Her birthday was yesterday, and I would have posted this here earlier, but you all were dragging your heels about filling up the eternal thread.
I first discovered Janis when I was 12, and I was afraid there might be something sinful about her, because every time I listened, I felt funny. Good funny, but kind of dangerous funny, too. But now that I’m a little bit older, I know that she was wicked, the best kind of wicked there is.
Even now when I listen to Janis I feel that same deep-down funny.
(Episode CCXCII: Eradicating all junk science.)
Riding that horse for some time now.
rorschach, June 12:
Before you click over to read that thread, ask yourself something.
What are the chances that anyone had mentioned Sharia arbitration courts?
Irene, quite.
***
Nah, just waking up.
…And then I fell asleep. :)
***
Here’s what happened: KG and I and some others were arguing with Ophelia and some others on her blog. We made a very specific argument, and she insisted on ignoring the substance of that argument and claiming that we were saying she’s racist or crazy and that her objection to the term “Islamophobia” is eccentric and the crux of the discussion, even after I’d explicitly said that this wasn’t what we were arguing. I stopped commenting on her blog because my arguments were being misrepresented and evaded, but when she continued to misrepresent them and to quote (in contradiction with that misrepresentation) that idiotic piece by Piers Benn I linked to it here.
Josh commented on that post to the effect that people had called her crazy and that we were incapable of following her argument. He either didn’t bother to read what KG, Improbable Joe, and I had said or he deliberately chose to misrepresent us. That was unkind. To me. Personally. He also did this in a comment on that post without saying a word about the homophobia analogy, which I found shocking. Commenting is not the equivalent of leaving the room. It’s the opposite. And people bring in and comment on discussions on other sites (especially those where they’re no longer commenting) here all the time.
But you’re advocating that we not use the term homophobic when we’re not referring to an inescapable psychological fear.
You are indeed making the homophobic argument that Piers Benn made: you are arguing that “criticism of homosexuality” is not homophobia, and that “disapproval of homosexual behaviour” is not homophobia, if these are not beyond conscious control.
It was homophobic when Benn said it, and it’s homophobic when you say it. (So go fuck yourself. I trust you are well enough able to follow the conversation that you’re now aware you’re promoting homophobia.)
Yes, my suggestion is to use words according to their generally accepted meanings.
Carlie
HUgs if you want them.
But off-place teeth can have severe effects on the overall health, including chronical headaches, and the off-bite can damage the teeth.
I’m sure you didn’t just say “yay, braces!”
Audley
Hmm, I don’t mind the smell of my detergent. I don’t mind the smell of my mum’s, which used to be mine.
I usually don’t handle other people’s clothes as well, but I needed to remove the sleeves of that denim jacket. I can even tell you that it’s the same detergent my friend uses, the mum of my godson and I can cuddle the boy for hours without end.
But funny enough, that smell didn’t trigger “ohh cuddly Christopher-babe”, but “ew, yuck”
shrimps
Did I mention that Mrs. Colon’s Stir Fry includes shrimp? But peeled ones.
I don’t mind them “complete”, but it’s messy.
I remember watching some broadcast about posh table manners one day. They explained how to eat mussles, and oisters, snails, and then they came to shrimp and I thought “finally I’m going to learn how to do it right” and the they went “first, you twist off the head, then you pluck out the legs, finally you peel off the shell” and I accepted that even if upper class twits can’t come up with a more elegant way apart from paying people to do it, there probably isn’t any.
Oh, and having said that, first encounters with boyfriend-families can be fun. Mine introduced themselves all by their relation to Mr., not that I wouldn’t have guessed so all along, but then I had no idea how to adress them since they didn’t give me a clue as to whether to call them Mr./Mr. X or by their first names.
You can hardly call them “hey, Mr’s mum, how are you?”
Thanks for the congratulations, everyone. I’m just now coming out of the shock of it all.
On a related subject, I’m going to be in the Portland, OR area around the 24th of March. I don’t know for how long, so I don’t know if I’ll have time to see folks, but I’m hoping to make it at least a week. I’ll report more as details coalesce, if anybody’s interested in getting together for an informal night of beer and excellent conversation. (I’m trusting others to provide the excellent conversation, of course.)
nigelTheBold – I have five grandlings, all of the female variety. I have enjoyed them, especially teaching them things their parents do not want them to know. Those things are usually the stuff I taught their parents, come to think of it. In any case, enjoy and luck to your daughter.
@ LM
Oh wait, I’ve said that before. LM, fear and hate (your example) are not the same … at all … I agree that this is an important issue. With important issues we need to be a bit more precise. I may be naive, ignorant,merely argumentative…. any number of things in this regard. But hateful or fearful? Please.
There are any number of reasons one might conceivably come to criticise homosexuality. Fear, hatred, ignorance, delusion, cerebral infarction, indoctrination … I am not saying any are justified. The word is all yours if you can give me another. In the example given: If not “xenophobia” to describe an irrational fear of foreigners, then what?
I am prepared to believe that in most cases there is a very conscious decision to discriminate against homosexual behaviour. We are arguing about the suffix “-phobia” (=”fear”) though? I get the sense that different levels of this discussion are getting conflated. (I am not following Piers Benn, we can each speak for ourselves.)
Why I prefer to put this discussion in the context of xenophobia is that I will then be called out for hating foreigners, why I prefer to put this discussion in terms of hemophobia is that I will then be called out as … ad infinitum )
JeffreyD — I tried teaching my daughter critical thinking, but it didn’t seem to take. I’ve only had her a couple of weeks each year since she was 4 or so, so I didn’t have much chance, but that’s life, I reckon. At least her fiance is Lutheran (it seems, anyway), which is a step up from the fundamentalism in which she was raised.
That’s OK. I’m going to try my damnedest to teach this kid to skeptical.
@ Denephew Ogvorbis
Oh no. Now I have a recipe I can no longer hide behind the excuse of ignorance. I shall have to come up with a devious plan.
…
Steamed. Break of head and … mange tout.
You still have an excuse. I didn’t tell you how to fold them.
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Lay the square eggroll wrapper on a cutting board with one point in your direction (in other words, make it a rhombus). Place a hefty one tablespoon of cooled and drained filling in the middle of the roll. Shape it, just a little, into an thin oval (short side up-down, long side left-right). Bring the point closest to you up and over the filling. Brush some beaten egg on the two long edges that are farthest away from you. Fold the left and right edge over so they are snug against the filling. Roll the egg roll up firmly but not too tightly (too tightly and it may rip). If you are using very moist filling, you may need to double wrap them. Repeat until you run out of wrappers or filling. If you run out of filling first, slice the wrappers into Fettuccini-width noodles and fry them after you do the egg rolls to serve over your Hot & Sour Soup.
If you have rappers instead of wrappers, you need to have your musical taste buds replaced.
nigelTheBold – I am lucky in that most of my kids took to skeptical and critical thinking with little effort. Mother of first two (divorced) and last three (deceased) also encouraged same. Hope you can work it with your grandchild, I still work at it with mine. Luck again to you and your daughter.
theophontes:
What’s wrong with being precise when the situation calls for it? See comments by walton, Giliell, myself and others, upthread, to the effect that yes, there does exist a specific hatred of Muslims in certain circles. (Just like the existence of anti-Jewish hatred warrants the use of the word anti-Semitism in addition to racism and bigotry.)
Since this hatred of all things Muslim is not limited to anti-immigrants agitation, we can’t just chalk it up to xenophobia. The likes of Wilders would like to make the whole religion illegal in the country, or at least ban the Qu’ran. (A boneheaded move, even if Islam was all they were claiming it is: how do we counteract a dangerous doctrine if we don’t know what it says?)
Changing the language to avoid the suffix “-phobia”? It might sound like a good idea, at the first superficial glance… But remember that you just advocated the use of “xenophobia” instead of “islamophobia”, a few lines earlier? (Or at least, that’s what it looks like.) And of course, there’s homophobia, and transphobia while we’re at it. We are going to have to make a lot of changes if we take this route. And all to try to avoid the evasive tactics of bigots who will do everything in their power anyway to twist the meaning of words!
But it’s not limited to “phobia”. If we call the anti-Muslim bigots racists, they claim that they are against a religion, not a race. (It’s also a tactic displayed by anti-Semites sometimes: “but Judaism is a religion, it’s not racist if I speak against it”…) If we call them xenophobes, or even bigots, it doesn’t help against when Islamophobes claim to be against theocracy and violations of human rights (but only when it’s Muslims doing bad things). And so on.
That’s why I think it’s pointless to try and change one’s words each time the bigots twist them! It even happens with “misogyny”, when MRAs claim that they don’t “hate” women, they just “object to the intellectual terrorism of radical feminists”…
@ Brogg
I am soooooo fucked now… (condemned to the kitchen). *
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* Translation: “Roast me, Brer
FoxOgvobis, but don’t fling me in in that briar patch!”theophontes:
Look up phobias. It isn’t necessary that they’re entirely subconscious processes. They may be triggered by events which people are no longer aware of, but even that doesn’t need to be the case.
If we’re really going to be picky, ambiguous concepts like “fear” and “hatred” aren’t the causes of a behavior. If you’re going to claim one kind of behavior is caused by hatred and not fear, that doesn’t really explain the behavior anyway, and we’re still left wondering what exactly caused the hatred. It doesn’t just pop into existence out of nowhere, after all, and there’s nothing about “hatred” that we can assume is more or less deliberate than “fear.”
theophontes, “Portrait of a Dragon” is punny and cool!
This is not a private ‘lounge’.
It’s an Open Thread.
There are no rules that need enforced*.
‘Do what thou wilt’ is the whole of the law.
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*deliberate ‘burghese
Yep. I’m pretty slack about compelling people to stay on topic on most threads here, but in the open threads, I expect chaos to rule. And that’s OK.
Chaos?
Or the milkman Kaos?
Isn’t being boring close to the top of the list?
Giliell – Thanks. :) You’re right, it certainly wasn’t a yay braces scenario! I hadn’t even thought of the headaches; he does get those sometimes, so that might help too.
Heh. I’ve known them for over 20 years now, and I’m still not sure quite what to call them. It’s just the last few years we’ve kind of settled on first name, but it still feels uncomfortable.
Oh yea, I had a dream this morning, and woke up with something that will bother me for the rest of my life!!!
I was playing some MMO (which doesn’t exist) and gaining faction points to get some items. Finally get “noble” reputation with this faction and look at their list and there’s some item like “Spirits’ Stamina” which has some odd status effects. So, in my dream I log onto a website with all the item descriptions and start to type in the name of this item to see what the status effects do… and my alarm goes off.
I will never know what the item did because it doesn’t exist. I can’t just make something up because my dream obviously had some plan in mind for what the item did. This is gonna bother me forever.
Nigel, conga rats!
++++++++++
Katherine Lorraine, I’m convinced that labs & cubicles get randomly moved because the space committee gets bored of their shitty task and wants to make everyone else as miserable as they are.
Katherine:
Not to worry. The only special power that the ‘Spirits Stamina’ item had was to give the holder the ability to debate the definition of the word ‘sprititual’ without getting angry, sarcastic, tired, discouraged, and without attempting to reprogramme your computer with a 9-pound spike maul.
@ Irene Delse
I agree with what you say here. The context was about precision. ie: We need to acknowledge there are circumstances where we are dealing with willfulness (here I would use the prefix “anti-” as you have done) and alternatively irrational/uncontrolled behaviour (here we are speaking of a true “-phobia”). Children may very well fear muslims, … in such a case the term “islamophobia” would be apt. We can hardly say they are coming to this position after deliberation. (Contrast Geert Wilders.)
You have wielded the prefix “anti-” very deftly and appropriately. If I am fishing behind the net wrt the term “-phobia”, I will still need a term (of the same original meaning) to describe the (morbid) phobic condition. This will become even more important if Geert Wilders gains traction. Rabid anti-islamic rhetoric will feed the need for such a term.
No (I hope not). The dychotomy should be in terms of anti-foreigner as opposed to xenophobia. (or, anti-islamic as opposed to islamophobia).
I realise that language moves on and I cannot stem the flow. If this is the case – my question then is what words should we use to say what we would otherwise mean by “(morbid) fear of” … islamists, foreigners, homosexuals, spiders, blood,…?
The “stick insect” morphing of the terms used in reactionary language is something we cannot argue against with a shotgun approach. We will also have to be careful of the terms we use. We must (at least the atheist/anti-theist amongst us) not be shifted by the logic of these people. I think our criticisms of religion are very valid. A cursory glance at evangelical attitudes towards science education is a warning against being afraid to call out religion (ideas) because such an approach is mimicked as a cloak for bigotry by people who are anti-social (not demophobic).
My argument is more for precision. The word “misogyny” is very accurate and appropriate. Simply put: “hatred of women”. The morbid fear of women is called “gynophobia”. Here the distinction is clear and we can hold a clear discussion using two precise terms that are quite distinct in meaning. I suggest we need to get the same handle on other terms we are required to use.
I’m starting to get a phobia about phobia arguments.
Rule-wise… well, being decent to each other isn’t a rule, it’s a social consensus. And ‘Do what thou wilt’ includes calling each other out when someone is prioritizing assedness over being decent. That’s not ‘enforcement’, that’s a suggestion to consider other people, and to ass-check one’s own behavior.
…Holy moley, I can’t ♥ Crommunist hard enough.
https://proxy.freethought.online/crommunist/2012/01/23/standing-on-the-shoulders-of-assholes/
If we’re dealing with willfulness, that doesn’t mean we must be dealing with something that isn’t irrational.
And I don’t know what you mean by “irrational/uncontrolled.” Are these supposed to be interchangeable or separate conditions? If the latter, it would be clearer if you said “irrational or uncontrolled.”
@The Sailor:
Well, we are losing a few people so I’m sure my supervisor just wants us all in the same area rather than spread out over two floors.
@Oggie:
Yea, I wish I could take that explanation, but it just won’t take.
@ CR
Am I using the wrong terminology then? Contrast the hatred embodied by someone like Geert Wilders with the terror of the little Sudanese girl.
(Please respond without using the term “no free will”.)
@ Sailor
We are awash with dragons right now. I haz happy.
(There really are a whole lot of artists doing portraits of tourists on Montmartre. I don’t know why Hong Kong is flooded with all things French right now. I can’t throw a beer bottle off my balcony without the initial screams being followed up with cries of “Merde, merde…”)
Katherine Lorraine:
Ya jest gotta BELEEVE!
Trust me. It’ll make all the thinking about things disappear.
Am I supposed to assume Wilders isn’t afraid or isn’t irrational, because he’s not a little girl?
We are (for the sake of argument), to assume two completely separate and unrelated people. As far as I know Geert does not refer to himself as Geertje.
Prithee, be more forthcoming.
@ theophontes:
I think I see what you’re aiming for, here, but I think this concern is not very relevant in the case at hand. If we are talking about the common usage of words, there’s not much risk to confuse a phobia in the medical sense (like arachnophobia, claustrophobia, etc.) and the set of social and ideological phenomena we call homophobia, or xenophobia, or whatever.
For instance, despite the meme of the “rabid homophobe who is really a self-hating gay”, a lot of those who despise GLBT people, who deny them human rights and who’d like them to turn straight or at least hide in obscurity, are not just reflexively being frightened, they build elaborate ideological justifications (often of a religious nature, but also sometimes pseudo-scientific), engage in activism and advocacy, etc.
The same is true of organised xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, racism… It’s not the same that the uninformed reaction of a child raised in a monocultural or monoracial environment suddenly confronted to a member of an obviously different group.
Or even the reflexive distrust and/or incomprehension of the other sex when boys and girls are raised and schooled apart! On that matter:
Not quite. “Misogyny” is a label used to characterise not only the people who hate women, but also all those who despise them: most defenders of the patriarchy don’t want to get away from women but to “put them back in their place”, deny them their rights and even the capacity to express themselves in the public arena.
You notice that now I’m purposefully using here the usual terms instead of teasing out specific issues, because the point is that we inherit a lot of words with a sense and a history of usage, even if we don’t like them very much. I might try to say “anti-Muslim hate”, or “anti-foreigner”, etc. But unless there’s really a possible confusion, or if I’m not being extra-precise for the sake of clarification at the beginning of a discussion, I generally don’t bother. Extra precision is called for sometimes, but too much can feel like pedantry.
As long as we know we are not talking about little kids in a Western country being amazed the first time they see women with veils or men in long robes and strange head-gear, I don’t think we need to be concerned about the use of the “-phobia” suffix.
Worse: this confusion is often purposefully brought to the table by the more clever of the bigots to try to muddy the waters! They have a vested interest in disqualifying the very terms we use to characterise their hateful behaviour, so it helps them if we spend our time arguing about how to label the bigots instead of calling them out.
First, I’ll contrast apples with oranges….
Nah, fuck it. I would rather you respond to the rest of my comments, or I’ll take it that you concede the points I was making in them.
If you think a word like homophobia should only apply to cases like that little Sudanese girl, then I doubt you’d have much occasion to apply it at all. I have no idea why you think that would be better socially, and it doesn’t seem to rely on anything more than erroneous folk psychology anyway.
Wait for the end of the clip when Santorum-For-Brains backs up his claims with thirty-two out of thirty-two states voted down gay marriage. Rights are not to be voted on, that is the point. In 1860, a majority of the states in the US would have voted down the freeing of slaves and granting the freed people full citizenship.
I am not even going to touch on all of the god shit and the fact that marriage has changed often over the millenniums.
And I want to burn all sweater vests!
nigelTheBold, conga rats ululations and good luck to all involved!
BroOgg, has anyone ever told you you have an eeeeevil streak? *g* Fortunately for me, I am not the cook in this household and the one who is the cook cooks whatever comes to mind. Not my mind, though my mind may be consulted if ideas are thin on the ground on a given evening.
Never attempt to reprogramme your computer with a 9-pound spike maul; always use a screwdriver and leave the cement outside.
A bit late on this, but…
Pteryxx @ 297:
If you need help re-figuring out some of the old stuff (or rebuilding a collection you had), let me know. I’ve digitized most of my music, and I tend towards 90’s techno (not sure if that’s “old” to you). Things like Wax Trax and Gatecrasher remixes, Chicane, Psykosonic, etc… Pop me at dstarfire at hotmail dot com.
@ janine:
Not all sweater vests, please, just the crummy, faux down-to-earth style sweater vests that were already a generation too old in the 1970s!
via Crommunist’s twitter: explaining the GOP primary in one graph.
https://yfrog.com/oe4nbp
Dunno. I’ve never gone streaking.
To be followed by the inevitable conversation about how much vodka should be in it.
@ Irene Delse
I do not run into the level of bigotry that I experienced in my youth (China now, as opposed to apartheid South Africa – (that is not to belittle many serious problems here)).
However, even then there was a very large variation within racist communities as regards to their motivations and energies (at least as far as I could ascertain). An example was a rally that I attended of the Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging. The hatred expressed in words, manner (intimidating and agressive), dress (brownshirts) stood in stark contrast to many of the their other supporters. There I had more the impression of otherwise gentle people being fearful – if anything. Certainly quite different in every way.
There is a whole range of people ranged against us. Some can surely be hauled across the line.
Undoubtedly we are working on a running engine that requires all manner of tweeks as we go forward. Refining our language and approach on-the-trot, I would take as a given. That we often need to cover the same ground over and over again only endorses this approach.
No, that was done during a general troll infestation, to see which ones would smoke themselves out (natually, it worked like a charm). You might be thinking of the Thread Vacation from last year.
From Crommunist’s post:
I really ought to consider buying Spore. Then I could design a creature with a corn-mimicking anus and a creature whose asshole had shoulders, and have them fight it out.
Congrats to you and yours, Nigel!
@Richard Austin, that’s generous, and sweet… I appreciate it. The problem I’m having right now is that I don’t even remember what, specifically, I’m missing. I just know that I used to have a big collection with lots of homemade tapes and CDs, and it gradually all vanished. There’s just boxes of stuff I have no interest in, and I know THAT ain’t right.
What’d really help is if y’all could suggest some playlists or streaming radio sites that cover Wax Trax and such over late 80’s-early 00’s. Then I’ll skim them and see what trips my memory. Some of the stuff I did uncover is early Underworld, Jarre, Vangelis, KMFDM, Skinny Puppy, Gary Numan. (I also lack straight-up rock, but that’s fundie damage, and easily rectified… would y’all believe I’d never heard “Sympathy for the Devil” until last month?)
Anyway, my gmail is my nym if y’all are so inclined, rather than clutter up TET with techno. Thanks.
Look like the frothy mixture himself will be visiting my city on Thursday. I wonder if Occupy will be there… I should check.
Oh, he’s not just visiting my city. He’ll be on the campus of my university! Now, this will be interesting.
Pteryxx, you mean that you never even heard Laibach’s cover of the song?
StarStuff: The question is, will Santorum fill the auditorium?
@ CR
Gosh, I’ll make that a standard clause in all my comments in future… :)
Indeed, likely not in the case of “homophobia”. But for the words”xenophobia”, or “islamophobia”, such cases might well increase as people paint such scary bogeymen as they do. What words should take their places? We are so articulate with regards Geert, why not with the less articulate?
@ Janine
QFT. It never fails to alarm me how many people fail to understand this.
@janine: no I didn’t, and I’ve never heard of Laibach, either. What little exposure I’ve had to actual, culturally significant music has come from this thread, DJ’ing sports, and my partner patiently explaining songs like “Sympathy for the Devil” to me over the holidays. I didn’t believe the lectures at school about all decent songs being evil, but I didn’t get exposed to those songs, either. (Partner was FURIOUS.)
…anyway, thanks for the link. I’m loading the video now. And, rather shaken and humbled.
Pteryxx:
Email sent, and I’ll try to piece together some stuff. I mostly use Rhapsody for listening, but I’ll bug some friends who like the same stuff.
Because,
1) The common usage of “xenophobia” (and “islamophobia”) doesn’t apply to the bogeymen-like fears of children, but to ideologies and organisations, like Wilders’ party.
2) When talking to children, we’d better use simpler words than the polysyllabic, Greek-derived “xenophobia”. Short words suffice: “It’s wrong to hate people who did you no wrong”, “She doesn’t look like you but she’s just like you under the skin”, things like that.
The common usage in English, here, applies to the situation most commonly found in Western countries with regards to foreigners. Even kids rarely grow up in isolation and know (if only from internet or television) that it’s “racist” to hate/despise people because of their skin colour or their country of origin.
I don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, here. Let’s just say that re-labelling xenophobia and islamophobia to distinguish them from medical phobias or from the irrational fears of children seems to me more than a little pointless.
*starts video*
O_o
…Did I just reveal myself to be a ginormous naive target for music-based trolling?
More seriously, my mentor just recommended that I study “American Pie” as a culturally significant song:
http://www.explainthelyrics.com/american-pie-don-mclean/
I remember that. It smoked me out, too.
Now that would be one terminally unhip cat.
Odd. I thought that he disdained higher edjumacation as the root of all modern evils.
Part of Laibach’s career was made from doing satiric neo-fascist covers of classic rock songs. And not so classic songs.
“We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter”
American Pie is one long metaphor about the culture and politics of late fifties and sixties era US.
And for me, one of my stranger memories is of a bar filled with lesbians in their thirties and forties (This was about fifteen years ago.) singing along with a karaoke version of the song.
As someone who has an actual factual phobia (yeah my mind is such a mess isn’t it :( ). I want to point out that a phobia isn’t a “bogeymen-like fear for children” For me it’s like an actual psychic block. I know rationally there’s little reason to fear but am often seemingly just fucking paralyzed.
Annecdote time: While having dinner with parent other night I spotted a large spider. My parent tried to flush it downt he sink but apaprently failed as durring dinner I spotted it on their arm…where they couldn’t see it but I could, so it was left to me to get it off them. They didn’t want me to just swat it they wanted me to get a paper towel and pinch it…moving my hand right up close to it. I tried to just do that, but couldn’t and wound up hitting at it, which led for it to start to scramble towards their hair. They yelled at me to just grab it and I wanted to but my body wouldn’t respond. I knew it was just a wolf spider and probably harmless but I couldn’t act to move closer to it. I wound up hitting it down off them and stomping it, and that took pretty much all my will to force myself to do that rather than pull away.
I don’t know why I have this phobia, I don’t even hate spiders, I just have a big seemingly irrational and unavoidable repulsion to them.
okay, I see that Laibach are satirists now… for what it’s worth, the concept of satire is kinda new to me. It took me a year of training to be capable of watching Stephen Colbert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathy_for_the_Devil
…and I didn’t even realize that more than one Kennedy had been assassinated. WTF, fundie schooling? Do I REALLY have to get my history education from rock music and Watchmen?
@Preryxx
Random question: do you think the fundie schooling and lack of awareness of satire are linked?
I’ve always wondered about why the fundie demographic seems blind to irony.
I had a friend from New York City. Most of her time since the fall of the Soviet Bloc has been in Poland and Russia. (She speaks six slavic languages.) Anytime she came back to the US, it took her time to get used to the humor used in the US as opposed to the humor of eastern Europe.
theophontes, on my charts your area would be called “Here be dragons”.
Here is but the latest example of a fundie not understanding irony.
So says that not at all vetted Sarah Palin.
It works wonders. Please notice the part you didn’t quote.
I said a word “like homophobia” in cases like hers, because it was meant to include words like (that is, for example) xenophobia and Islamophobia in similar cases. Wilders is in a wildly different situation, for a whole lot of reasons, which doesn’t mean this simplistic distinction you’re trying to draw is valid.
I agree with Irene Delse in #554.
@Ing: unfortunately I don’t think I’m equipped to attempt an answer, at least not right now (hell no I’m still in shock) and maybe not ever. If I weren’t aspie enough to keep asking blunt questions about things that obviously made no sense, when everybody else knew better, maybe I would’ve bought the religious brainwashing too; but if I weren’t aspie, I’d have understood what lying WAS and that maybe there really *wasn’t* a real reason that I could grasp…
Sorry, I don’t know. Maybe ask me a different question?
Get Over It: Men and Women Are from the Same Planet.
Short but good comment thread, except for the first, which brings serious derp.
I meant that going to another blog post entirely is the equivalent of leaving the room. The conversation is still happening in one room, but the person has stepped out to somewhere else for a bit and will walk back in when ready to resume that discussion. It’s not a perfect analogy, but I’ve always figured even on really active threads, waiting a day or so for a response to a comment isn’t unusual.
Yes, I thought generally under the other conditions I mentioned that turns it into a slightly different discussion rather than a direct parallel version of another, but mileage may vary. There may have been some like that I’ve missed.
Child is home with braces and doing just fine (I guess the pain will set in later?) He got red ties, which I told him went right with being Chinese New Year today. :) They ended up doing both top and bottom (were going to do only top), which will save him a couple of months total, but apparently the orthodontist didn’t say anything about it. After making a big deal about doing the top and bottom separately, it would have been nice for him to at least come over and say that he changed his mind on how to do it.
Congrats, nigelTheBold! *confetti*
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chigau, within minutes after the game broke up, I noticed that my missing items were missing, and only minutes after that, I FB-messaged all (adult) players (identical text; thank you, copy&paste!) asking if someone had “pranked” me; I chose this language specifically to avoid saying, “Okay, one of you stole or hid my (reducted); fess up, Malefactor!” As they arrived home, each messaged me back, disclaiming credit, but (aside from Friend) mentioning other, previous…incidents…at other game sessions in the recent past, and noticing an apparent corelation between the objects messed with, and Boy’s (lengthy) trips to the bathroom. Friend said that Boy also said that he knew nothing about the missing items; so this could be a “letting him know we’re onto him” moment, scaring him off from repetitions…unless he arrogantly assumes that the aforementioned uncertainty-in-numbers will still give him cover.
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Jeffrey, Four-Little-Square-Boxes to you, too. :D
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…We had, in the Kennedys, a duo in high office committed to desegregation and civil rights? And I learned this in 2012 because “Sympathy for the Devil” has “KennedyS” in the lyrics and a note in Wikipedia explaining why?
I don’t even have any WTF left. I’m just stunned.
Here’s a horde question:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/23/india-to-complain-to-u-s-over-jay-leno-temple-gag/
Is this racist? I’m serious.
I don’t see it, and I wouldn’t care if it was the vatican or the big mormon thingie.
I’ve always wanted to DJ at sporting events just to expose crowds to something other than “Welcome To The Jungle” and “We Will Rock You” and “Get Ready For This” over and over and over and over and over and over again.
@Sailor
IANAS but I don’t see it. They may take offense that the temple is being used as a sign of greed and luxaria but that doesn’t seem racist to me.
They may not be wrong for taking offense at it but it seems clear the jab wasn’t at them
cicely
re Friend and Boy
Hopefully, Boy will be scared off.
Confrontation cannot be far away.
Friend should not be kept out of the loop for much longer.
—
If you copy/paste the little square boxes into google translate, it will reveal the mystery.
@Sailor
The complaint seems to be that he used something that is of great reverence to them in a joke.
The Kennedys? I’m still trying to get over the assassinations of the Gracchi.
@The Sailor:
I don’t think it’s racist so much as it’s unaware. I think someone just did a Google Image search for “golden palace” as a joke to say Mittens lives in a golden palace. They found a picture, plopped it in the sketch, and they were done!
Probably didn’t even think that the site was some holy Sikh shrine. Just thought, “that’s good enough for a laugh.” I doubt it was done with the slightest hint of malice.
@Katherine
I can’t help but feel a bit odd about it. cause now because of the whining I actually want to mock it more because holy shit you people really have a literal gold plated palace as a sacred shrine!? You literally have a golden palace…and you don’t’ want me to make fun of that fact?
@Rey Fox: The reason all major sports DJs play the same damn rock songs ad nauseam is that the leagues pay a blanket licensing fee to the copyright companies for “public performances”, which scales up according to audience size. The RIAA basically approves a shortlist, and all the DJs draw from that list rather than negotiate independent licenses. The variants tend to be limited to single, team- or region-specific favorite songs. (I know this because I asked some real sports DJs, out of curiosity.)
When I was DJ’ing for beer leagues, I took requests. Still got a slate of the traditional songs though, but I also threw in a lot of *cough* techno. And soundtracks… Star Wars, Princess Mononoke, Jurassic Park. Oh, and I made customized song clips for scoring, so every time our team scored a goal (hockey) I’d play a DIFFERENT celebration. (I had twelve, after that it repeated.)
You’re not understanding the chain of events. I was not having a discussion with Josh at Ophelia’s. I wasn’t having a discussion with anyone there, because I had become fed up with her strawmanning, suggestions that we were calling her racist or her criticism of the term eccentric or crazy, and refusal to acknowledge that she was making an argument that went well beyond a dislike of the word, and had said that I wasn’t going to continue the discussion. She then chose to do a separate post repeating her misrepresentation of our arguments and including that horrible passage from Benn. Josh commented there: “No. What you’re saying isn’t ‘crazy at all. Nor is it hard to understand.” He weighed in supporting her misrepresentation of us, and basically calling us stupid, while ignoring that homophobic quotation to agree with her. I was surprised to read that. He then turned everything into a rant about how insulting and hurtful I supposedly am, in the context of my responding to his comment that misrepresented and insulted me. If people see that as being fair and civil, I think they have a skewed perspective.
Sidenote: probably a good idea to fight that impulse and make sure you actually understand their view and dogma. It’s just stupid to mock Islam for the 72 virgins when you can mock them even harder for their real doctrine of infinite sex robots!
And here I was thinking that one could play any music one wanted over a loudspeaker with the understanding that this was a one-time public performance and no money was being made off it. Sheesh, the RIAA sucks.
…I didn’t know who they were, either, so I looked. Is Gaius in Battlestar Galactica a reference?
…and does EVERYBODY who stands up for oppressed populations get assassinated? I mean crap, so far today it’s five for five.
People get stupid over privilege.
Case in point and another example of irony blindness.
I certainly didn’t mean to do that – I was commenting on the Islamophobia issue. I didn’t think that was hard to understand or nuts, and I have no idea why you think I was “supporting her misrepresentation” of you. That’s an awful lot of meaning to freight into my comment.
This is another example of how contemptuous and uncharitable you can be. You know what? I missed that quotation. I was skimming. I was reading fast while doing other things. I didn’t even see it until I got dragged over here to return to look at O’s thread. And you know what? I agree with you. I hate that thing about homophobia.
You expect me to just ignore how utterly nasty you are in conversational rhetoric? You insult me, you extend me no charity at all (remember when you did this during the conversation about dog sitting and I got equally enraged?), and you repeat the libel here that I actively ignored the homophobia quote in order to serve my agenda of agreeing with Ophelia. And yet you sit there acting as if I’m the one who’s committed an act of intellectual and conversational dishonesty because I didn’t shut off all my emotions and indignation to ignore you running roughshod over any pretense of civility so that I could answer your goddamned demands.
Fuck you.
Yet an other example of fundies not understanding irony; these crusaders for truth demand the use of the memory hole.
It matters not that many of the framers of the US Constitution held humans in bondage and debated enough to get this non represented and non voting segment of the population counted as 3/5 of a person. All that matters is the we believe that they meant for everybody to be free.
Just who is demanding political correctness here?
Wow talk about begging the question.
@Rey Fox: As I remember, back then, the MINIMUM licensing fee to play music for an event with zero profit (such as a wedding, or beer-league game like we had) was around two thousand dollars. Basically, nobody ever checks, nobody in their right mind buys one, and nobody attending ever turns them in.
I think I once DJ’d an entire game with non-RIAA music – indie and local techno – just to make the point. It still could’ve been technically illegal, because the RIAA wants to collect blanket license fees on *all* performances (and all Napster downloads) even when they don’t have jurisdiction, or whatever the proper term is.
Re irony blindness… is there some sort of relationship between irony recognition and cognitive dissonance? It’s like… recognizing irony requires comprehension of two viewpoints at once, just as conscious, deliberate lying does? Because fundamentalism’s all about absolute truth?
StarStuff: I think Ol’ Frothy Mix is on my campus right now.
Srsly.
Get Money, Turn Gay
Funny, for the most part, I hate auto-tuning.
Get a mop.
JeffreyD: Moo goo gai pan to you too.
Which is why many fundies are also really bad at empathy.
AFAIK, I’ve never eaten Dim Sum. Would this be a spicy dish?
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Chaos doesn’t “rule”; Rules are for The Law. Chaos rains.
Spelled just like that.
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Does it “obscure the experience or contributions” of anyone if you mention how much blood was on their hands?
The weather report lies. It was supposed to rain today and yesterday, so I canceled chalking. It hasn’t rained at all, so I checked the weather report again, and now it’s not supposed to rain until Friday! So I’m going to go a chalk this evening. The rain (or lack thereof) will not defeat me!
@ Ben
Ah. Yeah, you’re going to have a lot of Republicans in your area over the next 8 days. Have fun with that.
Ben:
Uh…no.
I know. I’m trying to work out a way to raise the subject with him diplomatically.
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Benjamin @ #594: What the fuck is wrong with you?
The “Islamophobia issue” was her continuation of the discussion we’d had on the Islamophobe thread. If you weren’t aware of that, it should have been obvious that she was responding to someone. You chose to weigh in. If you hadn’t read the previous discussion or my comments about it here, then I understand that you weren’t trying to insult us, but it’s not particularly civil to the people she’s arguing with to jump in suggesting that we’re stupid without knowing anything about the argument. No one had suggested that she or her dislike of the term were crazy, and she was misrepresenting the argument.
It was the majority of a short post, and someone had already remarked on it in the comments. How the hell am I supposed to know that you hadn’t actually read the post or comments before you commented? If I assumed that you were that careless and inconsiderate as a rule, that would be insulting to you. I’m surprised you were in this case, because you usually aren’t.
I expected that you would, which was why I was surprised to read your comment there not mentioning it and your comments here that seemed to be defending it.
I am not utterly nasty in conversational rhetoric, and I have not been nasty to you in this discussion; I was trying to avoid your again going there and making the discussion about me and how supposedly awful I am, which has a tendency to bring out really vicious, bullying comments from other people (as it did here). I didn’t even bring up that you had insulted us.
okay, I’m’a have to recuse myself from this fundie-irony-dissonance topic, because I’m shaking and may throw up. But from where I sit right now, being trained out of music by an abuser so that it faded from existence, and being taught out of noticing inconsistencies by fundies so that they pass without notice… feels exactly the same. Exactly the same.
I haven’t even listened to “American Pie” yet.
I’m sick of it being today. Can’t it be tomorrow instead? I’m gonna be driving around my field sites (or potential sites) in STL County during the day and seeing Craig Ferguson at night. Today is pretty much worthless.
I’m not a copyright lawyer, but it was illegal if the owners didn’t authorize you to use it. (That’s assuming this was for commercial purposes and that the owners require such authorization.) If the artists didn’t have a contract with a record label or distributor represented by the RIAA, the RIAA wouldn’t have any right to collect, but the artists still would.
cicely
dimsum (around here)
Gather 10 or 12 friends and go to a Chinese restaurant on Sunday morning.
Get seated a a table with one of those rotating things in the middle.
The food is mostly in the form of bite-sized dumplings, meat-balls, animal parts, etc. in steamer-baskets with 6-8 portions, served from trolleys.
You and your table-mates see something you like on a trolley the server gives it to you and marks it down on your bill. The choices are multitudinous and unending.
You keep eating until no one can lift a chop-stick, pay, go home and lie around groaning for the rest of the day.
postscript: Heck, it was already answered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kennedy
This is funny!
Reminds me of one of my favorite book displays. A bunch of best sellers by wingnuts like *nn C**lt*r, Newt Gingrich and others were all in a circle around one novel.
What was that novel?
A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
janine: I thought that was shopped…
Pteryxx: “No. This will not do.”
@consciousness razor:
It wasn’t,
They didn’t.
Several indie labels have much more generous licensing rules than the RIAA – essentially, they flat-out state they need the publicity, so if it’s below a certain audience or not-for-profit, they don’t care. Some indie labels encourage it, as do some bands. And three of the local musicians I used were folks I knew, so I just asked them. Another few were through a radio DJ friend who gave me songs in exchange for thanking his station by name, since publicizing those songs for the bands was (duh) part of his job – that’s why he had them in the first place.
In fact, I found one of those CDs last night. Here’s what a real performance agreement should look like, from the text on the CD case itself:
From the back of the Die Warzau CD “Convenience”.
(It also says: “No Christians have been harmed in the making of this record. This won’t stop them from killing, raping and destroying, however.”)
Die Warzau – Bliss (was, in fact, one of the songs I used. Note that Amazon doesn’t have it.)
As best I can remember, the RIAA, essentially, oversaw the creation of a royalty-collection agency with blanket permission to collect from everything, and then said bands have to have representatives on that board to claim their share. Since garage and indie bands don’t have representatives, small labels don’t have representatives, and big-label RIAA bands have reps who don’t give a crap, they rarely see any royalties at all. It’s a lot like trying to get minority representation in Congress.
It looks ‘shopped to me too. I don’t suppose any of us actually subscribe to the dead tree Post? I found on their web site a section inviting critique on the WP front page, with actual graphics thereof, but they skip right from Jan. 20 to Jan. 23. Ack.
Trigger warnings for sexual abuse: AMAZING diary from a woman who was serially raped as a child, telling the “JoePa” stans on Dailykos what they can do with their “hero.”
It’s extremely graphic, not only in terms of the abuse but of the sequelae (such as an eating disorder). It’s also the best possible response to Pedaterno’s defenders.
You didn’t get paid for the gig? The people running the game didn’t charge for admission?
In that case, it wasn’t illegal.
I think there should be a lot of different agreements for different artists in different circumstances. That probably wouldn’t work for some, and I think we ought to respect that.
I’m not sure what you mean here. The RIAA doesn’t have the right to any performance, just those of artists it represents. Others in garage bands or whatever (which it doesn’t represent) still have those rights, but they may not have the resources (or the inclination) to enforce it.
Good evening
I’m frustrated. My most beloved fantasy-con has been cancelled due to lack of tickets sold.
It was a small (300 people the most) con, mostly fan-run though based on an online-shop. One of the owners called me tonight to tell me in person. It was a hard decission all around for them, too, but they can’t ruin their business for having a great party (and it wouldn’t be great anyway if only half-sold and the last and ruining everything).
Fuck, I’ve been there since the beginning 6 years ago and nothing could stop me. I went there 2 weeks before #1 was born, I went there with a baby, with a toddler, with ababy and a toddler and I was planning to go there one day with two kids who’d set off with their friends and only show up for meals.
:(
I haz sad.
Pteryxx
…fuck. I didn’t either. WTF? I was in school in MI for K-7 and AZ for 8+. Even in MI I have a high school friends who I helped with their homework because we had already learned it. They didn’t even know how to fill out a job app and I was showing them how. When I got to AZ it was a breeze. I did honors and moved on to higher science. I knew AZ was bad but seriously this bad? How did no one teach my ANY of this?
Well, if it makes you feel better, everything you are learning here, I am too.
I hate US education >.< I need to get the fuck out of here. And my child is starting school next year! Shit…
Carlie:
Since crustacean shells can be used to make stock, I imagine they can contribute nontrivial flavor, if left on during cooking.
That said, I agree it can be a PITA to have to peel cooked shrimp, when all you really want to do is shove ’em in your maw! ;^)
Fuck Joe Paterno.
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http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/23/opinion/fleischer-democrats-gingrich/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn
Why the fuck is this on a news website? And why is it promoted as one of their top stories?
cicely:
On my way out the door, but I’m ‘minded of The Onion‘s headline (from memory, as posted to FB by a friend): Paterno Dies; Doctors Say They’ll Inform Superiors Tomorrow.
@cr,
I DJ’d either college club games or beer-league games, the hockey equivalent of bowling leagues. The beer-league games were free to attend. The college club teams were registered non-profits with “suggested donations” for attendance, to offset expenses for ice time and refs. I volunteered as a DJ with my own equipment, which more than doubled our attendance (and donations) during the seasons I worked. This is because I love hockey, I love music, and I got a rinkside seat for every game.
Yet the RIAA lobbies for laws and spreads misinformation to criminalize ALL file-sharing, media copying, and public performance by default. I’m saying that the agencies formed for the purpose collect royalties in the name of non-RIAA artists, then generally fail to pay those royalties TO the independent artists. They also apply royalty demands unfairly to control music access – levying crushing fees on internet radio while exempting traditional payola radio, for instance. The whole system’s obfuscating and corrupt.
I don’t remember offhand which collection rules or agencies cover DJ performances to a meatspace audience as opposed to DJ’ing an internet radio stream, sorry. Most of my documentation on this was on previous computers, and I don’t have much coherence or intelligence left. I started internet searching before running dry, so here are a few scraps:
http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/why-online-radio-royalties-are-a-joke/
http://futureofmusic.org/press/press-releases/clear-channel-strips-local-independent-artists-digital-performance-royalties
Pteryxx, I can’t even begin to imagine some of the things you’ve been through. I’d just like to send you a transatlantic cyberhug if that’s all right by you.
All-rabbit’s-friends-and-relations Ogvorbis, I think that technically I’ve only ever streaked once (just skinny-dipping without a run doesn’t count as streaking, right?) but it was after dark and a group effort (along a towpath beside the Isis) so it wasn’t that daring really. (We all went skinny-dipping at the same time as well; fortunately after dark you can’t actually see what the water there looks like …)
Why is the vodka always gone?
Genius.
Ben – LOL
What worries me is that the author, obnoxious as he is, might be right in his predictions… it does, unfortunately, seem possible that Gingrich could end up getting the nomination, and FSM forbid he might even win the general election. I know the polls say otherwise, but I’m not complacent; I’m not inclined to underestimate the idiocy of the voters. Plenty of politicians have been written off as unelectable right-wing extremists only to end up doing much better than expected.
And I genuinely think a Gingrich presidency would be the worst imaginable disaster. His plans of expanding executive power even further, and seeking the impeachment of federal judges who make decisions he doesn’t like, would effectively be the end of the Constitution: I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. He’s got a record of supporting every awful authoritarian policy, like introducing the death penalty for drug traffickers, and his rhetoric about immigration and welfare has always been steeped in racism. I’d say my dislike of Gingrich goes beyond political disagreement; he’s genuinely a very scary person. He appeals to the worst tendencies in America: tribalism, nationalism, xenophobia, misogyny, authoritarianism, and a desire for an unaccountable “strong leader” to “protect” America from its perceived enemies.
It’s obvious spin. There’s no reason to even lend this asshole the benefit of intelligence.
They see us as just a bunch of right wing nuts….but they miss the mood of the country, especially the right wing nuts!
TLC,
As someone who learned that my mother was saying how good she was much of the time she told me how good I was I have some hugs to offer. (I also learned that it was not hollow, just the only way she knew how to love: possessively.)
___
Pterryx,
Shit. I just don’t know. Theft on that magnitude just appalls.
___
Just A Lurker,
This too.
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SallyStrange,
So much going on I just don’t know. Being in people space sounds like a good choice and I hope it works out well.
___
On a different note:
Nigel,
Hey, that sounds like good news.
___
Pterryx,
Why grow up at all?
___
Nutmeg,
I moved where I live so that my off season consists of one or two weekends of snow each year. No need to wish, I will be doing what I want.
___
Katherine,
The number of times that the really interesting parts of my dreams are cut off by awakening is staggering. No alarm needed.
___
cicely,
There is beauty on the thread today.
@walton
Another thing to remember, Gingrich was in a really pathetic position at the beginning of the primary, so a turnabout in the election is not unimaginable. Also, I myself have thought that the Republicans have bottomed out in stupid, only for them to dig further down into stupidity. After being surprised a bunch of times, I am not falling for it this time. The average population can be that stupid.
That is precisely why I am hoping that corporate robot Mitt Romney wins over Gingrich. Out of all candidates, Gingrich is the most dangerous one.
It’s on a news site because it’s Ari Fleischer. That’s all, full stop. He’s been a political contributer at CNN since September.
I almost think the Republican party is hoping to “hang” the first vote at the convention; after that, the delegates are free to vote their conscience. Which means that anything can happen, and even someone who wasn’t running can win the nomination. That’s where “Republican Jesus” comes into play, and they can stick someone like Christie or Bachmann with the nod even if they did crap (or didn’t run) in the primaries.
Again, I’m not a lawyer, but this might qualify as “commercial” activity for this purpose. That it was a college sports event might make it an exception for one reason or another, but I’ve seen a few venues shut down because they weren’t paying to perform covers* of licensed works, even though they were only asking for “donations” at the door. But then again that could’ve just been scare tactics that didn’t have any legal backing. I suspect racism had to do with part of it in one case, and it upsets me every time I think about it.
*Yes, for playing covers not recordings, which I think is fucking ludicrous. These were tiny little dives, mind you, which probably didn’t make a cent of profit from the donations.
At the same time, it’s also infuriating to be reminded of the fuckers in the industry who can afford to lobby so they won’t have to pay artists royalties.
Makes me want to fucking spit.
Someone who probably wasn’t Hunter S. Thompson once said this:
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
Just pointing out how we apparently have to be balanced and fair…but CNN feels fine publishing as news “Democrats are idiots”.
AKAIK, the RIAA is an industry association and doesn’t hold the copyrights/ performance rights to anything. They sue on behalf of the owners.
The RIAA does have big pockets and the people they sue tend not to have them, and fucking judges have deferred to them over and over and over. The DMCA, IMO, should have been declared unconstitutional.
ASCAP/BMI sends scouts out to even small towns to check jukebox and live performance fees. And they go after the club, not the musicians.
If you play copyrighted music at a venue that charges admissions, it is for profit. Even if that performance isn’t the purpose of the event.
The above 3 observations are not necessarily connected.
INAL, and this area of law is very disputed.
From a press secretary from the G.W.B. administration….
Yeah, that’s how much the elite liberal media gives a fuck about this “fairness” and “balance” of which you speak.
@The Sailor: *nod* The nonprofit rules vary by state, too. One of our hockey players was a graduate student in law, fortunately.
@cr: at some point, the legal quibbling and viciousness just isnt’ worth it. If I could’ve bought an amateur DJ license, say 50 bucks for a single event or a couple hundred for a year, with that money going into an artists’ fund, I would have done so even if it was completely voluntary. I donate that much to my friend’s radio station and to SomaFM. If someone who isn’t a pro or semi-pro DJ gets caught without a license, let them pay it after the fact.
Compare that to my artist (drawing artist) business licence here in Texas. I filled out an app online, and every quarter I log in to report my earnings (if any) and pay 8.5%. If I’m audited, I can show all my receipts. It’d be trivial to simply report one’s playlist for any given event, or to fine a DJ who failed to provide their playlists on audit. That is, if the laws were being written and enforced in good faith.
—
Dhorvath:
“She loves us as much as she can.”
I’m making an active effort here to be nicer.
Skatje and Emmet are proving that this is going to be difficult.
Pterryx,
I am uncertain, but I suspect you may have misconstrued my meaning, I was not referring to a quantitative issue, but a qualitative one. When I say possessive it is not with a sigh but with a spit. The shit programming that far too many people need to overcome in order to behave decently towards people who have no defense inbuilt is abhorrent.
Pteryxx, about music — I was in a nasty, abusive, sort-of-relationship-sort-of-cult-situation about 10 years ago, and I’ve noticed that music disappeared too. Every so often even now I’ll hear a snatch of song or read a title and have the world sort of freeze around me for a few minutes while I realize I *knew* that song, and experience its associated memories washing over me.
My son was an infant and toddler at that time, so many of them are associated to that — once it was a Sesame Street song I had taught him and just a couple weeks ago it was a folk song I grew up having sung to me, sang to my son as an infant, and yet completely forgot existed for an entire decade.
I never thought of it was theft, but you’re absolutely right.
@Dhorvath, sorry. I interpreted “it was not hollow” as “she really was TRYING to love us”. I’m thrashed, don’t mind me.
A poor choice of words on my part. What she felt was genuine, but it wasn’t healthy.
I need a nap now. Otherwise my niceness resolution will be totally shot.
Well your 1st mistake was thinking CNN is a news outlet. [/snark]
+++++++++++++++++++++
“The RIAA doesn’t have the right to any performance, just those of artists it represents.”
The RIAA doesn’t represent any artists, just the record industry.
And if the industry had had a lick of sense (they were all smart people running large corporations) they would have been on top of the digital revolution. Instead they turned to lawsuits as the profit maker. And have done quite well, but it’s never enough for folks with that mindset.
+++++++++++++++++++++
It makes me less sad to know that others noticed the fun times here today. Not snark.
+++++++++++++++++++++
Pterryx, I worked on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign as a tween. I met Ted and I remember when JFK was shot.
IRT music, Pandora is what a lot of my friends listen to. If you can remember some of the songs it might suggest others to you that will help fill the gaps.
It sucks so bad to lose the originals, I really hope this helps.
p.s. Skinny Puppy was one of my favorite acts I ever worked with. And one of the few engineers I worked with that I went ‘how did you do that!?’
+++++++++++++++++++++
To all; after the last couple of days of TET I just want to say I’m going to do my best not to call anyone here an asshole or a liar and still engage in a lively debate.
@kristinc, my sympathies…
In that case, I guess my abuser owes me several hundred thousand dollars (at RIAA royalty rates).
>_>
So, interesting fact: I’ve been assigned to write a paper on a scene from a Roman comedic novel that involves a character relating an attempted rape. It is clearly supposed to be funny.
Fuck this paper.
Well, it’s not the paper’s fault. Fuck this novel. I’ve forgotten how to be in the Roman mindset, with its juvenile sexual aggression and bigotry as humor.
*agape*
Erm, yes, no, no, no, yes, sometimes, no, no, yes, no, no.
It’s lots of delicious things. And chicken feet. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dim_sum
@ Katherine #577:
That’s horribly possible. A quick Google Image search does indeed come up with a photo of Amritsar’s temple on the first page! Lazy, and lousy.
++++++++++
@ Ing 559:
Oh, sorry, I must have sounded flippant and dismissive when it was really not in my intention! Bad word use on my part, I guess. And I certainly didn’t want to make light of a child’s fear: Cthulhu knows that when I was a kid, I had all sort of terrible fears myself (of the dark, of fire, and especially of insects) that still sometimes make me very uncomfortable.
What I was trying to convey was that there are irrational, if very real, feelings like phobias or a child’s fear of monsters, but it had nothing to do with what goes on when talking about homophobia or xenophobia in the context of social and political debates.
P.S. Don’t feel bad about “a mess” in the mind, I still have the urge to avert my eyes sometimes when I see pictures of insects ;-)
According to a facebook friend of mine, Washington State is all set to approve Gay Marriage.
Is it premature to start celebrating?
carlie,
I wish I’d had braces when I was younger. I’ve got a gap between my front teeth, and my dentist said it’d close on its own. Technically it’s aesthetic, but I think it’s responsible for difficulties pronouncing /s/.
—
Audley/Giliell,
Scented detergents make me want to wash them again.
—
nigel,
How much around? I would be honored to meet any of the regular posters. It figures I would be across the country when one drops by.
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TLC,
I’d wait until the requisite court challenges have been thrown out.
Hey all, Natalie Reed opened her blog on FTB today:
o_O
ALL YOU CUNNING LINGUEY TYPES TAKE NOTE (and please shift it over there sometimes, plz plz plzzzzz…)
https://proxy.freethought.online/nataliereed/2012/01/23/hello-hello-again/
I’ve had a similar phobia for years when it comes to dogs. The phobia seems to have died away a little with age, but when I was a teen I would absolutely freak out and have a panic attack when in the presence of a dog that was off the leash and running around. I’m still very nervous around dogs, and probably always will be. It’s not rational, but I can’t control the panic-reaction.
I think, though (to link back to the earlier discussion), that the sense in which we use the term in the context of “homophobia” and “xenophobia” is and has always been quite different; those terms denote prejudice and bigotry against a group, rather than literal fear. I use the term “Islamophobia” in the same way, by analogy, since I think there is a specific bigotry against Muslims and Muslim culture which needs such a term to describe it accurately.
Hmm. The go-to dim sum restaurant of my younger days is now under new ownership. Plus ça change, and all that.
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Pteryxx, I, too, have lots of 90-00s electronica; Flux Trax, Global Underground, Jeff Mills, Damon Wild, other obscure NY labels, Carl Cox stuff, whatever. I couldn’t *possibly* countenance sharing this, oh no.
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Honky Tonky Women. If if the cowbell (of which there should always be more) is insufficient, I can only offer Guns’n’Roses – Night Train.
(No, Don’t Fear … is not acceptable as a riposte … that’s been done.)
Umm, any drummers or musicians out there? [/snark]
But seriously folks, I need some help locating free/cheap music notation software for a drummer. And yes, I have Googled it. I’m looking for someone who has actual experience with said software and would still recommend it.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10971-cheap-safe-drug-kills-most-cancers.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1535610806003722 –the real source, for those with the expertise to parse it
This has already cropped up. However, if you still believe that BigPharma is some sort of imagined boogeyman, then be my guest to keep your heads up your collective arses
@ r1ck:
Oh, hum. You’ve obviously didn’t bother to click on the link to this follow-up: “Cancer drug resurfaces and threatens false optimism”.
Sorry! The miracle-cure-that-Big-Pharma-suppresses looks more like gold on the other side of the rainbow, now..
Therrin:
I’m not entirely sure yet. Quite a bit of my family is in the area, and I’d like to take some time to hang out with them, but I have work duties here in Ohio. So it might be a quick trip to go to my daughter’s wedding, and right back home.
I’m hoping to stay at least one additional week, though, which would take me up to about April 1 or thereabouts.
“Sorry! The miracle-cure-that-Big-Pharma-suppresses looks more like gold on the other side of the rainbow, now..”
Not when chemo is standard practice and people spend billions of dollars on developing other treatments (and in this country, dying often from them, or going bankrupt trying not to die from the process), whereas this promising simple solution had ONE very small study done over 4 years.
It is barely even a footnote in the pile of other much more questionable (and profitable) tactics. I’m not blaming doctors at all here because oncologists likely aren’t even aware of this possibility. If it’s so amazing, why hasn’t it been made something on par of the Nobel Prize? This is headline news worldwide. Can you deny that this was seriously downplayed after all this time?
new scientist!? Really!?
There were no actual scientists harmed in the making of that website.
My kitteh does litter-art.
She left a large turd standing upright and scraped the litter up around it.
It’s a bit dark down there so I can’t tell if it looks like Jesus or Mary.
@ r1ck:
You still did not read the follow-up article. This is not a replacement for standard chemotherapy: like a lot of cancer drugs, it may well find uses, but it’s not a panacea.
This is more or less what cancer research can do, nowadays: no huge breakthroughs, even when preliminary results in cell cultures or mice looked hopeful, but in human patients, it often doesn’t pan out. Or in the best cases, it’s another incremental step: a drug that slow the growth of cancer cells, enabling the immune system and/or the chemo cocktail to kill them before the tumour grows back.
So, please, before claiming that We Cured Cancer OMG!!!11!, just head over at Orac’s blog to learn more about DCA and what we know about it:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/05/the_dca_zombie_arises_again.php
Well, I did say “I’m going to do my best not to call anyone here an asshole or a liar and still engage in a lively debate.” … but is SGBM morphed to r1ck?
What? No.
(The writing style is entirely different, and SGBM is not a science-denialist.)
Depression is so much like an abuser. It makes you feel shitty and worthless and powerless and then makes you feel like you’re to blame because you don’t do enough to fix yourself.
All right, now it’s just getting silly. This is the 3rd or 4th time I’ve had radio signals come through my speakers, and this time, the only thing not affected was my keyboard – I couldn’t even use my mouse. I’ll try shortening up the cables and tying up the excess with twisties, as suggested on another site, and moving at least one speaker a bit further away from the wall. If that doesn’t work, Radioshack sells ferrite rings you can just snap on.
————————————-
Gingrich vs. Romney. I’d give this a yawn but as stated, Gingrich would be a disaster to have as president. He’d probably make just one term worse than the eight years of Bush. I’m also a bit scared to see that yes, people can generally be that dumb, to want a guy in charge who will basically screw them over but kowtows to the right sky being the right way so it’s OK.
*offers internet-hugs to kristinc, some of which might be international (i keeps them all in the same cigar box)*
Underworld – Rez/Cowgirl live
You really think something that is cheap and really worked to cure cancer wouldn’t be looked at? And that no private foundation like the Gates Foundation, immune to the blandisments of big pharma (whatever that is), couldn’t pick up the project and get real clinical trials with large numbers of patients run? Perhaps there isn’t as much there as people are reading into the small trails. Cancer has a long history of small trials working, but large trials not…
I don’t know why I’m doing this to myself but I’m watching another debate.
Have some swill that looks like singe malt. It should help…
All hail Tpyos, single, not singe…
@ Nerd
of the Apocalypse#666:And not only that, but even if some drug works, it’s often only in one or at least a few types of cancers. What works for glioma is not a cure for leukaemia, or Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and so on. There are I don’t know how many separate types of nastiness under the big “cancer” umbrella. When someone claims they’ve found “a cure for cancer”, we can be certain they are talking out of their butt.
Walton, I was making a self-deprecating, very poor, joke.
+++++++++++++++
PTI – “All right, now it’s just getting silly. This is the 3rd or 4th time I’ve had radio signals come through my speakers”
Commercial radio or neighbors’ transmissions, as in CB or shortwave?
————-
“I’ll try shortening up the cables and tying up the excess with twisties”
Don’t put them in a loop, that also can be an antenna.
kristinc
On Depression
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/
and a *hug*
PZ Myers says:
23 January 2012 at 6:11 pm
There is a home page redesign in the works.
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2012/01/23/let-the-hazing-commence/comment-page-1/#comment-250572
Do tell.
You’re probably okay. The part of Washington (the western half) with a much greater population has a large majority of liberals, while our own personal South, the eastern half, is pretty much a post-apocalyptic uninhabited wasteland with the exception of Spokane and Pullman (the latter of which is just a college town that exists only because of WSU).
Apparently the bigots want to hold a referendum on the issue and must get about 120,000 signatures in the next six months to do so. That’s probably not going to be stopped in any way (we also have a large number of Mormons). However, we’ve already made domestic partnerships available to gays (and almost equal to marriage – that’s what the legislature is doing right now) in referenda, so we should vote sanely.
I can’t vote, since I’m underage, but a good friend of mine just eighteen and says he’s going to vote against the inevitable referendum (and he’s Mormon!).
…*just turned eighteen. Typing slower than you think is a bad idea.
Ah, but to singe malt is a glorious homage unto Tpyos (may His Holy Wrod never be spellchecked), for the scent of burning whisky is pleasing unto His nostrils.
The only higher form of worship is to reveal the secrets of one’s innermost heart unto Alot, the creature most sacred unto Tpyos (mHHWnbs), and to build effigies of Alot, yea, Alot of Straw, Alot of Beer Cans, or even Alot of Discarded Diet-Mountain-Dew Bottles. Or something like that.
SLenderman’s coming for ya
Sometimes we need ‘like’ buttons. Yes, I’m looking at you Walton.
ibyea:
I disagree. I was talking with my (Democratic) congressman yesterday, and he says the talk in DC is that if Romney is the nominee, there will almost certainly be a 3rd-party challenge from the right. You might think this would be a good thing, since it would almost certainly guarantee Obama’s reelection… but a right-versus-far right “side bet” would likely bring larger numbers of right-wing voters to the polls, where they would look down the ballot and find nobody but Republicans for them to vote for.
A 40%-35%-25% win by Obama means 60% of the total will be anti-Obama voters, and they’ll create a sweep for Republicans in the House, Senate, state legislatures, governorships, state attorneys general and secretaries of state, mayors, and dog-catchers… a result only trivially better for the future of the nation than an outright Obama loss.
Gingrich, OTOH, would mollify the wingnut base, likely heading off a Paul or Santorum 3rd-party run, yet is a sufficiently defective candidate from the POV of simple human decency that centrist independents and conserva-Dems probably won’t be able to bring themselves to vote for him. IMHO, he loses to Obama and doesn’t helps Repubs much down-ballot.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/kim-kardashian-got-a-divorce-because-her-dads-ghost-told-her-to/
I want to divorce my species
I love how Kardashian gives us the choice of what to believe
a) The marriage was a scam to rake in money
b) She’s too dumb to be trusted with floss
Woo, Walton’s on fire today. So I posted the Lilac Berets™ in front of the firehose so no one cools him off.
some pretty softball questions from the moderators tonight
1.) I’m having a bad day.
2.) I’m going to write a TERRIBLE paper.
3.) My socks are wet.
4.) My mouth STILL HURTS from being accidentally scalded by the toasted marshmallow latte I bought myself as a big, looked-forward-to treat.
Those are my petty complaints of the moment. More to come.
What moderators?
Where?
There are moderators?
Softball?
Sailor: Commercial radio. No I don’t know if it’s FM or AM.
Family went this evening to the younger kid’s school, where they were hosting the Reptile Man. He did a little talk, showed a large Desert Tortoise, Gila monster, a small crocodile, some de-venomed vipers and a truly mammoth albino constrictor. A couple other critters I can’t remember the names of. The thing that struck me the most was the king cobra’s desperate determination to just get BACK in its box away from the noisy scary mammals. Every single move that thing made was retreating.
NEW THREAD!