Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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"Heather Roy is a soldier in the territorials. She was scared of a short man with a spray-on suntan who went on Dancing with the Stars?"
Well, to be fair to Roy, there are several layers of scary in that description. I myself almost bumped into the man on Lambton Quay, outside Farmers, in early 2009, and the psychic scars are still with me. I can only imagine what working with him on a daily basis would do to one.
On a different note, these two recent posts on Crooked Timber have some thoughtful observations on why libertarians don't tend to do the whole "collective responsibility" thing very well. And some truly disturbing comments from offended libertarians that tend to underline the main points.
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It always amuses me when Facebook suggests I 'like' John Key because 'many people who like "Save Radio NZ" also like' him. Something about a lot of New Zealanders who just really don't get it, something something ...
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Exciting news, but I wanted to reiterate Peter Ashby's point that there's a lot more work to do, especially on the shop interface. It's great that they're selling MP3s, but at the moment individual songs (rather than whole albums) don't seem to be available. And I'd like to know what the bit rates are before I'll shell out for them. It's also not clear if the MP3s are album- or track-length and how they're id'ed, which are issues for those of us who do the whole scrobbling thing. (On the other hand, there's been a "Robot World"-shaped hole in my record collection since I lost my original copy over 10 years ago, so I might just take a punt, as the album's not available via iTunes UK.)
I'm sure all this is in the offing and that the lack of information and options are just aspects of a wet-alpha website, but I'd really like to see them put some more attention into this side of their operation.
Also, the photograph of the Flying Nun "archive," if it is what it purports to be, is just terrifying. I know archivists who would be out cold on the floor within seconds of viewing that image.
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As your link notes, the uncorrected data were thrown away -- more than 20 years ago, it seems worth noting, and before Phil Jones was even there -- because the university didn't give the CRU a big enough building to hold its stuff.
Again, the touching yet misguided devotion to the idea of linear time! As we would all instantly recognize had we not been EDUCATED STUPID, we are living four simultaneous days, every day. This explains how Al Gore and George Soros can flit back and forth and manipulate, sorry, "correct," the CRU data-set as the evolving needs of the inter-species conspiracy demand. As well as planting those oh so convenient "birth notices" in the Honolulu Advertiser that they liberal media refuse to critique! Resist the lizard oligarchy! Make me nice steaming cup of darjeeling!
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I can also see what happened at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. A small group that has been making climate measurements and conducting research for two decades increasingly found itself at the sharp end of a big argument and frankly did not cope.
A lot of it is that people have no idea what the working life of a senior academic in the UK is actually like. There's the teaching, and the lecture writing, and grad student supervision, of course. But then there are the endless course-team and Faculty meetings to attend, grant applications to write -- oh, and managing a laboratory, its staff, and its budget, too. Oh, and trying to get some actual research done so you can put a few articles out there for the REF.
The CRU guys are probably working 80-hour weeks, at least. It's not as if they're sitting round idly in their offices, just waiting for an FOI request to come through from yet another retired accountant in Swindon whose "climate scepticism" comes entirely from opinion pieces in the Telegraph.
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Concerning filmic representations of D Day, Curtis White's comments on Saving Private Ryan might be apposite:
Thus the film’s murderous thesis is fully disclosed. Self-survival, the survival of the good, requires that one always choose death. The cynicism and brutality of the first execution back on Omaha beach is excused in its fact if not in its style. Bad table manners, perhaps, but in murdering the prisoners the American soldiers did what they had to do. This is advocacy of international vigilantism and no whit more self-reflective than any Dirty Harry narrative.
The full article's here.
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It has worked for the last two hundred years. That is Shiner's point: art is a comparatively recent invention, one of the Enlightenment.... I am saying that art is an invention of the monolithic West that has become global.
Some of the reasons people might be frustrated with your arguments, Paul, might be discipline-related. Your arguments in favour of epistemic rupture in the Enlightenment leading to revolutionary change were very common in, say, English literary history about 15-20 years ago. But we don't seem to hear much about it now. Claims that, say, literature, or selfhood, or subjectivity, or individuation were creations of the European eighteenth century used to be everywhere. But that tide seems to have gone out. Part of the reason may be academic fashion. More importantly, though, the "everything is the fault of the Enlightenment" argument fails to explain why different cultures or time periods can "talk" to each other. A world in which there were absolute ruptures in intellectual history would be one in which it would be impossible for ideas to cross the boundaries between nations, cultures, historical periods, selves. Yet, everything about the history of the actual world says that isn't so. There are broad continuities everywhere. We can speak to each other. The translations may be imperfect, but the fact that they can be made at all testifies powerfully against the "rupture" school of history.
To prove the "Enlightenment changed everything" theory, you'd need to show that:
(1) There were no continuities between Enlightenment thought and the intellectual cultures of earlier periods.
(2) The ideas of the a small cadre of canonical C18 texts affected the practices of actual artistic communities everywhere in a uniform, predictable, and revolutionary way.
(3) That "art" now, as it's practised and understood, is what those eighteenth-century guys said it is.
I think this grossly exaggerates the actual power and achievements of Enlightenment thought. It's hardly as though they invented this stuff out of thin air, and that this "monoculture" (as you term it) then successfully colonized the world, extinguishing whatever traditions existed in other countries and entirely replacing them. Firstly, the West has never been an intellectual monoculture. Secondly, syncretism exists -- this is how ideas travel. They merge with pre-existing patterns of thought and create new and unforeseen systems. Thirdly, the Enlightenment was never that important nor that revolutionary, and only seems so retrospectively because of the enormous success of certain mid-20th-century (French) theorists in arguing that it was.
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They could have had Jacob doings aome post-rock aural soundscape and I would have been happy. Would have been epic of they had Yulia warbling over the top about mountains and farms and shit too, and it'd keep the suits happy.
Man, if we really were an ambitious country that supported innovation and vision, this would totally happen. Another missed opportunity!
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I suppose growing up in the early 90's when there was quite a groundswell of musicians who were 'angry' but more importantly had something to say, its really frustrating to see the downward spiral that has occured with female popular music, ie getting you tits out is deemed to be 'groundbreaking' see Lady Gaga. It disturbs me that young girls are growing up with this notion. Maybe they need to see a Sleater-Kinney (RIP) t-shirt from a wee while ago: "Show me your riffs".
Yeah. I grew up at the same time, listening to similar music, and have the same impression. It's sad and frustrating. Although, to be fair, there are still any number of angry women in music with something to say (see, e.g.):
It's just that they get practically no media attention, and basically starve. But looking back on that transition in musical and popular culture that took place in the mid-'90s -- represented on one hand by the rise of "lad culture" and on the other by the omnipresence of the gansta aesthetic -- you can't tell me that there wasn't a masculinist backlash at work. Dirty Sesh is just the end-game of that particular movement. In that respect, he's the local equivalent of Soulja Boy. It's not pretty.
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Personally, though, I think the song of the World Cup should be Stereolab's "Crest":
"If there's been a way to build it, there'll be a way to destroy it!"
At the end of the tournament, they can let Aucklanders loose with sledgehammers to obliterate every last trace of the rushed, expensive, and useless development that will be built to accommodate this slow-motion clusterfuck of an event.