Thanks for the link and the quotes, WV.

I like this one a lot. Boiled down, to the point, spot on:

But whatever their personal leanings, influential reporters mostly work in nihilistic corporations, to whom the news is a non-ideological commodity, to be sold the same way we hawk cheeseburgers or Marlboro Lights. Wars, scandals and racial conflicts sell, while poverty and inequality do not. So reporters chase one and not the other. It’s just business.

I think the song should be replaced. It celebrates our racist past, and it points to yet another time when words like “freedom” need to be footnoted. Let’s find a song that doesn’t need the footnotes.

As in, whenever people spout off about “freedom and liberty,” we should always ask “For whom?” When it comes to economics, social policy, education, health care — anything and everything. Freedom and liberty for whom?

Too often in American history, and right now, in the American present, freedom and liberty for one meant/means chains for another. In real terms.

And, yes, there are bigger problems in the world than the national anthem. But it’s a problem we could easily fix. Not so many of those these days. Change it. Find a song that speaks to our diversity, without celebrating slavery, or racism, or any kind of oppression of others, or “the Other.” Find a song that everyone can love, without any burden or sense of “bad faith” or alienation.

The nation should choose this song, together. It shouldn’t have been chosen for us.

Thanks for that article, Nittany.

I grew up in Maryland. We weren’t taught the truth about Key either. I had to learn about that on my own, later in life.

Don’t really know how to express this well, and it’s gonna come out an awkward mess of sorts. But, frankly, it’s a wonder any black athlete stands for the SBB. Ever. It basically celebrates the defeat of human beings who sought an escape from slavery, and the writer owned slaves and was anti-abolition his entire life, from what I’ve read. I think Kap was well within his “rights” to speak out about it. More public figures should, IMO. Of course, it’s not for me to say — which is where I feel the awkwardness most.

Related: I can’t stand hearing or reading nonsense like this: “He should be grateful he gets to live in America, where he is free to pursue his dreams!! In no other country but America could he do that!!!”

Bullshit. Too many knuckle-dragging, know-nothings seem to actually believe America stands alone in the world when it comes to “freedoms”. Hell, he could pursue his athletic dreams in dozens of countries, many of them granting far more “freedoms” than he has here — especially in Europe, and especially in the Scandinavian countries.

Bottom line for me: We need to axe the national anthem and bring down every single confederate flag existing on public grounds. I know those are just symbols, and we need radical, substantial change in policy far more. But it’s a good start.

This isn’t directed at anyone here:

I think some Americans fall for the idea of the “outsider” candidate, and they think, “Well, if the establishment is against this guy, he must be awesome!!”

Thing is, as bad as the establishment is, some “outsiders” are worse. It’s just not automatically the case that they’re going to be better. And I can’t see anything in Trump’s past or present that would indicate he would be better than the establishment. His business record is abysmal. He’s been sued literally thousands of times, including for discrimination against blacks and other minorities. His rhetoric is obviously incendiary, with serial lying being a major factor.

Aside from his well-known greatest hits of lies, he lied that the NFL agreed with him about debate schedules; he lied about meeting with Chicago top cops to discuss how to fix crime there; he lied that Clinton is targeting black businesses for a tax hike of 50%.

The above also points out another reason to doubt him when he says he will do X, Y or Z — whether it will help or hurt Americans. He lies so often, it’s impossible to know. But, on balance (IMO), given his personal history of NOT helping workers, minorities, women, etc. . . . and making his entire trade pitch a matter of workers against workers . . . I think it’s safe to conclude he’s unlikely to be good for the country.

Oh, and there is this rather important question Trump asks:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump asked a foreign policy adviser multiple times in an hourlong briefing why the U.S. can’t use its nuclear weapons, MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough said Wednesday morning.

Scarborough revealed the story while he was interviewing former CIA Director Michael Hayden on “Morning Joe” about Trump’s campaign.

“Several months ago, a foreign policy expert went to advise Donald Trump,” Scarborough said. “And three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons — three times he asked. At one point, ‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?’”

thehill.com

I think the financial elite is fine with Trump. Trump or Clinton, they don’t much care — at least on economic grounds. Trump would directly inflate their bank accounts by tens of millions, just from his tax cuts. And Clinton would make sure to grease the skids and protect them from all threats to their power. As would Trump.

The major error I see, when it comes to debating Trump’s apparent “populism” and rhetoric about workers: He never talks about how American corporations have screwed them over. He sets everything up as a battle between nations, with lopsided trade deals helping the people of other nations while screwing ours. He makes it all about the Chinese, the Mexicans, the Malaysians, etc. etc. against Americans. I’ve never once heard him talk about how our trade deals were set up to help American corporations ship jobs overseas, produce products there and not here, so they could sell them back to American consumers with much, much higher profit margins.

He can’t, of course. Because he’s been doing this for decades. All of Trump’s manufacturing has been outsourced. So he has to whip up anger and hatred between nations — workers against workers. He can’t talk about American Corporate control over trade deals and international capitalism, because he’s a part of all that.

The financial elite also know that on the few things he seemingly might go against globalist dogma, like potential tariffs, he’d never get those through Congress. They know this. So what we’d end up with, under Trump, are hard-line, right-wing, trickle down economic policies, with any “populist” ideas blocked by Congress — and I personally don’t believe Trump means any of it anyway.

Why would some of them choose Clinton over Trump? Not because they “fear” Trump would go against their interests, while knowing HRC wouldn’t. They likely think he’s a bombastic, churlish cretin . . . . and the financial elite have a great deal of inside knowledge about bombastic, churlish cretins.

Trump has never given us any indication that he will be less bellicose with his policies than Clinton. And she is likely to be quite the neocon.

Trump’s party, and his core constituency, puts great store by flexing American muscles, endlessly. For them — and this is my dime-store psychology talking — it’s essential masculinity, which they feel has been destroyed by Obama and “the left.” To go further with the dime store stuff, I’d say the basis for their hatred of PC is all about masculine projection, and the sense that women have stomped all over men in America. Down deep, being “PC” is seen as succumbing to moms telling you to be a good boy, and boys who never grow up really, really resent this.

Boys who never grow up also really, really love to blow people up, shoot them up, play with guns, play with fighter jets and battleships and so on, too. More of that resentment stuff in play.

In a nutshell, neocons are boys who never grew up. The alt-right are filled with them, and they add racism, anti-semitism, misogyny and homophobia to that as well.

So, yeah, we’re essentially screwed. But I think it’s safe to say Trump is worse. He combines all the things wrong with HRC and he adds the alt-right, and the alt-right is, boiled down, American Nazism, with slightly better packaging.

Why would modern humans mate with Neanderthals?

Bigger brains. Neanderthals apparently had bigger brains and were stronger physically.

Home Sapiens won the war. But it’s kinda like VHS versus Betamax. The latter should have.

This is missing the visual part, of course. If anyone can track down a great version of this classic with both, please post it.

To me, it’s one of the all-time great covers of a classic American song, which speaks to a classic American vibe of being the underdog, the red-headed step-child, the black sheep of the family, in a way that perhaps doesn’t exist anywhere else in America. New Jersey. New Jersey, across the water from that behemoth, New York City. That long, deep shadow cast by the Big Apple, and there is perhaps no greater generator of insecurity than NYC, especially for people who live in Jersey.

So when Springsteen sings about his Jersey Girl — and I had one of my own, so I know what he and Tom Waits are talking about — and the audience yells in spontaneous delight, it’s as if all the decades of being told they’re only second rate, or third rate, are wiped away, and for that moment in time, with the Boss on the stage, Jersey is Number One and Jersey Girls are queens of the night.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

WV,

Perhaps THE biggest mystery can be boiled down to “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Pascal, Kierkegaard and Heidegger (among a host of other great thinkers) all had different ways of posing that question and dealing with it, but the subject of “Being” is perhaps the one mystery we’ll never solve.

So I think science will eventually be able to reverse engineer the brain (and the body), and figure out how everything functions to get the results we see . . . . but we’ll never know why there is “Being” in the universe, of any kind . . . . which also includes that universe itself.

In my admittedly biased opinion, religious explanations tend to block us from getting closer to the mystery of Being. They give us nice little stories about the whys and the wherefores, so we just go, “Oh. Okay. God did it.” And we move on. It’s like there are all of these gateways out there — at least potentially — and they have the various gods and goddesses listed on them, on a sign, and that stops most people in their tracks. So they don’t bother to open the gate and go through it to see what’s on the other side. The names or some Name stops them short.

IMO, we need to get rid of the names first, so we can go through the gates. Maybe we’ll find out what “Being” really is someday. Probably not. But maybe.

————–
Yeah, i tend to agree, comrad.

But, as you know relying on human-language to even try to discuss ‘the mystery of being’ is…well…..

w
v

That does present a problem. I’ve always found it interesting that some of the most brilliant thinkers, poets, musicians, artists and so on sometimes arrive at this conclusion:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

— Wittgenstein

Some may take great satisfaction in this, or think it gives them a shortcut toward a kind of non-thinking, mute reality. But I think these thinkers don’t think that way. They’re actually saying something to the effect of: “Go through this process, this journey, make it as immense and deep and profound as possible, be fearless, be courageous, don’t let society stand in your way, take it as far as possible, and try to express what the experience means, as well as can be done. That remainder, that part that can’t be expressed? It’s okay to remain silent about that.

Again, I’m biased, by I think poets, musicians and artists get the closest to this. Wittgenstein’s words influenced a great many.

nittany ram wrote:

Yeah ‘Her’ is very good. One of the few love stories I ever liked only because it explores AI and the issues it entails. ‘Ex Machina’ is another good film about AI. You think it’s going to be a love story but then it takes a turn…

I really liked Ex Machina too. Very well done.

I’ve written a Sci-Fi novel, with a plan for a trilogy, and it deals with some of those issues. Clones and robots. It needs work. But I think it has potential. Unfortunately, with each month that goes by, with new stories from shows like Orphan Black, which I love, I’m seeing more and more competition . . . . and I really want it to be original to the degree possible.

My step-father got his doctorate in Nuclear Physics. A brilliant guy, and generally pretty humble about it. He was not likely to ever hold that over anyone’s head, even among other scientists.

__

WV, thanks for the book rec.

__

PA, if you haven’t seen it yet, the movie “Her” is really well done and seriously thought-provoking on the subject of AI. Remarkable too in that it’s a love story . . . and I think it could well be our future. One of the best films I’ve seen in the last decade.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Billy_T.

Sinéad Lohan was an exceptionally talented Irish singer/songwriter who seems to have disappeared. Or she just chose a different way to make a living. She created two beautiful albums in the 1990s and then basically just stopped.

This particular song is representative of her lovely voice, not her fine songwriting, being a cover of Dylan’s “To Ramona”.

Bnw,

Beyond all of that, I think we’ve reached another moment of impasse. On guns and pretty much everything else, politically. Your little post about Michelle Obama is kinda the proverbial straw that broke that old camel’s back. Our worldviews are just incommensurate, and they’re always going to be that way, so we should just agree to disagree, and you go your way and I’ll go mine.

In short, I won’t be reading or responding to your posts anymore. I hope you return the favor.

zn wrote:

ZN, is this really something you find yourself needing to say, even now? I guess I was really lucky growing up. Had two highly educated parents, with highly educated parents of their own, etc. etc. Most of the extended family was/is. Not monied — with a couple of exceptions. But very learned.

Well I am not clear what you mean by “need to say it.” The very way you put that makes me wonder if you got the actual point.

I said that as analysis of mass media news. My claim was that mass media news absolutely does not get that. I made that point because I thought it would be one most readers of this forum already knew and understood. So since we all get that race is cultural etc, isn’t it interesting that mass media news doesn’t get that.

Do we agree that mass media news doesn’t get that? That’s the point.

…

I’m thinking now my response was clumsy and poorly stated. What I meant really was “It’s a shame that has to be said this late in the game.”

Yes, I agree that our media do not seem to get that there is no such thing as “race,” that it IS a social construct.

I threw in the issue of religion at the end — with the post itself being kinda (too much?) thinking aloud — as one possible explanation.

(When I tell people, for example, that genetic science says there is no such thing as a race almost invariably they’ve never heard that before, even though the science on it goes back to the 70s. Knowing that race is a cultural/social/historical thing and not a biological thing should not be new.)

ZN, is this really something you find yourself needing to say, even now? I guess I was really lucky growing up. Had two highly educated parents, with highly educated parents of their own, etc. etc. Most of the extended family was/is. Not monied — with a couple of exceptions. But very learned.

Knowing that race is a social construct was just a given for me, though in the neighborhood of my childhood, that wasn’t the general view.

The birth lottery. All kinds of positives and negatives attach themselves to that. All kinds of wings and chains. Born inches from a home run or a thousand miles from the stadium, etc.

That said, it takes a lot of effort to insist that all the genetic evidence is invalid and that there is such a thing as “race.” Of course — and this is huge — the bible teaches a racialist origin story, and a huge percentage of Americans accept creationism.

In U.S., 46% Hold Creationist View of Human Origins