in the end, kramer and newman will make a deal to trick the big oaf into servitude. but, for right now, this is a perfect analogy to explain what's happening in the region.
Tonite
silly witch... Everyone knows that Russia could walk over Ukraine in 24h. if they really wanted to.
deathtokoalas
ukraine by itself, sure. it's not that easy, though. you'll note that ukraine is really just watching the game, as it's being played by external forces.
Kuripo Hirusama
you = the chick from the Shining.
deathtokoalas
you know, i'm not entirely sure what that means.
Rottooth
I think he's saying you look like Shelley Duvall, who starred in the movie, The Shining.
deathtokoalas
i could see it a tad in the shot (which was picked for obvious effect), but overall, not really. i'm an unusually mixed up mutt, so i look startlingly different depending on things like hair colour. i can look very norse with blond hair, very italian with a tan or very finnish if you get my eyes right. on an average day, it's probably closer to kristen stewart. she's actually sort of androgynous looking...
i'm suspecting it has something to do with the shower scene, though, and still not quite sure i get the crux of it.
Kuripo Hirusama
Was she related to Robert Duvall?
sorry to bring up a ghost thread, but i'm a little concerned about the cord that got here. it arrived when it did back in december, and i've been ecstatic about it since. but i've been noticing for the last several weeks that the left side of the cord again comes in and out.
i've swapped the inputs on the phones a few times and am convinced it's the cord, rather than the phones. the red/right in is flawless regardless of which phone it's plugged into, but the black/left one slowly fades over long periods regardless of which phone it's plugged into. often, merely touching it is enough to reset it.
i ultimately think it's a contact issue. that is to say that i think that the metal on the cord is sort of falling out. maybe it's a hundredth of a mm smaller in diameter. and i'd actually be willing to believe it's a production thing if you told me that. it's very obvious that there's not a short in the cord. but it's also obvious that if i keep messing with it one will develop.
i'm just wondering if you have any information that might be of interest. would you be able to verify that there is a small difference in the size of the metal plug going into the phones, over all these decades? is it possible i got a mild defect that's a tad small?
phones:
sennheiser 440-II (ireland)
cord:
069427
Cable steel 3m jack3.5/jack6.3
sennheiser
Hi Jessica,
No problems, please don't apologise!
I am rather surprised that a cable so new could be defective, but it's not unheard of. That's why you've got a 3 month warranty. Before we get into the whole rigomorol surrounding replacement, I'm bound to ask if the cable polarity has always been respected, you'll notice one pin is fatter than the other. If the cable has been forced in backwards, then the problem may not actually be the cable!
Just asking!
Please let me know about that, and we'll proceed from there!
Cheers,
jessica
i've definitely been careful about polarity - letters always on the outside. i'm certain it's not that. and, as mentioned, it does it with both phones on the black side, and only on the black side.
the entire idea of a warranty completely slipped my mind. it's getting to the end of the three months. so, how does that process work?
(pause)
i'm just a little concerned because you were always previously quick to apply.
i have to say that i don't want to send this cord back. it seems like there's something wrong, but it's a minor adjustment and i know now i can replace the cord when i need to.
but if it is under warranty, i kind of feel entitled to it.
again: if i have to send it back, then forget it. it's not worth the trouble.
also, do you have any information about possible manufacturing mismatches?
sennheiser
Hi Jessica,
My apologies for the delay in response! I was out on holidays.
If you'd be so kind, please provide your address (to save time trying to find it in the computer...) and parts will send you out a new one. No need to return the other, just toss it.
i am so remarkably bad with my hands. it makes me laugh to think i wanted to be a brain surgeon when i was a kid, although to be fair to myself what i *meant* was a mad scientist that hooks up brains to computers rather than somebody that goes in and physically carves up the mind.
there's currently crazy glue *everywhere*.
and i feel kinda funny. aha. ahahaha. ahahahahahahahahah...\
i've been suspicious of this for years, ever since i read a report about how the chinese government pays psychological experts to hang out in forums and use jedi mind tricks to brow beat dissenters back into orthodoxy. what i thought was "well, our government is probably doing it, too, then".
they said i was crazy to believe that...we don't live in china. we live in a free country! we have democracy.
*snicker*
the only thing i've ever been involved with is occupy, and it was actually pretty obvious who the cops were. they didn't hang around at the edges. they tried to take active leadership roles, which is a tip-off in a theoretically non-hierarchical group. but what i found was that most of the activists only rejected hierarchy up to a point and allowed for these positions of quasi-authority. that put me in a position where i was arguing with cops.
you don't throw accusations around. you might be wrong, and then that's a problem. rather, you operate with the assumption that your comrades are cops until you can prove otherwise without a doubt. in most cases, that never really happens.
for me, one of the things that meant was ensuring that the right information got into their notes. i've had a file for a long time. it's an expansion of my large high school file. i'm fully cognizant of that. it's purely a question of what i want the file to say, which is "highly eccentric" and "not a violent threat", rather than "thinks she's che guevara".
there were actually times when i spun it around a little: i went out of my way to mine information about people i'm sure were cops. that meant getting a little closer. one on ones.
i'm legitimately not fearful because i know that i'd have to be completely set up and i know i don't necessitate the motive. they tried a few times, though.
here's an example: i pretended to talk an obvious cop out of smashing up a bar by suggesting she smash up the owner's car instead, fully aware that no cop would ever actually do that. she claimed she had an issue with the bar owner. it was heresay; i never looked into it. logically, smashing up the car would be better if the problem is personally with the owner, right? but, the cop couldn't go with that. smashing a window is a minor annoyance. smashing a car is serious property damage. but, more to the point, i was careful to make the precise argument that the cops would go after the business-smashing anarchist for ideological reasons, but wouldn't have time to prosecute the petty crime. so, the smart thing for anarchists to do would be to carry out petty crimes targeted at particular assholes - not political action with a public message. i watched something click in her brain that night: she knew i was right, and she realized the injustice and absurdity of it. no cars were smashed, but the topic did drop, and the focus shifted to trying to alienate me.
at this point, i feel confident that i could peg a cop pretty easily. i think that's a useful skill.
this is the first in a string of pop-oriented belew discs that contain some hidden gems but are largely full of filler and watered down bowie and talking heads tunes. throughout this phase in his career, belew demonstrates that he has something unique to add to the genre but doesn't do so nearly often enough to fill up an entire record.
stringing all the hidden gems together creates something pretty solid, though, so that suggests that a compilation of the best tracks would be worthwhile. when island took his first three records out of print, they actually did create a compilation out of them. the compilation is called desire of the rhino king, which is a combination of titles from those discs. frustratingly, the disc throws away some of the best material and keeps some of the worst. rather than solve the problem, it compounds it. what that means is that there's no way to get the best stuff on this record except to download it.
there's a certain bipolar nature to this that falls flat on it's face. belew seems to want to do raw rock and roll, progressive jazz and dramatic pop all on the same record but never all at the same time. the result is that few of the ideas are fully explored. it comes off sounding overly generic and entirely half-assed.
regarding the raw rock tracks, the introductory beatles cover is as bad as the title track. taking it a step further, fish head sounds like bowie fronting the pixies at their most generic. while that may sound sort of visionary considering the date this was released (1983), the track is actually pretty boring - as one really ought to expect from the description of bowie fronting the pixies at their most generic. the ideal woman features spoken word samples and drum loops in that peculiarly byrne-eno way. this in itself would be much less of an error if the topic wasn't so trivial. paint the road is a simplistic horn jam that shouldn't even have been considered as filler. it sounds like a sound check, really. the rail song is a horrific trivialization of heroes, which was no doubt already approaching the status of a classic at the time. we can ride the trains for just one day? singing f#-a# forever, maybe?
see, it's the unrealized potential that's as annoying as anything else about it. the remaining tracks literally sound like king crimson outtakes, but they comprise the best part of the disc - ironically. the second and third tracks sound like they're good enough to be crimson to me, but i have to suspect that they were pieces that fripp couldn't quite work with. perhaps he didn't like the lyrical subject matter of them. the twelfth is all frippertronics. it's not the most developed example of the technique, but it functions as a realization of it's description. the ninth has more of a george harrison vibe. it really excels in it's layered vocal melodies, which seem to strongly foreshadow bjork.
what the record really needed was just a bit more love. it's easy to speculate that belew had his hands full, but the natural question is "why bother?". why not put it aside and wait until there's enough time to work on it? we think of runaway egos as the scourge of young men, but the truth is that they often follow those young men well into middle age. i can imagine a slightly bruised adrian taking his rejected songs and going home with them. which is fine, a couple of them are actually really good, but he really ought to have polished them up rather than releasing them in a near demo state out of pure spite at his master. that extra care would have probably reintroduced the playful, zappaesque aesthetic that the first disc showcases and this one sorely lacks.
so, the assessment of this is that the completed tracks (2,3,9,12) comprise what could have been a very good ep, or the core of a very strong record. however, it's just hopelessly bogged down with painfully bad, unoriginal and half-assed filler. it's years out of print anyways.
so, he's suggesting the "liberal success story" - redistributive processes create a middle class, which pushes for further reforms. interesting that the activist sounds like the upper class liberal, and the profs sound like the working class marxists. maybe those class associations are more real than may be immediately obvious.
i'll admit that the narrative works well as a synthesis of the competing media stories, but that doesn't suddenly make hegelianism scientific. and i've never really been one to actually buy that liberal narrative.
it's interesting to hear a different perspective, though. all these perspectives have aspcts of truth. but i'm not quite convinced by this one.
the thing i always notice about adrian belew's first record is that i always walk away from it weirded out if i listen to it once, but if it ends up on rotation then it makes more and more sense on each listen. that makes it not just a grower but a record that you need to let grow on you every time you put it on. i think that's less of a commentary on the record's abstraction and more a reflection of it's stylistic explorations, which have a certain affinity with gen y indie rock but are, overall, going to be largely alien to just about anybody that didn't live through the late 70s. at points, the record sounds very dated; ironically, though, it's the song structures that sound dated, rather than the technology, which has largely aged quite well. so, the record packs this sort of initial "disco cringe" that weakens on successive listens, when the songs become more and more familiar. in the end, the disc flows well as a cohesive whole.
my connection to the progressive rock of the 1970s and 1980s is largely through sorting through my father's cd collection, and it's a happy coincidence that he happened to have an interest in guitar players, but this isn't a record that was ever in his collection. rather, it's something i've only ever interacted with through mp3. this is true of all of the early belew material, up to the guitar as orchestra. i recall some offhand remarks that his solo work was largely forgettable, which acted as a strong disincentive for further exploration until as late a date as the mid 00s and only after connecting fairly strongly with sides one and two. rather, he had a cd called "sleepless: the concise king crimson" that acted as my early teenage introduction to both belew and robert fripp. unfortunately, my father was one of the people that made the error (and the economics of the situation were no doubt relevant) of selling his sizable record collection at the dawn of the cd era. it's something he slowly rebuilt, but he deeply regretted that decision for the rest of his life. it seemed to have large consequences on his general interest in music, as limited funds that would have previously been dedicated to buying new music became dedicated to replacing old music. the result was that he basically skipped the 90s, only catching up by sorting through my cd collection. i have to wonder how widespread this phenomenon was. anyways, that means that the greatest hits disc was related to the slow, expensive and time consuming task of replacing lost vinyl. 70s and 80s crimson discs came in periodically (and i think he prioritized them because he noticed that i was reacting particularly well to them), but there was never a solo belew disc amongst them.
i think my dad's analysis of belew's solo work was generally correct, but this first disc very much stands out relative to the other pop discs. at the time, belew was coming fresh out of working with five of the most important musicians of the twentieth century: frank zappa, david bowie, brian eno, robert fripp and david byrne. they all show their influence on the record in different ways. see, this is the record's tragic flaw, though: it pulls ideas from a lot of different places into a highly competent combination but it doesn't really present any ideas of it's own. belew would continue this general formula for many years, with varying results but generally not with as much of an attempt to form a synthesis and certainly not as much of an influence from zappa. it's that latter aspect that both makes the disc more interesting than his other solo material (which largely exists as an anachronistic bridge between bowie's berlin period and the talking heads) and essential in the context of belew's substantial body of work.
if i'm suggesting a record from 1982 as essential then, surely, it must be a classic? as noted, the record has a really dated sound and is more of an interesting collection of existing ideas than any kind of statement of it's own. beyond that, there is a juvenile sense of humour on display that just comes off today as totally lame. if there's a debate around whether zappa was an asshole or a comedian, there's little debate over whether he was offensive; belew is carrying on similar themes, but seems generally interested in humour rather than offense and consequently waters his misogyny down to a sort of clownishness that couldn't legitimately offend much of anybody. the record also contains lengthy tributes to the cat and the rhinoceros, which is just not the topical content of classic records. sorry.
despite it's substantial flaws, it is a well produced and interestingly written record from start to finish that happens to wear it's influences on it's sleeves but still stands up as better than average and is fully worth exploring - especially if you're a fan of more than one of the five aforementioned artists.
independent cd stores. i love what they do for the community, but sometimes i wonder.
i went in to get the new mt. zion disc. i haven't been buying a lot of cds lately, but i try and keep up with those guys. and i've been "saving" a lot of money from not smoking, so i've actually put aside a small amount for a monthly budget. i used to collect those little round discs before real life came around and started demanding i start paying into it. it gave me great enjoyment, so i'd like to get back to doing it. i'm going to be kind of working around my reviews to fill in holes in the collection.
so i thought i'd check to see if there's any belew. they had some of the ones i have and a bunch of the ones i don't really want, as well as one that i have a sort of high-end bootleg of. it was a gift from a friend of my father. my uncle used to do the same thing. so, i have a stack of this stuff - mostly prog-related. i've never really considered them as 'part of the collection'. rather, i've always thought of them more as try-before-you-buy type things, but i'm treating them as though they are for the review site. in actuality, a lot of them are out of print, so those boots are the closest i'm ever going to get. that's the case for this one.
so: $10 for an out of print disc i don't have - collectors jump on that shit. bring it up to the cash...
"geez, this is an old disc."
"yeah."
"i'll mark it down to $6."
"swell."
it's $184, new, on amazon. and i'd be surprised if the disc i got was ever actually played. the insert doesn't look like it's been unraveled before. crisp.
now, that says more about amazon taking advantage of dwindling supply than anything else. it's kind of an asshole price. but, still.
if you collect cds, you have stories like this - and you're glad the indie stores don't do these sorts of rigorous checks. there's not much chance somebody's going to walk into a cd store in windsor and hand over $200 for a decades old out of print adrian belew cd. sure. but, it could conceivably be auctioned for more than $6.
so, i'm happy about this, but i have to wonder....
well, it's a silly question.
it's interesting to see them go
back to the oil princess, though. that screams american interference
looking for a "moderate" figurehead. i wouldn't expect the protestors to
buy that. she's as much of a target of corruption as the president. the
trial was politically motivated, but she's also notoriously corrupt.
don't let them force you to choose either/or. it's all of the above.
so,
the fundamental situation has not changed. there's still a corrupt
government in power. i wouldn't expect the situation on the ground to
change much.
of course, media will initially attempt to suggest otherwise.
the
unfortunate truth is that the only way they're going to put this genie
back in the bottle, russian pawn or western pawn, is through the use of
force. expect that.
see egypt.
i'm pretty much convinced at this point that the reason obama claimed iraq was "stupid" was that he didn't understand the larger strategy. that is to say that he thought it was about "containing terrorism" rather than containing russia. now that he understands the strategy, he seems to actually want to escalate it.
ok, about robots.
sure. two things.
first, this idea that robots should be smart isn't going to get us anywhere. there's no value in building highly intelligent androids. where robots have a function is simply that they are more productive than us. the focus ought to be on building physical ones, not intellectual ones.
second, our understanding of genetics is leaps and bounds ahead of what it was in asimov's time. a lot of the things he was thinking about applying to robots are better applied to genetic engineering, and we may actually see some of these things happen sooner. from a resource perspective, genetic engineering is more sustainable. but genetically engineering superhuman strength is obviously more perilous than hardcoding it into otherwise dumb as shit robotic systems.
i want robots, and i want mutant creatures, but i don't want androids or cyborgs. the former will make our lives easier. the latter will simply give us a set of ethical questions that will no doubt end in emancipation followed by social problems. android welfare. let's just not bother. let's keep robots stupid...
to be entirely clear - let's leave robots for production, and focus on genetic engineering and computer-human brain interfacing to move the species forwards.
so, it seems to be a currency crisis in venezuela that's being spurred on by an undiversified economy. and the protestors in the street seem to not have any particular ideological persuasion.
if there's something to this, it reduces to the idea that venezuela is basically a mercantilist and colonial import/export economy, rather than a socialist state. in other words, what this says is that while the "bolivarian revolution" may have dramatically reduced inequality it has completely failed in producing a self-sustainable socialist economy. they import everything. that's the opposite of socialism...
all the signs are that venezuela is in for a rough ride. this was obvious to me after reading maduro's first public remarks. let's remember that, moving forward.
it's not really that we've dropped the connection between wages and productivity. it's more as though the new right economic paradigm argues that the market will determine how productivity should be awarded on it's own and that attempts to modify the way the market distributes wealth using government are actually interfering with the way that things "ought" to be awarded "naturally". it's really the second part of the thing that doesn't wash with me, not the first. it's true that if you don't have rules that protect the weak from the strong then the strong will enslave the weak. i'm not sure how "natural" that is (market economies are no less planned, and are no less human constructions, it's just planned by and for an elite rather than the masses), nor am i one to fall into the naturalistic fallacy in the first place.
but it's not a rejection of the connection. it's this idea that markets determine value for work more fairly than government can, and that setting up those laws is giving workers more than they deserve for the contribution they make.
i want everybody to be able to make truly free economic decisions. however, for the exact issue of fast food workers, precisely? regarding the question as to how productive fast food workers actually are in a social sense? well...
....maybe what we need is a new economic paradigm that considers not just the amount of labour performed but also it's worth in a social sense. i know the guy was sort of dancing around that point, but he wasn't as extreme about it as i would be.
i'd actually rather see mcdonalds in bankruptcy and it's workforce on welfare.
well, i went to check it out and it hasn't changed yet. i wasn't sure what i'd pick, i just wanted to see the option. i'm not sure if it's a slow roll out or because i live in canada. i can't promise i'll remember to go back and check again later...
i'll be cynical. it's about advertising. i'm not buying tampons any time soon. and i use adblock anyways.
but i do agree that there's a certain normalization attached to this that is overwhelmingly positive. i don't really care about what the gender designation is on facebook, but it would be useful to have more fluid options on a border crossing card or a health card.
they reinforce their own fantasies and their voting base buys right into it.
i've been having this discussion for years.
"why are you so gung-ho about the conservatives again?" "because they're lowering taxes." "why is it so important to you that they lower corporate taxes?" "because my property taxes are too high."
*pause*
"so you're voting for your local federal conservative mp because you think your property taxes are too high?" "yup. they said they want to lower taxes, and i'm all for that." "but, they didn't ever say they want to lower your taxes. i mean, i believe in progressive taxation..." "...stop trying to brainwash me with your liberal propaganda. they're going to lower taxes, which will get the economy going." "but it's not..." "...i know the truth, i don't need to listen to your lies." "well, alright, then. later."
the end result is that if they claimed that tax cuts affect the weather, and then drew a connection between their policy and an increase in sunny days (even if there's actually been a decrease in sunny days), their voting base would rally around it, and there's your new cpc talking point.
i live in one of the biggest tomato producing regions in the world, and all the supermarkets are full of beat to shit tomatoes that spent weeks bouncing around in trucks as they were being imported from mexico. i know it's cold out. but you know what the bizarre thing is? the imported mexican tomatoes are hothouse tomatoes. yeah. worse, i know for a fact that the tomatoes in the region i live in are also mostly grown year round and indoors.
i'm new to the area, of course. however, i'm going to have to go out of my way to try and figure out where the local growers are leaving their produce. and, to be honest, that's the kind of thing that calls for some local awareness raising.
i mean, honestly. why are we sorting through moldy tomatoes from thousands of miles away (i haven't actually bought any in weeks), then overpaying for the transportation costs to get them here, when there's a giant surplus 30 miles down the road? stupid, stupid, stupid...
the attraction to this is supposedly that it's an updated rendition of a very old, traditional buddhist chant. what do buddhists think about people in canada listening to sacred music without even realizing that it's sacred music? because i didn't realize it was sacred for some time - not when i saw it live nor while i was listening to it, not until i read something that explained the significance of it. to be blunt, the religious significance of the record means absolutely nothing to me and i have absolutely no interest in exploring it further. had it been marketed as religious music, i would have actually almost certainly chosen not to attend the show (which actually would have been a shame because i was introduced to the awesomely rocking mammatus at the gig).
i could consequently accuse the band of cultural appropriation in just about the worst way possible, but that's not a line of condemnation i walk down often and not one i really want to press in too much detail right now. i'd rather just be a punk and call them pretentious.
pretentious, indeed, is the best way to describe this. there are a few sections of more intricate detail, but it's mostly really just a simple, prodding riff repeating over and over, accompanied by sounds that seem to come from nowhere rational at all. within that accompaniment, there's a lot of atonal chanting that a westerner may conceive of as gregorian; this is interspersed with some kind of shamanistic chanting that really stresses japan's ancient siberian heritage. westerners may immediately interpret it as "native american sounding", but by doing that they're confusing a very old shared heritage.
what's really pretentious about it, though, is it's nature as "channeled music". i mean, what do you say to people that think they're channeling spirits into a theremin? is it worth saying anything at all, or is that one of those situations where it's better not to bother wasting your time? so, excluding those sparse patterns that repeat as motifs, the disc is completely aimless by conscious design. i could point out that the record lacks structure and cogency, or point out that it lacks a human element in the improvisation, but who am i to argue with the gods?
where the divinely channeled improv is particularly awful is the guitar playing, which can't have made religious authorities throughout asia particularly happy, i should add. i'm not likely to agree with them in exact terms, but i will agree with anybody that claims that it's in particularly bad taste to load up sacred music with entirely self-indulgent and overly masturbatory guitar work. i might not understand all of this, but i do understand that, and it is weak.
in the end, i can't help but feel that the best audience for this (outside of the stereotypical pothead stuck with the necessity of looking beyond western culture to connect with any kind of spirituality) is anthropologists. there's something fascinating about this on the level of it modernizing something that seems destined for cultural death. but, that's a very analytical application that goes well beyond the level of pure listening, and i simply can't recommend the disc - or the band, for that matter - at all on that level.
this is a record that happened in a very different phase of my life; i have to admit that i was actually extremely surprised to connect to this disc at all, let alone as deeply as i did. as it is, it might be my favourite record of the 00s - and a special disc it is, too.
my life in 2008 was virtually unrecognizable from my life in 2005. i'd lost touch with, rejected or been rejected by virtually everybody i had been in contact with; i was spending virtually all of my time outside of work entirely by myself, and largely enjoying it. while i would eventually go back at least twice, it seemed like i was out of school permanently - and without any serious employment opportunities. i was bouncing around from call centre to call centre (repeatedly fired, and unable to care) in an attempt to pay rent, bills and student loan interest payments. the pressures were very different, but, in a very real way, this was a return to the conditions that i first connected with this band in the first place. into that reality of aimlessly drifting through forced meaningless labour, and through whatever alignment that the universe provided, mt. zion managed to yet again produce a record that explored precisely what i was living through and hit me in exactly the way i needed at exactly the time i needed it.
i've long interpreted the disc as a concept record, but i don't pretend that the band meant for it to be one. it just seemed to intersect so much with what i was feeling and thinking that i intuitively constructed a narrative out of it. in this interpretative fantasy, the record follows an honest musician through the horrors of modern existence. it explores the vapid nature of indie culture, constructs villains out of evil bankers enforcing wage slavery to demand loan payments and ultimately ends with an affirmation of pure fucking honesty in the most powerful way possible. in absolute terms, the climax of the record is so precious as to nearly be trite but that's exactly why it's so amazingly powerful. you mean there really are some hearts that are true in this world? really? why are they so hard to find? in the midst of the extreme doubt i was experiencing, i definitely needed somebody to tell me exactly that at that exact point.
it's not just the conceptual aspect that drives this thing, either. in completely unhyphenated terms, it's just a fucking sold rock album full of messy, no wave stomps and flat-out kickass riffs. see, the kind of indictment of popular culture that the record lays out requires a very angry delivery and the band really delivers on it. the strings are very much pulled back to a more traditional "rock accompaniment", but it's actually an asset, in context. it's one thing to tear down the shit culture we're stuck with, it's another to show everybody how it should be done in terms that the masses can connect to. this had to be a takedown of popular rock music to get it's point across properly; it wouldn't have packed the same punch as a bunch of bartok variations.
it's not often that i will suggest an album is flawless, but i can't find a flaw here. what i will say is that the record is heavy. if things are going well for you right now and you're feeling pretty good about yourself, you probably won't want to hear a record full of rants that question your integrity, your intelligence and your basic decency for merely carrying through with the life that the system created for you to live. that might be exactly why you actually should listen to this very carefully. you might need an anvil across the fucking forehead to get you to behave like a decent person. unfortunately, if that's the case, you're probably more likely to get defensive about it, or run off words by some asshole philosopher that is so lost in meaningless abstraction that they can't see the basic use of being nice to people. that will restrict this record's most passionate audience to people with a conscience - and especially people with a conscience that are just getting bludgeoned down by a society that lacks one.
unfortunately, that means that most people won't really get this. for those that will get it, though, it's really a treat. highly, highly recommended.
you need to be extra careful about venezuela, because you don't just have imperialists lying to you, you also have chavistas lying to you.
without any special knowledge of what is happening, i'll point out that the opposition almost certainly does not represent the protestors. it may be entirely true that the opposition is working with the united states to overthrow the government. however, pointing that out is not the same thing as accusing the protestors of being right-wing - as they clearly are in the ukraine, i might add.
all the "independent" media reports are essentially the same. students represent the upper middle class. poor support the government. it's counter-revolutionary. but that's of course based on the false understanding of venezuela as a left-wing state in the first place. it can't be a counter-revolution if a revolution never happened in the first place. i'm well aware of active leftist movements in venezuela that are deeply opposed to the existing government.
within all that confusion, there have been tons of false images floating around, and it's hard to believe that's not something that's been orchestrated.
so, again, it's like anywhere else: there's three sides here, not two. the state and the opposition are well understood, and the opposition is definitely an imperial proxy. but the actual people, what they're fighting for, what their political ideals are and their end desires are a far more difficult entity to understand.
you know, given the prevalence of these "free trade" agreements, which are of course consciously designed to enslave the rest of the world into producing good to import to america, it's ironic to consider the role that america's place as an import driven market played in the revolution. that is to say that a big part of the reason that the landholders revolted was that they were denied a local market by being forced to compete with imported goods from elsewhere in the empire.
it plays back into the narrative about the revolution being a civil war in the british empire. those local landowners are now transnationals that are integrated with their british counterparts. recreating that condition of local landowners seeking more power would require a redistribution of wealth that is itself revolutionary. for that reason, those conditions cannot recreate themselves.
just a reminder that, liberal rhetoric notwithstanding, this is the first thing the united states actually did.
if you could write a program that perfectly emulates the neural processes that lead to thinking and set it in motion, the machine would be thinking. or, at least it would be insofar as it would be doing exactly what we do when we think; if we can think, the machine can. if you take it to the next step, you could even conceivably upload your own brain (maybe even by something as simple as a scanning process) and emulate your *own* thinking. not going to happen tomorrow, sure, but...
really, i'm a little disappointed to see him get this backwards. it's the kind of thing we usually see him criticize. it's not that the machine cannot act like a brain, it's that the brain acts like a machine. we realize the heart is a machine, kidneys are a machine. what's with the mysticism surrounding the brain, noam?
again: they're very openly interfering, and if they take over they're going to be a us puppet government. whatever the problems with the existing government, setting up a puppet state is no solution.
however, this report doesn't do a good job of separating between the protesters and the opposition. the opposition usually has little real control over protestors in the initial stages of the uprising. it takes time for them to take over.
i remain flabbergasted that there's not something over the counter for this.
still reading that silly puritan revolutionary nonsense. well, my head's just been throbbing....slept for something like 90 of the last 100 hours...i'm awake now, finally. hope to be done by the end of the night.
live just randomly struck me as the proper soundtrack for this stuff, 'cause it intersects properly into that area of christianity that i have a lot of respect for. be nice to people. have some fucking integrity. well, i'm an open socialist - on a basic definitional and historical level that largely means i like the morals and reject the theology. engels informs us of the difference between historically utopian (religious) socialism and his new brand of scientific (marxist) socialism. i digress. but i don't think that jesus would have been a hippie, really. he would have been more of a punk, out to smash the corporate state.
this record has a lot of errors. it's more of a guilty pleasure, really. i've grown to love it's flaws (funny how that happens, sometimes), but roughly half of it is admittedly undefendably awful. and this is certainly the last record they did before the singer got too preachy to listen to.
...but i've got a really weird soft spot for this disc, explicitly *as* the christian rock it is.
well, i think another reason they went downhill after this is that they stopped working with jerry harrison. that's probably not a widely understood narrative.
also, i'm again confused as to what the difference is between this and emo, other than that this is better than essentially all 90s emo i've heard - on their own basis of "emotional songwriting", "introspective lyrics" and "developed vocal melodies".
yeah. i'm doing far too many things at once. there's still that music history site i want to do, and here's the thing: i don't think we should have a thing called emo at all, dumb marketing, but if we're going to, and people are going to write this history, then this isn't just it but is some of the best of it. even if nobody realized it. *i'm* realizing it and will have to write it in.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
as a would-be revolutionary, i am perpetually annoyed by the way the united states propagandizes and controls foreign resistance movements, often in ways that the people on the ground are not aware of. but i've come to expect it.
the americans are backing yet another hard right group in an attempt to assert their global hegemony. they never, ever support democratic forces, either. it's always the most right-wing, racist, fundamentalist fascists they can find...
i had a thought walking through the rain: what we need to deal with flooding issues are elephants. if you just let an elephant walk through the streets it would suck all the water up and voila...
....except there are some problems. it's too cold for elephants, and that's not clean water, and it has to find it's way back out eventually.
so, robot elephants. seriously. this is the future of flood control.
i mean, we could maybe deal with the weather issue by genetically engineering mammoths, but it's still not humane to have them out lapping up water on the street.
it's not a crises, it's a reorganization of global trade and global wealth. and it's not going to "resolve" in the sense of a return to previous levels of employment. this is the new reality.
akyuz is full of relevant observations, but he's confusing cause with effect. lower consumption is an effect of falling wages, which is itself a result of global trade agreements that seek to take advantage of the surplus of global workers. that's an irresolvable situation that will keep wages spiralling down for as long as the labour market is global (unless it collapses itself first). further, the ideas he's suggesting are highly problematic in the context of a society that needs to be focusing on changing the way it uses energy and produces waste.
worse, if you were to ask around, i think you'd get the feeling that there's a general resistance to this idea of centering the economy around frivolous production.
the other side of this isn't a return to the past. that cannot happen. rather, the current situation will entrench itself and worsen. this is the way the system was designed. rather, people need to adjust to the reality of global markets by moving into the future in a way that focuses more on local economies.
it's dry in here and not likely to spill over. i don't feel the
structure got the test i was expecting it to, but it's not really a
needed test, either. i'm not expecting this kind of snow again next
year. but the temperature didn't climb to where it threatened it would,
and the rain didn't come down nearly as hard, either. really, windsor
seems to have completely skipped the system.
that's ok
with me. there's still a lot of water to get out of here, but the
temperature is going to drop enough to stop the melt and let it drain.
head is also clearing. what a wasted week...
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
i think that what we delude ourselves as thinking of democracy requires people like medea benjamin to push for due process with drone strikes, or glenn greenwald to get information out, or ralph nader to keep corporations on their toes. if the system that exists is going to work at all, it needs these kinds of liberals and libertarians to ensure it holds up it's own axioms. "the rule of law", and all that other liberal stuff. they talk about king, and that's another good example of the kind of perpetual reformism that the system requires to fulfill it's own promises.
but, if i look around me, i don't think "we need a bigger movement". two reasons:
1) co-option. and you can't just blame this on the hierarchy, "the masses" have to take responsibility for this. they melted all over obama. i don't see a way to avoid that. sorry.
2) if it can't be co-opted, it can be destroyed much more easily if it's centralized.
i could talk about how al qaeda's decentralized structure (rather than it's ideology or tactics) is something to try and emulate. to me, that was the promise of occupy. unfortunately, not everybody on the ground saw it like that. but, i think it was a first step. overall, i think a more valuable historical example is the kind of secret societies that were dominant in the french revolution. they realized that open organizing would be brutally suppressed, so they did it underground. we're not yet at that point, we're quickly approaching it. we need to sort of get that loss of democracy that we've been experiencing over the last few decades and find a way to adjust to it.
that is to say that this discussion belongs to the 1960s. there's a long list of fundamental realities that have changed so deeply that we just can't hope that we can organize these kinds of popular protests and hope that the state will respond, except in the kind of small scale ways that define what reformism is.
so, there's a housing problem in detroit. do they need a large scale organization? no - that's either going to be co-opted or repressed. rather, they need to find ways to quietly create clandestine, decentralized squatting networks with no active leadership that actively reject any kind of media exposure.
and i think that's a big reason why these larger movements aren't happening: the resistance is now anarchist, not marxist.
the "temporary autonomous zone" is becoming a more attractive model than working through a hopeless system.
field of broken dreams: if you build it, they will co-opt.
24 hours from now, i will know whether this basement is unusually flood resistant or not.
there's about 20 cm of snow on the ground. it was 7 degrees today, which was warm enough to turn the neighbourhood roads into a series of interconnected ponds. starting around 10 am, we're going to get close to 50 mm of rain (tapering off about midnight tomorrow), around with temperatures rising to around 10 degrees at about the same time. the temperature is then going to drop back to freezing very quickly...
that's kind of an algorithm for flooding, so it seems to be a virtual certainty that there's going to be some water issues in the neighbourhood. the roads are going to flood and the sewers are going to back up. that's very easy to predict, and not really much to care about from my perspective. what i'm worried about is that water seeping in...
i'll find out.
awake, but still not fully alert.
you have to keep
in mind that i'm somebody that has historically routinely gone well over
48 hours without sleep, on nothing but coffee and nicotine. nicotine is
such a powerful stimulant, for me anyways. i'm well aware of the
reality that if i just go buy a pack of smokes i can get some 36 hour
days in. but i need to cut the reliance on it.
so i'm not used to this...
i'm hoping the flip of that is that the option for really long days will be there if i want it by just getting a pack.
drugs should be used as drugs, y'know?
producing
humans that are naturally wired on caffeine - or that don't form a
resistance, at least - strikes me as a worthwhile application of genetic
engineering.
personally, i'd love to have that dna flipped...
c'mon, brain. you're supposed to like humidity.
the
hypersensitivity is off the wall, but so be it. i think the pollen or
whatever may have something to do with it (i've never been checked, but
it's something that comes and goes). but, every little change in my
surroundings produces these exaggerated responses. the atmospheric
pressure changes, i get a stomach ache. the moisture level of the air
changes, i get a headache. i'm starting to wonder if i was born with a
swim bladder.....
in the end, it's just more proof that
i am not a member of homo sapiens. sorry. like i've said - i don't mind
being on the same clade. that's ok. but i'm not the same species as the
rest of you.....
physically feeling snot harden at the top of your nose might be the weirdest shit ever.
actually, i feel a lot better since i woke up from a nap. weirdness, though.
it's
actually the constant napping that's made me rather useless this month.
awake for a few hours....zzzzz....again and again...
it's
partly the fact that i keep putting myself in nicotine withdrawal. i
realize this and realize i just need to make a fucking choice. as i've
been stating for years, it's not the cigarettes that are stopping me
from quitting altogether, it's the other things we smoke for
recreational reasons. which i'm infrequent about. but it's putting me in
constant withdrawal....
yet, i'm wondering if it has
something to do with the weather, too, given how sensitive i seem to be
to it. it's been so cold. and now my sinuses are thawing out.
coffee has stopped working, which scares me. i don't like the stronger options. maybe i'll switch brands.
those moments when you suddenly, without warning, have a "water up the nose" reaction (in error) as a part of the rehydration process that follows turning the heat down (and thereby moistening the inside air) in the spring....
"wait. i can breathe again. woah."
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
i can't believe nobody has picked up on the catch-22 reference.
...there's no argument at all and that reduces price to some kind of cheap mystical guru, pumping out oracular nonsense that seems almost precious in hindsight.
i'm an ass. sorry. but i know it can't be a sears poncho in 1776.
i have been so absurdly distracted this month...
Monday, February 17, 2014
i know there's some articles floating around about the melting waters up north messing with the jet stream, but every article i've seen on the topic actually presents itself as a minority view against the consensus. if you think about it for a second, it doesn't actually make any sense. we've had unusually warm winters for 20 years, then all of a sudden the warming trend results in coldness? i mean, i don't like to make a habit of agreeing with people like rush limbaugh but i think the truth is that the media is jumping on this in ways that demonstrate that most journalists really don't have the slightest understanding of what they're typing about.
you mean teaching people grammar for four years doesn't give them a deeper understanding of climate science? my mind is blown.
anyways, the article itself is interesting but please draw specific attention to the chart published, which points out specifically cold years in 2013, 1993 and 1976. specifically:
1976 -6
1993 -5.5
2013 -5.3
those are the three coldest years in the last 50. it's very interesting because it very clearly demonstrates how two different phenomena - cyclical sunspot activity and increasing greenhouse gas concentration - work together. we see that temperatures at the minimum of each cycle have increased slightly. it's entirely reasonable, based on this data and what we know about these two phenomena, to expect another especially cold year around 2030 - although not quite as cold. -5, perhaps. or perhaps -4.5 or even -4, if the warming picks up.
now, if you zoom out a little further to the last 100 years you see especially cold years in the late 50s, late 30s and late 10s, further corroborating a roughly 20 year cycle. further, the 30s (~-6) and 10s (almost -8) are the coldest - further corroborating the warming trend. this even pulls out the slight cooling trend in the middle of the century (when the bottom of the cycle hit in the late 50s, it was -5.5, a bit warmer than the 30s, so it's actually the 70s bottoming that demonstrates the cooling).
going back to the media, they want to present these ideas as counter to one another. and, certainly, the crackpots that want to write off climate change as all sunspots and no carbon aren't helping to clarify how they work together.
but this simple chart demonstrates it very clearly.
my understanding is that this particular relationship is demonstrable across the northern hemisphere (and only the northern hemisphere), and is not localized to toronto. it just happens to really cleanly show the relationship.
there was some murmuring a few months ago that the sun's low activity might be about to throw us into a cold snap for a few years, but my understanding is the sun has come back.
nor is it as simple as just sunlight. of course, i don't understand it down to the precise details. i'm not a climate scientist. but i think the idea is intuitive enough. i mean, it's been cold this year because of the air coming down from the north, which is specifically related to wind. when the wind roars it's way south, it gets cold down here. due to the way the earth is tilted, the amount of sun that hits the northern hemisphere has well known effects that are related to the onset of ice ages (milankovitch cycles).
maybe i should state the argument that convinced me that carbon has an effect. i'm a skeptical person. i was agnostic at first. but, the more i looked into it, the more i realized that "natural conditions" "should" be pushing us into an ice age. that is to say that we are hypothesized to currently exist in an interglacial. i say hypothesized because the future doesn't exist yet. but, based on what we know about the way the climate's been changing for the last really long time, we've been coming in and out of ice ages pretty regularly and seemed to be about on the verge of entering into another one (based on how long past interglacials lasted). that is to say that, based on past climate data, the reasonable conclusion to come to would be that we should expect to be entering an ice age just about any year now.
yet, the data states the climate is warming. therefore, something must be working to counteract the onset of an ice age. the chemistry of carbon works together with the correlation of rising carbon. that's something that requires a terrestrial explanation + correlation + mechanism - enough to convince me.
milankovitch cycles are like 20 some thousand years, though, and has to do with the way the earth orbits as much as it does with the way the earth is tilted. it's not at all the same thing. but the parallel to draw is that both ideas rely on differences in the amount of sun hitting the earth at northern latitudes - very small changes. milankovitch' ideas are based on very small changes making big differences over thousands of years. the sunspot thing is very small changes making relatively small differences over a short period of time. so, it's just a difference of scale.
like i say, that's just an intuitive explanation - the sun's energy hits us on enough of an angle in the north that small variations have the ability to set off chaotic changes. like lightning hitting a pond. that's the cause of most weather on the planet! so, i think that's uncontroversial. the difficulty is working it out in more detail than that. and there's been some studies noting the correlation i'm pulling out; in fact, that's entirely what i'm drawing on (i'm not one to make shit up).
here's my source. again - it's only the northern hemisphere.
as an aside, that brings up an aspect of the climate change discussion that nobody talks about. there's this sort of implicit assumption that if we stop carbon emissions then the climate will be static. of course, that's ridiculous. nobody would actually say that. the climate is in constant flux. yet, it remains implicit. in fact, we have every reason to believe that if we were to erase all the warming we've created with carbon then we'd be headed directly into an ice age. that is to say that the carbon we're dumping into the atmosphere is preventing an ice age.
i don't think we want to enter an ice age anymore than we want to go into a warming feedback cycle.
that doesn't mean we can just let the carbon flow and get away with it. milankovitch cycles or not, we can't just terraform the planet into venus and think we'll be ok. but, i don't think it's something the models take fully into account - and it is something they SHOULD take into account. the question of how much carbon is necessary to offset the milankovitch cycles is a valid one, as is the question of how much is too much. we want some carbon to offset the cooling, but we don't want so much that it melts the permafrost and unleashes all the methane. if the latter happens, it could very well take us out of an "icehouse" and into a "hothouse", and then we're totally lost in the woods without a compass.
i don't think that the numbers that are generally thrown around in the media are created with any of that in mind. like i say: it's just that implicit assumption of stasis that everybody knows is ridiculous. but, the other side of that argument is that ice ages don't happen that rapidly and that it's a lesser thing to be concerned about. yet, is it really? that's an assumption i'm less than comfortable with.
what i'm hoping is that we're going to see some stories in the next few months that point out that it's going to take a few years to thaw all the refreezing that happened this year. of course, that won't buck the trend. it might buy us some more time, though.
....but the flip side of that is when the cycle does it turn it could be worse than we're expecting.
i'm just working out possibilities of the way the models are flawed. we'll have to find out. but if there's something deep to the idea that sun activity does have these cycles in the north,
1) we'll need to recalculate the effect of this minimum
2) we'll need to recalculate the effect of the coming maximum around 2020
i think it probably won't just balance out.
this is more precisely what i'm talking about. as you can see, the amount of energy is very small. it's not enough to have serious climate effects on a short term basis (although the milankovitch theory, which is accepted, states that larger changes occur over thousands of years due to changes in the earth's distance from the sun, how it spins and etc). however, the idea is that the small differences in energy might be enough to set off weather patterns - and specifically that it might have an effect on cyclones raging off the coast of siberia and, by proxy, affect how the air pushes southwards into north america and europe.
i just want to make it clear that nobody is suggesting that less sunspots = less sunlight = cold. that neither makes sense in terms of energy or in terms of the cause of the cold we're experiencing (which is already frigid air moving south, not southern air becoming frigid due to the sun not warming it or something). rather, it's the idea that small changes in the amount of energy hitting northern latitudes can affect weather in the north, and that the weather in the north then affects shit further south.
which is not any different than el nino / la nina. it's just in siberia instead of the pacific, and follows a different pattern of air movement.
btw, i'm pointing to the 22 year hale cycle of magnetic reversal rather than the 11 year sunspot cycle that all the literature is citing. they're related. it's the same argument, i'm just stretching it out over two cycles. but i should be clear.
the nasty cold is only ~20 years (and sometimes a few times in a down cycle) 'cause there's other stuff besides the sun going on.
if you're still reading this and can't understand that document, what it says (amongst other things) is that the 11 year solar minimum (not the 22 year one) might create either an extremely cold polar vortex or an extremely warm one depending on whether the wind is easterly or westerly. it works that out by either pulling heat up or down from the atmosphere. this paper was unable to determine a cause or pattern underlying the direction of the wind.
meaning it's not quite the same thing as i'm saying, but it does present evidence that the solar minimum is a cause of extreme polar vortices.
and with that, we have once again derived the immortal words:
1) the whole dictators-for-israel thing goes back decades. egypt is a particular example. the peace treaty has always been unpopular in egypt and would probably not survive real democracy. so, the americans send them billions a year to prop up the military to prevent democracy. israel isn't the only factor (there was a suez crisis, but it's sort of ancient history), but it is a really important one.
2) 'stabilize' is basically an orwellian term that really means 'destabilize'.
3) american hegemony is weakened but still in tact. they simply can't remove assad due to threats from other players (most importantly russia). but that shouldn't lead to an exaggeration of iran's soft power. if you look at the agreement, it was basically the united states enforcing it's terms in exchange for an almost trivial reversal of sanctions. the greater context is iran turning to other countries. consider the banking embargo, which was supposed to make it impossible for iran to sell oil. instead, india and china and others started buying iranian oil with GOLD. turkey has been unhappy with the sanctions, and they're a really key us ally. the proper term for that is blowback: blowback on a financial level. it would be catastrophic to us interests if the embargo stimulated the rest of the world to ditch the dollar as a reserve currency rather than iran being isolated - it's both a failure of the sanctions and a weakening of american financial power. oops? absolutely. so, is that iranian soft power? sort of, but not really. it's more of a strategic error by the americans, followed by a sort of compensation for it. but, even with the error and it's possible consequences, the americans still maintain enough hegemony to assert themselves and possibly reverse the effects of the errors. so, what the americans are trying to do is weaken the effects of that blowback by pulling them in with honey rather than vinegar, but it's a sort of acidic honey if you see what i'm saying. it's transparemtly cynical. very tough terms. i think the fundamental realization that the americans have come to is that their hegemony is fragile, but that's a big step away from abandoning it. what that means is the iranians are still powerless to reject american demands, even as the americans are being forced to adjust to a failed policy. in the long run, the strategy hasn't fundamentally changed. the americans are still actively pursuing regime change. but they need to be more subtle, because if they aren't then things might unravel very badly. that's maybe a triumph of realism over neo-conservatism? two sides of the same coin, though. another bad move and the iranians could escape their grasp - but the thing is they realize that would mean becoming a protectorate of china, and they're obviously not going to see that as their first choice, so they largely remain optionless. in the larger picture, then, that's not really iranian soft power. it's more of a satellite being stuck between two powers and trying to find a way to make the best of it.
4) he's really exaggerating the opposition to assad. syrians seem to have temporarily aligned with the government as a lesser evil. ironically, the best way to actually remove assad would be to pull the foreign islamist fighters out and let the people rise against him. but, that moment may now be lost for many years, as the state effectively mobilizes it's citizens against the terrorist groups.
whatever assad's crimes, it's hard to blame syrians for choosing secular stability over religious fundamentalism. i mean, it's the old "would you rather saddam husseein was still in power?" canard. the reality is that a huge number of iraqis would say "yes". i think commentators really need to work that out more strenuously in understanding the depth of the opposition to these islamist groups.
there's this desire to project this third option that it seems like syrians realize isn't realistic in the short term. in the short term, the focus seems to be on saving the country from the fascists, rather than aligning with them to topple the government.
it's a constant problem. even in a simple occupy context, there were nazis popping up all over the place. we decided it was more important to kick the nazis out. so, for me, reproducing that line of thinking is very easy. if i'm choosing between upholding parliament and shooting nazis? it's not even a choice, give me a gun. the only good fascist is a dead one.
so, the revolution in syria is not likely to carry on.
but it doesn't fall under the category of "blunder" the same way that the screwed up sanctions do because the crux of the operation was to *prevent* democracy in syria (assad was building a constitution at the time).
it's not the preferred outcome, but it's an acceptable result in the short run.
to an extent, i'm reminded of the spanish or russian revolutions. there were far deeper anarchist movements there than in contemporary syria, and there was a lot of debate, but in the end they had to align with statist interests to fight a far greater threat - franco and the bolsheviks, respectively. they lost in both cases. but they picked the right side of the fight.
it's interesting today, fwiw, that nobody talks about the slaughter that the republican forces were no doubt responsible for. i'm deducing this, i can't cite anything.
it's maybe perilous to draw an exact analogy, but you get the point.
war's a shitty deal all around.
i mean, we see what's happened in libya, and that is far less organized. just total racist and sectarian slaughter. i shudder to think at would what happen if these groups actually succeed, and i think "the average syrian" is well aware of what the stakes are in supporting assad to defeat them.
if anything, support seems to have strengthened. there was supposedly a huge pro-assad rally yesterday.
deathtokoalas
the people that censored this didn't understand it. strangely, that's often the case with artistic censorship.
it's anti-hierarchical, but it's explicitly rejecting violence as a means to that end and pointing out that attempts at violent revolution always backfire.
also, for those that are arguing about it, the offspring were, from the start, a middle point between old punk and what i'm going to call corporate punk. they have a certain affinity with the ending points of the first wave of punk - later damned, some dead kennedys and certainly bad religion. but from the very beginning they infused it with a very pop aesthetic. that's not to say they engineered the idea, but they certainly took it to a different level. strangely, though, the thing that made them stand out was a softening of the crossover sound. there's a really strong thrash narrative through their early work that clashed really well with the poppier influence that wasn't just from stuff like the descendants but also bands like the police.
think of it like this: you could very easily take out the lyrics on any offspring record up to 1997 and insert blink 182 lyrics and it wouldn't really stand out that much. it's like they had a pop-punk sound with an anarcho-punk ideology.
that being said, you can tell holland didn't lean completely anarcho-punk. people are often shocked to learn that there were actually republican punk bands in the period. southern california was a very wealthy area, and a certain right-wing subculture did arise from that. my hypothesis has always been that holland started there and grew out of it. you can hear it in his later stuff, like "why don't you get a job?", for example. that's kind of a conservative tune. even 'come out and play' has a certain right-wing vibe to it.
...and it landed them in some hot water with their peers. they really wanted to be on epitaph and eventually got there but gurewitz always hated them, initially rejected them repeatedly and literally sold them to columbia the first chance he got.
so, they don't really fit into either category. along with bad religion, and to a lesser extent fugazi, they form a bridge between punk and pop. the difference is just that they were way more successful than the others...
i don't know how much of their fan base really followed them back to their punk roots. i'm sure enough did. for me, they were the first punk band i really heard (well, excluding nirvana). smash was out when i was 13. had the disc. had the shirt. just from looking around at the other kids around me, it seemed like the same kids that were listening to offspring in grade 7 were listening to avril in grade 12. it seems like most people followed the punk pop trend forwards the way that mtv presented it to them. i hope they weren't listening to thursday after they graduated :\
but i have to say that if i were to run across them today as a new punk band, i'd be a lot more critical of what they have to say, and i can entirely understand why they were rejected by so much of the punk rock community. they were always half very punk, and half very not punk and in a very strange and almost contradictory way.
but i'm glad i'm not a trendy asshole :P
slumdog
Well maybe violent revolution always backfire but maybe killing a president or two would not harm, after all now they can just fuck us in the ass as long and as hard they want without any consequences but maybe if a couple of heads rolled just maybe they'd think twice..
deathtokoalas
nah. you need to think structurally. the president is the fall guy. you're supposed to hate him; keeps the oligarchs safe.
lincoln's death accomplished nothing, and they took out kennedy from the inside.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
"Of such liberty as I have now described, it is impossible there should be an excess. Government is an institution for the benefit of the people governed, which they have the power to model as they please; and to say that they can have too much of this power, is to say that there ought to be a power in the state superior to that which gives it being, and from which all jurisdiction in it is derived. Licentiousness, which has been commonly mentioned, as an extreme of liberty, is indeed its opposite. It is government by the will of rapacious individuals in opposition to the will of the community made known and declared in the laws. A free state, at the same time that it is free itself, makes all its members free by excluding licentiousness, and guarding their persons and property and good name against insult. It is the end of all just government, at the same time that it secures the liberty of the public against foreign injury, to secure the liberty of the individual against private injury. I do not, therefore, think it strictly just to say that it belongs to the nature of government to entrench on private liberty. It ought never to do this, except as far as the exercise of private liberty encroaches on the liberties of others. That is, it is licentiousness it restrains and liberty itself only when used to destroy liberty."
this is from a text that was popular amongst revolutionaries at the time of the american revolution. it's rooted in this idea of "moral freedom", which basically means the freedom to avoid temptation from satan. by this logic, it is reasonable to lynch the gays because they're infringing on your freedom to not be exposed to "immoral" ideas. which is sort of like they do in russia.
that's of course the exact opposite conception we have today. today, we'd talk more about intellectual freedom. this text is really hard to read through as a result of this totally backwards kind of thinking. this guy wasn't a conservative in his period, either, he was a prominent liberal that communicated with some of the early anarchists. he had a big influence on fairly radical liberals like jefferson and paine.
it's just the different concept of freedom that's really startling. so, consider "free love", for example. price (the author) would consider "free love" to be a type of slavery - to satan. in order to emancipate the wicked from the enslavement to evil, "free love" should be restricted by the state. a free society would therefore be one where sexuality was highly regulated, in order to ensure that we do not become enslaved by our own passions.
that's not some dystopian fiction, it's coming from a text written by a leading religious scholar that was one of the dominant ideological arguments underlying the american revolution. this is the concept of "freedom" that north american society was constructed upon - the freedom to not be exposed to ideas that differ from the state's (and church's) official pronunciations.
the same logic would apply to homosexuality, drug use or any other kind of "passion". freedom, to these people, meant the state intervening to ensure we do not become enslaved by our passions. slavery meant giving into satanic pleasures, and even being forced to tolerate ideas that differed from the norm.
i guess the whole tyranny of the majority thing eventually worked itself out. but when you read the constitution or the declaration within the context that the mob understood the word "liberty" as, the whole thing becomes a ridiculous joke....
like, their concept of liberty necessarily implied that society has the right to oppress minority views. they would actually argue with a straight face that a society that tolerates minorities is unfree - *because* they're forced to tolerate those with minority moral views. the whole idea of freedom, to them, was intrinsically related to the ability of the majority to attack minorities if they didn't uphold social norms because it would threaten to unravel the status quo.
so, when you're reading jefferson or paine or whomever else that should be in your mind. "liberty" meant something entirely different to these people than it does to you or i.
Friday, February 14, 2014
deathtokoalas
i tend to agree with damon, but i find he suffers from a sort of "hot head syndrome", which forces him to lose focus in the midst of an argument. the reporter offended his moral sensibilities, and his emotions took over.
there are maybe some bad teachers, sure. the first question is "what does it mean to say a teacher is bad?", and the answer is generally to do with students' performance. arguing that they need incentives to work harder is basically reducing the problem of under-achieving students to an issue of lazy teachers. that's what the reason reporter is really saying: students have bad marks because the damned teachers are too fucking lazy and those lazy, good-for-nothing teachers should be fired. judging by his response, i think damon realized that, but it made him so upset that he couldn't respond reasonably.
of course, if such a policy were actually put in place then the state would no doubt interpret 'lazy' as 'not white, anglo-saxon and protestant'.
a real libertarian wouldn't blame student under-performance on teachers, they'd have students and parents take responsibility for their own behaviour. blaming teachers for student performance is very much collectivist thinking.
but, if we acknowledge that there is a problem (and it's not that teachers are lazy), is firing people going to actually accomplish anything? first, you have to ask what the problem actually is. is it a systemic problem? one to do with administrative policy? if so, firing and rehiring is a waste of time. the only thing that could justify actually firing is to focus on personal defects. if it's not laziness, what is it? drug abuse? so, again, the debate collapses to a baseless personal attack.
nobody debates that there's a lot of things that can be done to improve public schooling, but thinking that firing teachers is going to solve anything is a symptom of the larger problems we face, rather than a solution of any sort.
Ryan Darling
he didn't lose sight for a second.. you fell victim to it by missing it... that was total alpha/domination on the reporter... Through logic
deathtokoalas
c'mon. he was less than articulate when pressed....and obviously very upset.
keith hutchison
to be fair don't you see that from all ideologues?
deathtokoalas
i don't think that having an ideology necessarily blinds one to reason, or that people that tend to react emotionally are necessarily more ideological. nor am i suggesting that the reporter had anything worthwhile to say. i'm an empiricist, but i don't reject theory on that deep a level. theory is useful. the problem is when people refuse to allow evidence to alter it.
i think it's more about anger management. to what extent that's real and what extent it's an act, i don't know.
allixpeeke
You write, "Arguing that they need incentives to work harder is basically reducing the problem of under-achieving students to an issue of lazy teachers. that's what the reason reporter is really saying."
I disagree. Merely mentioning one important factor does not mean it is the only factor. If one infers that the reporter is claiming that the problem reduces entirely to unmotivated teachers, one misinfers.
There are multiple factors worth noting. A teacher may start off highly motivated and, over time, become discouraged upon seeing student performance. This may cause a teacher with job security to, whether consciously or not, put in marginally less effort. Would a teacher with no job security allow pessimism affect her or his performance? Perhaps, but one would have to suspect that such teachers would be marginally more inclined to be vigilant about not letting her or his performance slip.
Another factor is that teachers who start off appropriately suited to teaching one generation of students might not be as appropriately suited to teaching another generation of teachers. Naturally, some humans are better able to adapt to changing environments than others, and the same applies to teachers adapting to changing social conditions among students.
You write, "If such a policy were actually put in place then the state would no doubt interpret 'lazy' as 'not white, anglo-saxon and protestant'."
That's why we need to have a complete separation of education and state. The state should not be able to determine anything about education, should not even be involved in education. Parents, unlike the state, have the incentive to make sure that their children get the most out of their education, and parents will always prefer to hire teachers who are able to provide that quality education. Parents will always take performance into account before other factors, like race or ethnicity, whereas the state, having no capacity for empathy, will be more likely to let petty prejudices influence policy. Moreover, in completely eliminating government involvement in education, we will see new approaches to educating springing up and offering alternatives that, in many cases, will be far better for kids than the government's one-size-fits-all top-down approach.
You write, "A real libertarian wouldn't blame student under-performance on teachers, they'd have students and parents take responsibility for their own behaviour. blaming teachers for student performance is very much collectivist thinking."
It doesn't make one a non-real libertarian to acknowledge that the quality of the teacher's teaching ability can impact a student's ability to comprehend the material being taught. Teachers who do not care whether their students are actually understanding the material should also take personal responsibility for their role in the situation.
Allow me to present some anecdotal evidence. In high school, the one and only C I got was in trigonometry. I certainly wanted to understand trigonometry on a conceptual level, since I believed that understanding it on a conceptual level would help me understand it on a practical level. But, it was never taught to me on a conceptual level. Instead, it seemed we were expected to memorise formulas, not understand them.
Luckily, partway through the year, a student teacher came in to teach. The real teacher sat back and let her. I say "luckily" because this student teacher was actually doing a better job at teaching trigonometry than the real teacher. Thanks to this student teacher, I started to actually "get" it. I started to actually catch on and learn. Then, a few months later, the student teacher left and the actual teacher started teaching again. What happened? I went right back to not understanding. That's when I realised: this teacher simply didn't care. I spent the remainder of the year wishing the student teacher would come back.
It's pretty bad when a student teacher is doing your teaching job better than you.
Yes, students have to take responsibility, but let's not pretend that all teachers are equal, that they bear no responsibility.
You write, "[B]ut, if we acknowledge that there is a problem (and it's not that teachers are lazy), is firing people going to actually accomplish anything?"
Again, it's not entirely an issue of laziness. While that trigonometry teacher I referenced may be a good example of laziness or at least of apathy, some teachers might be better than others at relaying ideas, facts, and concepts to students through their individual teaching styles. Imagine a hypothetical history teacher who simply stands in front of the class lecturing, and imagine another hypothetical history teacher who finds interesting ways to relate, say, the Revolutionary War to events happening in the lives of the students themselves, or who finds fun ways to get the students interested in the Magna Carta. This first hypothetical teacher may say, "I don't understand. This teaching style worked very well for students in the '80s, why are today's students so different?" Adaptability to the changing needs of students is probably just as much, if not more, of a factor as marginal laziness or apathy of secure teachers.
But, in answer to your question, it's not about actually firing teachers. It's about having the <i>ability</i> to easily fire bad teachers. As long as teachers are <i>able</i> to be fired, they will be inclined to try harder than they would if they cannot be fired. (It's very similar to guns. Most of the time, when guns are used to protect a man from being murdered or a woman from being raped, no bullets need even be fired. There are documented cases where a woman has been approached at night by a guy that worried her, and where the guy turns around and leaves simply by seeing she has a gun.) Just knowing that I can be fired will make me work harder than I would if I knew I couldn't be fired, and this is true of any job, even if it's a job I love (or, especially if it's a job I love).
But, to change gears just slightly, in the Sudbury model of education, schools are run directly by the students. Every year, students directly elect what teachers they wish to work in the Sudbury model schools. Students naturally elect the teachers they think do the best job, because what student wants to take lessons from a teacher who is crap? If the teachers do well, they will be reelected in future years, and if they don't, they will not be reelected, effectively meaning they've been fired by their students. Can one imagine a better model for ensuring that teachers tailor themselves to the needs of their students?
While I highly prefer the Sudbury model of education, virtually anything is better than government involvement in education. Government should have no involvement in hiring, firing, funding, taxing, or regulating education. If you own a school, you're going to want to hire the best teachers you can, just as your competitors will want to hire the best teachers <i>they</i> can. Meanwhile, parents will purchase the services of those schools that they believe will do the best job teaching their children and offering their children things the children actually need to survive and thrive in society.
E.g., I wouldn't want my children going to a school where faith is being shoved down their throats, so that is a factor I'd take into account. I also wouldn't want a school that promotes intolerance toward homosexuals, etc. And, I would want a school that has a good reputation at teaching kids. These are three important factors to me. If we had more competition between schools, we would see so many different kinds of school, parents would have so many choices, it would be far better for everyone than what we have now. (Further, without government involvement in education, competition would drive education costs down, which means that we would be paying less than we have to pay for under the present tax-funded system.)
Respectfully yours,
Alex Peak
deathtokoalas
you're missing the point.
can you provide a cogent argument as to how incentives for teachers could possibly have any effect on grades? because that's what i'm rejecting off hand as a ridiculous idea. in order for this to make any sense you have to establish a connection between how hard teachers work and how high students' grades are. i'm going to demand you do this before you continue the discussion, because there's nothing else that can be said until that is demonstrated. and, yes, you have the burden of proof because it's a positive statement.
you provided an anecdotal response, but it doesn't make any sense to me. if you were understanding something better when the student teacher came in, it would have to coincide with an increase in effort on your behalf. the student teacher certainly couldn't make you understand something better by explaining it differently. if you didn't understand it in the first place, rewording it isn't going to magically make you understand it! it had to be something you did. perhaps your interest in the course increased as a result of somebody closer to your age group teaching it.
"Would a teacher with no job security allow pessimism affect her or his performance? Perhaps, but one would have to suspect that such teachers would be marginally more inclined to be vigilant about not letting her or his performance slip."
what performance? what slip? what does how teachers scrawl things on a blackboard have to do with whether or not students take initiative to control their own lives?
there's a much larger, underlying problem with this perspective, which is really very much nanny state thinking and not at all libertarian. it's the idea of blaming other people for your own problems. rather than taking responsibility for being subpar parents when their kids don't do well in school, millions of middle class americans want to blame somebody else. teachers become an easy scapegoat for a society that doesn't want to take responsibility for any aspect of their own lives.
there is a problem with student initiative, but there's nothing teachers can do about it. i return to my initial conclusion: thinking that these problems can be solved by threatening to fire them is a symptom of what is wrong with our society, not the kind of thinking that is going to provide us with answers.
regardless, even if i agree that some teachers have better methods than others (and i deny this - i think it's 100% up to the student, and it essentially doesn't matter who is teaching or whether they care or how hard they work), then the solution is greater training. i mean, if there's some magic trick that can get kids to understand things better and teacher A understands it then there's no reason that teacher B shouldn't be trained to use those methods as well. arguing otherwise reduces to something about the personality of teacher B - that they're incapable of learning the method, unwilling to learn the method or disinterested in learning the method. threatening to fire them doesn't teach them that method, it just creates an unhealthy teaching environment where teachers are more concerned about losing their jobs than they are about doing their jobs. it's consequently not a rational approach to deal with the issue of underachieving students, but a way to scapegoat teachers into taking the blame for students - and a way to put teachers into a precarious position where they are forced to make further labour concessions.
the reality is that there isn't a magic technique. students are going to respond to things differently. especially with math (and i have a master's degree in math, fwiw), there's no way to do it except to sit down and teach yourself. there's a bit of a quip from a famous mathematician of the classical era that, when asked by a king to be taught mathematics, said "there's no royal road to mathematics". that is to say that even the king was going to have to sit down and do the work. there's no shortcut. and that certainly applies to just about anything else, excluding a handful of arts that rely purely on talent - things you can't teach at all.
when you look at studies regarding private and public schools, it all washes out when you control it for class. that is to say that what students bring to class is the dominant factor, not who is teaching the courses. if you take an inner city public school and swap teachers with an upper class private school, the grades will not change to reflect the teacher. rather, the teacher's performance will change to reflect the audience.
what we learn from that is that we need a cultural shift regarding how we raise our children, not a way to beat teachers into submission.
