Rogueish

Power Loss – The New Inquiry

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:05:06 +0100

Couldn’t help but think about left wing calls for detailed planning of a post-capitalist society when reading this article on right wing survivalists.

Choosing Minecraft Over Disney — Editor's Picks — Medium

Wed, 22 May 2013 21:29:01 +0100

Choosing Minecraft Over Disney — Editor's Picks — Medium:

It’s odd, the positive appreciation of Minecraft here looks like it involves a confidence in children’s powers of creativity, but the accompanying negative view of TV exhibits an extremely condescending estimation of children’s critical abilities, as if they are simply passive sponges who will repeat whatever they see on TV. And, there’s this sentence: “Let my sweet impressionable kid spend a day with China on AntFarm or Alex on Wizards of Waverly Place and my parental battles erupt.” Is there not something narrow and limiting about insisting that your children must always be “sweet”?

Audio

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:53:55 +0100

Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender by Rhian E Jones – review | Books | The Guardian

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:17:36 +0100

Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender by Rhian E Jones – review | Books | The Guardian:

I sort of admire John Harris’s attempt to fashion an entire career by endlessly writing the “where have all the protests songs gone?” article. His complaint always appears to be that, as a man who chooses to listen exclusively to shit music, all the music he hears is shit. And this article fails to mention Girls Aloud, so its argument is obviously invalid.

It turns out it’s light streaming through missing ceiling...

Sun, 19 May 2013 07:37:42 +0100

It turns out it’s light streaming through missing ceiling panels but when I first saw this, I thought they’d made a giant communist disco ball.

Bestselling writers know that image counts | Books | guardian.co.uk

Sun, 19 May 2013 06:47:35 +0100

Bestselling writers know that image counts | Books | guardian.co.uk:

Yet there’s a jeering tone whenever reviewers pick up on what Langdon wears – invariably a turtleneck, khaki trousers and loafers with the jacket, whatever the context – that suggests a lack of appreciation of what Brown is doing…. Langdon’s taste for tweed in all weathers…says several things about him: that he’s a don, and a little stuffy and old-fashioned; more European than American in his interests and ways.

Wait, you’re saying that Dan Brown has his protagonist wear tweed in order to create the impression that he is an academic? My god, without John Dugdale to decode these avant-garde literary techniques, we’d never understand Brown’s oeuvre.

Fall schedule analysis: See, The CW's schedule makes sense once you realize Mary, Queen of Scots, was a vampire | TV | Newswire | The A.V. Club

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:38:32 +0100

Fall schedule analysis: See, The CW's schedule makes sense once you realize Mary, Queen of Scots, was a vampire | TV | Newswire | The A.V. Club:

If you don’t get why they would schedule The Vampire Diaries and the show about teenaged Mary Queen of Scots on the same night, I really don’t think you’re qualified to be talking about CW’s programming decisions.

The Great Gatsby - review | Film | The Guardian

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:25:37 +0100

The Great Gatsby - review | Film | The Guardian:

This is a movie whose adjective is unearned. It’s a flashy Gatsby, a sighing Gatsby, an angry Gatsby, a celeb Gatsby. But not a great one.

Erm…

"This domain of the less than rational bounds the figure of human reason, producing that..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:25:13 +0100

“This domain of the less than rational bounds the figure of human reason, producing that “man” as one who is without a childhood; is not a primate and so is relieved of the necessity of eating, defecating, living and dying; one who is not a slave, but always a property holder; one whose language remains originary and untranslatable. This is a figure of disembodiment, but one which is nevertheless a figure of a body, a bodying forth of a masculinized rationality, the figure of a male body which is not a body…. This figuration of masculine reason as disembodied body is one whose imaginary morphology is crafted through the exclusion of other possible bodies…. The body that is reason dematerializes the bodies that may not properly stand for reason or its replicas, and yet this figure is in crisis, for this body of reason is itself the phantasmatic dematerialization of masculinity, one which requires that women and slaves, children and animals be the body, perform the bodily functions, that it will not perform.”

- Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 49

Even more than Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II, the new Ghostface...

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:18:42 +0100

Even more than Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II, the new Ghostface album feels rather like a lovingly handcrafted heritage Wu-Tang replica. Which is not entirely a bad thing, obviously.

5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think.

Sun, 12 May 2013 09:03:37 +0100

5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think.:

oyveyzqueer:

divineirony:

To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans
In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers
In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

I learned about this stuff this in my Ethnolinguistics class, I fucking love the relationship between culture/language/mind.

I kind of want to go full Judith Butler on the way this naturalizes language to construct culture as its effect, though.

mootpoint: ABC has scheduled the eight remaining unaired...

Thu, 09 May 2013 21:40:24 +0100

mootpoint:

ABC has scheduled the eight remaining unaired episodes of sophomore comedy Don’t Trust the B—— in Apt. 23 for a May 17 bow on ABC.com, iTunes and Hulu, according to star Krysten Ritter. (via)

I have literally been so sad about those episodes.

Yay! Well, I guess this is bad news inasmuch as it means the show is definitely 100% cancelled and isn’t going to get saved at the last minute by a cable channel or something, but at least we’ll get to see the last few episodes of what was one of the very few actually good sitcoms of recent years.

"Pop is defined by this quality—not by sound or genre but precisely by its market magnitude. Because..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 20:08:10 +0100

“Pop is defined by this quality—not by sound or genre but precisely by its market magnitude. Because it is simultaneously an aesthetic and economic fact, pop is a vessel for that ineffable but ambient experience: a sort of empathy with the global economy, a world-system affect.”

- Bonus quote from that Joshua Clover article on Taylor Swift and China, which sums up better than I’ve ever managed my pop-reading methodology.

Red Country: On Taylor Swift | The Nation

Thu, 09 May 2013 20:03:31 +0100

Red Country: On Taylor Swift | The Nation:

Recently I have been feeling that Taylor Swift is China. Having shrugged off the decisive genres of communism and capitalism as we understood them back when we believed in guitar solos, the red country is the home of a rocketing GDP, Detroit-size pop-up cities appearing overnight, magisterial production of a sort we barely remember. China’s place in the public imagination is no longer that of the rising threat to a US-centered world; it is the boom we are riding. It is the last best hope to draw us out of the ongoing systemic crisis of capital. It is profligate, prolific; it towers over the landscape. It is a global phenomenon.

But there is a shadow. We can well understand linking one’s sense of industrial well-being to Taylor Swift; there don’t seem to be many others prepared to fly the industry standard. She seems to have paid $17 million in cash for a Rhode Island house. Yet there is not an endless supply of singles; perhaps three more remain. It is not quite visible yet, certainly not obvious—but the great profit center, the bearer of hope and thus of futurity itself, is beginning to reach its limits. Taylor Swift is winding down.

I know the flirtatious “guys are terrible lol/jk”...

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:39:22 +0100

I know the flirtatious “guys are terrible lol/jk” thing is a trope, but the view of men in this track is so jaundiced the flirtatiousness only exists as trope, making the song rather weird (and pointing up the creepiness of the way in which men can only be criticized along with elaborate reassurances of unseriousness). I’m just going to assume it was originally titled “#killallmen” until the suits forced them to change the lyrics.

Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity | Dissent Magazine

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:55:58 +0100

Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity | Dissent Magazine:

Frustrating piece, this. I obviously like its call for a fiction which is something other than the celebration of the liberal subject, and I hope NW is such a book, but it’s odd that the piece doesn’t consider any of the other attempts to produce this, that is, almost all the interesting fiction of the 20th century. Instead it mushes up Cervantes and Sterne with McEwan and Eggers, as if they all wrote a kind of sub-Balzac bourgeois chronicle (the idea that Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy are novels about “freedom to choose” is absurdly reductive). Also annoying - though given that this is Dissent, unsurprising - that this is mapped onto a praise of “sociological realism,” which means an undifferentiated concept of “class,” as against the supposed fripperies of identity politics.

It is the official position of rogueish dot tumblr dot com...

Sat, 04 May 2013 11:32:40 +0100

It is the official position of rogueish dot tumblr dot com that Game of Thrones contains:

Two genuinely interesting and well-developed characters (Cersei and Tyrion)
Two characters who are not very interesting per se but are interesting by virtue of the circumstances they find themselves in (Sansa and Theon)
Two characters who are not very interesting as characters but are interesting to watch because they are played with such brio (Jaime and Daenerys)
And a bunch of stuff in the north that no-one cares about.

I’m not sure where Margaery fits into this scheme, although I’m intrigued by not being able to tell if she is actually a terrifying psycho, or is just pretending to be a terrifying psycho because she knows that’s what Joffrey is in to. Either way, she’s clearly going to do something very, very nasty to somebody pretty soon. I hope the victim is going to be Joffrey, but I suspect it’s actually going to be Sansa.

Bartleby in the University of California: The Social Life of Disobedience – The New Inquiry

Fri, 03 May 2013 21:27:51 +0100

Bartleby in the University of California: The Social Life of Disobedience – The New Inquiry:

This is not only bureaucratic obfuscation, however. In such a situation, we find ourselves confronted by a power that does not justify itself by recourse to truth, does not attempt rationalize its actions. The reverse, in fact, is the case: authority constantly and compulsively disavows its power, refusing to admit or acknowledge that it has acted. It therefore has no reason to justify itself.

The perverse result is that because no actions were taken, no accountability is possible. Chancellors will acknowledge that “mistakes were made,” but by enshrouding the decision-making process in a kind of fog of war—in which everyone is acting on imperfect information in response a time-sensitive crisis—it can be possible, even praiseworthy, for actions to take place without any agency in doing so.

No Useless Leniency: Emergency Brake

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:27:33 +0100

No Useless Leniency: Emergency Brake:

In his essay ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929) Benjamin criticises the surrealists ‘overheated embrace of the uncomprehended miracle of machines’, which can be found wanting in comparison to ‘the well-ventilated utopias of a Scheerbart.’ (1979: 232) I would suggest that we see this, again, as a reminder that we not simply embrace the accelerative and ‘overheated’ function of technology. In fact, earlier in that ‘Surrealism’ essay Benjamin remarks of the surrealists that: ‘No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution – not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects – can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism.’ (1979: 229) This suggests another instantiation of the earlier project in which the absolute is found in ‘the most vulnerable, deformed, ridiculed creations and thoughts’. The surrealists proffer a ‘method of nihilism’ that can traverse the destitution of the present to a dis-placement (ent-setzt) that is not subordinate to the ends of accumulation (Gess 2010; 688), a ‘constructive destruction’ (Gess 2010: 706) that, in Gess’s words, ‘presum[es] great intimacy with the things it takes apart.’ (2010: 706)

“…the various freedom movements that Wondaland...

Thu, 02 May 2013 19:02:28 +0100

“…the various freedom movements that Wondaland disguised as songs, emotion-pictures, and works of art.”