|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 28, 2022 13:16:57 GMT -5
Two doses of whataboutism in three minutes. A land speed record?
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 28, 2022 13:01:38 GMT -5
I believe you are merely using power instead of proof to make your case. This is a bit gnomic. Unpack, please. My power? The power of rhetoric? The power of some notional hegemonic social group? The power of epistemological and semantic rigor, of separating falsifiable from unfalsifiable propositions? All God's chillun got an epistemology and a metaphysic. Only some of those models and protocols, however, lead to reliable, actionable conclusions about the physical world.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 28, 2022 12:53:59 GMT -5
Bad information is always a problem, and I would say that deliberately-designed and -targeted disinformation is a threat because it is intended to do damage. And since part of what Putin would like to stop is Western aid to Ukraine, American public opinion is an inevitable target for disinformation. I know that some will resist a Mother Jones account, but here's one take on the matter: Over the last week, a new disinformation hybrid has appeared, as online anti-vaccine groups have become a hotbed of pro-Russia conspiracy theories about the conflict in Ukraine—and some of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists are actively promoting geopolitical falsehoods. www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/pro-putin-disinformation-on-ukraine-is-thriving-in-online-anti-vax-groups/Russia Today's Sputnik "news" organization has a radio-station outlet, WZHF, in the D.C. area. Sputnik’s talking heads have tended to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, alleging Ukrainian “crimes” against its Russian-speaking population and “encroachment” on Russia from the NATO alliance. They typically describe the invasion as “a military operation” or “an intervention,” echoing Putin’s framing. There’s plenty of whataboutism: A Russian commentator on Friday fretted that the United States could give nuclear weapons to Ukraine. “We cannot be confident that America will be a responsible member of the international community,” he said. www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/03/07/radio-sputnik-wzhf/With private-sphere fact-checking viewed skeptically by many on the right, what countervailing force can be brought to bear on lies and craziness that is being fostered by actual bad actors?
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 28, 2022 12:16:11 GMT -5
I understand why the notion of such an official governmental department might be unsettling. On the other hand, there are actual disinformation factories run by hostile operators (Russia, North Korea, China), able to draw on government resources. What kind of countervailing effort is appropriate and sufficient to deal with this?
There are only so many options available: outsourcing to the private sector or official counter-disinformation or some hybrid arrangement. And since the deliberate undermining and perversion of private-sector journalism (Trumpian "fake news" characterization; Fox News and its even-farther-right competitors), the signal-to-noise ratio in the public sphere has made it hard to counter, say, Russian propaganda.
And given the appetite of a large segment of our population for conspiracy theories and meme-driven thinking, I wonder whether any mechanism can counter our own gullibility.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 28, 2022 11:55:14 GMT -5
The terms "truth" and "facts" have become highly-charged enough these days to be barriers to understanding, especially when prefaced by the definite article: the truth, the facts. And various descriptors (man, woman, child, male, female, sex, gender) that have been taken to be stable and absolute--metaphysical, even--have had their hard boundaries softened or dissolved by the presentation of evidence that undermines that stability.
Apologies if this comes across as some kind of lefty/post-modern/academic blather, but it's not exactly semantic-linguistic-epistemological rocket science. But like it or not, the notion that various categories are "socially constructed" is pretty hard to deny--after all, legal codes are made out of words by groups of people who usually start out defining basic terms before proceding to the job of laying out thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots.
There is plenty of evidence* (note that I am not using the loaded, built-in prejudgemental "facts") indicating that what we understand as "sex" in "higher" animals depends on a range of physical attributes and conditions, and that natural** variations do not always produce tidy either/or physical conditions. There is also evidence that some humans experience a range of subjective senses of sexuality and their social gender status. The decision to treat such variations as "unnatural" or pathological or criminal are posterior to the conditions themselves--such decisions are always socially constructed. The variations themselves, however, are not necessarily so.
* There are epistemological and procedural criteria for developing and evaluating "evidence." We've been working on them at least since Aristotle.
** Meaning "without human intervention" as distinct from some socially- or morally-normative sense of "natural."
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 27, 2022 20:55:19 GMT -5
Mark's story is a lot like mine, minus the musical family, the musical friends, and the musical talent. But the follow-your-ears part is pretty much what I did. (And I'm only a couple years younger, so a lot of the repertory is similar. Sh-boom sh-boom, yadada-dadada dadada-dadada indeed.)
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 27, 2022 16:26:54 GMT -5
As Arlo Guthrie observed, we all draw from the river of song--you just don't want to be downstream of Dylan.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 27, 2022 16:07:51 GMT -5
When describing social-cultural-economic matters, I prefer "distribution" to "rule." This may be because I am located at the outlier parts of so many distribution curves, or just because I'm generally passive-aggressively nitpicky when it comes to rules and rule-makers or even rule-describers.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 27, 2022 14:40:12 GMT -5
The music of my life?
Also this:
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 27, 2022 12:02:02 GMT -5
The reason I wouldn't hear the music of my life "if it were written today"* is that it is extremely unlikely that it would be written today. For starters, there's the fact that the music of my particular life started being written about 500 years ago and includes samples from just about every generation since then--up to 1980 or so. There has also been a lot of filtering and a bit of abandoning of styles--I spent several decades (between, say, 16 and 45) sampling nearly everything and discovering what I liked well enough to keep around. And I still am discovering how to listen to some things--I hear bop a lot better than I once did, mostly thanks to playing with a bunch of bop-centric guys once a week. On the other hand, a lot of hard rock doesn't do much for me. (Somewhere in the archives is a Blue Cheer LP I haven't played for maybe 45 years--though their version of "Summertime Blues" might merit a re-listen if I have an urge to head-bang a bit.)
The social-music segment of my listening life (that is, the part that was strongly shared with my birth cohort) peaked between, say, 1955 and 1975, and the "social" part had much to do with courting (dance music was part of that machinery) and social music-making, and again there was a commercial system feeding us "product." So what. The machineries of marketing and popular taste are push-pull, and marketing taste-makers (currently "influencers") can only take things so far. See George's encounter with one such in A Hard Day's Night.
Music, like love, finds its own path. In the mid-19th century, Henry Worral's easy-guitar compositions "Spanish Fandango" and "Sebastopol" migrated from the white folks' parlor to wherever it was that black folks amused themselves and also provided names for open-G and -D tunings that run through the blues. (This was the subject of John Renbourn's academic thesis.) In the 1950s, black kids in Philadelphia sorted themselves into vocal groups (inspired by the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, gospel quartets, and barbershop harmonies) and helped to invent do-wop. Which I would not have heard on the radio without the intervention of talent-scouts and record producers and payola-taking DJs. But no amount of marketing or popularizing of a similar up-from-grassroots music has drawn me to hip-hop.
* Whateverthe hell the music of a 77-year-old's life would be. That process is still going on.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 26, 2022 11:06:26 GMT -5
There's a machinery behind just about any piece of popular music, but it's not necessarily of the "star-making" sort. Mechanical reproduction and commercial distribution* are necessary to get things started, after which something like the folk process can take over. The tunes that come up in song circles/jam sessions enter those events from the commercial world**, but they persist because the amateur pickers enjoy them. It's interesting to observe, in a multi-generational playing circle, not only who calls what tune but which recorded version of a traditional tune is used--for example, the Joan Baez or Animals*** changes for "House of the Rising Sun." (Older folkies know both; somewhat younger rock-influenced players always default to the Animals.)
There are any number of songs I know only from hearing them in sessions, thanks to players whose tastes, histories, and record collections differ from mine.
* Which arguably begins with the printing press, which enabled the production and distribtion of broadside ballads as far back as the 16th century.
** This can operate even in mostly-oral-tradition cultures--"gypsy jazz" became a kind of folk music in which Tin Pan Alley and European pop tunes entered via Django's recordings and then got passed around and often transformed and adapted, player-to-player.
*** Copped from Dylan, who copped them from Dave Van Ronk.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 24, 2022 20:11:07 GMT -5
I've also noticed how many of the car chases were undercranked to make them look faster--though the stunt drivers still must have been nuts to do some of the crashes.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 24, 2022 18:32:50 GMT -5
If you watch the car-chase scenes from actual old movies--especially matinee serials from the 1940s--you'll see plenty of sway and bounce in those big old sedans. And it's a wonder that the entire driving population didn't wind up dead from what would now be walk-away accidents.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 21, 2022 11:18:03 GMT -5
Actually, given IJam demographics, the more doctors the better. Cardiologists, rheumatologists, and gerontologists particularly welcome.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 19, 2022 20:48:57 GMT -5
I don't know about intractable, but in New York State in the 1950s and 60s, the curriculum was designed to end with either a statewide Regents or a local-system diploma, with the Regents diploma pretty much required for college entry. For non-college-bound students in our district (which was pretty progressive), there were indeed tracks--which is to say, sets of courses with explicit or implied paths after school. Placement on these tracks or segments was at least partly determined by standardized testing, which I first encountered by seventh grade (maybe earlier). In eighth grade, my cohort was the first identified as "accelerated," which meant we took 9th-grade science a year earlier and were kept together for our other core courses. The rest of my class was not as closely tracked, but there was certainly some directing of students into the commercial and shop-centric parts of the curriculum.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 19, 2022 17:57:48 GMT -5
Just the punchline: "And they never did manage to get the coffin lid closed all the way."
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 19, 2022 10:57:11 GMT -5
It might be useful to take a tour through the history of actual home economics courses, along with the actual social/economic history that was its context--it's actually pretty interesting.
When I was in high school (1958-62), "home ec" was a bit of a dead-end track for the girls, not unlike "shop" for the boys, except that shop (especially "t-shop," that is, auto mechanics) looked forward to possible paid employment. (The girl equivalents were the business-skills courses*.) On the other hand, the New York State college system did offered a four-year ride at Cornell's School of Home Economics, which was where many of my farm-girl classmates headed. (The other girls headed to the various ed-college campuses, depending on their target disciplines.) Like the forestry and ag colleges sited at Syracuse and Cornell respectively, the Home Ec college offered a for-real university education that pointed many of its students beyond the limits implied by the school's name.
* These tracks were intensely "gendered"--a very few guys took the commercial courses, but no girls ever took shop. And a guy in a home-ec class would have been the talk of the school, little of it admiring. The college-prep track was the least gendered part of the high school--just about half and half.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 19, 2022 0:21:52 GMT -5
And the guy with the beard looks pretty silly, too.
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 19, 2022 0:20:35 GMT -5
This has been kicking around at least since 2016--I found being promoted by the Daily Mail, one of the UK's least reliable news sources. (Though the byline was for the Australian edition.) So it might not be entirely, um, authentic. FWIW, Snopes has rummaged around for a source: www.snopes.com/fact-check/how-to-be-a-good-wife/
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 18, 2022 13:16:59 GMT -5
The currently-working* shaver I like best is my little $20 Braun Pocket Twist 370, several of which I bought at blowout prices at Radio Shack. For some reason, Braun did a redesign on this series that changed the foil arrangement and also made them less functional (replaced the wide pop-up trimmer with a narrow one--and removed it entirely from the base model).
* There are several I would like fine if the original manufacturers hadn't discontinued replacement heads and foils. In fact, Braun has also discontinuted 370 foils, but at least I have several whole shavers, and I only use them when I travel, and I'm old, so I probably don't need to worry about planned obsolescence, other than my own. I'm also pissed that Braun has made it impossible to replace the rechargeable batteries in their otherwise excellent Oral B toothbrushes without complete disassembly and access to a desoldering station.
|
|