I love the song on this one...but, the true beauty comes at the 1:09 mark.
On the other hand, during Conference play, we can forget about all that and get down to what we truly and dearly love...beating hell out of the only worthy foe...one another.
That's Thursday...this is still Tuesday and we need to go ahead and get some things out of the way...maybe deal with a few recurring topics before things go pear shaped.
PAVEMENT
Other than the sweet sweet degeneration**....the best thing about this about this clip is the flippant political statement. Earlier during the set he said "We're here for turrets...I mean Tibet." Ha. I know a lot of y'all are true believers in the political power of music...y'all and hippies :)...but, many of us were horrified and scared, as young'uns, watching you punk rockers become hippies with mohawks...pestering us about workers and the sandinistas or whatever. We were dismissed for being willfully uninvolved with reality...as Slackers. Yeah. I guess.
Speaking of politics spoiling everything....this bastard.
MIRO
Today, during my trials and tribulations on the road (I left home without a wallet...and had to wait for an hour at a gas station to be rescued by Martha with credit cards), I tried to listen to a series of podcast on Miro. These were put on by the Tate...good...they turned out to be on MIro and politics...bad, very bad. The stream of profanity that I unleashed on the windshield was so intense that it blocked sunlight for a nanosecond. Look up there...look at it. Who looks at that and thinks about politics? It turns out, people whose definition of politics includes every possible human activity...that's who. Then they set about explaining his paintings through politics...even when political statements, in the paintings, were vague at best.
It's one thing to say a storefront mannequin unavoidably evokes Plato...it's quite another to say the worker who put the mannequin together had Plato in mind. I'd rather be bit on the forehead by a mosquito than listen to this nonsense.
Rude Talk
Did y'all hear Richard Dawkins the other day? He said it was "immoral" not to abort a fetus with downs syndrome. That's nasty man. Then, under the guise of an apology, he doubled down. At least he didn't actually apologize. I'm sick of people saying something...something they've obviously meant to say...something they'd given some thought to...then coming out the next day and apologizing like they'd merely burped at the table. You said it...stand by it. Shit.
What I want to know is this...what did he mean by immoral? He didn't say it was undesirable. He didn't say it shouldn't be allowed. He said it was immoral...as if he had some absolute authority in mind. I'd like to know exactly why he thinks it's immoral to have a baby with Downs. Why it's wrong...and what authority he's drawing on? I could infer...but, that would just be rude. Where does a machine go for moral authority?
Adamparsons Hates on the Fall
An oldie but a goodie (as a topic on the blogs...the song is timeless)
Me
Who am I kidding...we gon' keep talking about me....but, this gives me an excuse to point you all in the direction of Hugh Marwood's blog. He is an artist...a good one. He has been kind enough to recount some of our recent conversations on his blog. He's also put some of my really fantastic photos on there. So go look at it. He talks about Tom Wolfe too...so it's actually worth a click. :). Hugh's work is really good.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some things but, that should hold us over for now.
*If the money grubbers keep expanding the Conference we'll have Yankees in it...at that point we will seriously be looking to immigrate...it'll all be over at that point.
**If only Pavement had given this much "effort" in covering The Classical.
Richard Dawkins isn't serious about atheism . . . he's a barely-literate literary tart who saw an opportunity to make a lot of money, and a lot of popular currency for his ludicrous ideas about treating aspects of culture like aspects of biology, out of western fears of "religious primitives" after September 2001. He probably has about as much to say about morality as any other average goes-to-church-exactly-never Anglican.
ReplyDeleteI know he's an easy target but, this particular line of unstable reasoning is really up my nose lately...the moralizing materialist.
DeleteI'm not a materialist, but I don't see the problem with materialists blagging on about morality if the materialist chooses to define good morality as behavior leading to greatest comfort for the greatest number of people and immorality as its opposite. I can guess how much that definition of morality appeals to you. I don't have much time for it myself.
DeleteYeah...not much but, only because it only takes about two seconds to follow that line of thinking to its own destruction.
DeleteI don't have a problem with people making ethical claims, or claims about acceptable behavior...I really don't care how somebody determines what's acceptable or not but, don't tell me matter is all there is and then start making declarations on Moral Truth.
What a sad, inhuman, loveless world Dawkins must gaze out on. Does he seriously think this would have been a better place if the kids in this video had been sluiced away before birth? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju-q4OnBtNU
Delete- or that the parents of those children committed an immoral act by bringing them into the world???
On a related point, I was interested in a comment I read last year about high-profile, proselytising atheists like Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, to the effect that, unlike the vast majority of us, they don't seem to share or understand the basic human need for solace. For them, religious belief boils down to the acceptance of a specific set of factual assertions, as if believing in the existence of God is a similar sort of thing to accepting the Second Law of Thermodynamics (whatever the hell that is).
God save us from fanatics of all kinds - religious and atheistic.
Yeah...that was a vile thing to say...and gives us a fairly clear picture of Dawkins' morals. Even the ethicists that make value assessments of human life don't usually go that far.
DeleteThis is a good point you're raising. Alvin Plantiga asked that if someone wants for "proof" or evidence of the Virgin Birth...what exactly would that evidence look like? Dawkins and the others adhere to a strict tautology...seemingly without realizing it. They have an unbending faith in their own epistemology....without seeming to realize it has no power to justify itself. They can't close their own circle.