countless examples of where evolution produced results that seem like horrific mistakes - and would be if "mistake" made any sense in the context of a random, unguided process with no end.

....but biologists have the same problem as the rest of the teleologists. they want everything to have a causal relationship, as though selection is as perfect as a deity would be.

there isn't a brilliant reason. evolution just done fucked up on this one.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sexual-cannibal-spiders-may-have-poor-impulse-control

see, this is how christianity ruins societies. instead of presenting this as an obvious empirical reality that is debatable to nobody, they have to tip-toe around it by bringing in ancient (and 80% preposterous) philosophy as well as suggestions from foreign cultures.

of course your dog has a consciousness. nobody needs an argument to demonstrate that. universal? well, define that. there's a level of complexity required, and it's a pretty fuzzy idea. if we're going back to debating whether a rock has a soul or not, i'm leaving the room...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-consciousness-universal&

we think of aging as though it's an irreversible process that's tied to time, as a flow. we age because the clock ticks.

but stating it that bluntly at least presents a causal problem. what does time really have to do with aging? do we just exhaust? is that coherent?

well, it is if you consider something like a suicide cell, but that reduces it to a chemical rather than a temporal process. aging is actually being increasingly understood as a chemical process, conceivably making it treatable with drugs.

i know. that's crazy. except it isn't. what's really crazy is attaching the aging process to the tick of the clock without any kind of intermediary. that's what actually doesn't make any sense. aging as a reversible, chemical process is, in reality, the *only* thing that makes any sense.

that doesn't mean that anti-aging drugs aren't an incredibly complex proposal.

this is a neat read.

http://www.ff.ul.pt/FCT/EXPL/NEU-BEN/0241/2013/19.pdf

keep in mind this has to do with pheromones. i'm actually surprised by how simple the difference is.

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(13)01476-1

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

yeah. honestly. listen...

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.)

http://www.brit.co/3d-photoshop/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-morningside-post/leave-3d-printing-alone_b_4666660.html
http://www.3dprinterworld.com/article/renishaw-and-empire-cycles-build-3d-printed-bicycle-frame
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/new-laser-printed-material-is-lighter-than-water-as-strong-as-steel/
http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5912/enormous-aquifer-found-under-greenland-ice-sheet
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/5923/mapping-amino-acids-to-understand-lifes-origins
http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5933/neowise-spots-its-first-asteroid
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/5943/rosetta-spacecraft-waking-up-for-final-leg-of-comet-landing
http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5966/cracked-sea-ice-stirs-up-arctic-mercury-concern
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/5974/cooking-up-lifes-origin-the-safer-way

so, it turns out the earth probably shouldn't be modelled as a closed system. how about the universe?
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/5986/space-dust-carries-water-and-organic-carbon

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?

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5968/predatory-organisms-at-depth

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...

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5939/public-views-on-climate-engineering

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.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11421

geoffrey malaterra - the deeds of count roger of calabria & sicily & of duke robert guiscard his brother

caveat bullshit

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.

full text:
http://www.medievalsicily.com/Docs/03_Norman_Conquest/Malaterra%20all%20text%20revised.pdf

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/books/congress/DG/867.24.M3513/index.html

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.

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/gen/lines/hauteville/tancred.html

Monday, February 3, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

immediate impression of new cloud nothings single

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(deleted post)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solace Creat
Well. This took a turn.

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

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

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

Olm8Cuz
touche my friend, touche.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

deathtokoalas
their despicable cuteness necessitates their imminent destruction.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Kardinal ZG
Senile Chomsky being a sanctimonious prick again....

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/02/noam-chomsky-super-bowl-reduces-joe-six-packs-capacity-to-think/

Gordon Lutze-Wallace
I actually agree with this.

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".

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/robert-fisk-if-only-tony-blair-could-grasp-the-truth-about-field-marshal-sisi-9097378.html

Friday, January 31, 2014

drogo

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.

it is said that drogo appointed both humphrey and robert guiscard as counts.

[1]: the deeds of count roger of calabria & sicily & of duke robert guiscard his brother , book I

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/gen/lines/hauteville/drogoIapulia.html