tears posted:like everyone i am interested in the origins of christian metalcore
Yes
tears posted:Im reading Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal (Ian Christe, 2004)
i finished this and stand by what i said earlier. it is interesting but superficial in a few ways - the chapters on the origins of maligned subgenres of metal are the main appeal for me unless you were looking for a history of metallica, the band, who I get the feeling the authour really really likes. props to the last chapter on being a little time warp to a 2004 trash can full to the brim with trash
i've moved on to "Death metal and music criticism--Analysis at the limits" (Michelle Phillipov, 2012) which is a much more academic book - there is a lot of dunking on academics tendency to judge the value of popular music by its overt (and superficial) "progressive politics" (hello to me 2017).
i am now reading Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent (Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, 2015) which is about how metal is gay and also an exercise in how many times you can use the word problematic on a page
tears posted:i am now reading Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent (Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, 2015) which is about how metal is gay and also an exercise in how many times you can use the word problematic on a page
other than problematic overuse of problematic, how is that?
shriekingviolet posted:tears posted:i am now reading Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent (Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, 2015) which is about how metal is gay and also an exercise in how many times you can use the word problematic on a page
other than problematic overuse of problematic, how is that?
im not very far into it because it is textually difficult reading, but it is quite nice to see someone acknowledge queerness in metal and try and dig metal studies out of the trap of assuming it is all just music for the angry heterosexual man - its interesting that the legacy of scholarship almost shapes the (perception of) the scene itself:
"The problem with such analysis is that the reliance on heterosexual exclusivity reveals scholars have not adequately examined the cultural and social capital of heterosexual masculinity inherent in such concepts. In other words, is it heavy metal itself that “leaves untouched the constructed core of identity” or is it the scholars who study heavy metal?"
i think a lot of my difficulties with it are that i have read very little academic queer literature and very little scene-culture studies work so i dont really know what is going on except that i love extreme metal, i will keep reading and give you a better answer once i have finished
Edited by tears ()
It's one of those things you find all over the place, that's so constant that it's sometimes hard to notice. The biggest current example is the marketing-department pseudoscience of "generations", probably the most widely believed and applied hokum in the West today, where who gets hired or fired may depend on whether the boss remembers "Millennials" as they were originally identified—describing those who reached legal adulthood around the year 2000—or has updated their belief system from later how-to-succeed-in-business con-artistry to apply the same name, and the exact same traits supposed to distinguish "Millennials" from other "generations", to those who were young children or just born around the turn of the century. There's the ongoing intellectual fascination with "the bicameral mind", seemingly in part because of how the idea contradicts evidence of historical development in different places around the world, because it's a pseudo-complex way to ward off the dullness of a complex reality. There's the enduring interest in fiction such as H. P. Lovecraft's, presenting ancient humanity as frighteningly hostile to our own perception of the world, their savage and half-animal blood a constant threat to minds and bodies that know better, where not only does pop culture revisit those ideas constantly in defiance of Lovecraft's purple prose, an entire school of prolific genre writers is dedicated to liberating "Lovecraftian" horror from Lovecraft.
What made me think about this lately was a refresher on the fanciful, still-popular 20th/21st-century interpretation of the Lascaux cave paintings as reflecting a terrified animism about the animals coming to life and attacking the viewer, or acting as make-or-break determinants of success in the hunt based on the magical power of certain rooms, and on the counter-theories that try to drag academics back down to earth.
Like: the simpler explanation for why the Lascaux paintings are clustered in certain sections of the caves isn't that those sections were seen as successful mystic engines for better hunting—it's that most artists, from sculptors to performance artists to taggers, would rather display their own art in well-trafficked areas where people already go to look at more popular works. There's no real need to imagine that animals from the same environment appear next to each other at Lascaux because the artists thought they needed to provide their painted predators with painted prey—both the artists and their contemporaries could see those animals in those environments every single day, and illusionistic realism only works if the viewer can believe the illusion. The "wound" markings on the Lascaux paintings could be magical sigils designed to keep the most dangerous animals from leaping off the walls and eating you—or they could just be wounds or "We killed it!" inscriptions on predators that Paleolithic humans would be smart and proud to kill, or representations of other less-than-fantastic objects or concepts in a form we don't recognize... those more mundane explanations would put them in line with what about Lascaux seems likely to have fascinated Paleolithic people in the same way it fascinates people now. It's stuff like: a horse really does gallop that way, so the one in that painting really looks like it's trying to get away from that lion; marking out where the back legs of those panting bison cross makes it easier to imagine that the herd's parting as you approach, as herd animals really do to baffle predators; and so on, the illusion of reality that many, probably most, of the Lascaux paintings strive to achieve. We don't need to go to great lengths to understand why people might come back year after year to look at that stuff, or why other people would feel proud and satisfied creating it.
I get the appeal of the muddier paths of thinking about Lascaux, about "generations" or "Millennials", about an entire human species that built cities and forged metal tools but didn't realize when they were talking to themselves, and so on. It's interesting and exciting, or some part of it is, anyway, and the ideology at work is inside me too. It feels cool to imagine people with similar bodies as us but utterly alien minds, or similar methods of reasoning as us but guided by a demonic moral code that defies the analysis that we'd apply to, say, bourgeois values. The idea of people like that, somewhere in time, maybe even as recently as before social media existed or whatever, that's creepy and unsettling and a satisfying way in the moment to deal with feelings of alienation. Werewolves, vampires and changelings all around us do make for a good story, sort of like the pseudo-scientific pop-culture fascination with "psychopaths" as mythical super-achievers. And the real knowledge underlying the ideology is perfectly sound, because people's minds really are shaped by their material world, just not in the ways that sort of thinking suggests.
Anyway it's your posting pal cars and I've just been wasting my days in the time of the plague think about the ways the ideology interacts with the casual, or bourgeois-intellectual, belief that Amazon dot com is a faster way to do as the Ancient Romans did, that all of humanity resides in Caesar's Rome forever, including the cavemen. Chears.
Edited by cars ()
cars posted:I get the appeal of the muddier paths of thinking about Lascaux, about "generations" or "Millennials", about an entire human species that built cities and forged metal tools but didn't realize when they were talking to themselves, and so on. It's interesting and exciting, or some part of it is, anyway, and the ideology at work is inside me too. It feels cool to imagine people with similar bodies as us but utterly alien minds, or similar methods of reasoning as us but guided by a demonic moral code that defies the analysis that we'd apply to, say, bourgeois values. The idea of people like that, somewhere in time, maybe even as recently as before social media existed or whatever, that's creepy and unsettling and a satisfying way in the moment to deal with feelings of alienation. Werewolves, vampires and changelings all around us do make for a good story, sort of like the pseudo-scientific pop-culture fascination with "psychopaths" as mythical super-achievers. And the real knowledge underlying the ideology is perfectly sound, because people's minds really are shaped by their material world, just not in the ways that sort of thinking suggests.
Edit: I finished John Smith's Imperialism.
cars posted:The biggest current example is the marketing-department pseudoscience of "generations", probably the most widely believed and applied hokum in the West today, where who gets hired or fired may depend on whether the boss remembers "Millennials" as they were originally identified—describing those who reached legal adulthood around the year 2000—or has updated their belief system from later how-to-succeed-in-business con-artistry to apply the same name, and the exact same traits supposed to distinguish "Millennials" from other "generations", to those who were young children or just born around the turn of the century.
I saw something the other day in one of these buzzword Wired-esque spinoff Medium blogs about how the "hustle economy" will replace the "gig economy" and I stopped reading there but imagine this is going to correspond with "Zoomers." It's like "oh man, the Millennials with their gigs... what's up with that? Well here come the Zoomers, and they've got hustle." Anyways I like your post.
cars posted:
Maybe I'll be misinterpreting a little of what you're talking about but it tangentially relates to a way of seeing the world that I've tried to conceptualize or make sense of for a while relating to the the dichotomy between 'pagan' and 'non-pagan' thinking. That's the only context I've seen it developed in clearly (I'm sure other people have probably elaborated a more general theory of it before, or maybe it's so obvious that it's not even worth elaborating). Specifically I mean the distinction drawn toward paganism, which is ultimately grounded in mundane material concerns, and whose notion of divinity reflects that, in the sense that their 'divinity' is just an extra layer pegged onto everyday experience, but on a larger scale and just out of reach. It's a way of addressing the fact that there's things that are inexplicable in common experience, but sort of putting a pin in it so that its never actually fully resolved, like the way the Greek pantheon becomes increasingly more vague the further up the hierarchy you go. The 'ultimate ground' that it would be resolved in, which is necessarily completely divorced from experienced reality, is never concretely addressed. The same thing crops back up as a paganistic thread in vulgar interpretations of Christianity obviously (praying for material benefits, pulling transcendental concepts back into a vulgar material framework, etc.), but more generally it functions as a way to expand the parameters of experience without actually making the qualitative shift into seeing it from the outside.
I don't think there's any categorical difference between this 'paganizing' conceptual framework, and the pseudo-explanations that come from vulgarized science. They're a way of artifically opening the field of accepted everyday experience as a bourgeois subject, so that extra theories can be tacked on that appear to 'explain' without actually progressing in any meaningful way. An obvious example would be neurological research which creates new ways of describing cognitive states as neurological or physiological phenomena without contributing any understanding to those states in themselves at all. The more directly political version of this is conspiracy theories, where even if you take a particular theory and hypothetically grant that its true, it explains absolutely nothing in actual systemic terms. It's just a way of tacking on an extra unresolved issue which is perpetually deferred as the complicating agent, so that you never have to adopt a perspective from outside the system to understand what is happening or why.
This ended up going off way more on a tangent than I originally intended, but the cave painting example specifically reminded me of how obscene and useless this pseudo-scientific approach is, which simultaneously mystifies other subjects, while also railroading all possible experience under the narrow parameters of petty bourgoise experience.
Edited by ribaraca ()
Has anyone read any good criticism in this area? A.I., 'data science', any of the 'bleeding-edge' computer stuff would be good to read.
edit: A shallow rhiz' search turns up that, in connection with some of this, ilmdge once brought up Thomas Pynchon's essay "Is it okay to be a Luddite" and chthonic_goat_666 once brought up 'The Entropy of Capitalism' by Robert Biel.
Belphegor posted:
I was reading about these things tangentially because someone I knew was really interested in cognitive psychology, but I didn't really start getting into it enough to be able to vouch for recommendations. Hubert dreyfus's what computers still cant do seems like one of the books addressing these questions the most directly, although I think even the newer editions are a little dated. I came across this article recently also which justifies reading a slightly older book on the subject
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/eye-catching-advances-some-ai-fields-are-not-real
Otherwise most of the critical books I got were more related to the conceits that come from cognitive psychology that inform that A.I. ideology in the first place. I've been interested in some of the critiques or defenses because some of the fundamental errors or contradictions seem glaringly obvious and even bizarre (believing that the physical substrate fully determines/explains emergent structures while also believing that you can create the same emergent structure with a completely different substrate, that there is an ideal 'absolute' knowledge through mechanical causality that transcends all perspectives or emergent level models, etc.)
ribaraca posted:Otherwise most of the critical books I got were more related to the conceits that come from cognitive psychology that inform that A.I. ideology in the first place. I've been interested in some of the critiques or defenses because some of the fundamental errors or contradictions seem glaringly obvious and even bizarre (believing that the physical substrate fully determines/explains emergent structures while also believing that you can create the same emergent structure with a completely different substrate, that there is an ideal 'absolute' knowledge through mechanical causality that transcends all perspectives or emergent level models, etc.)
the intersection between AI development, neuroscience, and psychology (throw in philosophy of mind as your free square because of course) is a fucking wasteland of extremely obvious bad ideas. when I was an academic it really confused me that all this trivially refuted trash was allowed to hang around, get taken seriously and receive all the good research grants. later I realized the full extent that science research in the west is completely contingent on addled lizard brain nerdlingers in the pentagon giving infinite money to whoever says they will make star wars gadgets for them and it all clicked
e: also welcome, nice posts
shriekingviolet posted:the intersection between AI development, neuroscience, and psychology (throw in philosophy of mind as your free square because of course) is a fucking wasteland of extremely obvious bad ideas. when I was an academic it really confused me that all this trivially refuted trash was allowed to hang around, get taken seriously and receive all the good research grants. later I realized the full extent that science research in the west is completely contingent on addled lizard brain nerdlingers in the pentagon giving infinite money to whoever says they will make star wars gadgets for them and it all clicked
If that is how the Pentagon is investing its resources then that might not be a bad thing. Sometimes you'll see these greek statue guys on Twitter complain about misguided priorities in western education, but the halcyon past they're referring to were often scientists and engineers coming up nuclear-powered death machines that would travel around the world nuking everything and spraying radiation in all directions. If there's less of that and more trying to "operationalize" Jordan Peterson then I think that will be a bad thing for the U.S. over the long term. Like they get themselves into a big war because that's the hero's journey but look at the giant screen and see hundreds of Chinese ballistic missiles heading toward their air bases in Pacific, and everyone in the room turns and looks at the president's national security advisor who is frantically flipping through the 12 Rules for Life.
trakfactri posted:If that is how the Pentagon is investing its resources then that might not be a bad thing. Sometimes you'll see these greek statue guys on Twitter complain about misguided priorities in western education, but the halcyon past they're referring to were often scientists and engineers coming up nuclear-powered death machines that would travel around the world nuking everything and spraying radiation in all directions. If there's less of that and more trying to "operationalize" Jordan Peterson then I think that will be a bad thing for the U.S. over the long term. Like they get themselves into a big war because that's the hero's journey but look at the giant screen and see hundreds of Chinese ballistic missiles heading toward their air bases in Pacific, and everyone in the room turns and looks at the president's national security advisor who is frantically flipping through the 12 Rules for Life.
well, no, the problem is that this is investment in material technologies, dead end ideologies and boneheaded AI development don't necessarily create broken machines that do nothing. they make nightmares. think about stuff like predictive AI currently being sold to police stations to "predict crimes before they happen" trained on racist data by racist computer touchers, giving a technological excuse and logistical support for cop violence. the basic assumptions behind the collection and allocation of data are stupid, insane, and evil, but their application definitely does something significant and dangerous.
remember that facebook of all places has office buildings full of nerds whos entire job is to look at every post to see if it's got the goatman or a beheading in it. i'm sure that the us government would have no problem getting some gig economy thing going for filtering through this shit, even and especially if it doesn't actually work beyond being a black hole to dump defence budget into
i'm not sure what your point is with the vietnam conparison is. you're right, no surveillence apparatus can deal with gurilla warfare. but that's because if you're constantly moving around the forest sleeping in trees with the AK in your hand you obviously aren't vunerable to being black bagged by judge dredd and his rented minivan like a protestor coming back from getting groceries is
Edited by Horselord ()
swampman posted:https://illwilleditions.com/the-rise-of-black-counter-insurgency/
The essential difference between the Black middle class and the white middle class is strategic: the Black middle class uses Black proletarian struggles to advance its own cause. Since it is not strong enough to advance its cause on its own, it leverages the fear of riots and street protests to push its own agenda. The Black middle class cannot completely dissociate itself from the militant phase of the rebellion because it needs to wield riots and violence as a potential threat over the rest of society. At the same time, the Black middle class cannot identify itself with the riot, because to do so would contradict its own desire to be integrated into the capitalist state, whose laws and order secure the existence of private property.
word, i concur
the practical means you suggest seem too small. occasionally doing a gmaps search and then not going there or losing your phone in a friends car for a few hours is the normal behavior of people. what i think is most effective is not using these cop services, or using them from a burner.
but that is only thinking about them spying on your computer and phone. if need be we can communicate in ways that can't be bugged or intercepted. i'm more interested in face recognition and more classic evidence like fingerprints or left behind dna, or even getting ratted on. but an even higher priority than being followed is as swampman points to, counter insurgency, which can convince everyone not to do anything worth keeping secret in the first place
"defeating" facial recognition is like "defeating" DNA evidence at crime scenes: it always comes out eventually that a bunch of the results were doctored anyway
i recently read julian assange's when google met wikileaks, which is the transcript of a 2011 meeting between assange and jared cohen and eric schmidt (chairmen of google/alphabet/jigsaw/state department/department of defense) on the topic of a treatise the latter were writing for technocratic fascism. the transcript itself is really boring and assange's libertarianism can get nauseating but the auxiliary material before the reproduction of the transcript is pretty good. the opening chapter regards the interpenetration of the US state and google. it details how google is at once an appendage of the repressive state apparatus and a major site of reproduction of ideology. not in those terms, of course, but still.
Even when Google airs its corporate ambivalence publicly, it does little to dislodge these items of faith. The company’s reputation is seemingly unassailable. Google’s colorful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year—an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history. Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the US intelligence community through the PRISM program, Google nevertheless continues to coast on the goodwill generated by its “don’t be evil” doublespeak. A few symbolic open letters to the White House later and it seems all is forgiven.
... powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and ... they enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus exclusively on one of those horns will find themselves gored on the other.
Google's penchant for luring people into its services trap with gigabytes of “free storage” produces the perception that Google is giving it away for free, acting directly contrary to the corporate profit motive. ... If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was running a program like Google Ideas, it would draw intense critical scrutiny. But somehow Google gets a free pass.
im also reading a texbook of psychiatry (bleugh) and some teaching theory (mundane and pedestrian). ive been slowly coming out of a long period of serious depression so its nice to be reading a lot again though i have moved on from reading lots of books about heavy metal music
tears posted:im reading paul feyerabend's against method, which is good. its funny because he uses the term anarchism in the sense of anarchic, but its clear that he actually met some anarchists irl and they annoyed him
im also reading a texbook of psychiatry (bleugh) and some teaching theory (mundane and pedestrian). ive been slowly coming out of a long period of serious depression so its nice to be reading a lot again though i have moved on from reading lots of books about heavy metal music
sorry i lied im actually reading all the tweets from the sex police and the anti sex police on twitter. more and more i realise that yes the internet is a DARPA psyweapon, destroy it, scatter its bytes to the wind, blast its datacenters into the sun,