Link Archive 10/6/17 – 12/31/17

My Favorite Medieval Film Is A Knight’s Tale

“this film challenges the ideas of a medieval past as being so very different from the present. Spectators singing a rock and roll song by Queen at a medieval joust certainly raise the eyebrow of many, but the song certainly strikes a more familiar chord with a modern audience than the strumming of a lute. Does the modern song convey the enthusiasm and pageantry of such events to a modern audience more successfully than an authentic tune would have done?

… In other words, there is a truth of historical reality, and then there is a truth of historical relationship — a difference between knowing the actual physical feel of the past and the relative emotional feel of it.

 

History is Written by the Losers
“Herodotus is one of two men who can claim to have invented history. Sima Qian is the other.

This is a rare feat. It was accomplished in exactly two places. Herodotus did it in Greece; Sima Qian did it in China. Of the other great civilizations—the Mesoamericans, the Egyptians, Summerians, and their descendants, the Andean kingdoms, the early rulers of the Eurasian steppe, the great empires that sprouted up along the Indus and Ganges rivers, along with their cultural satellites across South and Southeast Asia—history is nowhere to be found. I remember my shock when I discovered our knowledge of ancient India relies more on ancient Greek historians than ancient Indian historians. Traditional Indic civilization simply did not have any. In ancient India, playwrights, poets, lyricists, grammarians, philosophers, story-tellers, mathematicians, military strategists, religious authorities, and religious upstarts all put pen to palm frond, leaving a treasury of Sanskrit literature for the future. This literature is sophisticated. It is meaningful. Even in translation, much of it is beautiful. But search as you may, nowhere in this vast treasury will you ever find a work of history. That a great thinker could profitably spend his time sorting through evidence, trying to tie together cause and effect, distinguishing truth from legend, then present what is found in a written historical narrative—it is an idea that seems to have never occurred to anyone on the entire subcontinent. Only in Greece and in China did this notion catch hold. The work of every historian who ever lived finds its genesis in one of these two places—and with one of these two people.”

As to the thesis – “Those who rule do not have the time to write about it. … When high position is stolen from you, and access to the heights of wealth and power denied, there is little one can do about it—except write. History is thus rarely a “weapon of the weak.” The judgments of the historian do not serve the margins. They do not even serve the masses. They are a weapon in the hand of defeated elites, the voices of men and women who could be in power, but are not.”

 

The Tragedy of Jon Stewart

In short, nightly comedy news fell into the same trap as the 24-hour news channels. To keep their audience night after night they have to manufacture outrage.

I’ve been saying for a while that Cultural Segregation is bad, and I’ve lost some friends over it. I’m glad to see the view is finally starting to reassert itself in the wider culture. (well ok, the wider culture of my bubble, I realize there’s plenty of sane places that never went through this phase)
This is a link to an open Facebook post that went semi-viral. It starts with “As an Indian woman, I really appreciate Indian fashion being normalized in this way. Why should our clothes be relegated to Indian-only spaces? Why are only Western clothes allowed to be worn by mainstream society? This kind of generally well-meaning social segregation has the overall effect of holding White Western culture as a neutral norm all other cultures can and should draw from, while simultaneously telling us our cultures must be kept to ourselves.”

 

Iraq declares final victory over Islamic State. That was kinda anti-climactic for what was supposed to be the reestablishment of God’s Kingdom on Earth. “The only territory it still “controls” are a few scattered villages in Syria in the middle of nowhere.”

 

The host of this show set up a Trolley Problem. Subjects were convinced they were part of a focus group about commuter rail. They’re placed in a switching station, that mointors tracks remotely via CCTV, while waiting for the focus group to begin. A kindly old conductor shows them the ropes, and even has them switch a train coming down the tracks from one track to the other just for fun. Then he’s called away.

While he’s gone, convincing video footage is played of a 5-and-1 constructions workers stationing themselves on the two tracks. And then footage is played of an oncoming train that will hit the group of 5. The subject must choose to throw the switch or not, they don’t have a lot of time, maybe a minute?

 

An interesting rescue of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” that shows how not knowing about the cultural context of something is a pretty big deal.

“Given a cursory glance and applying today’s worldview to the song, yes, you’re right, it absolutely *sounds* like a rape anthem.

BUT! Let’s look closer!
…
So it’s not actually a song about rape – in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. ”

Most interesting comment was the observation that the line “At least I’m gonna say that I tried” is basically saying “It’ll be easier for both of us if people just think you raped me” which… fuck. The past was a horrifying place. :(

 

God I hate the FDA. Feds Prepare For A New War On Kratom, An Herbal Drug Many Swear By.

 

Another open Facebook post, this one on Jeremy Bentham.

“I’d like to talk a little bit about moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and why he has a weird level of celebrity status among people who think like I do.

…There is a sense in which Jeremy Bentham literally invented a lot of the concepts we take for granted as the founder of utilitarianism and a prolific Enlightenment thinker, but there is another sense in which, almost as a side-effect, he came to a variety of conclusions about the social order which wouldn’t gain widespread traction until decades or even centuries after his death.

…Jeremy Bentham, at a time when the morality of chattel-slavery was still a hotly-debated topic, was saying that It’s Okay to Be Gay and we shouldn’t slut-shame.

…Here is a radical proposition: Jeremy Bentham wasn’t just ahead of his time — he was ahead of *our* time.

…maybe you can’t have the visionary foresight without the eccentricity. Even among progressive people, who pay a lot of lip-service to celebrating diversity, there is a surprising amount of hostility to weird nerds re-deriving the social order from first principles. When we’re judging people for doing this, maybe we should remember Jeremy Bentham.”

 

How Evangelion Altered Anime Eternally.

OK, I knew it was one of the best pieces of art ever, I didn’t realize how much it altered a genre!

Navy apologizes after aircrew members draw a penis in the sky. Well color me impressed! It must take a ton of skill to be able to draw something like that with jet that’ll be recognizable from the ground! Good ol’ Kit Cloudkicker strikes again.

 

Russia organized 2 sides of a Texas protest and encouraged ‘both sides to battle in the streets’. “Russian actors organized both anti-Islam and pro-Islam protests in the same location at the same time on May 21, 2016, using separate Facebook pages operated from a so-called troll farm in St. Petersburg, the Senate Intelligence Committee disclosed on Wednesday.”

 

Pretty. This is the rare kind of poetry that I get.

“but now they tweet from Syria, and when our beautiful missiles crashed into their airbase Jared Kushner was listening to Hamilton

do you think bin Laden ever picked up the controller? maybe he did. maybe he slid into the skin of an American Marine and blew holes in his own country. high score. high score.”

 

What New Atheism Says “I’m not surprised when the New Atheists are characterized in ways which attempt to erase what they are saying or just get them to shut up. They’re forcing a conversation that most on the left really don’t want to have.”

 

People freaking out about Amazon Key are showing their “Living In A Neighborhood Where You Can Leave Packages Unattended Outside Your Door For Hours” privilege.

 

The Grand Unified Keanu Theory. O_O

 

Photographer Spends Eternity Waiting For Museum Visitors To Match Artworks And The Result Is Worth The Wait

 

Hah, Wired has an article about the Paperclipper game.

“Gaming, Lantz had realized, embodies the orthogonality thesis. When you enter a gameworld, you are a superintelligence aimed at a goal that is, by definition, kind of prosaic.

“When you play a game—really any game, but especially a game that is addictive and that you find yourself pulled into—it really does give you direct, first-hand experience of what it means to be fully compelled by an arbitrary goal,” Lantz says. Games don’t have a why, really. Why do you catch the ball? Why do want to surround the king, or box in your opponent’s counters? What’s so great about Candyland that you have to get there first? Nothing. It’s just the rules.”

Now whenever someone asks why an intelligent agent would turn the universe into paperclips, point them at this game. Then come back the next day, look them dead in the eyes, and ask them “Why. Did. You?”

 

So good! Now I want every visual story to do this. How David Fincher Hijacks Your Eyes

In Favor of Futurism Being About the Future “We are going to fight our hardest to end poverty, disease, death, and suffering, and we’re going to do it in spite of petty Boston Review articles telling us we should stop doing it so we can focus on hating each other for stupid reasons.”