State of the Discussion

I don't doubt that a significant portion of Orange's posts are written by someone (or something?) else, but I wouldn't necessarily attribute his late-night/early-morning posts to someone else just because of the time of day. That guy's a total f**king weirdo who is obsessed with himself and lacks impulse control.

He's patient zero for TDS. It's a different disease than he thinks it is.

It's been obvious for some time that many (most?, virtually all?) of the Truth Social posts are written by someone else. Too many long sentences, too many big words, too long, just flat out too many posts. Which also may explain the use of the third person, althouth Trump has taken to doing that when speaking.

At minimum, Trump rants about something, a minion writes it down, cleans up the wording, and enters it -- which I would guess is what happened, at least in part, with the Rob Reiner post. More often, someone else drafts a post, reads it to Trump to get his approval, and then posts it. And sometimes (for example the middle of the night posts) someone just echoes his style. Albeit with better syntax and a far bigger vocabulary than Trump ever uses.

one of the comments on that Kyoto HS vid said the reason there were so many women in the band was because marching band is seen as a 'girly' thing in Japan.

?

it being a former girls-only school makes more sense, though.

Hartmut, I suppose one could read it like that, but I'm just pointing out that linguistically, the wording is a bit implausible as something authored by Trump, which then has me imagining some writers' room where they are churning out these truth social posts. Gemini tells me that he averages 15-20 a day but that's skewed, and it was mentioned that he posted 160 times in a single evening.

Degree classifications went private decades ago. But I suppose she would have let it be known if hers were creditable.

Getting into Oxbridge is an achievement in itself,

Yes, the summary conveys the import but not the tone of the article, which was in some ways positive about Truss, with obvious reservations. Stears will have chosen his words carefully.

Here's a bit of what Stears wrote in The Times:

Back in our tutorials, Truss demonstrated an unnerving ability to surprise. No other student matched her mischievous ability to read out essays on any number of the main events in British political history which always managed to say something new; not always accurate, but definitely new.

These essays were creative and self-consciously unconventional. As we argued over the hour, she almost never backed down, even when I did what all Oxford tutors try to do and present fact after fact to try to change her mind. It was frustrating at times, but as a young tutor, I really liked how she insisted her judgment mattered just as much as anyone else’s. Older tutors were probably more frustrated by how she was happy to deviate sharply from the textbooks.

There's a lot going on between the lines in this assessment.

Pro Bono: that would surprise me, regarding the words in bold. They were exactly what I remembered reading when she became PM. Was AI generating that stuff then?

By the time we get to Dave Lombardo and Slayer’s Reign in Blood, we are in a zone of Darwinian mutation, as Lombardo pulls off feats of speed and dexterity unimaginable—and probably terrifying—to his drumming forebears.

SLAYER!!!

(Sorry, it's kind of mandatory for me to do that.)

The thing about Liz Truss I can never forget is Marc Stears, one of her tutors from Oxford saying that

"once Truss had an idea in her head, she was "unshakeable" and seemed to thrive on going against the prevailing orthodoxy. Stears noted her ability to argue a position fiercely, even when presented with facts that showed she was wrong, only to later drop that belief entirely and adopt a new one with the same fervour."

That's copied from Google's AI, but I distinctly remembered it from when she was leader, and did a quick search to find it. It's (my) bolded part that I find particularly telling.

I always think of noise rock, math rock, and post-rock when I think about influential Japanese musicians: MONO, Toe, Boris, Merzbow - all hugely influential far beyond Japan itself. (I'm tempted to throw Sigh into the mix as well, with their avant-garde black metal catching some of that noise and dada influence.)

It seems to me that Japanese rock splits itself into the groups that are coming at things from an Idol influenced direction - having a huge emphasis on visual presentation and fandom - and the more otaku side that is dedicated to exploration of some aspect of music with willful disregard for the Idol ethos.

I would say that I prefer the latter over the former, but I listen to a lot of BABYMETAL, so I am not immune to the charms of the idol aesthetic.

cleek, nous, that's really interesting, at my university and I believe at every other university, there is always a large contingent of students who are in a band, and I think the large majority of them leaning to heavy metal/hard rock. I'm wondering if it can be connected to the love of classical music, it is hard for me to see it as the same, though it could very well spring from the same source.

I have no idea if this is of any interest to anyone, but it is a gift article from the Atlantic by James Parker called The Great Mystery of Drumming, about a book called Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers by John Lingan. I've heard of neither of these guys, but maybe some people here have.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/rock-music-history-drummers/684955/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCfu6mZ7op8KFvj2oLcbyLWg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

I think Japan does have that Chinese heritage of music education for young people, but the Cultural Revolution destroyed large ensembles of Western music, so you don't have the same ethos as Japan.

The institutions in China have been rebuilt in the intervening 50 years, and music is a required subject for primary and secondary school, but that discontinuity, plus the fact that academic subjects are more highly emphasized means that the situation is a little different from Japan.

You do have the same thing here with students who said that their mother (usually, the father most of the time doesn't deal with this) forced them to play piano, but a number of them say that they hated it at the time, but now appreciate it.

A couple of anecdotes, in Japan, every jhs and hs has a class chorus competition and it always surprised me that there was always at least 1 or 2 students within the class who played piano well enough to accompany. The whole thing is often run by the students, so you get this move away from a teacher centered thing to student led.

Another factoid that always amazed me, when a broadcaster records/televises a concert, they don't have to train the broadcast staff, they can simply give them annotated orchestra scores because they all can read music to a degree that the score acts as a shot list.

In Willie Ruff's autobiography, Call to Assembly, there is a chapter about the Mitchell-Ruff duo (Ruff plays french horn and bass) going to visit China and lecture at the Shanghai conservatory in 1981, which was 5 years after the end of the Cultural Revolution. The whole chapter is interesting, but this is particularly relevant

One [question] came from an older Chinese teacher. "When you created 'Shanghai Blues' just now," he asked, "did you have a form for it, or a logical plan?"
I said, "I just started tapping my foot, then a theme suggested itself, which I played on the horn, and Mitchell heard it. And he answered And after that we heard and answered, heard and answered, heard and answered."
"But can you play it again?" the professor asked.
"We never can.
He would not accept my answer. "But that is beyond our imagination. Our students here play a piece a hundred times, or two hundred times, to get it exactly right. You play something once-something that has great value-and then you throw it away."
I said that if we played the same music twice in an improvisation, the second time would be no improvisation at all. "We call improvisation the lifeblood of jazz because the performer is challenged to do it better each time."
The old teacher as much as threw up his hands. The mystery persisted.

This isn't to suggest that there are no Asian musicians who improvise, on the local level, there are some folks here whose concerts I go to and have great chops. (perhaps the topic of a future music thread), but I think all of them have had a period overseas where they immersed themselves and then have returned.

Just trying again, in case I found out how to delete one link
Part 1

Stewart Lee: Remember when America used to destroy democracy in style? Those were the days

The CIA once promoted abstract expressionism as a tool of regime change. Now we have AI videos of Trump bombing people with faeces

Stewart Lee

Dec 12, 2025

I wasn’t even born in the 50s but I’m already nostalgic for the days when, rather than re-bombing drowning Venezuelan sailors to make sure none survive an airstrike in a war Congress has not authorised, American operatives in sharp suits and sunglasses instead tried to implement regime change subtly, discreetly and even tastefully, to a soundtrack of Paul Desmond cool jazz classics. It’s called democracy, daddio, you dig?

The historian Frances Stonor Saunders believes the CIA promoted the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in order to discredit Soviet realist art. Donald Trump, meanwhile, just gave some kind of made-up award to the band Kiss, who pretended to be magic animals from space in the 1970s.

A world in which America could imagine abstract art as a cultural propaganda tool is a far cry from one where the president releases an AI video of himself carpet bombing protesters with clods of human excrement, although the 60s Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who canned his faeces and sold them, might recognise Trump as a kindred creative spirit. On balance though, those postwar CIA guys were a better class of bastard. 

Because on Monday, quietly and without much fanfare from the mainstream media, the world we grew up in changed for ever and our Euro-doom was decreed. Donald J Trump’s National Security Strategy statement explained, quite explicitly, that he will be actively aiding European far-right nationalist parties to win elections in order to “restore western identity”, end mass migration into Europe, and enforce a contemporary American idea of freedom of speech, which appears to mean the right to say anything irrespective of its accuracy. Don’t like these facts? The algorhythmically amplified far-right avatars of American social media have others. And if those don’t convince you, the president has a cartoon of himself bombing people with shit.

Conservative commentators like to imagine Donald J Trump as a largely unserious presence whose provocative statements are meant to bait the libtards rather than to represent a genuine direction of political travel. Keir Starmer in turn chooses to see Trump as some kind of elderly greedy badger who can be placated with offers of a deluxe breakfast with Magic King Charles of Ye Olde England, and some string. 

Trump in turn has already agreed to use the United Kingdom as an enormous energy-sapping battery, housing all the servers needed to generate the algorithmically skewed content that will eventually destroy liberal European democracy. Result! Sir Keir did a great deal with Donald, who then sent him down to the DIY shop to buy some striped paint.

But since Monday’s White House National Security  Strategy statement, Starmer’s going to have to up the standard full English at Windsor Castle to at least the level of the late lamented Little Chef Olympic if he wants to avoid the country falling fast into fascism. Baked bean ramekins all round! Just how good can those Windsor Castle sausages be? And will the Royal footmen even be able to find any sausages now Prince Andrew, currently Andrew, is rumoured to have been playing a game involving hiding them?

Interesting. I'm fairly familiar with how China does their music education because of the music writing class I've taught. There the emphasis is more on testing and certification than on ensemble playing. I'm sure that there must be a lot of young people who did the lessons and found something they loved, but most of the students who have written essays about their experience complain that it was too much about technical ability and challenge, and not nearly enough about play. They were pushed into it by their parents in order to have an objective certification of their diligence and discipline. Expression was secondary. Their stories are mostly about rediscovering music and learning to love it only after they had either refused any further lessons, or crashed and burned out of the competitive testing at a lower level of proficiency. They only learned to love playing after they came back to it with no outside pressure to excel.

Are there parallels in Japan, or is this one of those cultural differences over how each nation expresses their collectivity?

I am thinking that they are going to end up using chinese tech, and at some point, the Chinese will flip a kill switch and none of our stuff will work.

Who says corporate America doesn’t have at least some sense of humor left?

Ryan Reynolds makes humorous, self-deprecating Mint Mobile commercials. In 2020 and 2024, he was the world's second-highest-paid actor. Now that he's an entrepreneur, he's also a billionaire.

Who says corporate America doesn't have at least some sense of humor left? I got this card from Mint Mobile. It included a fragment of holiday wrapping paper :^)