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Reminds me of RCA’s electronic music lab. It housed the RCA synthesiser and used a lot of musique concrete techniques. On vinyl record lathes…
Eventually they had to replace them with tape as everyone working there hated it.
To be fair Schaeffer did develop the early concrete techniques on record but as soon as the Nazis took over Paris they moved to tape.
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People always used to say “What this world needs is a plague” too. Fat lot of good that’s done us.
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That’s because we didn’t let it kill enough people!
There will be a schism soon-the evangelicals love Israel because of end times bullshit, but the nazis hate the Jews, so they hate Israel. Ultra Orthodox Jews loved the Cheeto because he supported the expansionist Israeli government. Even though he also supported actual nazis, the Israel issue was enough to convince them.
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They idolize war and soldiers, but don’t actually understand the brutality of war. It’s an exciting movie to them not an actual reality they can imagine. The first American civil war was brutal… a second one will be even more so and will look something like Syria or Afghanistan…
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I know it wouldn’t help everything, but I think if Americans travelled more, I mean really travelled, not stayed at resorts somewhere, they might be a bit more reasonable.
Having lived all over the place, I don’t take it for granted that I can drink delicious clean water straight from my tap, or that the local grocery store has literally never blown up! That our heating fuel deliveries come on time, and we almost always have electricity.
This guy I’m talking about is a mechanic for Coca Cola, and I imagine logistical operations like that would be totally screwed by a civil war, but he doesn’t appreciate how good he has it.
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Honestly, maybe it would help for some people. But I’ve known plenty of people who did travel and are still blinkered and unreasonable, or prone to embracing extremism. I think you have to be open and humble for that sort of thing to have an impact, you know?
And of course plenty of Americans live without adequate heating, food, or clean water. Most of us don’t have to go far to find those things. It might be more important for more Americans to travel within our own borders and really see how others who are less fortunate are faring. Maybe then we can get more vocal support for humane domestic policies that will hopefully translate to humane foreign policies as well.
That’s my $.02, FWIW.
As for civil war, for most (white, privileged) people in the US an actual war is an abstract, something their grandfathers or great grandfathers participated in, that we celebrate for having saved democracy. We wrapped that generation in glory for sacrificing so much and ignored the very real pain it caused. The reality of what that generation went through (WW2) has been abstracted away and the last generation of holocaust survivors are starting to pass away. The whole concept that a war would disrupt their day to day life is both exciting, even welcome (they’re not doing the normal grind anymore, but are participating in “real” history) and mass mediated. Even the wars that are going on right now, we see them via TV, radio, papers, the internet… it’s not a lived reality for us, so we just see it as we see a movie, that’s tragic, sad, kind of intense, but not a reality.
So… I don’t know.
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Yeah, I’m probably projecting my own reality. As a sheltered new englander, when I struck out into the world alone with little money, it was the best education I could’ve hoped for. But I did meet people along the way for whom the experience wasn’t as eye opening.
Maybe less travel and more “clockwork orange” treatment is in order.
(Kidding!)
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We all do that of course!
True. And there are people who do benefit from travel, so…
Nothing I said precludes them just wanting to kill others with impunity, which is also true. But they do also idealize war because they’ve never experienced it themselves and live in a culture that worships “warriors”.
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Yeah, I didn’t mean to contradict you. I realized I feel much more nuance than I posted, so I withdrew
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You didn’t need to withdraw. I think it’s an important point.
I’ll also say that I think there are some people who really are blood thirsty assholes who would revel in killing others with no regrets. But I think there are lots of people who would get to that point and then realize how horrific it is to take another life and really regret getting to that point. What the breakdown of that would be, who can say, but I do think some who are calling for blood would get there and realize what they’ve done. I think that did happen to some at the capitol insurrection, not just because of the crackdown, but because they saw the actual violence and realized how they fucked up. It’s probably a minority, but still.
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I was thinking that, plus at large group who wouldn’t participate, but would feel vindicated/righteous watching it on TV
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This too. I have no doubt that there were people who did the same with the insurrection and have doubled down… That’s the problem with mass mediated culture especially with Social media… it mediates what you see and in the US, I think we really tone down the violence of war in terms of it’s direct impact on human beings. It’s one thing to see an explosion in the distance, it’s another to look at the destroyed building full of dead bodies of innocent people close up… It’s even another to be there and see those bodies IRL, and to smell it, etc.
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The laserdisc version was transferred to DVD for the 2006 Limited Edition release. It’s not a great transfer but it’s the only way you can own the “original” movies in a relatively modern format.
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All of this. I was raised pretty well, but some of the experiences I am most thankful for are from moving to the Bay Area and really exploring. Seeing all of it and finding out that it’s just people trying to get by.
And that’s the thing that requires humility and openness. One insidious part of racism is having it block that truth. I think someone who cannot see this at home won’t see it abroad.
(This also covers “white savior” types who see the suffering but miss seeing the people.)
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Right? People can over come it, but often they either have to have a life-changing experience OR they have to be open to it. If someone believes they have it all figured out, that they KNOW how the world actually is, then it’s going to be harder to change their minds.
Or dismiss the notion that we can tackle that issue on a systemic level.
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Preach. I have travelled in Honduras and Haiti with medical missions and have had members of the team remark to me that the level of disasters there was just “proof that (racists slur for Central Americans (Honduras) or Blacks (Haiti)) don’t know how to build a society. They would be better off if we owned the place.” Trying to explain how we destroyed their economies, particularly in Haiti, was met with bored expressions and shrugs. As usual, if you can’t fit it on a bumper sticker, don’t bother.
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And this is why we need a good history education. There are reasons these societies have problems and it’s most certainly not about the race of the people running the countries. It’s very much about colonialism and imperialism, along with capitalism.
That’s really upsetting to hear though. You’d think people doing that kind of work would have a more informed perspective, but apparently not always.
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As we have discussed before, education helps, but only to a certain degree. Experience with human suffering likewise. The way the human mind is able to interpret input to support whatever it needs supported, rather than let facts speak for themselves, is truly amazing. And infuriating.
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I get the same thing here in Tijuana. I live purposefully at the same socio-economic level of housing as a majority of people, in a south-central neighborhood. Yet the first place majorly privileged USians move to is luxury housing/white people communes in Rosarito or Ensenada, so they don’t have to mingle with the “unwashed heathens”.
It’s a way to exploit without getting “dirty”, and there’s absolutely no empathy involved.
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