leighton

I did a post here a while back regarding the Brutal Assault festival.
Just thought I'd do a quick update with the list of confirmed bands,
and see if anyone from MC is gonna go!

The lineup is fucking insane I tells you!

( Read more... )

At TAM7 this year I heard a talk from Michael Shermer about tribalism, politics, and group dynamics. I enjoyed some of it but I started having problems about halfway through. The first problem came with this familiar diagram, which I've seen many times but never noticed something till now:



He asked folks to raise their hands: who self-identified as being on the liberal side (lots), who self-identified as being conservative (four). Then he asked who puts themselves at the top as a libertarian (lots). I waited for him to ask who was at the bottom, but he didn't. Why? Because with the political space represented that way it's a silly question. The diagram is a graphical push-poll. Nobody's going to raise their hand and say "yes, I love powerful authorities who tell me what to do", and that's before you orient the libertarians higher than either side, standing with the statue of liberty with swastikas at the bottom. Some people actually do love authority but you're never going to get them to admit it with that diagram. The next time someone shows something like that to me I'm going to see whether it's because they're trying to railroad me into declaring a libertarian affinity.

Then he brought up some work by psychologist Jonathan Haidt which I liked quite a bit more. Haidt divided politics into the five fundamental moral values: care (for others), fairness (reciprocity/justice), loyalty (to your family/group/nation), respect (for tradition/authority), and purity (avoiding disgusting foods and actions). Across cultures, liberals tend to value care and fairness higher than loyalty, respect, and purity. Conservatives value loyalty, respect, and purity higher. Everyone values care but conservatives valued fairness lowest and liberals value purity lowest.



Shermer said (if I remember correctly) that our political and social system is not left/right but a series of pragmatic value judgments about these dimensions' relative importance. There's a balance in a liberal/conservative system. Liberals' freewheeling freedom and altruism ("question authority, celebrate diversity, keep your laws off my body, help the weak and oppressed") and Conservatives' societal cohesion ("follow the rules, look out for your own, don't spoil a good thing, don't rock the boat"). Liberals want change and justice even at the risk of chaos. Conservatives want institutions and order even at the cost of those at the bottom. And both forces are important. You need people inside your group making sure things are free and fair, and you need people "on walls guarded by men with guns". Both sides are important.

Unfortunately I never got the chance to ask my question: does this square with the way that conservatives represent themselves? The conservative party line is that conservatives value personal freedom and liberty while it's the liberals who want to set up big institutions to tell you how to run your life. Haidt's study seems to indicate the opposite which I thought I'd been noticing for some time - in practice liberals seem to be far more into the personal freedoms. (Eat what you want, smoke what you want, love who you want, worship who you want - or don't.) The rules and institutions they *do* embrace are to prevent harm and promote fairness - the United Nations, the Kyoto Protocol, CAFE standards, national health care. Conservatives support personal freedom as well - to join the army, to attend a christian church every Sunday, to love one opposite-sex partner in the conventional way. Conservatives seem a lot more concerned about collapse (of the family, of traditions, of society, of American military power, of currency sovereignty) with the implication that things are going to crap. Liberals see these changes far less negatively - getting rid of outdated ideas and baggage. Which seems to describe what I've been noticing since 2000 as I've moved from conservative to liberal - I'm far more drawn to the first two dimensions than the last three.

I leave unfairly early tomorrow morning and I'll only have occasional rather than daily internet access on deployment, so see ya, and don't do anything excessively dumb or false. I leave you with the theme for the remainder of the month: Come up with a caption for this picture:

EDIT: RE-UPLOADED FOR WHINY BABBYS WHO CANT HANDLE WAFFLEIMAGES

...and wait well you all did. Especially the returning astralromantic and carminalizarin who now have full community access.

As your reward, here it is, and try not to soil yourselves with jealousy...

( Metal Camp 2009: International Rescue )

From my Facebook status feed:

" ...has discovered her guinea pigs actually quite like Manowar! Heather McPig has been squeaking along to 'Master of the Wind'."

In other news, there is a new Paradise Lost track up on their CryFace page. It sounds like... well, pretty much everything else they've done post Symbol of Life. I pine for Draconian Times.

Day from hell yesterday. Really needed a day off from organising my life and from dealing with increasingly stress-inducing parents who've been hovering around a bit lately. I was quite happy to tend to life itself, however, in the guise of family organisation and housewifely duties so it wasn't as if I needed to head to bed to escape it all, despite having had only 2 hours sleep. But to no avail this hopeful day to myself. Ma and Pa needed to pick up the small fridge Mum had lent us for the granny flat. To be fair, she'd just forgotten to get it the day before because she was helping me out, and another fortuitous forgetting was Dad re his drill. I still haven't drilled all the holes we require!

Anyway, parents dealt with, hardworkin' chores mostly performed, me walkin' round the house slowly like a ghost (so drained... so tired...) and I was grilling cheese on toast and about to settle onto the couch nestled into my pupdoggy. The only sounds of the day were ambient ones: birdsong and budgie-tweet, distant conversations between cars in the traffic, the light patter of animal feet as they followed me across the deck, onto the back lawn, inside again, from room to room, into the laundry, etc.

I decided to throw caution to the wind and put a CD on. Trawled through Anne's CDs, most of which are still separate from my own, dusty and very telling of her 'era'... Would you have guessed I put on Roxy Music? Used to have the double vinyl of the Street Life greatest hits collection, and Anne used to get such mileage out of it she bought it on CD. Now talk about dated. And I don't mean the '70s stuff - more the '80s! My favourite song, which I didn't expect would stand out to me one way or another, was "Over You". It was never a favourite before but the guitar refrain playing over and over struck me as way ahead of its time and as melodic and lovely as it was innovative. What a song! As I've tried to imply, the songs leading up to that point were leaving me kinda chilled and bored, but that invigorated me.

Far too tired to DL and hook you up with an mp3, so have a listen to this snippet to reacquaint yourself with the song. You might think you don't know it, but you do. It was a huge hit in these parts.

Over You (Roxy Music)

I have to let Todd have a go on the computer before he nicks off to work, so I'll be back after a good long sleep (cross fingers) to explain the subject line of this post. Yes - brace yourself.