no. you know what i always say about religious folks, but i'm just being an ass. you cancel church....
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
they're cancelling concerts here. it's hysteria.
if you're going to cancel events, they should be events with lots of old people, not events where essentially everybody is under 35. so, church services should definitely be cancelled. i'd probably accept them cancelling events at the dso without much pushback.
but, i'd rather see venues put out warnings that tell concert-goers to enter at their own risk.
i'm willing to avoid old folks for a while, but i'd rather catch this thing and beat it than try and hide from it. i'm not afraid of this...
musically, this is not bad, if a little boxy.
however, the macho, lad culturish singer is a very strong disincentive.
i liked this kind of music better when the singers had purple hair and wore eyeliner; this shift to looking like soccer players or, worse, business people, is deeply unsatisfying. and, there's a substantive, lyrical shift along with it that i'm just not interested in...
it's something that's happened across the rock music spectrum, so it was really just a matter of time before the bros ruined post-punk, too.
however, the macho, lad culturish singer is a very strong disincentive.
i liked this kind of music better when the singers had purple hair and wore eyeliner; this shift to looking like soccer players or, worse, business people, is deeply unsatisfying. and, there's a substantive, lyrical shift along with it that i'm just not interested in...
it's something that's happened across the rock music spectrum, so it was really just a matter of time before the bros ruined post-punk, too.
i self-identify as a nerd. i'm proud of it.
but, i didn't sit at the nerd table. well, i'd drop by to say hi sometimes, but i found the nerds boring. they just wanted to play cards. they were so quiet, and well-behaved.
i was an outcast, a punk, more than a nerd, and i actually ate outside of the caf, in the stairs, with a small group of other outcasts. we'd then go around and vandalize the school at recess.
there were months-long stretches where i refused to set foot in the caf at all....
so, when i found myself back at work, i would repeatedly either skip lunch, or eat it off site. i'd walk down to the tim's and get some coffee, or go to the gas station to get smokes.
biden isn't winning because his policies are popular, and sanders is not going to turn this around with middle-aged whites by appealing to policies. most of them won't watch the debate. he has to change the cultural messaging.
and, gramsci would tell you that that's really hard to do at all, let alone in six days.
but, i didn't sit at the nerd table. well, i'd drop by to say hi sometimes, but i found the nerds boring. they just wanted to play cards. they were so quiet, and well-behaved.
i was an outcast, a punk, more than a nerd, and i actually ate outside of the caf, in the stairs, with a small group of other outcasts. we'd then go around and vandalize the school at recess.
there were months-long stretches where i refused to set foot in the caf at all....
so, when i found myself back at work, i would repeatedly either skip lunch, or eat it off site. i'd walk down to the tim's and get some coffee, or go to the gas station to get smokes.
biden isn't winning because his policies are popular, and sanders is not going to turn this around with middle-aged whites by appealing to policies. most of them won't watch the debate. he has to change the cultural messaging.
and, gramsci would tell you that that's really hard to do at all, let alone in six days.
the media is not afraid to be racist; the media thrives on racism. it divides people, as it manufactures consent for the ruling elite. that, as gramsci understood, is it's fundamental purpose in a capitalist oligarchy.
it is because the media is racist that it is trying very hard to obscure the data that's coming out of this primary, and it's happening with a lot of signals from the party itself. this is an old divide that we've really seen the media clampdown on this cycle.
they want there to be a black party and a white party, and they want voting decisions to be based on tribal allegiances instead of policy differences. this is the ideal world for the neo-liberal establishment that runs both parties; you float democratic candidates that are virtually identical to republican candidates, then you herd people into fighting with each other over race, instead of aligning based on class.
in fact, it's the oldest trick in the book in the united states. there's neither anything new about this, nor is there anything liberal about it. it's the same trick that got white servants and black slaves fighting against each other, instead of working together to overthrow their common enemy. it really goes all the way back to the roman policy of bread and circuses; there it was greens and blues, here it is blacks and whites.
but there were populists back then, too.
in order to understand the trends coming out of the cycle, you have to all but ignore what the media has said.
so, what are the actual trends?
fishiness in the data aside, this is what it says, whether you think it's trustworthy or not:
1) bernie is winning huge majorities of young people, but youth vote is way down. bernie has failed to excite young people enough to win.
2) biden is winning huge majorities of black people, but the black vote is way down, too. if your argument was that clinton didn't get enough blacks out, and that's why trump won, biden is getting less blacks out than clinton did. so, he hasn't been winning using that tactic, and he won't win the general with that tactic.
3) however, turnout is up. a lot.
so, if youth turnout is down, and black turnout is down, who is driving turnout up?
the answer is older white voters, who are showing up in unexpectedly huge numbers across the country and voting for biden.
that is the movement that's underway, here - middle aged white people flocking to the democrats. stampeding, even. like a herd of obese elephants looking to consume. more. more...
why is this happening, exactly?
i'd have to assume that not many watched the debates, as they wouldn't, that they couldn't, vote for biden if they did. a lot of these people are quite educated. what is going on here?
i'd have to assume that not many watched the debates, as they wouldn't, that they couldn't, vote for biden if they did. a lot of these people are quite educated. what is going on here?
if you believe it, if you take it at face value, it must be cultural. it's rachel maddow. it's saturday night live. it's a broad idea that it's not socially acceptable to be a republican, right now - that the cool middle aged kids vote for the democrats.
i remember leaving university and going to work and feeling like i'd gone back to high school, in terms of how people interacted with each other. i felt like i'd grown down, that i'd reverted to life as a teenager, not like i'd grown up and become an adult.
if that's true, bernie has roughly 6 days to destroy biden's popularity amongst middle-aged voters.
and, he just wants to be a nerd and talk about policies.
so, your average boomer appears to essentially be thinking something like this: biden's cool, like me; bernie's a nerd, like my kid, who has to use their phone to google how to brush their teeth every morning and can't be trusted to bring back the groceries without fucking it up.
there's an old cliche.
"those who would exchange liberty for security will receive neither".
the direct quote from franklin is:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
this is a little taste of the wisdom that is so lacking around us right now.
"those who would exchange liberty for security will receive neither".
the direct quote from franklin is:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
this is a little taste of the wisdom that is so lacking around us right now.
these quarantines are not preventing the spread of the disease, they are making the situation worse, and they need to be stopped.
i've forced myself to listen to a fair bit of deafheaven over the years, without ever really being able to get into it. if i'm going to approach this from any perspective, it's actually as a sonic youth fan; if i'm going to like anything about this band, it's those dissonant, branca-esque guitar parts riffed out at 300 bpm. and, i could get into something like a black metal take on new york city ghosts + flowers.
this seems more like they're trying to move into the contemporary pop-prog space that something like between the buried and me are in, by bringing in more and more references to gazey post-rock. the result is big, but it isn't very elaborate, and it's not very epic, either - meaning it doesn't end up very compelling.
this seems more like they're trying to move into the contemporary pop-prog space that something like between the buried and me are in, by bringing in more and more references to gazey post-rock. the result is big, but it isn't very elaborate, and it's not very epic, either - meaning it doesn't end up very compelling.
they could salvage this by upping the intensity significantly. as it is, it's actually kind of boring....
i've tried to check her stuff out a few times, and while it is mildly interesting as background music, it tends to lack much of any kind of development. sometimes, that's a purposeful thing; other times, it's a function of the technology.
what i would suggest to her is that she needs to look at the idea of running things in parallel to that buchla, because there's often just not enough going on, here - and what is going on often doesn't really go anywhere.
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