Saturday, August 27, 2016
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Harold Pinter - A Kind of Alaska
Judi Dench and Harold Pinter
I won't say anything about this except it has rather haunted me since I decided not to post it.
Though not exactly a radio play. From Michael Mantler's setting of a text by Pinter
Around Me Sits the Night
From the album, Silence, an adaptation of the play by Harold Pinter
SILENCE
WATT/5
words
by Harold Pinter
(an
adaptation of the play 'Silence')
Robert
Wyatt (voice, percussion)Kevin Coyne (voice )
Carla Bley (voice, piano, organ)
Chris Spedding (guitar)
Ron McClure (bass)
score
Michael Mantler has a way with these kinds of texts.
Hate Mail
How stupid is it to expect me to get upset about what some of Duncan's rump of dolts say about me when the most they've ever read of anything I write is the clipped and misrepresented passages that one of their more vapid and dishonest "brain trust" buddies posts there.
Why would anyone care what such lazy, superficial people thought about anything? If they wanted to make me upset they could read the whole thing and come up with factual or logical refutations of what was said. "I don't like it" and "You're a stupid-head" don't worry me, at all.
Atrios maintains one of the bigger wastes of time on the internet considered to be of the left. I know, I wasted a lot of time there before 2012. But not as much as some others did. The getting got good there about a decade ago.
Dušan Bogdanović's Polyrhythmic and Polymetric Studies Are A Work of Genius
I had the chance, this morning, to look through Dušan Bogdanović's
Polyrhythmic and Polymetric Studies, both the first section of exercises and the etudes in the second section and I've got to say that it strikes me as the best thing I've ever seen of its kind. The range of polyrhythms is much smaller than those treated in another fine series of exercises and studies, Polyrhythms, A Musician's Guide by the jazz drummer Peter Magadini, but Bogdanović's melodic treatment of them has an added layer of musical substance and consideration. I think both books are essential for anyone who reaches the level of playing music containing varied and extended polyrhythms and polymeters (they aren't exactly the same things) or anyone who wants to master them for use in improvisation (impromptu composition) or composition (frozen improvisation). Both of those works are miles and miles ahead of Paul Hindemith's similar exercises in his famous book, Elementary Training For Musicians. If and when I'm ready to take students again I will
probably adapt some of them for keyboard, though I'm not up to
or arrogant enough to try to transcribe the etudes. Not sure
they'd work very well on keyboard, especially piano. Maybe on a
clavichord, though. Hope that idea annoys a certain someone. As I said, I have to have my fun, too.
Here is a doctoral dissertation by Michael J. Morey on the Polyrhythmic and Polymetric Studies, to get your interest up. Youtubes of three of the etudes were posted below last Tuesday if you want to hear some of them.
I'm Very Sick Today So Here's A Repeat Likely To Annoy Those Who Need Annoying. I've got to have my fun, too.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Why Materialism and Atheism Are Compatible With The Interests of the 1% And Entirely Incompatible With Liberalism
Here is my imperfect attempt to transcribe what I think is the most telling part of the "bad religion" guy's destruction of even the most general of moral principles, as he is, in the atheists' own terms, destroying their materialistic explanations of why that is right.
... There are competing things which are all good like happiness and truth. For example, we sacrifice some happiness when we accept the truth that we're not going to have life after death. Should we tell other people that they're not going to live after they die? It probably will reduce their happiness on the other hand truth has a value of its own how do you balance truth and happiness there isn't any algorithm for balancing that. I think you just have to accept that there is no postulate that allows you to judge how much happiness you're willing to give up for how much truth.
Even people who accept all this will say, all right we're not going to agree on what is the good but at least we can agree on the fundamental principle of morality that something like Rawls original condition [I think he meant "Original Position"] that we should not treat other people worse than we treat ourselves. Rebecca [Goldstein] was saying something like this that everyone equally deserves whatever is good, happiness or whatever it is. That's not the way I feel either. And I think it's probably not the way most of you feel if you think about it because. I could probably increase the total amount of happiness by making my family live on rice and beans and live in a one room apartment and just barely keep enough money to keep us alive and healthy and send all of the rest of the money to poor parts of the world where it would do to me. I'm not going to do that I'm not going to .... and I well, I'm not confessing immorality. I'm saying that my moral feelings tell me I should be loyal to my family.
Similarly when my university tries to recruit a bright young star in physics I suppose I could calculate, well, he could do more good for some other university and the greater good would imply we shouldn't go after him let some other university go after him. I don't care, I care about my university I'm loyal to my university similarly. So there loyalty is a value it's not an absolute value I wouldn't cause, like Edward the Third, I wouldn't cause the hundred years war to advance the interests of my family. But it is one of these things where we have no algorithm for balancing loyalty against distributive justice.
And I think we have to live with that. I think we have to live with the fact that although we can reason and try to uncover what our moral feelings are. And if we get into that I think a very good example would be arguing about abortion ... maybe I'll come back to that in the discussion.
We can reason, the reasoning uncovers how we feel morally and perhaps allows us to identify areas of agreement so we can cooperate with each other and bring about what we want.
I think in the end we have to live with not having a moral philosophy that really works in a decisive way. I think we have to live the unexamined life. I think this is part of the tragedy of the human condition just like we have no absolute way of determining that Mozart is better than Led Zeppelin we feel it but it's not something that we can argue, we can rationally show. We have to live with the fact that... this came up yesterday.... when we discover the fundamental laws of physics from which all in some sense follows, that all other principles follow, we won't know why they're true. This is something that we have to accept, that the position of human beings is tragic and part of the tragedy, that there is no way of deciding moral issues on the basis of - well there is no way of deciding moral postulates which should govern our actions. And in fact we don't have moral postulates that govern our actions when we behave morally.
I'll start by pointing out that it is the moral deficiency of Weinberg's ideology, materialistic atheism, that is at the base of his program of destruction. It is, as Rebecca Goldstein points out later, unrealistic and rather useless in dealing with the problem of how people behave, though I think her natural selection based attempt is totally unsuccessful, as well. It doesn't stand up to Weinberg's attack based on their shared framing. When Weinberg said, "we have to live with not having a moral philosophy that really works in a decisive way," he was, I believe unwittingly, pointing out why we can't possibly live with his intellectual pose in real life, because it will never work to produce moral behavior and prevent the horrible disasters that his preferred framing of familial and professional loyalty bring about, continually.
As in my update in my post the other day, you should compare Weinberg's statements to those of Jesus and think seriously as to which ones would produce the worst of family based plutocracies, oligarchies, crime families, and other aristocracies, corrupt institutions, unequal distribution of goods, material inequality and the political, legal and societal inequalities that are necessary for that. And you should ask which is actually compatible and incompatible with politically effective liberalism.
Weinberg's substitute for morality is far more supportive of the worst of Republican policy than anything Jesus said on the subject*, it is a secularized formulation of what Jesus said which Weinberg is arguing against, using the pose of a lack of absolute postulates for those things he throws his acid on while refusing to do the same with those he favors, physics, even as he grants they also lack the same thing he calls absolute knowledge. His "competing goods" of loyalty, truth, etc. are no more founded in his ideological framing than do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That universal acid of insisting on the artificial creation of algorithms and postulates such as those in mathematics and physics before you won't tell lies beneficial to yourself or to betray even those closest to you works on those quite nicely. I have not noted that scientists are especially loyal to their spouses and children of first marriages, such as Carl Sagan, though I suspect that if you could do a quantitative analysis, professional self-interest to your university department makes that stand up a bit better.
That Weinberg reassures us that his refusal to accept any kind of moral absolutes wouldn't lead him to start a Hundred-Years-War only shows that he's a conventional senior faculty member at an American university. They are mostly rather a contented lot who don't aspire to make war, except when their meal ticket is threatened. Though, again considering the role that the often asserted atheist-majority of physicists played in producing nuclear, atomic and massively destructive "conventional" armaments during his lifetime, you don't want to rely too heavily on them being uniformly otiose and even mostly harmless. That there is nothing in what's left of his program of destruction of morality to keep a more ambitious, modern day Macbeth in science from killing hundreds of millions is certainly more relevant than his personal lack of desire to do so. Sam Harris, as I'll remind you, has called for that as a rational consideration and in a similar kind of calculation as something that might substitute for "the good", which would last a day and not a hundred years.
A liberal who thinks hard about this won't find anything in materialism to support their liberalism, if their liberalism is a matter of the moral obligation to do justice in the world, real equality, material, social, political and legal, and the preservation and advancement of rights. When someone chooses the ideological position of atheism, materialism, scientism, there isn't even anything that could make the entire destruction of the biosphere and the eventual extinction of human and all other life on the planet an absolute act of immorality if an atheist, so able, choose temporary self-interest over the continuation of life, itself. You need to exit the framework that is materialist atheism to assert why they shouldn't.
* For example, from Matthew, the continual insistence of Jesus that you had a moral obligation to act morally outside of your family and inner circle, that even the gentiles and tax collectors and such were nice to their family and friends. The elite 1% are the relevant modern day equivalent. Weinberg is saying there is no reason for people such as those at Carroll's discussion group to act any better than they do and he, from an atheist, materialist and scientistic viewpoint, successfully destroys all of their attempts to make natural selection come up with a reason for him to not do just what he wants to. And he's considered something of an expert on such things among pop atheists, frequently presented as such, one who is constantly being thrown in other peoples' faces on these issues.
Friday, August 26, 2016
" You never post standards"
I do sometimes. Here
Art Blakey And The Jazz Messangers 1958 A Night In Tunisia
Drums: Art Blakey
Trumpet: Lee Morgan
Sax: Benny Golson
Piano: Bobby Timmons
Bass: Jymie Merritt
Here's another one
Moanin'
Art Blakey And The Jazz Messangers 1958 A Night In Tunisia
Drums: Art Blakey
Trumpet: Lee Morgan
Sax: Benny Golson
Piano: Bobby Timmons
Bass: Jymie Merritt
Here's another one
Moanin'
Cluelessness Made Simels - Two Comments
steve simelsAugust 26, 2016 at 5:36 PM
BTW, are your neighbors avoiding you because of your porn obsession?
I would, if I were them.
The Thought CriminalAugust 26, 2016 at 5:39 PM
Oh, are you saying there's something wrong with people who consume porn? Yes, I think you unwittingly did just say that, as you unwittingly say everything, including "and" and "the". Why, Simps, you are agreeing with me without even being aware of it. How truly hilarious that is, and here you think I'm humorless.
Update: Oh, yeah, I forgot, feel free to avoid me from now on. Feel entirely free to do that.
BTW, are your neighbors avoiding you because of your porn obsession?
I would, if I were them.
The Thought CriminalAugust 26, 2016 at 5:39 PM
Oh, are you saying there's something wrong with people who consume porn? Yes, I think you unwittingly did just say that, as you unwittingly say everything, including "and" and "the". Why, Simps, you are agreeing with me without even being aware of it. How truly hilarious that is, and here you think I'm humorless.
Update: Oh, yeah, I forgot, feel free to avoid me from now on. Feel entirely free to do that.
Using Kitty Genovese - "Where is all this coming from?"
Where it's coming from is the reaction to a post I did exactly one week ago in which I documented just a tiny fraction of the kind of pathological self-hatred of gay boys and men, setting up a hierarchy of "alpha men, gay men" really Nietzschian "supermen" types who, by their superior strength, sociopathy, and, very occasionally, superior intelligence, are encouraged to seduce and oppress, abduct, rape, torture, humiliate, degrade, insult, and generally abused what are presented as inferior boys and men for the sexual gratification as self-aggrandizement of said "alpha men" all of it as found in gay porn available for free consumption by anyone on the web. And you will find every aspect of fascistic and Nazi role playing, white supremacist psychosis and whatever other depraved aspect of human thought or history that can be mixed into the stinking mess and sold with sadistic porn images, gifs and videos, as gay porn. I will repost that original piece below this.
I am a gay man who has the radical idea that every gay man, every person who falls under the LGBT acronym, every straight woman who doesn't, in fact every single person in the world, deserves entirely better treatment than that. And when I say "ENTIRELY BETTER" I mean in every single way. I think everyone deserves to have sexual relationships of the highest kind which will be an equal experience of love, affection, committed caring and honest fidelity. I think that Lesbians and gay men deserve to have truly equal same-sex marriages, equal to the best of straight marriages of equally practiced and experienced love, affection, committed caring and honest fidelity. I don't think fighting for the right to reproduce the worst kind of straight marriage would be worth the effort of anyone. But that and entirely worse is being sold through porn in its idiotically enabled and ever worse form, encouraging the worst that any sick mind can encourage in other sick minds and those who can be enticed by that kind of fantasy to practice ever more degraded, ever less loving and affectionate, ever more hating and indifferent, uncaring, dishonest sexual acts by them.
You can't have both, the best, most moral sexual relationships, an expression of equality, of respecting equal rights, the dignity of each other embodying the moral obligation to treat everyone that way can't co-exist with the regime of the kind of pornography I'm talking about. They are mutually exclusive, both ways of thinking, both ways of acting cannot exist in the same mind without damage to the better of them, both programs of behavior cannot be encouraged in the same society without damage to the better, never mind the best of it which we might aspire to. Individuals might be able to sustain such a duality in appearance but it will be at a cost to their front of virtue maintained while their worst part is undamaged and will come to corrupt even what appears to the world to be good. The same is true for a society, perhaps even more so through the powers of magnification.
When Jimmy Carter was mocked for his statement that he "had sinned in his heart", making reference to what Jesus said about the consequences of seeing other people as merely sexual objects instead of the full human beings, the full living beings they are, it showed how far the American society was on the road to this kind of thing.
The lie told by the professional porn promoters in the media, the legal profession, such "social scientists" as they could pay to push their lies is that porn and the industrialization of sex for profit was not only not harmful but an alleged benefit to society, is a lie. It is a lie which, through the basest of coercion and corruption has become the required, de rigeur framing of this issue in what passes as respectable thought these days.
Of course feminism, in even its earliest phases, knew that was a lie due to the experience of women who had to fight against sexual objectification as the most basic aspect of their struggle for equality, just as black people had to most directly address the forms of objectification that were the substance of their inequality. The aspects of the inequality of gay men was more directly done primarily through our sexual natures and, so, the mixture of that with the huge burden of internalized self-loathing and hatred which burden us could easily create this kind of pathology. Lesbians, being women as well as defined by their sexuality had to deal with both forms of oppression and that informed their struggle for equality. Gay men, being men, are, perhaps, more prone to have the same expectations of unequal relationship that can be the worst aspect of many straight sexual relationships. The kind of thing I am dealing with here plays off of those vicissitudes of gay male identity as men who are attracted to men but men who have been, in so many cases, raised with all of the same screwed up expectations of inequality and unequal benefits from sex that are taught in the wider society and the media. No two groups are discriminated against in exactly the same way, each struggle for equality will have its own aspects peculiar to that group as well as features which are common to all.
It's all a lot more complex than the simplistic, reductionist program of making general absolute statements and facile arguments can admit to. Journalism and its advocacy seldom practices the kind of depth that you need to get past the slogans, the lies, the deceptions, the inadequate and dishonest framing of this issue just as it seldom got real feminism, creating a phony substitute for it for easy and quick sale. The results are the backlash against real equality for women and the increasingly pathological sex lives people are encouraged to have because objectification is easier and more profitable than relationships of equal love, affection, support and commitment. And the sale of the cheap imitation, the gaudy knock-off results in what I've been writing about for the past week.
Filthy 卐 Brutal 卐 White
Reblog if you want it Unsafe Insane and Non-Consensual
via Degradation and Destruction
Drugged, raped, and pozzed [to be intentionally infected with HIV]
Yeah, we make snuff movies glad you could come over tonight.
Rape me like a faggot
Superior white men
This site is dedicated to the restoration of the rights of the straight white man that have been stolen by faggots over time
Live your fantasies [That one comes right after encouraging raping and killing a young "man" who looks about 12]
Those are accompanied with porn photos, gifs, videos, that are intended to sell the messaging with sex.
And that's just on one site. Tell me why letting this stuff be posted online, where any psychopath can get their worst inclinations encouraged with sexual imagery is good for democracy or how any prosecutor or judge couldn't figure out that it's encouraging fascism, racism, violent domination, harm, rape and murder. Or why you are afraid that coming to that would endanger the right to encourage the opposites of those? .
The lie that we aren't capable of regulating those decisions by courts and so we MUST allow this kind of stuff, and, believe it or not, far worse, to be considered to have the right to be distributed to the susceptible, is so willfully stupid that you have to be even more willfully stupid to pretend you really believe that. Somehow, the Franklin Roosevelt administration, with all of its enormous advances, the advances in civil rights during the 1950s and early 60s happened in a country where the distribution and sale of that stuff would have been illegal and gotten you a prison term, and yet democracy was advancing during that period. It's in the period when the Supreme Court permitted its distribution without restriction that has seen the destruction of civil rights progress, the corruption of democracy, the putsch that stole the presidency and the elevation of a TV created fascist strong-man to be within one woman from the presidency and the ability to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will obliterate democracy.
You people are total fools if you can't see the problem. I don't want to be part of any "left" that pushes lies like that.
Post script: I didn't realize until yesterday the relevance of that song, Small Circle of Friends to what I was talking about. Thinking about that Phil Ochs song that begins with an evocation of the infamous murder of Kitty Genovese but, in its iconic treatment focusing on the supposed urban anonymous indifference of those who heard her being killed, as first read about in the New York Times. Ochs and the media, then and now, ignore the facts of what led the man who killed her to believe he should do what he did, that that was permissible, that he had a large stash of straight pornography presenting women as objects for the use of men found with him when he was arrested for breaking, entering and theft. The extent to which him having that stash of porn tipped off the police that he might have been involved in the sexual murder of several women, including Kitty Genovese, is certainly worth thinking about. They certainly made the connection. I would imagine they were used to seeing rapists, sex murderes having stashes of porn and that having one might be an indication of what to suspect. That its relevance went over the head of Ochs, to the extent that he, later in the song presents a porn publisher's prosecution as another instance of injustice on par with the others in the song. That isn't a surprise, the lefty media had been pushing that line for more than a few decades, already. Those guys, who, no doubt, believed themselves to be more sophisticated than police detectives, didn't seem to get a glaringly relevant aspect of the case and what information it carried. How its relevance could be denied and that denial could be pretended to be credible also carries a lot of information but about how willfully dishonest the media, mostly men but with a few women, are about this.
It would take several more years before the second-wave feminists pointed out that presenting people as objects in pornography had real consequences, for the women so used and for the general society as men, so informed and encouraged, treated women like objects for their use. The men of the media retaliated rather fast painting that insight of feminism in about the worst and most dishonest of lights, including the entertainment industry. Feminism would have made it harder to crank out the same kind of crap they'd relied on to make money for a long time, its writers, directors, producers, would have had to have learned entirely new ways of writing and, worse, they'd have had to have thought about a situation that, still, largely, is for the benefit of men. It certainly was harder and more complex than would fit into a preachy protest song of the period.
They used Kitty Genovese for their own purposes and still do without caring much about what it was that led the man who killed her to do what he did, what he did to other women, what is done to millions of other women and children and men who can be subjected to someone with a physical advantage and the idea that they are entitled to use them and dispose of them as they like. It's easier to make up stuff about the neighbors and concentrate on that, instead. They don't even bother with the other women, just the one the New York Times used.
I am a gay man who has the radical idea that every gay man, every person who falls under the LGBT acronym, every straight woman who doesn't, in fact every single person in the world, deserves entirely better treatment than that. And when I say "ENTIRELY BETTER" I mean in every single way. I think everyone deserves to have sexual relationships of the highest kind which will be an equal experience of love, affection, committed caring and honest fidelity. I think that Lesbians and gay men deserve to have truly equal same-sex marriages, equal to the best of straight marriages of equally practiced and experienced love, affection, committed caring and honest fidelity. I don't think fighting for the right to reproduce the worst kind of straight marriage would be worth the effort of anyone. But that and entirely worse is being sold through porn in its idiotically enabled and ever worse form, encouraging the worst that any sick mind can encourage in other sick minds and those who can be enticed by that kind of fantasy to practice ever more degraded, ever less loving and affectionate, ever more hating and indifferent, uncaring, dishonest sexual acts by them.
You can't have both, the best, most moral sexual relationships, an expression of equality, of respecting equal rights, the dignity of each other embodying the moral obligation to treat everyone that way can't co-exist with the regime of the kind of pornography I'm talking about. They are mutually exclusive, both ways of thinking, both ways of acting cannot exist in the same mind without damage to the better of them, both programs of behavior cannot be encouraged in the same society without damage to the better, never mind the best of it which we might aspire to. Individuals might be able to sustain such a duality in appearance but it will be at a cost to their front of virtue maintained while their worst part is undamaged and will come to corrupt even what appears to the world to be good. The same is true for a society, perhaps even more so through the powers of magnification.
When Jimmy Carter was mocked for his statement that he "had sinned in his heart", making reference to what Jesus said about the consequences of seeing other people as merely sexual objects instead of the full human beings, the full living beings they are, it showed how far the American society was on the road to this kind of thing.
The lie told by the professional porn promoters in the media, the legal profession, such "social scientists" as they could pay to push their lies is that porn and the industrialization of sex for profit was not only not harmful but an alleged benefit to society, is a lie. It is a lie which, through the basest of coercion and corruption has become the required, de rigeur framing of this issue in what passes as respectable thought these days.
Of course feminism, in even its earliest phases, knew that was a lie due to the experience of women who had to fight against sexual objectification as the most basic aspect of their struggle for equality, just as black people had to most directly address the forms of objectification that were the substance of their inequality. The aspects of the inequality of gay men was more directly done primarily through our sexual natures and, so, the mixture of that with the huge burden of internalized self-loathing and hatred which burden us could easily create this kind of pathology. Lesbians, being women as well as defined by their sexuality had to deal with both forms of oppression and that informed their struggle for equality. Gay men, being men, are, perhaps, more prone to have the same expectations of unequal relationship that can be the worst aspect of many straight sexual relationships. The kind of thing I am dealing with here plays off of those vicissitudes of gay male identity as men who are attracted to men but men who have been, in so many cases, raised with all of the same screwed up expectations of inequality and unequal benefits from sex that are taught in the wider society and the media. No two groups are discriminated against in exactly the same way, each struggle for equality will have its own aspects peculiar to that group as well as features which are common to all.
It's all a lot more complex than the simplistic, reductionist program of making general absolute statements and facile arguments can admit to. Journalism and its advocacy seldom practices the kind of depth that you need to get past the slogans, the lies, the deceptions, the inadequate and dishonest framing of this issue just as it seldom got real feminism, creating a phony substitute for it for easy and quick sale. The results are the backlash against real equality for women and the increasingly pathological sex lives people are encouraged to have because objectification is easier and more profitable than relationships of equal love, affection, support and commitment. And the sale of the cheap imitation, the gaudy knock-off results in what I've been writing about for the past week.
Friday, August 19, 2016
Hate Mail - Tell Us Which Of These Things Being Sold With Sex On Porn Sites This Month Are Compatible With Democratic Morals
Reblog if you want it Unsafe Insane and Non-Consensual
via Degradation and Destruction
Drugged, raped, and pozzed [to be intentionally infected with HIV]
Yeah, we make snuff movies glad you could come over tonight.
Rape me like a faggot
Superior white men
This site is dedicated to the restoration of the rights of the straight white man that have been stolen by faggots over time
Live your fantasies [That one comes right after encouraging raping and killing a young "man" who looks about 12]
Those are accompanied with porn photos, gifs, videos, that are intended to sell the messaging with sex.
And that's just on one site. Tell me why letting this stuff be posted online, where any psychopath can get their worst inclinations encouraged with sexual imagery is good for democracy or how any prosecutor or judge couldn't figure out that it's encouraging fascism, racism, violent domination, harm, rape and murder. Or why you are afraid that coming to that would endanger the right to encourage the opposites of those? .
The lie that we aren't capable of regulating those decisions by courts and so we MUST allow this kind of stuff, and, believe it or not, far worse, to be considered to have the right to be distributed to the susceptible, is so willfully stupid that you have to be even more willfully stupid to pretend you really believe that. Somehow, the Franklin Roosevelt administration, with all of its enormous advances, the advances in civil rights during the 1950s and early 60s happened in a country where the distribution and sale of that stuff would have been illegal and gotten you a prison term, and yet democracy was advancing during that period. It's in the period when the Supreme Court permitted its distribution without restriction that has seen the destruction of civil rights progress, the corruption of democracy, the putsch that stole the presidency and the elevation of a TV created fascist strong-man to be within one woman from the presidency and the ability to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will obliterate democracy.
You people are total fools if you can't see the problem. I don't want to be part of any "left" that pushes lies like that.
Post script: I didn't realize until yesterday the relevance of that song, Small Circle of Friends to what I was talking about. Thinking about that Phil Ochs song that begins with an evocation of the infamous murder of Kitty Genovese but, in its iconic treatment focusing on the supposed urban anonymous indifference of those who heard her being killed, as first read about in the New York Times. Ochs and the media, then and now, ignore the facts of what led the man who killed her to believe he should do what he did, that that was permissible, that he had a large stash of straight pornography presenting women as objects for the use of men found with him when he was arrested for breaking, entering and theft. The extent to which him having that stash of porn tipped off the police that he might have been involved in the sexual murder of several women, including Kitty Genovese, is certainly worth thinking about. They certainly made the connection. I would imagine they were used to seeing rapists, sex murderes having stashes of porn and that having one might be an indication of what to suspect. That its relevance went over the head of Ochs, to the extent that he, later in the song presents a porn publisher's prosecution as another instance of injustice on par with the others in the song. That isn't a surprise, the lefty media had been pushing that line for more than a few decades, already. Those guys, who, no doubt, believed themselves to be more sophisticated than police detectives, didn't seem to get a glaringly relevant aspect of the case and what information it carried. How its relevance could be denied and that denial could be pretended to be credible also carries a lot of information but about how willfully dishonest the media, mostly men but with a few women, are about this.
It would take several more years before the second-wave feminists pointed out that presenting people as objects in pornography had real consequences, for the women so used and for the general society as men, so informed and encouraged, treated women like objects for their use. The men of the media retaliated rather fast painting that insight of feminism in about the worst and most dishonest of lights, including the entertainment industry. Feminism would have made it harder to crank out the same kind of crap they'd relied on to make money for a long time, its writers, directors, producers, would have had to have learned entirely new ways of writing and, worse, they'd have had to have thought about a situation that, still, largely, is for the benefit of men. It certainly was harder and more complex than would fit into a preachy protest song of the period.
They used Kitty Genovese for their own purposes and still do without caring much about what it was that led the man who killed her to do what he did, what he did to other women, what is done to millions of other women and children and men who can be subjected to someone with a physical advantage and the idea that they are entitled to use them and dispose of them as they like. It's easier to make up stuff about the neighbors and concentrate on that, instead. They don't even bother with the other women, just the one the New York Times used.
Thursday, August 25, 2016
Dušan Bogdanović - Book of the Unknown Standards
Adrian Martinez, guitar
I've become interested in hearing as much of Dušan Bogdanović's music as I can find. Luckily, he wrote a lot and transcribed a bit too.
Hommage a Federico Mompou
Christopher Colucci, guitar.
This is the second of the "Easier Polymetric Studies", Bogdanovic's writing of real contrapuntal textures for solo guitar is one of the most interesting things about his music. The independence of the voices can make it sound like more than one guitar is playing, at times.
We Need A Second Wave of Second Wave or The New Speak c. 2016 Is The Same As The New Speak c. 1966
So, your claim is that the fact that the man who murdered Kitty Genovese and at least two other women, raped and brutalized others, when he was arrested, had a stash of straight porn in his car is of no bearing on trying to figure out what made him do what he did. What motivated him, what empowered him to ignore any idea that he didn't have a right to do that. Yeah, typical 60s era , pseudo-liberal double-speak as pushed by the media industry and the "free speech - free press" lawyers in the employ of said industry. And the "liberals" who were a lot more wedded to being groovy than to something like equality and the moral obligation to respect equal rights.
I think that we're really way over-due for a second wave of second wave feminism in its most brutally logical, brutally honest and brutally insistent forms. The left went stupid for the crap that shoved it aside. I'll name names, almost all of them from the lefty side of the scribbling profession, pretty much anyone who took up "First-amendment absolutism" as a motto.
We really need a list of sex murderers and their consumption of porn and their other influences. Primary evidence in this argument which is hardly ever considered.
Update: Well, maybe if you were an LGBT person you wouldn't think it was unimportant. Or a straight woman. As I say below, straight, white, men often don't see life from the perspectives those not so privileged do. I would imagine straight, white men are about the least likely of people who would a. have to worry about being abused or murdered in a sexual manner, b. would be in the habit of considering that a possibility for themselves. That would take an act of empathetic imagination that straight, white men so often consider a sign of effeminacy and wouldn't catch themselves dead practicing.
Update 2: Don't bother telling me what Duncan's Dimwits say about things they don't read. Especially the real dim bulbs like Tlaz and Skeptic Tank. Nothing much has happened over there since that walk on part on West Wing was alleged to be Duncan Black went to his head and he figured he didn't have to do any work any more.
I think that we're really way over-due for a second wave of second wave feminism in its most brutally logical, brutally honest and brutally insistent forms. The left went stupid for the crap that shoved it aside. I'll name names, almost all of them from the lefty side of the scribbling profession, pretty much anyone who took up "First-amendment absolutism" as a motto.
We really need a list of sex murderers and their consumption of porn and their other influences. Primary evidence in this argument which is hardly ever considered.
Update: Well, maybe if you were an LGBT person you wouldn't think it was unimportant. Or a straight woman. As I say below, straight, white, men often don't see life from the perspectives those not so privileged do. I would imagine straight, white men are about the least likely of people who would a. have to worry about being abused or murdered in a sexual manner, b. would be in the habit of considering that a possibility for themselves. That would take an act of empathetic imagination that straight, white men so often consider a sign of effeminacy and wouldn't catch themselves dead practicing.
Update 2: Don't bother telling me what Duncan's Dimwits say about things they don't read. Especially the real dim bulbs like Tlaz and Skeptic Tank. Nothing much has happened over there since that walk on part on West Wing was alleged to be Duncan Black went to his head and he figured he didn't have to do any work any more.
Hate Mail - "Why Don't You Just Not Look At It"
How typical of the preening, narcissistic, materialist-atheist, pseudo-liberal to consider what I objected to in the promotion of internalized hatred and the bashing, humiliation and abuse of gay boys and men as if it were a mere matter of personal distaste for something, ignoring the fact that what is promoted actually does harm real people, whether or not you see it or know the people so abused. No, merely not looking and ignoring that this is being promoted and, beyond any rational ability to deny it, modeling the behavior of people through appealing to both their narcissistic, egotistical feelings of supremacy and finding sexual arousal in hurting other people is too easy and entirely inadequate.
This is the American Firster way of dealing with the advocacy and the practice of fascistic violence somewhere out of sight, treat it as if the personal comfort of those bothered by it was the paramount consideration for you to have, pretending that it isn't there. We're talking about the abuse of real people in real life, not going to a bad movie or listening to a bad dance band. Though, considering the content of what's being objected to, the egotism of it, perhaps its not surprising that its champions would consider that to be a rational or adequate response to it.
If I were going to deal with only what's easy, what is not problematic, the common received consensus I wouldn't bother writing to post it, at all. If I were going to do that there wouldn't be any point to it because that's already done in things that are published for profit, either to sell magazines or by those who put up ads and links to Amazon. But, really, for someone who thinks the way to deal with things you don't like is to not read them, you spend a lot of time here looking at stuff you don't like and whining that it's been said.
I don't want my LGBT family members, including myself, to act in the ways taught and encouraged by pornography, or the straight ones. I don't want any of them abused and used in that way. The difference between us might be I don't want anyone to either be destroyed in that way or to be the people who give into any encouragement to act that way strongly enough to look at that awful stuff to know what's being advocated. Not people I merely know about, not people who I don't even know are alive and at risk for that. It's not all about us. It's not all about me. It's certainly not all about you.
Update: Let me guess, when Phil Ochs sang "A Small Circle of Friends" you thought the guy explaining his indifference really had a valid point. That's essentially what you're arguing this is about, its OK because only the people it's going to hurt and their small circle of friends need to care about it. And it's exactly the attitude to that the post-feminist "left" including so many "feminists" have gotten seduced into whenever sex is involved. In fact Ochs got suckered into it by the parts of the media that wanted to peddle smut - with no concern for real people whose lives were destroyed by that industry - as you can hear from the lyrics. It was such a groovy position to hold in the later 60s, before those second-wave feminists ruined the boys' fun. Hey, he wasn't someone who was being pimped to whoever wanted to beat him up while they corn holed him, infected him, wore away his soul or crushed it. So much for the educational value of pop music. Maybe the latter days of Ochs' life, before his suicide, were worn away by the hypocrisies and idiocies of materialism posing as an adequate substitute for real liberalism.
I wonder why Phil Ochs' creative imagination didn't extend to wondering how the man who stabbed Kitty Genovese got the idea that it was OK to do that to women, how that was and is a predictable result of seeing women as objects that men can do with what they like, exactly the kind of thing that pornography teaches. When Winston Moseley had been arrested for theft he had a stash of pornography in his car.
But maybe partying with guys like William Kunstler diverted him from making that intellectual and personal connection. I remember those times really well. Boys didn't think much about the consequences for women unless something like reading about it in The Times forced them to and The Times didn't cover it much. Straight boys were pretty much a small circle of friends interested in what interested them. Even the ones who sang about that in their artistic life as a lefty protest singer-songwriter.
This is the American Firster way of dealing with the advocacy and the practice of fascistic violence somewhere out of sight, treat it as if the personal comfort of those bothered by it was the paramount consideration for you to have, pretending that it isn't there. We're talking about the abuse of real people in real life, not going to a bad movie or listening to a bad dance band. Though, considering the content of what's being objected to, the egotism of it, perhaps its not surprising that its champions would consider that to be a rational or adequate response to it.
If I were going to deal with only what's easy, what is not problematic, the common received consensus I wouldn't bother writing to post it, at all. If I were going to do that there wouldn't be any point to it because that's already done in things that are published for profit, either to sell magazines or by those who put up ads and links to Amazon. But, really, for someone who thinks the way to deal with things you don't like is to not read them, you spend a lot of time here looking at stuff you don't like and whining that it's been said.
I don't want my LGBT family members, including myself, to act in the ways taught and encouraged by pornography, or the straight ones. I don't want any of them abused and used in that way. The difference between us might be I don't want anyone to either be destroyed in that way or to be the people who give into any encouragement to act that way strongly enough to look at that awful stuff to know what's being advocated. Not people I merely know about, not people who I don't even know are alive and at risk for that. It's not all about us. It's not all about me. It's certainly not all about you.
Update: Let me guess, when Phil Ochs sang "A Small Circle of Friends" you thought the guy explaining his indifference really had a valid point. That's essentially what you're arguing this is about, its OK because only the people it's going to hurt and their small circle of friends need to care about it. And it's exactly the attitude to that the post-feminist "left" including so many "feminists" have gotten seduced into whenever sex is involved. In fact Ochs got suckered into it by the parts of the media that wanted to peddle smut - with no concern for real people whose lives were destroyed by that industry - as you can hear from the lyrics. It was such a groovy position to hold in the later 60s, before those second-wave feminists ruined the boys' fun. Hey, he wasn't someone who was being pimped to whoever wanted to beat him up while they corn holed him, infected him, wore away his soul or crushed it. So much for the educational value of pop music. Maybe the latter days of Ochs' life, before his suicide, were worn away by the hypocrisies and idiocies of materialism posing as an adequate substitute for real liberalism.
I wonder why Phil Ochs' creative imagination didn't extend to wondering how the man who stabbed Kitty Genovese got the idea that it was OK to do that to women, how that was and is a predictable result of seeing women as objects that men can do with what they like, exactly the kind of thing that pornography teaches. When Winston Moseley had been arrested for theft he had a stash of pornography in his car.
But maybe partying with guys like William Kunstler diverted him from making that intellectual and personal connection. I remember those times really well. Boys didn't think much about the consequences for women unless something like reading about it in The Times forced them to and The Times didn't cover it much. Straight boys were pretty much a small circle of friends interested in what interested them. Even the ones who sang about that in their artistic life as a lefty protest singer-songwriter.
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Encouraging The Hatred, Oppression and Destruction of Gay Boys and Men Isn't Any Better Than Gay Bashing Especially When It's Sold Through Sex - Hate Mail
Encouraging pathological sexuality among men, the encouragement of pathological narcissism, selfishness, egomania as sexual dominance is behind every rape, every act of using sex to harm someone else, every sexual murder, the rape of children, etc. That's as true when the man so encouraged is gay as when he is straight and might focus his domineering hatred on women or LGBT people. The added feature of internalized hatred when it is encouraged in gay men, through pornography, only adds to the pathological nature of it. The lives of gay men aren't there for the entertainment of would-be sophisticated straight people who like to impress each other with their not being shocked at things they hope will be found generally shocking. The lives of gay men aren't there for the free speech, free press industry to use to enable their rich backers to get to peddle ever more pathological encouragement to act in those ways.
When the old, white, straight theologian Walter Brueggemann was asked about the morality of gay sex, he, very impressively and very tellingly answered in terms of the generalized use of sex as an occasion to sin among straight as well as LGBT people. I thought it was the most impressive answer to the question I've seen, taking into account the very common use of all sex as an occasion to do evil and to call that evil what it is, evil. It was so much more realistic, so much more sophisticated, so much more liberal than the pseudo-sophisticated common received wisdom that when you can call something sex, that means acknowledging the evil done through it and often obviously practiced through it is not to be mentioned, that when you call it "sex" that means that any evil done from it i not allowed to be acknowledged as evil. Today, all too often, gay sex is the hate that you dare not name for fear of being considered uncool and unsophisticated. Only, and especially when you are a gay man to deny that is to deny one of the primary venues of spreading hate of gay men and others, the encouragement to oppression, harm, degradation, humiliation, maiming and death, even of murder.
Mixing messed up feelings of sex in it doesn't make it one bit less bad than when the most violent of straight gay bashers do exactly the same thing without any sexual arousal being involved. Tumblr is a far larger, far more extensive, far more influential venue of disseminating the hatred of LGBT people than the notorious Westboro Baptist Church of Fred Phelps and his tribe of vicious haters. I don't link to either straight or gay-porn sites that incite hatred and violence but the messaging, down to the URLs of some of them are indistinguishable, except that the alleged "Baptists" dirty the name of Jesus in their blasphemous depravity.
Trying to white-wash it by saying "First Amendment" is a lie, it is a dangerous lie that has been turned into the law of the land by the media industry using the language of civil liberties, sold by peddlers trained at Ivy League law schools to a very willing judiciary, either through the stupid idea that they were promoting liberalism or through the very sly motive of using the rulings that resulted to allow the corruption of the political process in favor of Republican-fascism. Once the corporate thugs on the Supreme Court figured out they could throw the anti-porn folks over the side and use "free speech" to enable billionaires to lie in the media, they took that opportunity every chance they could.
When the old, white, straight theologian Walter Brueggemann was asked about the morality of gay sex, he, very impressively and very tellingly answered in terms of the generalized use of sex as an occasion to sin among straight as well as LGBT people. I thought it was the most impressive answer to the question I've seen, taking into account the very common use of all sex as an occasion to do evil and to call that evil what it is, evil. It was so much more realistic, so much more sophisticated, so much more liberal than the pseudo-sophisticated common received wisdom that when you can call something sex, that means acknowledging the evil done through it and often obviously practiced through it is not to be mentioned, that when you call it "sex" that means that any evil done from it i not allowed to be acknowledged as evil. Today, all too often, gay sex is the hate that you dare not name for fear of being considered uncool and unsophisticated. Only, and especially when you are a gay man to deny that is to deny one of the primary venues of spreading hate of gay men and others, the encouragement to oppression, harm, degradation, humiliation, maiming and death, even of murder.
Mixing messed up feelings of sex in it doesn't make it one bit less bad than when the most violent of straight gay bashers do exactly the same thing without any sexual arousal being involved. Tumblr is a far larger, far more extensive, far more influential venue of disseminating the hatred of LGBT people than the notorious Westboro Baptist Church of Fred Phelps and his tribe of vicious haters. I don't link to either straight or gay-porn sites that incite hatred and violence but the messaging, down to the URLs of some of them are indistinguishable, except that the alleged "Baptists" dirty the name of Jesus in their blasphemous depravity.
Trying to white-wash it by saying "First Amendment" is a lie, it is a dangerous lie that has been turned into the law of the land by the media industry using the language of civil liberties, sold by peddlers trained at Ivy League law schools to a very willing judiciary, either through the stupid idea that they were promoting liberalism or through the very sly motive of using the rulings that resulted to allow the corruption of the political process in favor of Republican-fascism. Once the corporate thugs on the Supreme Court figured out they could throw the anti-porn folks over the side and use "free speech" to enable billionaires to lie in the media, they took that opportunity every chance they could.
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Dušan Bogdanović - Polyrhythmic and Polymetric Studies: I. Molto ritmico
II. Con meditazione
III. Rubato, appassionato
Angelo Marchese, guitar
This is wonderful music.
Enrique Granados - La Mira De La Maja - Victoria De Los Angeles, Gerald Moore
Good Lord, could she ever sing, could he ever accompany.
La Maja de Goya: Ana María Sánchez soprano, Enrique Pérez de Guzmán Piano
I ran across this recording of the most famous of the group of songs a few years back. She's very, very good but his accompaniment is the best I've heard on this song.
Victoria de los Angeles "La maja y el ruiseñor" Goyescas
Philarmonia
Orchestra. Anatole Fistonlardi conductor
Enrique Granados
died far too young when the boat he was going back to Spain on was
torpedoed and sunk during WWI.
WikiLeaks, Never Elected By Anyone Is A Law Unto Itself Or A Terrorist Group, If It Chooses To Be
It is one of the stupidest things, the knee jerk, automatic reaction on the alleged left that puts on the highest of pedastals entirely private, secretive organizations of people who break the laws by collecting, distributing and publishing stolen information collected by hackers. When the United States government breaks laws, it can be held accountable in many cases. If it violates the law in invading someones' privacy it can be prosecuted, who are you going to hold accountable if WikiLeaks publishes your most intimate and private information as a result of one of its massive, publicity or revenge data dumps?
Someone asked me if I were not worried that slamming Assange and his merry hackers could result in them going after me. Do they even know I'm doing it? I doubt it, but, well, I don't know, should I be worried? And if that's a serious question, doesn't it actually prove the point that these unelected, unaccountable groups of hackers are criminals who, if they wanted, could destroy people and, since they are largely anonymous, no one could hold them accountable? As it is, I'm more worried about the person I share computers with, some times. He didn't ask to be involved with this and I did tell him that it's a possibility, once it was pointed out to me. If he were attacked, he knows it's my fault and I would feel obligated to go off line for good, at least as myself. Of course, by that time the damage would have been done.
In the mean time, here are some instances in which Julian Assange, complaining about the time and expense of "vetting" the stuff he has used and uses to gain fame and, I'd guess, fortune for himself, including the private information they or their contributors have stolen in the past.
WikiLeaks’ global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill.
In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial, or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.
‘‘They published everything: my phone, address, name, details,’’ said a Saudi man who said he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. ‘‘If the family of my wife saw this . . . Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.’’
WikiLeaks’ mass publication of personal data is at odds with the site’s claim to have championed privacy, even as it laid bare the workings of international statecraft, and has drawn criticism from the site’s allies.
Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were unsuccessful; a set of questions left with his site wasn’t immediately answered Tuesday. WikiLeaks’ stated mission is to bring censored or restricted material ‘‘involving war, spying and corruption’’ into the public eye, describing the trove amassed thus far as a ‘‘giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents.’’
The library is growing quickly, with half a million files from the US Democratic National Committee, Turkey’s governing party, and the Saudi Foreign Ministry added in the last year or so. But the library is also filling with rogue data, including computer viruses, spam, and a compendium of personal records.
The Saudi diplomatic cables alone hold at least 124 medical files, according to a sample analyzed. Some described patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children, or refugees.
‘‘This has nothing to do with politics or corruption,’’ said Dr. Nayef al-Fayez, a consultant in the Jordanian capital of Amman who confirmed that a brain cancer patient of his was among those whose details were published to the web. Dr. Adnan Salhab, a retired practitioner in Jordan who also had a patient named in the files, expressed anger when shown the document
‘‘This is illegal what has happened,’’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘‘It is illegal!’’.
Yeah, it's illegal and one thing you know, WikiLeaks didn't have to go in front of a court to justify doing what it did, its "contributors" never got a court warrant to search and seize information, they have no legal procedure to determine which information it should leak and which it should not, they have no accountability at all. And what you can say about WikiLeaks and the people who steal information for it, you can say about other online, secret groups which also do this. You might point out to the stuff you approve of being released as if that justifies the other things but if it were you whose life was destroyed or put in jeopardy by the self-styled transparency crusaders (held up as great heroes by the fans of privacy at the same time !) I suspect you wouldn't see it the same way.
Do read the story at the Boston Globe, what I posted is far from all of it. Assange doesn't much care who gets hurt in his self-written drama centered on himself.
One, a partially disabled Saudi woman who’d secretly gone into debt to support a sick relative, said she was devastated. She’d kept her plight from members of her own family.
‘‘This is a disaster,’’ she said in a phone call. ‘‘What if my brothers, neighbors, people I know, or even don’t know have seen it? What is the use of publishing my story?’’
Medical records are widely counted among a person’s most private information. But AP found that WikiLeaks also routinely publishes identity records, phone numbers, and other information easily exploited by criminals.
Someone should really ask the people who are such fans of both Assange and Edward Snowden, who likely turned over more private information to these unelected, unauthorized, unaccountable groups than anyone else, about this.
Assange is totally irresponsible. He's far more interested in using data dumps to get publicity for himself and his group than he is the mere lives of these people.
Assange insisted WikiLeaks had a system to keep ordinary people’s information safe.
‘‘We have a harm minimization policy,’’ the Australian told an audience in Oxford, England, in July 2010. ‘‘There are legitimate secrets. Your records with your doctor, that’s a legitimate secret.’’
Assange initially leaned on cooperating journalists, who flagged sensitive material to WikiLeaks which then held them back for closer scrutiny. But Assange was impatient with the process, describing it as time-consuming and expensive.
‘‘We can’t sit on material like this for three years with one person to go through the whole lot, line-by-line, to redact,’’ he told London’s Frontline Club the month after his talk in Oxford. ‘‘We have to take the best road that we can.’’
Assange’s attitude has hardened since. A brief experiment with automatic redactions was aborted. The journalist-led redactions were abandoned too after Assange’s relationship with the London press corps turned toxic. By 2013 WikiLeaks had written off the redaction efforts as a wrong move.
Withholding any data at all ‘‘legitimizes the false propaganda of ‘information is dangerous,’’’ the group argued on Twitter.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that if that's their MO then their doing so as, largely, anonymous, largely unknown, unnamed people with unexamined motives and lives is massively hypocritical. If that's their excuse for their massive irresponsibility, lets see them come forward and open themselves, their private records, their medical records, their sexual histories up for as public exposure as they have those of other people.
At the very least the double-talk, double-standards of the left in regard to these groups needs some serious thinking. It really does seem to all boil down to a group of adoring fans favoring them doing to other people what they would never, ever want even their own, elected government being able to do to them with full legal protection and only at the approval of a judge. There is absolutely no integrity in that pose of being champions of privacy and private spying by unaccountable groups who are free to dump private information online. How do we know they aren't practicing high finance blackmail with some of what they've stolen or been given? How do we know they won't, eventually, turn to outright outlaw activity. One of the problems with blackmail is that its victims can't risk being exposed.
This is all a lot more sinister than Hollywood would ever want to lead you to believe, the indy movie makers or the bloggers who have promoted it to their own fame and fortune. It is certainly no less of a danger than a democratically elected government collecting data. We can vote out the government, we don't get a vote on WikiLeaks or its leaders.
Update: No, if I really wanted to "be a little bitch" I'd point out how much the adult Julian Assange resembles the child Ricky Schroder as Little Lord Fauntleroy. I don't know why people use the word "bitch" that way, I've never known a dog of any gender who wasn't the moral superior of easily 95% of the human beings I've encountered. But, then, I'm not a cat.
Someone asked me if I were not worried that slamming Assange and his merry hackers could result in them going after me. Do they even know I'm doing it? I doubt it, but, well, I don't know, should I be worried? And if that's a serious question, doesn't it actually prove the point that these unelected, unaccountable groups of hackers are criminals who, if they wanted, could destroy people and, since they are largely anonymous, no one could hold them accountable? As it is, I'm more worried about the person I share computers with, some times. He didn't ask to be involved with this and I did tell him that it's a possibility, once it was pointed out to me. If he were attacked, he knows it's my fault and I would feel obligated to go off line for good, at least as myself. Of course, by that time the damage would have been done.
In the mean time, here are some instances in which Julian Assange, complaining about the time and expense of "vetting" the stuff he has used and uses to gain fame and, I'd guess, fortune for himself, including the private information they or their contributors have stolen in the past.
WikiLeaks’ global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill.
In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial, or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.
‘‘They published everything: my phone, address, name, details,’’ said a Saudi man who said he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. ‘‘If the family of my wife saw this . . . Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.’’
WikiLeaks’ mass publication of personal data is at odds with the site’s claim to have championed privacy, even as it laid bare the workings of international statecraft, and has drawn criticism from the site’s allies.
Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were unsuccessful; a set of questions left with his site wasn’t immediately answered Tuesday. WikiLeaks’ stated mission is to bring censored or restricted material ‘‘involving war, spying and corruption’’ into the public eye, describing the trove amassed thus far as a ‘‘giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents.’’
The library is growing quickly, with half a million files from the US Democratic National Committee, Turkey’s governing party, and the Saudi Foreign Ministry added in the last year or so. But the library is also filling with rogue data, including computer viruses, spam, and a compendium of personal records.
The Saudi diplomatic cables alone hold at least 124 medical files, according to a sample analyzed. Some described patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children, or refugees.
‘‘This has nothing to do with politics or corruption,’’ said Dr. Nayef al-Fayez, a consultant in the Jordanian capital of Amman who confirmed that a brain cancer patient of his was among those whose details were published to the web. Dr. Adnan Salhab, a retired practitioner in Jordan who also had a patient named in the files, expressed anger when shown the document
‘‘This is illegal what has happened,’’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘‘It is illegal!’’.
Yeah, it's illegal and one thing you know, WikiLeaks didn't have to go in front of a court to justify doing what it did, its "contributors" never got a court warrant to search and seize information, they have no legal procedure to determine which information it should leak and which it should not, they have no accountability at all. And what you can say about WikiLeaks and the people who steal information for it, you can say about other online, secret groups which also do this. You might point out to the stuff you approve of being released as if that justifies the other things but if it were you whose life was destroyed or put in jeopardy by the self-styled transparency crusaders (held up as great heroes by the fans of privacy at the same time !) I suspect you wouldn't see it the same way.
Do read the story at the Boston Globe, what I posted is far from all of it. Assange doesn't much care who gets hurt in his self-written drama centered on himself.
One, a partially disabled Saudi woman who’d secretly gone into debt to support a sick relative, said she was devastated. She’d kept her plight from members of her own family.
‘‘This is a disaster,’’ she said in a phone call. ‘‘What if my brothers, neighbors, people I know, or even don’t know have seen it? What is the use of publishing my story?’’
Medical records are widely counted among a person’s most private information. But AP found that WikiLeaks also routinely publishes identity records, phone numbers, and other information easily exploited by criminals.
Someone should really ask the people who are such fans of both Assange and Edward Snowden, who likely turned over more private information to these unelected, unauthorized, unaccountable groups than anyone else, about this.
Assange is totally irresponsible. He's far more interested in using data dumps to get publicity for himself and his group than he is the mere lives of these people.
Assange insisted WikiLeaks had a system to keep ordinary people’s information safe.
‘‘We have a harm minimization policy,’’ the Australian told an audience in Oxford, England, in July 2010. ‘‘There are legitimate secrets. Your records with your doctor, that’s a legitimate secret.’’
Assange initially leaned on cooperating journalists, who flagged sensitive material to WikiLeaks which then held them back for closer scrutiny. But Assange was impatient with the process, describing it as time-consuming and expensive.
‘‘We can’t sit on material like this for three years with one person to go through the whole lot, line-by-line, to redact,’’ he told London’s Frontline Club the month after his talk in Oxford. ‘‘We have to take the best road that we can.’’
Assange’s attitude has hardened since. A brief experiment with automatic redactions was aborted. The journalist-led redactions were abandoned too after Assange’s relationship with the London press corps turned toxic. By 2013 WikiLeaks had written off the redaction efforts as a wrong move.
Withholding any data at all ‘‘legitimizes the false propaganda of ‘information is dangerous,’’’ the group argued on Twitter.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that if that's their MO then their doing so as, largely, anonymous, largely unknown, unnamed people with unexamined motives and lives is massively hypocritical. If that's their excuse for their massive irresponsibility, lets see them come forward and open themselves, their private records, their medical records, their sexual histories up for as public exposure as they have those of other people.
At the very least the double-talk, double-standards of the left in regard to these groups needs some serious thinking. It really does seem to all boil down to a group of adoring fans favoring them doing to other people what they would never, ever want even their own, elected government being able to do to them with full legal protection and only at the approval of a judge. There is absolutely no integrity in that pose of being champions of privacy and private spying by unaccountable groups who are free to dump private information online. How do we know they aren't practicing high finance blackmail with some of what they've stolen or been given? How do we know they won't, eventually, turn to outright outlaw activity. One of the problems with blackmail is that its victims can't risk being exposed.
This is all a lot more sinister than Hollywood would ever want to lead you to believe, the indy movie makers or the bloggers who have promoted it to their own fame and fortune. It is certainly no less of a danger than a democratically elected government collecting data. We can vote out the government, we don't get a vote on WikiLeaks or its leaders.
Update: No, if I really wanted to "be a little bitch" I'd point out how much the adult Julian Assange resembles the child Ricky Schroder as Little Lord Fauntleroy. I don't know why people use the word "bitch" that way, I've never known a dog of any gender who wasn't the moral superior of easily 95% of the human beings I've encountered. But, then, I'm not a cat.
Hey, Simps
I send you something gorgeous and profound, and you counter with ethnic elevator music.
Steve Simels
If I weren't sick I'd go look for a list of your A-listers, like Mick and his old Stones, who would join your list of heroes from the past who, either themselves or their heirs licensed their music for a treatment "scientifically" planned to profitably appear in a supermarket c. 1974 or so or in similar contexts. But I'm sick so you're going to have to groove to your favorite Mop Heads mopping up the money with this.
There, you must have found that gorgeous enough.
I do have to say that if you want to prove a. you have no ability to listen to music of any complexity or subtlety, b. are a low-grade ethnic chauvinist, c. are a pop-muzak putz, I'm powerless to do anything but allow you to do so. I'll go into detail if you insist. You won't enjoy it.
Update: I make it a practice to never listen to individual movements of a work unless I know the composer approved of that kind of performance. I have no idea if C.N. approved of it or not so I'd have to listen to the whole symphony to hear it and I don't want to.
Your grasp of logical thought is as loose as your grasp of any but the most facile music but not as loose as your grasp of a difference between a lie you like and a truth, especially a lie you'd like to be true but which isn't. A truth you hate goes past your mendacious mind.
Update 2; Well, Simps, there's one thing you can be certain of, the mop heads didn't let someone else record their stuff unless they got paid for it, one way or another. If I had a dollar for every really crappy "beautiful music" arrangement of mop head music I've been subjected to involuntarily, I'd be more than able to buy that counterpoint book by the Balkan guy whose music you can't deal with.
Update 3: As the Simpering gets longer, it grows wronger.
You do know that Rodrigo is the most financially successful classical composer of the 2oth century, right?
Simple Simels
Hey, if I ever post a piece by Rodrigo, I assume you mean Joaquín Rodrigo, that might be relevant. As I never have, never expect to and can't recall ever even owning a recording of one of his pieces, you may as well have chosen any other irrelevant bit of trivia from your bag of trivial trivia. I don't even own Sketches of Spain, my brother did and it was more Rodrigo than I cared to hear. He never produced a piece of music I'm aware of as good as Granados' Tonadillas, a number of which I accompanied when I was young. Or is this just another ethic group you feel comfortable ridiculing among the kewl kids?
Update 4: Stupy always gets to the point where he accuses me of feeling superior to people whose work isn't my preferred music. I went through how his kind of childish thinking would be based on an assumption that a matter of preference is the same thing as a judgement of quality. That is something that is typical of people who dabble in the arts on the most superficial level, who scribble crap that is honored with the label, "criticism" who figure that their preference is all there is to it. You can read what I wrote on that the Sunday. It's especially funny coming from Stupy who made a living scribbling his opinion about music, what he liked, what he didn't like for the intellectual equivalent of an ad flyer. If I wanted to risk the damage reading much of his scribblage would do to someone's mind I'd go through his crap to find out who he's dissed over the years. I can tell you from what he's posted and tried to post at my blogs, he's definitely got a thing against any composer who departs from the tied if not trite and true. Most of the people I've known like that don't really listen to music, they use it as background, wall paper in the home, a back drop to themselves, in public, something to get paid for writing about, sometimes. None of it matters.
Update 5: You hate thought, you hate anything that requires you to exert concentration, you hate anything that you figure won't get you the kind of attention you crave. You are the Zaphod Beeblebrox of pop-music blogging. You've even got more than one head, well, they're sock puppets, all of them childish, attention seeking, superficial and dishonest.
Steve Simels
If I weren't sick I'd go look for a list of your A-listers, like Mick and his old Stones, who would join your list of heroes from the past who, either themselves or their heirs licensed their music for a treatment "scientifically" planned to profitably appear in a supermarket c. 1974 or so or in similar contexts. But I'm sick so you're going to have to groove to your favorite Mop Heads mopping up the money with this.
There, you must have found that gorgeous enough.
I do have to say that if you want to prove a. you have no ability to listen to music of any complexity or subtlety, b. are a low-grade ethnic chauvinist, c. are a pop-muzak putz, I'm powerless to do anything but allow you to do so. I'll go into detail if you insist. You won't enjoy it.
Update: I make it a practice to never listen to individual movements of a work unless I know the composer approved of that kind of performance. I have no idea if C.N. approved of it or not so I'd have to listen to the whole symphony to hear it and I don't want to.
Your grasp of logical thought is as loose as your grasp of any but the most facile music but not as loose as your grasp of a difference between a lie you like and a truth, especially a lie you'd like to be true but which isn't. A truth you hate goes past your mendacious mind.
Update 2; Well, Simps, there's one thing you can be certain of, the mop heads didn't let someone else record their stuff unless they got paid for it, one way or another. If I had a dollar for every really crappy "beautiful music" arrangement of mop head music I've been subjected to involuntarily, I'd be more than able to buy that counterpoint book by the Balkan guy whose music you can't deal with.
Update 3: As the Simpering gets longer, it grows wronger.
You do know that Rodrigo is the most financially successful classical composer of the 2oth century, right?
Simple Simels
Hey, if I ever post a piece by Rodrigo, I assume you mean Joaquín Rodrigo, that might be relevant. As I never have, never expect to and can't recall ever even owning a recording of one of his pieces, you may as well have chosen any other irrelevant bit of trivia from your bag of trivial trivia. I don't even own Sketches of Spain, my brother did and it was more Rodrigo than I cared to hear. He never produced a piece of music I'm aware of as good as Granados' Tonadillas, a number of which I accompanied when I was young. Or is this just another ethic group you feel comfortable ridiculing among the kewl kids?
Update 4: Stupy always gets to the point where he accuses me of feeling superior to people whose work isn't my preferred music. I went through how his kind of childish thinking would be based on an assumption that a matter of preference is the same thing as a judgement of quality. That is something that is typical of people who dabble in the arts on the most superficial level, who scribble crap that is honored with the label, "criticism" who figure that their preference is all there is to it. You can read what I wrote on that the Sunday. It's especially funny coming from Stupy who made a living scribbling his opinion about music, what he liked, what he didn't like for the intellectual equivalent of an ad flyer. If I wanted to risk the damage reading much of his scribblage would do to someone's mind I'd go through his crap to find out who he's dissed over the years. I can tell you from what he's posted and tried to post at my blogs, he's definitely got a thing against any composer who departs from the tied if not trite and true. Most of the people I've known like that don't really listen to music, they use it as background, wall paper in the home, a back drop to themselves, in public, something to get paid for writing about, sometimes. None of it matters.
Update 5: You hate thought, you hate anything that requires you to exert concentration, you hate anything that you figure won't get you the kind of attention you crave. You are the Zaphod Beeblebrox of pop-music blogging. You've even got more than one head, well, they're sock puppets, all of them childish, attention seeking, superficial and dishonest.
I'm Done With Thinking The First Amendment Is The Most Pressing Issue In This
Every time I look into the open, swirling, stinking swill of the cesspool of freely available porn online, it is worse. The recent look at it that I posted included what are clearly supposed to be gay porn sites which take the self-hatred to new depths of depravity. There is a class of such gay porn, especially on the premier venue of it, Tumblr, which encourages gay men to fantasize about being savagely beaten by, humiliated by, even killed by straight men who are presented as superior beings. As could be gathered from what I posted on the weekend, white supremacy also figures into it. One "redneck" gay porn site I saw had prominent banners declaring "White Lives Matter" with American style white supremacist content and themes.
It's hard to decide which of the bottom feeding sites is the worst. One I saw featured gifs of a younger, smaller man whose hands were tied as he was repeatedly punched in the stomach. I saw another image of the same who was being strangled from behind with a caption that talked about how the strangler couldn't get off until "the boi" was unconscious "so bye bye faggot". I traced the images back to appearing on Eastern European neo-fascist websites with captions which google translated into encouraging the murder of gay men. But in America, under the current interpretation of "The First Amendment" the same content is being presented as acceptable sexual arousal. Women, of course, won't have to imagine that kind of stuff because the sexual murder of women has been presented as a turn on by such men as who find it so since before Larry Flint put an image of a woman being put in a meat grinder as arousing. Yet people wonder why women are treated like objects for use by men who grew up with such stuff.
And this stuff isn't rare or hard to find online, it's everywhere, encouraging sadistic, homicidal psychopaths and the boys who can be so convinced of their own hatefulness that they would find the idea of being spit on, forced to open their mouth to be spit into, urinated into as they're being humiliated, degraded, hated, slapped, punched, battered with whatever the imagination of the photographers, film makers, and others classified as journalists or artists or whatever, "exercising their right of expression" and going on to encouraging the sadistic enslavement, torture, maiming and murder by stronger, often openly Nazi or fascist men, even making reference to Nazi concentration camps, presenting Nazism as a turn on and such survival of the fittest as the way of nature. It's my impression that such stuff is an increasing percentage of the marketing of ideas, attitudes, habits of thought with spectacle sex as appears on the "social media" available to who knows who in your neighborhood.
The next time you read some outraged article on a lefty webazine or in the news about the vicious torture of gay men by Russian neo-Nazis, remember those images are probably selling similar ideas, exactly the same practice, here as a sexual turn on. As I pointed out, one of the attractions in that stuff is the idea that superior men rape, they don't find consent by their victims gratifying. And if you point that out their knees will jerk and they will say "First Amendment," as real people are really destroyed, minus their show of outrage.
Anyone who believes this spiral, not cycle, can go on to who knows whatever newer depth of depravity before the results become catastrophically unacceptable, overturning the current ACLU, Joel Gora concepts of the First Amendment, is willfully and stupidly irresponsible. In the meantime, who knows who is paying the price, with their lives, of their media-industry financed and gratifying legal theories. I doubt the high-priced "First Amendment" lawyers will ever have to face that in their lives or in the lives of their loved ones. The victims of it, those whose degredation, intimdation, torture, and killing - who knows if it's all "merely" simulated? - are seldom in their class. And a lot of them come from the 3rd world. Not "people like us".
It's hard to decide which of the bottom feeding sites is the worst. One I saw featured gifs of a younger, smaller man whose hands were tied as he was repeatedly punched in the stomach. I saw another image of the same who was being strangled from behind with a caption that talked about how the strangler couldn't get off until "the boi" was unconscious "so bye bye faggot". I traced the images back to appearing on Eastern European neo-fascist websites with captions which google translated into encouraging the murder of gay men. But in America, under the current interpretation of "The First Amendment" the same content is being presented as acceptable sexual arousal. Women, of course, won't have to imagine that kind of stuff because the sexual murder of women has been presented as a turn on by such men as who find it so since before Larry Flint put an image of a woman being put in a meat grinder as arousing. Yet people wonder why women are treated like objects for use by men who grew up with such stuff.
And this stuff isn't rare or hard to find online, it's everywhere, encouraging sadistic, homicidal psychopaths and the boys who can be so convinced of their own hatefulness that they would find the idea of being spit on, forced to open their mouth to be spit into, urinated into as they're being humiliated, degraded, hated, slapped, punched, battered with whatever the imagination of the photographers, film makers, and others classified as journalists or artists or whatever, "exercising their right of expression" and going on to encouraging the sadistic enslavement, torture, maiming and murder by stronger, often openly Nazi or fascist men, even making reference to Nazi concentration camps, presenting Nazism as a turn on and such survival of the fittest as the way of nature. It's my impression that such stuff is an increasing percentage of the marketing of ideas, attitudes, habits of thought with spectacle sex as appears on the "social media" available to who knows who in your neighborhood.
The next time you read some outraged article on a lefty webazine or in the news about the vicious torture of gay men by Russian neo-Nazis, remember those images are probably selling similar ideas, exactly the same practice, here as a sexual turn on. As I pointed out, one of the attractions in that stuff is the idea that superior men rape, they don't find consent by their victims gratifying. And if you point that out their knees will jerk and they will say "First Amendment," as real people are really destroyed, minus their show of outrage.
Anyone who believes this spiral, not cycle, can go on to who knows whatever newer depth of depravity before the results become catastrophically unacceptable, overturning the current ACLU, Joel Gora concepts of the First Amendment, is willfully and stupidly irresponsible. In the meantime, who knows who is paying the price, with their lives, of their media-industry financed and gratifying legal theories. I doubt the high-priced "First Amendment" lawyers will ever have to face that in their lives or in the lives of their loved ones. The victims of it, those whose degredation, intimdation, torture, and killing - who knows if it's all "merely" simulated? - are seldom in their class. And a lot of them come from the 3rd world. Not "people like us".
Republican-Fascists Politicizing The Judiciary Are What Happens When Republican-Fascists Win Elections
Anyone who has any doubt as to why it is important to elect a Democrat for every office you can vote for should look at the ruling by the crypto-fascist federal judge, Reed O’Connor, blocking Barack Obama's recent policy on providing basic services to transgendered people. One judge with a Republican-fascist agenda and he's blocked a rule that could provide rights for a beleaguered minority across the country.
O'Connor is, no doubt, the kind of judge a Republican-fascist would like to elevate to the Supreme Court, a George W. Bush appointee, he has shown a willingness to work with politicians for political purposes. As recently as the end of May, Think Progress named him as part of a plan to resurrect the fascism of Antonin Scalia, using bigotry against LGBT people as a means of making regress. And it's clear he doesn't care who gets hurt.
O'Connor is, no doubt, the kind of judge a Republican-fascist would like to elevate to the Supreme Court, a George W. Bush appointee, he has shown a willingness to work with politicians for political purposes. As recently as the end of May, Think Progress named him as part of a plan to resurrect the fascism of Antonin Scalia, using bigotry against LGBT people as a means of making regress. And it's clear he doesn't care who gets hurt.
A little over a year ago, Judge Reed O’Connor handed down a surprising decision targeting same-sex partners
who wanted time off to care for their sick spouse. The Family Medical
Leave Act (FMLA) permits workers to take unpaid leave in order to care
for a sick family member. A Department of Labor regulation, promulgated
after the Supreme Court forbade the federal government from engaging in
marriage discrimination but before this Constitutional guarantee was
applied to the states, provided that same-sex couples who were lawfully
married in one state could still take advantage of FMLA, even if they
resided in a state that did not recognize their marriage.
The
same week that this rule was supposed to take effect, however, Judge
O’Connor ordered it halted in an opinion accusing the Labor Department
of attempting to “unilaterally impose its definition of marriage upon
the states.” If an employer wanted to fire a woman because she took a
few weeks of unpaid time to be with her dying wife, O’Connor effectively
ruled, then that employer should be allowed to do so if the woman lived
in the wrong state.
It
was a surprising decision, in no small part because O’Connor handed it
down just weeks before the Supreme Court held that marriage equality is
enshrined in the Constitution — and months after the justices started sending up signals
warning lower courts that such a decision was coming. Judge O’Connor
halted the regulation by issuing what is known as a “preliminary
injunction,” an order that may only be issued if the plaintiffs can
demonstrate a “substantial likelihood of success on the merits.” In
March of 2015, no one who had paid a lick of attention to the Supreme
Court’s moves on marriage equality could conclude that a challenge to
the Labor Department’s regulation was likely to succeed.
Anyone, those who might be gulled by Greens or talked into not voting for Democrats by such, generally affluent, white, straight, lefties who scribble for one of the lefty webazines or websites, shouldn't minimalize the damage even one of these fascists put on the court can do to countless people. The Republican-fascists have mounted a takeover of courts around the country and their poisonous appointees will be in place for decades to come. Don't count on the "free press" to fight against that, they've been AOK with it for as long as the fascists have been doing it. After all, as long as they're allowed to do business in the most profitable way, it's no skin off their nose. I doubt even any who are gay, at the high, decision-making level, have not had to worry much about who was going to be taking care of a family member. That's well taken care of for them, they couldn't care less about the class of people who do have to worry about it.
It should be common practice to note who put judges on benches as the pretense that they are not political has kept media from noting. The ridiculous mythology of judicial independence has almost never been true, its class, racial, gender, and gender preferences have always been a part of American history. It veils the reality that who you vote for is far more potent than what that person does while in elective office.
Still Ill
Don't know what I've got but it's a lulu. In the worst sense of that locution.
I've been having problems with controlling the fonts and spacing when trying to post from a new browser. If I can't get used to it I'll go back to the old one which was becoming unreliable as they kept adding more features to it. I'd just as soon forego the features, which I never use and get some stability.
I've been having problems with controlling the fonts and spacing when trying to post from a new browser. If I can't get used to it I'll go back to the old one which was becoming unreliable as they kept adding more features to it. I'd just as soon forego the features, which I never use and get some stability.
Monday, August 22, 2016
Marijo bela kumrijo with Vismaya Lhi - soprano and Dusan Bogdanovic improvising accompaniment on guitar
The old dog's fine, he just might outlive me. I've been running a high fever all day.
I'll post something when I can.
Till then, here's something to upset the musically superficial who can't get past the sub dominant. That's the harmonic degree on the 4th note of a diatonic scale, Simps, not your pathetic attempt at achieving some kind of kinky thrill.
Durme, Durme
I'll post something when I can.
Till then, here's something to upset the musically superficial who can't get past the sub dominant. That's the harmonic degree on the 4th note of a diatonic scale, Simps, not your pathetic attempt at achieving some kind of kinky thrill.
Durme, Durme
Lachin
You can click on
the titles of the videos to read the description and see what the
songs are about.
Update: a. Stupy, I
don't look at the links you try to get me to look at so I'm not
countering anything, b. you didn't even bother to listen to these, as
your stupid description of them proves, c. if I had a dollar for
every time I heard Gershwin's music on an elevator or in a
supermarket or in some Muzak style treatment, I'd be rolling in
dough.
I forget, who was
it, the Monkees or Brian Wilson or someone who you said was his
generation's Gershwin? Your band should be called Discontinued
Model, considering you're in it.
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Back To School Time Is Resolution Time
When I smell the ragweed pollen this time of year, I think of the first week of school. The school playground in my childhood was covered with it the first week of school, before it got stomped into dust by thousands of feet about the fourth day or so. There was no grounds-keeping except what the feet of children did. And with that smell comes the old habit of thinking of the possibilities of new beginnings, learning new things, trying to do it better.
And I saw the black birds, starlings, red-wings, probably a cow-bird or so, have started flocking together three days ago, which is also a sign of fall coming. Now that I'm officially old, that carries its own set of things to think about. Ok, I'll say it, death.
Here's Krista Tippett's latest show about the spiritual significance of running. I'm way too old and too achy for running and I couldn't possibly care less about winning a race or any other sporting event, but there's a lot more than that to the show. I've never understood why anyone cares who wins and who loses. I never understood what was good about a sporting event in which half of the poeple participating and half or the people watching it hoped the other half did badly. In music you hope everyone does well, all of the time, that is unless there's something wrong with you. In sports something is wrong with you if you don't want "the opponents" to do badly.
The emphasis on games in phys-ed classes, winning and losing, teaches all kinds of really rotten values, one person wins, lots of people lose and a lot of the people who are good at something win all the time when lots of people who aren't good at it are constantly taught that they are losers, with all of the baggage that carries. Athletes in the news don't demonstrate that the lessons of winning make people moral. Jocks are, in many, maybe most cases, conceited jerks. Lots of them are bullying ass holes.
But if there is something else that is part of it, meditation, reflection, moral reflection, that makes it something worth doing. Of course, if they tried that in public schools someone would either have a hissy-fit, with lawyers, or someone would worry about someone having a hissy-fit-with-lawyers and it would never get started. So the dreary, regimented, coercive, sports oriented phys-ed regime will probably turn off more children to staying in good health through moving. And the screen-based childhoods of a lot of them really need to be overcome if they're going to escape the miseries of aging. We've got to get our schools out of the hands of the jocks and the jerks as much as we do the corporate managers, if there's a real difference.
Here's the Soundcloud podcast of the program which goes on to a talk with Stuart Brown, about the possible relationship of deprivation of play in childhood and murderers. The University of Texas bell-tower murders figure into it. It's interesting to think about but I don't think it's the science that it's presented as being. People have very limited abilities to understand the thinking of animals, even ourselves. I don't know exactly what they mean by "play" but what is talked about doesn't match what I've seen of sports, at least for the majority of people who engage in it. And I wonder how much of the understanding of what was observed didn't have the ideas of human sports imposed on them. As for children at play, much, if not most of sports, seems to me to be a product of trying to please adults and conforming to gender roles, the coercive aspects of that. Imagination, imagining things that aren't structured and regimented doesn't come into it much. I'd take as much play as possible out of the context of sports.
Games are always a good walk or run spoiled. I think I'll go out and walk through the ragweed and elderberries. Watch the birds flocking. I'm spending too much time sitting down, again. Maybe I'll think about Psalm 73 while walking, too.
And I saw the black birds, starlings, red-wings, probably a cow-bird or so, have started flocking together three days ago, which is also a sign of fall coming. Now that I'm officially old, that carries its own set of things to think about. Ok, I'll say it, death.
Here's Krista Tippett's latest show about the spiritual significance of running. I'm way too old and too achy for running and I couldn't possibly care less about winning a race or any other sporting event, but there's a lot more than that to the show. I've never understood why anyone cares who wins and who loses. I never understood what was good about a sporting event in which half of the poeple participating and half or the people watching it hoped the other half did badly. In music you hope everyone does well, all of the time, that is unless there's something wrong with you. In sports something is wrong with you if you don't want "the opponents" to do badly.
The emphasis on games in phys-ed classes, winning and losing, teaches all kinds of really rotten values, one person wins, lots of people lose and a lot of the people who are good at something win all the time when lots of people who aren't good at it are constantly taught that they are losers, with all of the baggage that carries. Athletes in the news don't demonstrate that the lessons of winning make people moral. Jocks are, in many, maybe most cases, conceited jerks. Lots of them are bullying ass holes.
But if there is something else that is part of it, meditation, reflection, moral reflection, that makes it something worth doing. Of course, if they tried that in public schools someone would either have a hissy-fit, with lawyers, or someone would worry about someone having a hissy-fit-with-lawyers and it would never get started. So the dreary, regimented, coercive, sports oriented phys-ed regime will probably turn off more children to staying in good health through moving. And the screen-based childhoods of a lot of them really need to be overcome if they're going to escape the miseries of aging. We've got to get our schools out of the hands of the jocks and the jerks as much as we do the corporate managers, if there's a real difference.
Here's the Soundcloud podcast of the program which goes on to a talk with Stuart Brown, about the possible relationship of deprivation of play in childhood and murderers. The University of Texas bell-tower murders figure into it. It's interesting to think about but I don't think it's the science that it's presented as being. People have very limited abilities to understand the thinking of animals, even ourselves. I don't know exactly what they mean by "play" but what is talked about doesn't match what I've seen of sports, at least for the majority of people who engage in it. And I wonder how much of the understanding of what was observed didn't have the ideas of human sports imposed on them. As for children at play, much, if not most of sports, seems to me to be a product of trying to please adults and conforming to gender roles, the coercive aspects of that. Imagination, imagining things that aren't structured and regimented doesn't come into it much. I'd take as much play as possible out of the context of sports.
Games are always a good walk or run spoiled. I think I'll go out and walk through the ragweed and elderberries. Watch the birds flocking. I'm spending too much time sitting down, again. Maybe I'll think about Psalm 73 while walking, too.
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