Animism is also at the heart of circumpolar shamanism. As a Dark Green Religion, biocentric type, I lean that direction, at least as a narrative for living ethically in the world. It's the story I allow myself to live by whenever and wherever physics starts to slide towards metaphysics.
I think it's healthy to treat everything as a fellow creature wherever possible. It maximizes empathy and guards against hubris.
Similar to Mike's Math Tape, I wrote most of my dissertation while playing a mix of albums from A Beautiful Machine, which was all washed out, ambient, shoegaze-y sounding post-rock. It was noisy enough to drown out distractions, flowy enough to not get monotonous, and indistinct enough that the lyrics wouldn't interfere with whatever complex thought it was I was trying to work out in words.
https://abeautifulmachine.bandcamp.com/album/home
It was my most played music for three years and for 247 pages worth of obsession, stress, and isolation.
russell - As an aside, this has always been one of my issues with antifa and similar. The folks they want to fight would like nothing better than an opportunity to get into it with them. It’s kind of what they live for.
I think it's important to see this in context. There's more than one sort of antifa group and more than one way in which they get involved in violence. (There's also non-violent antifa groups, but no one really talks about them in these discussions.) The ones that most get talked about in the media, social and otherwise, are the black bloc types who are the (much less prevalent) equivalent of the right wing action clubs. They are looking for action and want to provoke, and are ready and willing to engage in violence if that seems to be the order of the day.
There's also, though, the antifa types who see themselves as mutual aid groups, who are there to offer medical support and protection to other groups they are in solidarity with. They are not wanting to provoke, and they are willing and ready to go into a violent situation and respond with as much force as necessary to protect the people who have been caught in the violence being brought against them by the aforementioned action clubs and counter protesters, and occasionally from law enforcement when situations start to escalate. They are functioning as shields between the oppositional violence and the peaceful, marginalized folks who are there to protest that use of organized force.
It's really hard to tell the difference between these two groups in typical edited video that has been cut down to the spectacle and stripped of the context. And jerkfaces like Andy Ngo make a living off of providing a stream of videos that work to paint all such encounters as being the first type, when a lot of what is being shown are people of the second type working to defend against the violence brought to them by the action club Ngo is working with.
In the absence of the second type, though, a lot of marginalized people would be on the receiving end of the violence with no one there to aid them, and no guarantee of police protection, since the police are busy protecting property.
The repetitiveness of reggaeton is a feature, rather than a bug, for most fans of the genre. It's meant for dancing to in a hot, sweaty club, or blasting in the car, or for (as my students tell me) "vibing" to as they chill or do other things. Breaks in pattern and variations distract from the vibe and demand attention.
A lot of modern popular music is meant to be a background soundtrack for the listeners' noisy lives. It takes a couple weeks for my students to learn how to actively listen and to match speeds with music that is trying to be more than just a simple expression of a single thought or feeling, strung together in a playlist full of similar songs.
If I were to formulate a hunch about "Yonaguni," I'd say that there are a few different synergies at work there. Given El Conejo Malo's gender fluidity, we might consider how Yonaguni, as a feminine coded island holding of Japan might stand in for a similar dynamic between Puerto Rico and the US.
Of course it also lets him cross over into the Kpop and Jpop audiences while stepping around the US (and, as you note, English language lyrics). Between reggaeton and the Asian pop scenes one could really capture an international audience and maintain a US presence all without ever having to make a single move to acknowledge the US mainstream.
From NPR: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/10/nx-s1-5565146/white-house-claims-more-than-1-000-rise-in-assaults-on-ice-agents-data-says-otherwise
While the number of assaults on ICE agents have increased, there is no public evidence that they have spiked as dramatically as the federal government has claimed.
An analysis of court records shows about a 25% rise in charges for assault against federal officers through mid-September, compared with the same period a year ago.
I'll also note, for everyone's edification, that the much more modest increase is for charges of assault. I take every one of these charges with a grain of salt. I have colleagues who were involved in peaceful protests who had been charged with resisting arrest just because they tried to keep themselves from falling as several officers attempted to wrestle them to the ground. The officers involved were all using more force than required in an attempt to intimidate. It was ugly, and disproportionate and it was being directed at people who were pointedly non-violent. Some of the protesters were charged with assault because officers were struck by elbows a two or three of them bore down on single protesters. Was it the middle aged black woman's elbow or was it the elbow of one of the other officers? Doesn't matter. If there is a bruise, the person involved is getting a charge filed. A felony charge can be used as leverage to get a plea deal that the DA can use later on to bolster their "tough on crime" pose come election time.
And that's with local agencies who are relatively restrained compared to the ICE bullshit.
Also, while it's not doxxing proper, several of those colleagues have had their names and photos posted online and featured on mobile billboards that have been driven around the campus by right wing activist groups. They hardly have to post a faculty member's home address when the classes they teach and the location of those classes are available to any student enrolled at the university. The university says that all they can do is offer already-available mental health counseling and make the involved faculties' campus profiles available only to the university community at large. The university is afraid that anything more will be seen as an attack on the RW activists freedom of speech and attract more nuisance actors to the campus, creating more danger and a lot of bad PR when the RW media jumps on board.
On the flip side, I've had a former colleague outed by name in a major news outlet for being a pseudonymous alt-right influencer. As far as I can tell that has just boosted his views and gotten him invited to speak at the big conservative activist conventions.
There again - editing your already posted comment may end up getting that comment marked as potential spam, so we may have extra motivation not to abuse the edits.
If I'd known russell were responding on the doxxing thing and covering the same points I was making, I'd have saved the typing and the risk of further piling on bc.
Also, I just noticed that we can now edit our comments after posting them. Let us try our best to use these powers only for good.
Tony P. - I’d like to know more about this “doxing”. I do not trust Kristi Noem’s statements about it any more than I trust her DHS 70% statistic. Let’s hear about a few actual cases.
Not meaning to come in here and force bc to engage and defend this while outnumbered. I do think it is important to note, though, that this particular scenario does not start with people on the left being upset that the Trump administration is enforcing the immigration laws and respond by doxxing ICE agents wholesale.
It starts with ICE being given arbitrary quotas and being sent out to grab people based on language and ethnicity, and detaining and deporting people without due process.
And even with that, the few people who have actually been doxxed (as opposed to those who are afraid of being doxxed - not for enforcing the law, but for being violent while pursuing these reprehensible tactics) only ended up getting doxxed because they were the ones caught being especially, shockingly violent on video while engaging in these reprehensible tactics.
Should the public's response here be to say that all ICE agents should be allowed to wear masks so they need not fear being identified, or should it be to say that ICE needs to stop these show raids and use their enforcement power only to go after the actual criminals in a way that does not violate their right to due process? And if we protest it should be both, which of the sides of that choice should be the one we give priority to?
Pro Bono - What we are doing to the planet really matters. What the US is doing matters a lot, because why should poorer countries restrain themselves if the US won’t.
There is that, and also the data suggests that the top 1% of the world are responsible for 2/3 of the warming measured since 1990, and we have over 900 billionaires in our country. China is next closest with 516, and only 3 other nation states have more than 100.
But then here is another shocker - to be in the top 1% worldwide, you need only to make $60,000 a year*, so I'd guess that most of us writing here are in that 1%.
*If we are talking income rather than wealth. Wealth is probably a better measure, but it's also a harder measure to come by.
wonkie - Maybe the Republican party wouldn’t have degenerated into the corrupt, fascist, anti-Constitutional front for religious extremists and oligarchs that it is today if the rest of us had spent the last twenty-five years LOUDLY DENOUNCING THEIR FASCIST PROPAGANDA instead of trying to be “reasonable” while politely engaging in discussion of issues.
...or if the "concerned republicans" had actually been critical of the alt-right and had chosen to ally with the centrist democrats rather than choosing to conciliate their radicals and blame the "radical liberals."
There's a whole lot of quiet complicity enabling this lawless administration, and all of this hindsight is blame shifting.
This is, in many ways, the dynamic that defines reactionary centrism: the right must be understood, but never blamed. The left can be blamed, but need not be understood. One thing that follows from this is a hyper-sensitivity about treating the right fairly. John Rentoul, for instance, the chief political commentator for the Independent, is no cheerleader for Reform UK. Yet his theory of how to defeat the party often involves scoldingthe left for directly stating the nature of the threat: “Oh dear, m’lud: It’s never a good idea to call people Nazis if they are not Nazis” (that might sound like a mean-spirited parody of a British establishment type, but it’s actually the title of one of his columns).
This being just a taste, not the sum total of what I think is apropos. Again, worth a read.
It seems weird to me to be discussing whether or not Omelas was in better shape under Biden or under Trump when the part of the story that is being ignored in order to make this response is that Trump has decided that too few children have been tortured in order to make Omelas great, and that Biden was a pussy for having not had the courage to grab more kids to torture in order to launch Omelas into high gear towards greatness.
Oh, and everyone else in the world sucks compared to Omelas and needs to jump on the kid torturing regime ASAP or else their countries are going to sink just like Omelas under Biden.
wj - As so often, we wonder just what definition of “elite” is being used here.
He covers that earlier: The real answer is that the most powerful liberal institutions – the Democratic establishment, major donors and the professional class around them – are captive to outdated etiquette.
It'sthe DNC and those with input into the strategy side.
In elite liberal spaces, the expectation is always the same: stay quiet, exit gracefully, never make a scene. Yet nonviolent unruliness has power precisely because it breaks the code of composure. Psychologists call this the “expectancy violations theory”: when behavior defies what’s anticipated, it commands outsized attention and carries significant weight. That impact is magnified when it comes from insiders with status or access.
This dynamic suggests that liberalism’s best strategy is to subvert its own norms. Critics may argue that spectacle undermines substance, or that breaking etiquette diminishes the credentials that lend Democrats authority. But in today’s attention economy, spectacle is often how substance gets noticed. Breaking strict decorum is not the enemy of liberalism; it may be the very tool that keeps it alive.
Worth a read. Someone will hopefully send it to Chuck Schumer.
russell - I also disagree with nous’ thought that health care “codes” as a management issue. At the policy level, it does. At the level of “do I have to choose between health insurance and rent” it does not.
Then we agree, because that is what I was trying to get at with my: It doesn’t register for workers as a policy thing so much as it does a wages and benefits thing. The voters that the Dems are losing are going to tune out as soon as the conversation starts focusing on the details of health policy, same as rank-and-file union members start getting sore feet and shuffling as soon as the rep with the bullhorn starts babbling on about the importance of changing the language in Article 5 Part 3 of the CBA.
Keep the language focused on struggles and outcomes and whose side you are fighting on. And if there are cleavage lines over policy choices, focus on the need for solidarity.
You can tell the difference between the Dems with close union ties and allies and the ones who have never been a part of a union and only have ties to people in management.
Healthcare codes as a management concern. It doesn't register for workers as a policy thing so much as it does a wages and benefits thing. Policy details don't land with working class voters because those decisions are made by other people. What matters is whether they are feeling like government is fighting for workers or for the big people.
I really think it's that simple. Low information voters don't listen to policy discussions, and they don't trust people who spend all their time talking about that stuff. It's a cultural divide.
I found the video interesting in pieces, but the combination of a uncertain sync between video and audio and the lower fidelity of the audio made it hard for me to stay focused. It made Solti's conducting feel less than intuitive and had me constantly wondering if what he was signaling was the moment I was hearing.
Chasing down the audio recording in full fidelity on Apple Music and losing the video completely eliminated that feeling of disorientation, as did chasing down a more recent live performance video from Dudamel where the conducting seemed better matched to the audio.
Between watching that and another performance with Gatti conducting, I started to really get a sense for the different impressions that one can get based on where one's visual attention is drawn. The gaze plays a powerful role in what the ear seems to hear in these videos.
One thing that I have found effective in teaching is that the moments when I am being critical of something are always more powerful for the class when I can find a way to tell them from the perspective of "we," rather than "I," and when that narrative incorporates how "I" learned to view the problem through a perspective that helps put "us" back in a position with more agency to address "our" problem.
That, and starting with questions and listening rather than with advice and instructions seem to be the magic mix.
My biggest complaint about the assessment culture that has set in across academia (and the overall rise of big quant that coincides with the monetization of big data) is that there are a lot more people with the tools to gather and measure the data than there are people who have the understanding, expertise, and rigor to tease out when the things we measure actually measure the right things.
I'm interested in reading Limits of the Numerical one of these days: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo146791774.html
It seems the sort of book that can take on the technocratic push for quantitative over qualitative data gathering and analysis. I find that the voices that most often get amplified in management meetings dealing in quantitative assessment are the voices that are on the wrong side of Einstein's admonition that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Not just pain of whatever they have suffered either, GftNC. They also have to give up the narrative justification that gave that suffering purpose, and they have to take on the additional sting of shame for having embraced that hate. That's a lot to swallow.
People will do a lot of shameful things in order to avoid feeling shame.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The South shall writhe again”
Gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/opinion/columnists/tennessee-house-nashville-shooting.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uk8.b5T9.3bVhxDrcFsH7&smid=url-share
On “The Return of the Boat Hook”
Animism is also at the heart of circumpolar shamanism. As a Dark Green Religion, biocentric type, I lean that direction, at least as a narrative for living ethically in the world. It's the story I allow myself to live by whenever and wherever physics starts to slide towards metaphysics.
I think it's healthy to treat everything as a fellow creature wherever possible. It maximizes empathy and guards against hubris.
On “Weekend music thread #02 Bad Bunny”
Similar to Mike's Math Tape, I wrote most of my dissertation while playing a mix of albums from A Beautiful Machine, which was all washed out, ambient, shoegaze-y sounding post-rock. It was noisy enough to drown out distractions, flowy enough to not get monotonous, and indistinct enough that the lyrics wouldn't interfere with whatever complex thought it was I was trying to work out in words.
https://abeautifulmachine.bandcamp.com/album/home
It was my most played music for three years and for 247 pages worth of obsession, stress, and isolation.
On “What’s up, doxx?”
russell - As an aside, this has always been one of my issues with antifa and similar. The folks they want to fight would like nothing better than an opportunity to get into it with them. It’s kind of what they live for.
I think it's important to see this in context. There's more than one sort of antifa group and more than one way in which they get involved in violence. (There's also non-violent antifa groups, but no one really talks about them in these discussions.) The ones that most get talked about in the media, social and otherwise, are the black bloc types who are the (much less prevalent) equivalent of the right wing action clubs. They are looking for action and want to provoke, and are ready and willing to engage in violence if that seems to be the order of the day.
There's also, though, the antifa types who see themselves as mutual aid groups, who are there to offer medical support and protection to other groups they are in solidarity with. They are not wanting to provoke, and they are willing and ready to go into a violent situation and respond with as much force as necessary to protect the people who have been caught in the violence being brought against them by the aforementioned action clubs and counter protesters, and occasionally from law enforcement when situations start to escalate. They are functioning as shields between the oppositional violence and the peaceful, marginalized folks who are there to protest that use of organized force.
It's really hard to tell the difference between these two groups in typical edited video that has been cut down to the spectacle and stripped of the context. And jerkfaces like Andy Ngo make a living off of providing a stream of videos that work to paint all such encounters as being the first type, when a lot of what is being shown are people of the second type working to defend against the violence brought to them by the action club Ngo is working with.
In the absence of the second type, though, a lot of marginalized people would be on the receiving end of the violence with no one there to aid them, and no guarantee of police protection, since the police are busy protecting property.
On “Weekend music thread #02 Bad Bunny”
The repetitiveness of reggaeton is a feature, rather than a bug, for most fans of the genre. It's meant for dancing to in a hot, sweaty club, or blasting in the car, or for (as my students tell me) "vibing" to as they chill or do other things. Breaks in pattern and variations distract from the vibe and demand attention.
A lot of modern popular music is meant to be a background soundtrack for the listeners' noisy lives. It takes a couple weeks for my students to learn how to actively listen and to match speeds with music that is trying to be more than just a simple expression of a single thought or feeling, strung together in a playlist full of similar songs.
This life brought to you by The Algorithm.
"
If I were to formulate a hunch about "Yonaguni," I'd say that there are a few different synergies at work there. Given El Conejo Malo's gender fluidity, we might consider how Yonaguni, as a feminine coded island holding of Japan might stand in for a similar dynamic between Puerto Rico and the US.
Of course it also lets him cross over into the Kpop and Jpop audiences while stepping around the US (and, as you note, English language lyrics). Between reggaeton and the Asian pop scenes one could really capture an international audience and maintain a US presence all without ever having to make a single move to acknowledge the US mainstream.
On “What’s up, doxx?”
...and to get ahead of any posts about quick concrete in protesters' milkshakes:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/07/how-a-dubious-claim-of-cement-milkshakes-in-portland-became-a-right-wing-meme/
There have to be plenty of officers who believe that meme, though, and will act accordingly.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
russell - Clean your damned house. You have rats in the walls.
A fitting metaphor. The GOP, like Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls," have a lot of racism and xenophobia on display.
On “What’s up, doxx?”
From NPR: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/10/nx-s1-5565146/white-house-claims-more-than-1-000-rise-in-assaults-on-ice-agents-data-says-otherwise
I'll also note, for everyone's edification, that the much more modest increase is for charges of assault. I take every one of these charges with a grain of salt. I have colleagues who were involved in peaceful protests who had been charged with resisting arrest just because they tried to keep themselves from falling as several officers attempted to wrestle them to the ground. The officers involved were all using more force than required in an attempt to intimidate. It was ugly, and disproportionate and it was being directed at people who were pointedly non-violent. Some of the protesters were charged with assault because officers were struck by elbows a two or three of them bore down on single protesters. Was it the middle aged black woman's elbow or was it the elbow of one of the other officers? Doesn't matter. If there is a bruise, the person involved is getting a charge filed. A felony charge can be used as leverage to get a plea deal that the DA can use later on to bolster their "tough on crime" pose come election time.
And that's with local agencies who are relatively restrained compared to the ICE bullshit.
Also, while it's not doxxing proper, several of those colleagues have had their names and photos posted online and featured on mobile billboards that have been driven around the campus by right wing activist groups. They hardly have to post a faculty member's home address when the classes they teach and the location of those classes are available to any student enrolled at the university. The university says that all they can do is offer already-available mental health counseling and make the involved faculties' campus profiles available only to the university community at large. The university is afraid that anything more will be seen as an attack on the RW activists freedom of speech and attract more nuisance actors to the campus, creating more danger and a lot of bad PR when the RW media jumps on board.
On the flip side, I've had a former colleague outed by name in a major news outlet for being a pseudonymous alt-right influencer. As far as I can tell that has just boosted his views and gotten him invited to speak at the big conservative activist conventions.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
So it's okay to violate constitutional rights and due process so long as ICE can trot out a few actual criminals afterwards.
Gotta burn the constitution in order to save it?
I mean, that was Lincoln's justification.
Does this rise to the level of slavery in terms of being a threat to the nation?
I don't buy it, but it does seem to be selling well in conservative circles.
"
There again - editing your already posted comment may end up getting that comment marked as potential spam, so we may have extra motivation not to abuse the edits.
"
If I'd known russell were responding on the doxxing thing and covering the same points I was making, I'd have saved the typing and the risk of further piling on bc.
Also, I just noticed that we can now edit our comments after posting them. Let us try our best to use these powers only for good.
"
Tony P. - I’d like to know more about this “doxing”. I do not trust Kristi Noem’s statements about it any more than I trust her DHS 70% statistic. Let’s hear about a few actual cases.
Not meaning to come in here and force bc to engage and defend this while outnumbered. I do think it is important to note, though, that this particular scenario does not start with people on the left being upset that the Trump administration is enforcing the immigration laws and respond by doxxing ICE agents wholesale.
It starts with ICE being given arbitrary quotas and being sent out to grab people based on language and ethnicity, and detaining and deporting people without due process.
And even with that, the few people who have actually been doxxed (as opposed to those who are afraid of being doxxed - not for enforcing the law, but for being violent while pursuing these reprehensible tactics) only ended up getting doxxed because they were the ones caught being especially, shockingly violent on video while engaging in these reprehensible tactics.
Should the public's response here be to say that all ICE agents should be allowed to wear masks so they need not fear being identified, or should it be to say that ICE needs to stop these show raids and use their enforcement power only to go after the actual criminals in a way that does not violate their right to due process? And if we protest it should be both, which of the sides of that choice should be the one we give priority to?
On “The Mother-in-law defense”
Pro Bono - What we are doing to the planet really matters. What the US is doing matters a lot, because why should poorer countries restrain themselves if the US won’t.
There is that, and also the data suggests that the top 1% of the world are responsible for 2/3 of the warming measured since 1990, and we have over 900 billionaires in our country. China is next closest with 516, and only 3 other nation states have more than 100.
But then here is another shocker - to be in the top 1% worldwide, you need only to make $60,000 a year*, so I'd guess that most of us writing here are in that 1%.
*If we are talking income rather than wealth. Wealth is probably a better measure, but it's also a harder measure to come by.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
wonkie - Maybe the Republican party wouldn’t have degenerated into the corrupt, fascist, anti-Constitutional front for religious extremists and oligarchs that it is today if the rest of us had spent the last twenty-five years LOUDLY DENOUNCING THEIR FASCIST PROPAGANDA instead of trying to be “reasonable” while politely engaging in discussion of issues.
...or if the "concerned republicans" had actually been critical of the alt-right and had chosen to ally with the centrist democrats rather than choosing to conciliate their radicals and blame the "radical liberals."
There's a whole lot of quiet complicity enabling this lawless administration, and all of this hindsight is blame shifting.
"
May be apropos to the current discussion:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/70966/what-is-a-reactionary-centrist-does-uk-have-them
This being just a taste, not the sum total of what I think is apropos. Again, worth a read.
"
It seems weird to me to be discussing whether or not Omelas was in better shape under Biden or under Trump when the part of the story that is being ignored in order to make this response is that Trump has decided that too few children have been tortured in order to make Omelas great, and that Biden was a pussy for having not had the courage to grab more kids to torture in order to launch Omelas into high gear towards greatness.
Oh, and everyone else in the world sucks compared to Omelas and needs to jump on the kid torturing regime ASAP or else their countries are going to sink just like Omelas under Biden.
On “The Mother-in-law defense”
wj - As so often, we wonder just what definition of “elite” is being used here.
He covers that earlier: The real answer is that the most powerful liberal institutions – the Democratic establishment, major donors and the professional class around them – are captive to outdated etiquette.
It's the DNC and those with input into the strategy side.
"
In line with this discussion, Ryan Powers' op ed at the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/12/democrats-etiquette-dangerous-democracy
In elite liberal spaces, the expectation is always the same: stay quiet, exit gracefully, never make a scene. Yet nonviolent unruliness has power precisely because it breaks the code of composure. Psychologists call this the “expectancy violations theory”: when behavior defies what’s anticipated, it commands outsized attention and carries significant weight. That impact is magnified when it comes from insiders with status or access.
This dynamic suggests that liberalism’s best strategy is to subvert its own norms. Critics may argue that spectacle undermines substance, or that breaking etiquette diminishes the credentials that lend Democrats authority. But in today’s attention economy, spectacle is often how substance gets noticed. Breaking strict decorum is not the enemy of liberalism; it may be the very tool that keeps it alive.
Worth a read. Someone will hopefully send it to Chuck Schumer.
"
russell - I also disagree with nous’ thought that health care “codes” as a management issue. At the policy level, it does. At the level of “do I have to choose between health insurance and rent” it does not.
Then we agree, because that is what I was trying to get at with my: It doesn’t register for workers as a policy thing so much as it does a wages and benefits thing. The voters that the Dems are losing are going to tune out as soon as the conversation starts focusing on the details of health policy, same as rank-and-file union members start getting sore feet and shuffling as soon as the rep with the bullhorn starts babbling on about the importance of changing the language in Article 5 Part 3 of the CBA.
Keep the language focused on struggles and outcomes and whose side you are fighting on. And if there are cleavage lines over policy choices, focus on the need for solidarity.
"
You can tell the difference between the Dems with close union ties and allies and the ones who have never been a part of a union and only have ties to people in management.
Healthcare codes as a management concern. It doesn't register for workers as a policy thing so much as it does a wages and benefits thing. Policy details don't land with working class voters because those decisions are made by other people. What matters is whether they are feeling like government is fighting for workers or for the big people.
I really think it's that simple. Low information voters don't listen to policy discussions, and they don't trust people who spend all their time talking about that stuff. It's a cultural divide.
On “Weekend music thread #1”
I found the video interesting in pieces, but the combination of a uncertain sync between video and audio and the lower fidelity of the audio made it hard for me to stay focused. It made Solti's conducting feel less than intuitive and had me constantly wondering if what he was signaling was the moment I was hearing.
Chasing down the audio recording in full fidelity on Apple Music and losing the video completely eliminated that feeling of disorientation, as did chasing down a more recent live performance video from Dudamel where the conducting seemed better matched to the audio.
Between watching that and another performance with Gatti conducting, I started to really get a sense for the different impressions that one can get based on where one's visual attention is drawn. The gaze plays a powerful role in what the ear seems to hear in these videos.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
One thing that I have found effective in teaching is that the moments when I am being critical of something are always more powerful for the class when I can find a way to tell them from the perspective of "we," rather than "I," and when that narrative incorporates how "I" learned to view the problem through a perspective that helps put "us" back in a position with more agency to address "our" problem.
That, and starting with questions and listening rather than with advice and instructions seem to be the magic mix.
On “Chinese corruption”
My biggest complaint about the assessment culture that has set in across academia (and the overall rise of big quant that coincides with the monetization of big data) is that there are a lot more people with the tools to gather and measure the data than there are people who have the understanding, expertise, and rigor to tease out when the things we measure actually measure the right things.
I'm interested in reading Limits of the Numerical one of these days: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo146791774.html
It seems the sort of book that can take on the technocratic push for quantitative over qualitative data gathering and analysis. I find that the voices that most often get amplified in management meetings dealing in quantitative assessment are the voices that are on the wrong side of Einstein's admonition that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
Not just pain of whatever they have suffered either, GftNC. They also have to give up the narrative justification that gave that suffering purpose, and they have to take on the additional sting of shame for having embraced that hate. That's a lot to swallow.
People will do a lot of shameful things in order to avoid feeling shame.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.