What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[Raphael]

Could you explain what insights the book has given you? (On both Trump and postmodernism!)

The centrality of TV, and specific forms of TV at that, to Trump's rise. The way he effectively turned himself into a TV character. Into a symbol or an idea of something - in a way, a personification of the stereotypical image of a rich businessman. This touches on some postmodern ideas, especially the idea that in the modern mass media society, often, the image of something is perceived as more real than the original.

The early part of the book puts the focus on how Trump was born at a time when TV started to become a major force in US culture and society, so to some extent, you could say that Trump and the medium of television grew up together. The book claims that while, of course, as the son of a wealthy real-estate developer, he had to become a real-estate developer himself, at the same time, as a member of the first generation in the USA that grew up with TV, he ended up wanting to be a TV star, and a lot of his life was about trying to reach that goal, and eventually reaching it.

The book contrasts the TV and general media landscape of the mid-to-late 20th century with the one that started to grow in the 1980s and 1990s and took over in the 21st century. Under the old system, a few major organisations tried to sell TV shows to as many people as possible, and usually did that by being as pleasant and inoffensive as possible. There were some attempts to be a bit more daring, but they usually petered out after a while. In that environment, Trump was already able to become a regular presence on TV, but the more unpleasant sides of his personality meant that there were limits to how much of a star he could become.

Then came the much more fragmented media landscape created by cable TV and the internet, and, as a result of the breakdown of norms about what TV could show, reality TV. In this environment, people could do well for themselves by selling just to specific segments of the market, and Trump could become a superstar. Reality TV allowed him to turn his offensiveness into an asset and made him one of the most famous people on TV, and politically polarized cable news allowed him to become a major political figure, eventually - with additional help from Twitter - catapulting him into the White House.

In the book, this is presented together with commentary on how various kinds of media setups affect the collective psychology of society. That commentary seems to owe a lot to various "postmodern" or at least postmodern-influenced media theorists. In the last parts, there's emphasis on how people, as a result of perceiving the world through the media rather than directly, sometimes simply can't see a difference between facts and fiction any more.

Looks like the book has already influenced me to some extent - I just spent several paragraphs writing in a style and using vocabulary that I would probably have mocked a month ago.

[Raphael]

Warning: sometimes extreme cheesiness ahead. Viewers may be offended by banality. Viewer discretion is advised.

Earlier this week, I discovered that, since the last time I had visited them, the Museum of the Moving Image's Living Room Candidate website has finally given up on Flash, so I can watch their collection of US presidential campaign ads again:

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/

Let's start with one of the lesser known ads. Some people might have heard that Jimmy Carter somewhat embarrassed himself while running for president in 1976 by letting Playboy interview him and admitting in the interview that he had sinned by coveting other women inside his heart. What fewer people may know is that the Ford campaign tried to seriously use the fact that the interview had happened against him:

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/comm ... 6/criswell

So in 1976, the Republican incumbent tried to get re-elected partly with the message "Vote for me, my opponent granted an interview to Playboy", and 40 years later, in 2016, the, by then, 90-year-old Hugh Hefner wrote, or commissioned the ghostwriting of, an essay celebrating Donald Trump's victory. The time, they are a-changin...

Speaking of Trump, it's interesting that the use of "Make America Great Again" didn't start with him:

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/comm ... ampaign-80

Now that we've reached Reagan, I'd like to note that one very short line from his famous 1984 re-election ad "Morning in America" neatly illustrates one difference between US and German perceptions of economic matters. At one point, the narrator says "...with interest rates at about half the record heights of 1980...". No German chancellor running for re-election would try to brag about interest rates being low. People would be like, "Why are you bragging about us getting lower interest on our savings accounts?":

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/comm ... ger-better

And, from the same campaign, the related "Train" ad. Mostly just cheesy, but at the end, the narrator suggests that some in the crowd might have been there to say "thank you". Regular people saying "thank you" to politicians? GTFO:

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/comm ... 1984/train

All in all, Reagan changed a lot of things dramatically. So much that it can feel weird to look at how things were like before him. For instance, would you have guessed that in 1972, Richard Nixon of all people, apparently believing that his right flank was secure, tried to win over as many centrist voters as possible by bragging about his diplomacy? "Vote for the Republican incumbent, he signed an environmental agreement with Canada" is difficult to imagine these days:

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/comm ... 2/passport

In the same vein, there are the lines

Reaching out across the seas
Finding friends where foes used to be

from this ditty:

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/comm ... /nixon-now

And earlier, there's Lyndon B. Johnson. Horribly messed up man, who did a lot of horrible and messed-up things, but boy, could the man campaign. At the moment, my favourite one is "My opponent is going to radioactively poison your children":

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/comm ... /ice-cream

His more famous and more directly nuke-related ads are, IMO, pretty uncomfortable viewing in the current geopolitical climate,

Unrelated, apparently, to some extent, the Democrats still tried to run against Herbert Hoover in 1952. No wonder they lost that year:

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/comm ... the-farmer

[rotting bones]

Trying an audiobook for Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. Sounds interesting so far. It's also very well written.

Thinking of watching Akiba Maid War if I get the time. It's about a world where working in a maid cafe is the same as being yakuza. You know, the service industry. So basically identical to our world in spirit.

[Raphael]

I recently read a somewhat dry and academic, but nevertheless very interesting, piece of legal scholarship: David Schraub's Liberal Jews and Religious Liberty:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm ... id=4269319

(You need to click on the "Open PDF in Browser" box; directly linking to the pdf doesn't seem to work.)
(Schraub is, for my taste, too far to the left on what might be called "identity politics" issues, and at the same time not left-wing enough on Israel/Palestine issues, but he nevertheless often makes good points.)

As you might know, as part of their recent rampage through US constitutional law, conservative judges in the USA have established an interpretation of the US Constitution under which Freedom of Religion basically means that you're allowed to break the law if your religion tells you to. You can figure out on your own where it would lead if this principle would really be consistently applied to everyone, including followers of traditional Aztec religious beliefs.

Now, one problem that these conservative judges might run into is that some of the more liberal variants of Judaism might explicitly tell their followers that it is a moral requirement to do things that are banned by this or that law passed by conservative politicians. For instance, even some forms of Orthodox Judaism seem to hold that under certain circumstances, abortion is not only allowed but morally required.

So, does this mean that these conservatives will allow liberal Jews - or even some Orthodox Jews - to break some of the laws passed by conservative politicians? Fat chance.

What Schraub suggests is that instead, conservatives will sooner or later resort to the time-honored antisemitic principle of "Wer Jude ist, entscheide ich!" ("I decide who is a Jew!") That is that they will declare that any Jew whose stances on ethical issues are different from those of conservative variants of Christianity isn't really a Jew. Becaus, as everyone knows, conservative Christians are better than everyone else at determining what is and what isn't authentically Jewish.

[Raphael]

I'm currently reading Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, by Alec Ryrie, which is, interestingly enough, a history of Western atheism (and related ideas) that is quite fair-minded despite being written by a religious believer (Church of England).

I just have to share this short passage, about an alleged atheist plot in 1590s England:

[...] but getting past rumours to hard evidence proved frustratingly difficult. A shocked minister reported that a parishioner had told him:

There is a company about this town that say that Hell is none other but poverty, and penury in this world; and Heaven is none other but to be rich, and enjoy pleasures; and that we die like beasts, and when we are gone there is no more remembrance of us.

But when the man himself was hauled in, he claimed to have heard about these views from his brother, who had in turn only heard about them from a preacher who was denouncing them.

[bradrn]

As you might know, as part of their recent rampage through US constitutional law, conservative judges in the USA have established an interpretation of the US Constitution under which Freedom of Religion basically means that you're allowed to break the law if your religion tells you to.

Wait, what? When did they do that?

For instance, even some forms of Orthodox Judaism seem to hold that under certain circumstances, abortion is not only allowed but morally required.

Correct. See e.g. Oholot 7:6: ‘If a woman is having trouble giving birth, they cut up the child in her womb and brings it forth limb by limb, because her life comes before the life of [the child]’. (Yes, it’s somewhat gruesome, but that was the best they could do in those days.)

[Raphael]

Wait, what? When did they do that?

I think that there might be several sources for that, but for a brief intro, you might read the first part of the document I linked to.

[Raphael]

I'm currently reading Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, by Alec Ryrie, which is, interestingly enough, a history of Western atheism (and related ideas) that is quite fair-minded despite being written by a religious believer (Church of England).

I'm now on a page where the author mentions a 17th century "bestselling spiritual advice book" and reports that "The book's index listed both 'Blasphemous thoughts' and 'Thoughts, blasphemous', and in one surviving copy a reader has underlined both entries."

[rotting bones]

I recently read a somewhat dry and academic, but nevertheless very interesting, piece of legal scholarship: David Schraub's Liberal Jews and Religious Liberty:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm ... id=4269319

This is the kind of reading that comes across as gripping for me.

I guess we could all convert to Unitarian Universalism if it comes to that. To be honest, I'm more of a radical than a liberal, but they probably won't count association with the Institute for Christian Socialism. I also have to join a church, and I strongly believe that traditional religions are false. If I had to be a theist, I'd be something like a Spinozist. Besides, I don't know much about Christian Socialism, and I'm not confident it will be consistently liberal on social issues.

[Travis B.]

The only religious belief I could countenance believing in is Deism, since it is not subject to things such as the problem of evil and it makes no attempt to impose religious laws or like. However, I reject it on the grounds that a claim made without evidence may also be rejected without evidence, since Deism in its form where it cannot be disproven, unlike the Abrahamic religions, which make claims about the observable world that can be disproven, is a religious belief not grounded in observable reality.

[rotting bones]

The only religious belief I could countenance believing in is Deism, since it is not subject to things such as the problem of evil and it makes no attempt to impose religious laws or like. However, I reject it on the grounds that a claim made without evidence may also be rejected without evidence, since Deism in its form where it cannot be disproven, unlike the Abrahamic religions, which make claims about the observable world that can be disproven, is a religious belief not grounded in observable reality.

Is there a recognized Deist church? It probably doesn't matter in this context because we want to belong to a religion that requires us to be socially liberal. It's hard to argue that Deism stands for either liberalism or illiberalism. Unitarian Universalism is an explicitly liberal religion. It also came up as comparable in liberalism to the black church. The black churches are explicitly Christian, and joining those will require me to lie about my beliefs.

Spinozism is also more general than Deism. Deism requires me to affirm that the world was definitely created by a watchmaker God. This would seem to be incompatible with the position that the Big Bang is an asymptotic singularity that the past approaches, but never reaches. Another theory that came up in recent cosmology is that before the Big Bang, the world was full of slowly decaying supermassive black holes.

I think Spinozism can accomodate these theories. You can interpret Spinoza's Ethics as saying that the world is saturated by two aspects: matter and representation. The underlying substance of which these are aspects is called "God". The drive to know all matter and its representation is the "intellectual love of God". This is very compatible with science in every form I recognize.

Of course, Spinozism is also wrong. Apart from the obvious objection that Spinoza misuses the word "God", it's difficult to explain why. One book that goes through it in detail is A Study of Spinoza's Ethics by Jonathan Bennett.

[rotting bones]

I watched 2 episodes of Wednesday. Wednesday's character gives off radical leftist vibes. I don't know why I'm surprised given the things she said and did in the second movie. They can't possibly keep this up forever given the teenage vampire/werewolf backdrop.

Edit: Classic Wednesday Addams: https://youtu.be/6iGbxUAM0cc

[Raphael]

The only religious belief I could countenance believing in is Deism, since it is not subject to things such as the problem of evil and it makes no attempt to impose religious laws or like. However, I reject it on the grounds that a claim made without evidence may also be rejected without evidence, since Deism in its form where it cannot be disproven, unlike the Abrahamic religions, which make claims about the observable world that can be disproven, is a religious belief not grounded in observable reality.

I'm kind of sympathetic to deism partly (but not only) because, when people try to convert me to their religion and start out with standard arguments for the existence of God, I can respond with something like "Ok, you've convinced me. God exists. Now prove everything else that your variant of your religion claims.

[zompist]

I watched 2 episodes of Wednesday. Wednesday's character gives off radical leftist vibes. I don't know why I'm surprised given the things she said and did in the second movie. They can't possibly keep this up forever given the teenage vampire/werewolf backdrop.

Edit: Classic Wednesday Addams: https://youtu.be/6iGbxUAM0cc

I really liked the show, but I wouldn't say it's leftist. Wednesday rejects cultural norms, which can go either way; she also kind of hates people, which is antithetical to leftism (but not unknown among leftists). But there's a character arc though, so that's probaby not her final position.

(It's true that the show picks up on the anti-Pilgrim vibes from the second movie, and that could be considered an anticolonialist or anti-religious position... but it's not deep; it's just For The Marginalized in the same vague no-politics way the X-Men are. That's still better than conformism, but I don't think people are very good at drawing out the implications.)

[Ares Land]

I'm kind of sympathetic to deism partly (but not only) because, when people try to convert me to their religion and start out with standard arguments for the existence of God, I can respond with something like "Ok, you've convinced me. God exists. Now prove everything else that your variant of your religion claims.

I'm an atheist or perhaps an agnostic. Believing in God or gods is something that makes rational sense to me, even if I personally don't: it's a big and weird universe out there so why not?
I think (some) religious people are trying to pull a fast one on us: they seem particularly well informed as to what God has in mind.

I also find it hard to reconcile the sheer scale of the Universe and our insignificant place on it with a God that cares deeply about the way we amoebas pair-bond. I think it's been a difficult bit for all Abrahamic religions for millenia: 'what is man that thou art mindful of him?' and all that.

[Travis B.]

The only religious belief I could countenance believing in is Deism, since it is not subject to things such as the problem of evil and it makes no attempt to impose religious laws or like. However, I reject it on the grounds that a claim made without evidence may also be rejected without evidence, since Deism in its form where it cannot be disproven, unlike the Abrahamic religions, which make claims about the observable world that can be disproven, is a religious belief not grounded in observable reality.

I'm kind of sympathetic to deism partly (but not only) because, when people try to convert me to their religion and start out with standard arguments for the existence of God, I can respond with something like "Ok, you've convinced me. God exists. Now prove everything else that your variant of your religion claims.

I am of a similar view - even if there is a God, why is that god your version of God?

[Glenn]

I also find it hard to reconcile the sheer scale of the Universe and our insignificant place on it with a God that cares deeply about the way we amoebas pair-bond. I think it's been a difficult bit for all Abrahamic religions for millenia: 'what is man that thou art mindful of him?' and all that.

I have thought a little about this as well. One way of thinking about this is to see God as fractal - in other words, if there is a God, then God exists on all scales, and the scale of our human existence is no more or less important (or worthy of being mindful of) than the scale of galaxies.

[Glenn]

(I apologize profusely in advance for the length of this post:)
Some time ago, I acquired E-book copies of the Library of America editions of two works by the late author Ursula K. Le Guin, The Complete Orsinia (containing the short story collection Orsinian Tales and the novel Malafrena), and Always Coming Home. I had read Orsinian Tales and Always Coming Home already (repeatedly, in the case of the latter), but the new LOA editions contain additional bonus material, notably information about how the works were written and some additional fragments of conworlding and (to some extent) conlanging by Le Guin. The conlanging info is quite sparse (Le Guin, as an author, was more of a conworlder than a conlanger), but it is something which I had previously been quite curious about.

Le Guin’s Orsinia is a fictional Central/Eastern European country set in our world; it is not based on any one country, although the outline of the map of Orsinia on the Le Guin website resembles that of real-world Moravia. Malafrena contains the partial lyrics of two songs in Orsinian, with English translations found elsewhere in the book. Judging from these, Orsinian appears to be a Romance language (sui altiy muriy “beneath high walls,” amor miye “my love”), although some names appear Slavic (notably the capital, Krasnoy). The external reason for this seems plain: Le Guin began creating Orsinia as a university student in the late 1940s, and while she set it in Eastern Europe, she was more familiar with Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish) than with Slavic language, so she chose to make the native language, as she wrote in the introduction to the LOA edition, “Slavic-influenced but Latin-descended.” She does not appear to have worked out much in the way of grammar or vocabulary, but it was good to get a glimpse of the language nonetheless.

Always Coming Home is set in a far-future post-apocalyptic California; it is partly a novel, but mostly a collection of anthropological material: stories, poems, songs, legends, recipies, and ethnographic descriptions, including a few passages that appear to include an anthropologist (in effect, Le Guin herself) interviewing the people. (I am sure a number of people here are already familiar with it.) Her people, the Kesh, inhabit the Napa Valley, where Le Guin spent summers in her childhood. The Kesh language is a bit more fleshed out than Orsinian; it is an a priori conlang, primarily prefixing, and less Indo-European than Orsinian. The book contains words, names, a few song lyrics, and a glossary of Kesh, and the LOA edition contains some additional grammatical information, although some of it is contradictory (e.g., it describes Kesh as OVS; there are no examples of transitive sentences in the book, but the intransitive examples appear to be SV).

The original published edition of Always Coming Home, in 1985, was accompanied by a cassette tape entitled “Music and Poetry of the Kesh”; my copy, which I still own, is the 1986 mass market paperback edition, but the cassette was reissued as a CD and an LP in 2018 after Le Guin’s death, and I acquired a copy after getting the LOA edition. The CD contains instrumental music, songs, and poems, all in untranslated Kesh and accompanied by synthesized versions of “traditional” Kesh instruments, as described in the book, some of which were subsequently constructed. (The recording itself apparently helped spark the conlang: according to Le Guin and the musician Todd Barton, who spearheaded the recording project, when he and Le Guin began discussing it, she showed him some poems and song lyrics she had already drafted in English. He asked, “But don’t they speak something different?”, and Le Guin responded “Drat!” and went on to spend the next six months fleshing out the language enough to translate the lyrics into it. According to Barton, when they applied to copyright the music on the cassette, the copyright office mistakenly thought that they were arrangements of traditional music from a real-world people.) One thing that the original cassette and the LP contain, but the CD unfortunately lacks, is a set of bilingual (Kesh/English) liner notes for the poetry and song lyrics on the tracks.

I have listened to the CD; probably the most interesting tracks are those that lean into the book’s “anthropology of the future” concept, with background audio (nature sounds, snippets of conversation, etc.) that make it sound as if these fictional people were going about their festivals or their daily lives, and an anthropologist just showed up and turned on a tape recorder.

[Glenn]

Other reading of note:

Some time ago, I tracked down and read Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai by Robert Nichols, written in the early 1970s, a piece of semi-utopian fiction that serves in part as a vehicle for the author’s anarchist-syndicalist ideas. I am not sure how successful it was in getting across those ideas, but I was struck by a section in which he describes local leaders from different neighborhoods meeting by video to discuss policy agendas, with a setup that resembles nothing so much as a Zoom call (although with a 1970s vision of technology, each party appears on a separate TV screen). Those policies are then voted on by a referendum of local residents who gather in a stadium and show their votes by holding up different colors; at the entrance to the stadium is an information station where they can consult a collection of information about the issues they will be voting on, which sounds a bit like Wikipedia.

On a different note, I decided at one point to read more works of fantasy and science fiction inspired by non-Western cultures (primarily Asian, but also a few African and Native American works). Unexpectedly, many of the works I ended up reading were inspired by Southeast Asia, which was not at all planned: In the Vanishers’ Palace and The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard, Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho, The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf, Snake Agent by Liz Williams, and the anthology The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia. (De Bodard is of Vietnamese/French extraction; Cho and Alkaf are Malaysian; Williams is British, but her work is set in a very-alternate Singapore; The SEA Is Ours contains stories by authors from several Southeast Asian countries, most notably the Phillipines.)

Summing up my recent reading more briefly: I am currently reading Life Beyond Us, edited by Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law, and Susan Forest (an anthology of science-fiction stories and science essays, which I contributed to on Kickstarter) and A Coup of Tea by Casey Blair (a cozy fantasy novel); the last nonfiction book I completed was Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy by Mark P. Witton; and the last piece of linguistic material I read was “A Typology of Morphological Argument Focus Marking” – the author, Aidan Alexander Annestad, was interviewed on the most recent episode of the Conlangery podcast, and this is his master’s thesis. I found it quite interesting, and it helped me to confirm a feature of my perpetually-embryonic conlang as a focus marker.

In the last few years, I have begun listening to podcasts on a regular basis (I have a fairly lengthy commute to work, so I download podcast episodes and listen to them while driving). The podcasts that I listen to fall into a few specific categories: Russia and the former Soviet Union (including Sean’s Russia Blog and In Moscow’s Shadows), fantasy writing and worldbuilding (including Worldbuilding for Masochists and the now-defunct Be the Serpent), the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (notably the Prancing Pony Podcast), and history (Revolutions by Mike Duncan, and The Medieval Podcast, The Medieval Grad Podcast, and Byzantium & Friends, all connected to the website Medievalists.net).

(Once again, I apologize profusely for the length of all this, but I have been meaning to share it for a long time.)

[foxcatdog]

I just finished watching blade runner which was enjoyable with it's atmosphere and dialogue. I also watched tails of earthsea by studio ghibli which struck me as more enjoyable with it's plot through it did meander a bit towards the beginning.