State of the Discussion

"Relinquishing" as opposed to "being stripped of".

I'm put in mind of the executives who get offered the choice of resign or get fired. Or the occasional enlisted military methodology (for undesirable, but not actually dangerous, tasks): "I want 3 volunteers. You, you, and you."

You can't help wondering how some of the other people who "played" with Epstein are feeling about this. Interestingly, Giuffre's brother and SIL, and the other Epstein victim interviewed on Newsnight, were all very approving of and grateful for the King's behaviour in this. I wonder whether this will to a large extent lance the boil, at least over here and regarding the Royal Fam.

This New Statesman podcast had a detail that I found fascinating (at the 3:50 mark), that Andrew, in his published statement, said that he was relinquishing 'my titles'.

Telling and totally unsurprising.

https://youtu.be/F2Ww_82ifhg?si=2vC0VBGuVb0IbF6l

My favorite of the projects took a problem from telephony switching, multiple pieces from computer science (a very peculiar virtual machine and a bunch of compiler theory), and some odd math to prove a couple of critical conditions actually held. I did get to publish a paper in a special topics issue of an IEEE journal. And present at a small conference, where one of the computer science demi-gods of that era stopped me and told me it was by far the most interesting paper at the conference. I never did find out why he was there.

A friend said it would take more than a minor miracle to find a school that (a) had a telephony group that would vouch for the difficulty of the problem, (b) a CS department that would accept the odd virtual machine as legitimate, and (c) math and CS departments that were on speaking terms.

By the time I did that work I had come to grips with the fact that I'd never be more than a pseudo-academic.

Michael Cain - At one of those, one of the people who did have a doctorate made the observation that yes, Mike had done multiple projects that would easily qualify for a PhD in terms of originality and impact, but all cut across multiple disciplines so no department would ever accept them.

I was in a similar situation with my dissertation, which spanned informatics, film and media studies, and rhetoric. I had people from each of those three disciplines on my committee (two of whom had appointments in English, which is what made my project possible).

I earned the degree, but there were no journals that felt my work was in the pocket for what they covered, and no programs or departments that were looking to hire someone with an oddball set of research interests.

So I teach rhetoric and composition, and transmedial rhetoric sits and gathers dust.

If we had more cross-disciplinary appointments and more interdisciplinary collaboration, we’d probably have better structures in place for working through these sorts of blind spots and assumptions.... Alas, that is not the model on which academia currently runs.

My last position during my technical career was a research job where everyone just assumed I must have a PhD. Occasionally this came up at lunchtime discussions. At one of those, one of the people who did have a doctorate made the observation that yes, Mike had done multiple projects that would easily qualify for a PhD in terms of originality and impact, but all cut across multiple disciplines so no department would ever accept them.

I think this is a particular problem for academics specializing in East Asia because of the problem I faced: Getting fluent in one language/culture is tough, in two is exponentially tougher and three requires something on the level of cosmic coincidence.

I'm not discounting the specific language challenges that you identify here. I suspect the same can be said of linguists that are attempting to do comparative study between geographically distant and isolated branches of Indo-European - leaning too hard on the common ground of shared language and not doing enough to understand the divergent histories, local influences, and historical contexts of the moments they are comparing. These complexities are difficult to work through and require multiple bridging assumptions.

On a more general level, though, I think that the disciplinary specialization of university departments and the specialist communities that form around these disciplinary homes may also lead to another form of overestimation of individual expertise and critical perspective. Scholars submit their work to specialist journals, and the editors on those journals share methodological approaches and disciplinary identities with most of the people submitting papers for publication. And even if the paper does get submitted to an outside expert to verify parts that are outside of the author's expertise, those outside experts often find themselves in unfamiliar methodologies and contexts that limit how much they are able to interact with the wider implications of what is being asserted in the article.

If we had more cross-disciplinary appointments and more interdisciplinary collaboration, we'd probably have better structures in place for working through these sorts of blind spots and assumptions.

Alas, that is not the model on which academia currently runs.

I don't think we can save America from fascism without somehow countering the firehose of Goebbels style propaganda from Faux, Newsmax, and other Republican media outlets. Trump will stroke out, but the rest of the R party will remain. I don't see it as a Trump cult as much as it is a Faux news cult.

The rebuilding at home will be, by comparison with the destruction of trust, be quick and easy. 

I wish I shared your optimism here, but unfortunately I do not.

The problem I see is that all the people who are more than fine with what's going on now are still gonna be here. They might not be an absolute majority, but there are a lot of them, and the non-democratic aspects of our polity - the Senate, the Electoral College - give them political clout beyond what their numbers would merit.

And a lot of the people who Trump and the conservative movement in general have brought into government are still gonna be there. Especially in the judiciary, not to exclude the SCOTUS. Roberts, Alito, Thomas are all 70 or older, but Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Coney Barrett all have decades of time ahead of them.

To add to that, I think the Trump years are gonna make the professional civil service - the people who actually do the governmenty stuff - a much less attractive option for people who might otherwise be interested in basic public service.

If every four years you're gonna have to worry about having to explain to some 20-something techbro asshole why what you do - monitoring economic and labor data, tracking the weather, medical research, etc. - is important enough to justify your continued employment is gonna make a lot of people look elsewhere.

Some folks who have been RIF'd would probably go back, a lot will not. And I can't blame them.

There are times when it's a great coping mechanism to be a compulsive optimist. Although that should probably be a *relative* optimist.

I expect the nation will take a lot (more) damage in the near term. But I think it is, eventually, recoverable damage. Not without a lot of work. And in a lot of cases, it will probably take a couple of generations for the memories to fade. Definitely, in the case of our foreign relations.

But consider our relations (pre-Trump!) with Germany and Japan. Economic competitors to some degree, sure. But even the oldest of us are only the children of the folks who fought World War II, and it's never had the same emotional impact that it did for them. For us, it's just history; for our children it's mostly ancient history.

The rebuilding at home will be, by comparison with the destruction of trust, be quick and easy. Relatively. Lots and lots of people hurt in the meantime. But horrible as that is, overall it's a long way from "permanent".

And (see compulsive optimist) I could see us getting to something resembling the Progressive Era that followed the previous Gilded Age. Not just fixing the trashed stuff, by completely new improvements.

...going numb...

I had a cavity filled today. Four hours on from when they started, my upper lip on that side is still numb. Ah, the joys of trying to drink from a glass when you can only feel it on one side.

"it’s something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it"

this ^^^

I'm sure it's obvious from my comments here over the years that I'm fine with an active government.

But the government we have right now is profoundly toxic.

We need to resist all of that wherever we can, to the degree that we can, with whatever resources we can bring to that effort. But turning all of that around, for whatever meaning of "turn that around" manifests itself, will take time. And a lot of government-y stuff is going to be broken, and some it will stay broken indefinitely, perhaps forever.

So it's important to find other avenues for, as the cliche has it, making the world a better place. Which mostly amounts to helping each other and not shitting on the given world we all live in. Or, you know, trying our best to do those things.

The federal government we have right now is effectively a cabal of greedy vindictive malicious wanna-be tyrants. Most of them are deeply incompetent, and the ones that aren't we probably wish were.

Find ways to work around them. Get in their way if you can, to whatever degree of risk you can tolerate. Which might be none, which is OK. But find ways to do constructive things in spite of them.

That's how we get through.

This may sound weird, but one thing I have been doing is planting trees. Not personally. We're in an apartment in campus managed housing, so our ability to do much of anything with our surroundings is highly limited. Nope, I've been donating monthly to One Tree Planted for most of the year, and they have been doing the planting for me in areas devastated by wildfires or desertification. By the end of the year I'll have planted 240 trees around the world.

It's a small thing, but it's something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it, and it directly contributes to slowing down the damage we are doing with our other shortsightedness.

For the last week or two I've been dealing with water infiltration and resulting black mold in the basement. Which has been, to a surprising and welcome degree, a great way to keep from feeling overwhelmed by all of the Trumpian BS.

It's a tractable problem, and I can fix it. Tear out bad sheetrock and insulation, bag it up and throw it out. Treat the remaining nasty spots. Hang new insulation and sheetrock. Tape prep and paint.

All done! All better! It's actually been kind of therapeutic.

Household chores, same. Pruning, fall cleanup. I've been putting peanuts out for the crows, who have figured out my schedule and arrive more or less on time each morning in a kind of raucous crowd. Gonna put the feeders up for the songbirds this weekend.

Listen to music, play music. Stay in touch with friends. Be mindful of my own reactions to events, emotionally physically and spiritually, and step away when it begins to overwhelm.

It will, for better or worse, still be there when you feel up to dealing with it.

I was volunteering at a local food bank, but stopped back in June when I got COVID. Now I just send them money, but it's actually much more satisfying to contribute in person. So I may go back to that once I finish getting the basement cleaned up.

There is a limit to what any one of us can absorb, and to what any one of us can do about it all. Recognize and respect your own limits. That doesn't mean put your head in the sand and pretend nothing bad is happening, it just means don't let it run you over.

You're doing all good things, wonkie. It's an inspiration to me, personally. Carry on, and take care of yourself.

OK, now I gotta check Opeth!

Bembe is kind of the mother lode of hypnotic, trance-inducing rhythms. It embodies that polyrhythmic "is it in 2 or 3?" thing that draws you in with its ambiguity.

I have a long list of retirement projects that I hope to get to before I peg out. One of them is working through a short book of exercises based on the bembe bell pattern by Boston area drummer Jerry Leake, who has made a kind of one-man cottage industry of teaching people to work and play with multi-layered rhythms.

Here's Jerry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G0qZsW481g

The pagan feminist author and teacher Miriam Simos (aka Starhawk) has said that magic is the "art of changing consciousness at will". I've found music to be one of the available vehicles for that.

Good stuff. You wouldn't think it of a metalhead like me, but bembe is close to my heart as well. Opeth, the band that I got some of ObWi hooked on a while back, was notable for being a Swedish metal band with a latin rhythm section. Both the drummer, Martin Lopez, and the bassists Martin Mendez, were Uruguayan. (Well, Lopez was born in Sweden to Uruguayan parents, and lived there for a time. Mendez emigrated to Sweden when he was 17.) All of the 6/8 feel stuff that Opeth plays starting on My Arms, Your Hearse through Ghost Reveries were given pulse by Lopez and Mendez playing bembe influenced heavy rhythms to the point where even after Lopez left the group, Mikael Åkerfeldt, the main songwriter, was still writing Afro-Caribbean inflected rhythmic sections. He even had Alex Acuña play percussion on one song on the album they did right after Lopez left the band.

Bembe is what gives Opeth's brutal passages that groove that few other metal bands can find. Sepultura and Gojira get it, but Sepultura is Brazillan and Gojira are French eco-activists who do tons of work in the Amazon basin and that has bled over into Mario's drumming.