Friday Warhammer: Salome's Last Veil

Two years after the last addition to the regiment, we have the sixth knight in my Riverlands army.  This particular bloodthirsty killer is a Piper from Pinkmaiden.  Some claim these particular Riverlords lack a certain gravitas, emblazoned as they are with almost naked women.  I, on the other hand, subscribe to the Modified Jayne Cobb Theory: a man rides into battle wearing that on his shield, you know he's not afraid of anything...

The full regiment.

Wicked Awesome?

I went to my first West End show at the weekend (is the Victoria Apollo in the West End? I've no idea!), which was also my first ever musical which I went to with BigHead (which, now I think about it, is really quite strange).

(Vague spoilers below)

"But... But... His Hair Is So Funny!"

Thirty years ago the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner published his most famous work, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Inside, he laid out a theory so obvious in hindsight it's amazing it took humanity so long to put it all together.  In brief, Gardner argued that "intelligence" is not a single quality, but a series of sub-divisions of skill within a person which may or may not be correlated [1]. Thus, simply describing a person as "intelligent" betrays a bias within the speaker towards certain forms of intelligence that are subjectively viewed as more important.

This should come as no shock to anyone who has taken an IQ test, which tend to focus on one's skills with linguistics, mathematics, and spatial relations.  Even there, cracks can appear; I do pretty well with the first, exceptionally well with the second, and utterly abysmally with the third.  Gardner argues that there are many other forms of intelligence (six more in the original book, though last I checked this had grown into something more like eleven more) that are no less real.  Musical intelligence, bodily intelligence, inter- and intrapersonal; there's a whole range of skills born within the mind that for centuries were viewed as either too hard to or not important enough to try and measure (or both),

I mention all this by way of a reminder that what it means to be called "intelligent" is in large part a social construct, just as it is to be called "beautiful". An IQ test measures (imperfectly) those strands of intelligence society has judged to be most valuable.  Not only does it prize linguistic and logical intelligence over interpersonal or artistic intelligence, but it prizes it's own conception of linguistic and logical intelligence over all others.  That's how western nations can create intelligence tests, pass them over to Africans, and then act surprised if they don't do quite so well (see Bell Curve, The).

As between societies, so within.  The rich and the powerful determine what the rich and the powerful consider most important to being rich and powerful, and then are amazed to find those qualities lacking in those not hoovering up seven-figure salaries. Doubtless certain forms of intelligence are very useful in making your way to the top. But in this country at least we may as well call those strands the "succeeding in a neoliberal capitalist marketplace" strands.  We can't draw any conclusions beyond that.  Perhaps we could call this strand "low cunning" for short, or even just "luck", as if the mechanisms by which you enter the world with high aptitudes for given intelligence strands weren't entirely down to luck in the first place.

There is no idea in the world more toxic to Boris Johnson's classical approach to Conservatism (the Jacobins would doubtless have recognised much in his comments, except of course they probably weren't "intelligent" enough to speak English) than the possibility that the systems by which some "cornflakes reach the top" are anything but the purest expressions of meritocracy, and moreover, that the merits the meritocracy reward are anything other than universal qualities worthy of equally universal respect.  The existential terror that the rich and powerful might have to share their riches and power with others less deserving - as defined by the rich and powerful themselves - can only be allayed by convincing themselves the world is better off with a strict social heirarchy in which those on the lower rungs accept they are objectively unsuited for a larger slice of the pie.

(Yes, I have been reading Corey Robin's Reactionary Mind recently.  Why do you ask? Jack Graham deserves some credit here, too, though all mistakes and bouts of idiocy remain forever my own.)

So is the game rigged, and those that rig the game comforted by hearing their own voices, louder than those they sit above, as they explain to people that it's really their own fault they haven't risen higher. After all, if they were smarter they could have rigged their own game, and reached the final level, where the only rule is to lie to each other over the champagne flutes.

[1] In fact, as I understand it Gardner was of the opinion that the correlations were very weak (I've only read bits and pieces of the original text, so I may have misunderstood, however).  I'm less convinced by this; I think it depends very much on the pair of intelligences under consideration and the population one is observing.  The key point though is that these correlations can be very weak, which is why trying to divide the population into "intelligent" and "not intelligent" is so ridiculous an endeavour.

The Days After Of The Doctor

So, this post as originally conceived was just going to be my thoughts on Saturday's Who special.  Really, though, I'm just not sure there's any point. The whole thing was such flimsily constructed sound and fury that trying to figure out if it signified anything seems fruitless.  When Moffat called this "a love letter to fans", he really wasn't kidding.  The only real question is whether you enjoyed the letter's prose, and whether you appreciated the letter's handwriting.

Not everyone did, which is hardly surprising.  Much as David Tennant's swansong contained pretty much every one of Davies' most obvious tics, Day of the Doctor surely couldn't have come any more Moffat than it did. For those who dislike Moffat's endless obsession with flashy structural tics and ironic banter, this must have been pretty excruciating.  I am not one of those people (which isn't to say I don't get the criticisms; different things bug different people). Moreover, even by new series standards, this thing had plot holes you could fly an inside-out TARDIS through.  Like Davies before him, Moffat clearly thinks he can rely on the rule of cool to combat this.  Unlike Davies, he's often right.

In short then, I loved it, but can't rationally explain why.  I suspect a great many people who didn't like it can summon far more coherent arguments than my "YAYFORALLDOCTORSAWESOMETIMES", but having waited some twenty-five years for something like this to show up, I'm not so self-sabotaging as to watch it with a detached, clinical eye.  That's what everything else on television is for.

That concludes what could charitably be called my thoughts on the special itself.  What strikes me as more interesting is some of the fan reaction that followed in its wake, most particularly regarding how Day of the Doctor impacts on previous Who stories.  There's no way to discuss this without major spoilers, so those who haven't seen the special - or who have had their minds wiped by the Black Archives - would do well to look away now.

Fourteen Million Reasons To Despair

(Trigger warning: sexual assault is mentioned, though not discussed, below)

One of the most strange truths about the growth of the ludicrous far-right bigot smorgasbord that constitutes the bedrock of the modern Republican Party in the United States is how blase everyone seems to be about it.  I can't count the number of times I've had a conversation about the horrific state of American news media in which someone has said: "Yes, but aside from FOX News".

The suggestion seems to be that FOX is so outrageously and openly biased that it has a disproportionate effect on the overall shape of American journalism.  Which is true, but not in the way these people mean.  FOX doesn't make the whole shebang seem like it's more slanted and mendacious than it is, it demonstrates the full value of slant and mendacity to everyone else. Arguing the most successful and influential example of a given group must also be an outlier strikes me as a damn hard sell.

The radio equivalent of FOX News has to be Rush Limbaugh.  This is a man nobody with the brains nature assigned to his least-favourite lungfish would take seriously for the length f time it takes to boil an egg in molten rock. This is the man who spent days calling Sandra Fluke a slut because she has sex with people for money testified before Congress that access to birth control was a genuine health concern for women.  If Limbaugh were an ice-cream flavour, he'd be Rocky Salmonella. If he were a Doctor Who villain, he'd be Davros' speech-writer.

Rush Limbaugh has over fourteen million weekly listeners.

I mention him today because this hideous man, this addled mess, this capering fool with the unique talent for making Howard Stern look like Cicero, has decided to weigh in on the question of whether the Senate is better off now the filibuster is partially gone:

Let’s say, let’s take 10 people in a room and they’re a group,” he said on his radio show. “And the room is made up of six men and four women. OK? The group has a rule that the men cannot rape the women. The group also has a rule that says any rule that will be changed must require six votes, of the 10, to change the rule.

How is any rational human being with an ounce of empathy in their souls supposed to process this? The forty-five millionaires who make up the Republican aisle of the Senate (88.9% of which are white men, of course) are kind of like women held hostage voting for themselves not to be assaulted?  Because they can't stop Democratic candidates from becoming judges?  Are we not to be concerned - and revolted - about a mind that jumps straight from restoring majority rule to one half of the legislative branch to the idea of gang-raping women trapped in a room.

And does the sweatiest mouthpiece the Republican Party has yet created really want to be using comparisons like this whilst his cronies in government are trying to crank out as many laws as possible forcing vaginal ultrasounds on any woman wanting to have an abortion?

In its own despicable way, of course, this hideous piece of non-think demonstrates just how absurd the thinking behind the Republican freak-out has really gotten.  It's not just that Rush has his sums wrong - in a Senate with ten people six people get their way even with the filibuster; he'd have been better off saying "in a Senate with twenty people the filibuster needs twelve of them to agree" - it's that the sheer horrific nature of the analogy is essential to hide what's really happened.  To switch the metaphor to something that doesn't make want to be ill, let's say twenty people are in a room.  Eleven of them want capital punishment to be mandatory for all crimes, and the other nine are sane.  Under this new system, it is not the case that capital punishment could then be voted in.  Even if the insane death-hungry party controlled the White House and the House of Representatives, the ability to directly vote for such a lunatic policy is still covered by the filibuster.

What our blood-crazed frothing madmen (in their white shirts, blue suits, and red ties) could do is vote for a judge that was similarly divorced from reality, and hope that judge eventually came across a case involving capital punishment so they could announce leaving any given criminal alive was contrary to the constitution.  Then you'd need for the Supreme Court to agree with so utterly insane a reading of what constitutes unconstitutional.

So, to sum up: Limbaugh's nightmare scenario is that eleven out of twenty senators could nominate a judge with views almost no American voter would find even close to tolerable, who might get lucky and get a case on which they can work their utterly insane thinking, which might then not get reversed by the Supreme Court despite its self-evidently lunacy. Limbaugh believes the correct number of those twenty senators to obliterate their electoral chances in the off-chance of acting contrary to overwhelming public opinion should be twelve. [1]

Fourteen million weekly listeners.  It took twice as long as usual to type this because my hands kept balling up into fists.

[1] On the other hand, the Democrats have a genuine reason to fear some of this coming true, since the current Supreme Court is both extremely conservative, and contains at a bare minimum three judges who have repeatedly contradicted not only clear precedent but their own clear precedents in order to achieve the result Republicans want.  Amongst other things, this is why Al Gore was never president, it is now illegal to limit campaign contributions, states are now able to refuse to accept money for improving their healthcare systems, and there is no longer any effective way to take Southern states to task for minting laws blatantly aimed at preventing non-white people from exercising their right to vote.  This would be a major concern for me, except that the current status quo favours Republicans to a major extent, and I don't believe the filibuster would survive the next Republican Congress in any case.

D CDs #482: Getaway Driver

George Carlin once said "white people got no business playing the blues, ever... Their job is to give people the blues, not to get them, and certainly not to sing or play them".  And it's not like it's hard to see his point.  Louis CK puts it more delicately (not many people Louis is more delicate than, but Carlin was one of them): "I'm not trying to say that if you're white, you can't complain. I'm just saying if you're black, you get to complain more."

Guitar Town is a white guy complaining about his blues.  Like, a lot.  There's even a song on here called "My Old Friend The Blues", so this ain't exactly stealth misery, or anything.  And this is a common theme of country music: a white guy on stage singing about how hard it is to live in the United States.  Which, considering country music a) has so much of its DNA entwined with that of blues music, and b) originated from areas of America that were hotbeds of racial resentment and the violent oppression of black people, is no small concern. 

That said, though, this is a dangerous game for me to play.  I'm not just a white man, I'm a white middle-class British man.  I'm not any closer to being able to pass comment on the struggle of being a working class white guy out on the deserted, hopeless back-roads of the American South than I am the daily experiences of African Americans.  Both of them represent experiences utterly different from my own, and both represent experiences far too infrequently discussed or represented in the media likely to sail its way across the channel.

In short, a man who appropriates music born from generations of the intolerable treatment of a whole people in order to complain about how no-one understands him is someone I can frown at (for all that I'm a sucker for self-absorbed moping to a catchy tune).  A man who takes that music to sketch out the shitty economic conditions that provide a backdrop for their life - well, I don't want to get into a fight with that guy about his choice of rhythm and structure.

This, in essence, is Guitar Town is all about.  Living in some out-of-the-way tiny speck of civilisation ("They don't even know there's a town around here", Earle laments in "Someday") where there's nothing to do, but nor is there money to be made and, therefore, no escape to be had.  The best songs on here detail this death-by-stasis; take the aforementioned "Someday", where counting out-of-state license plates constitutes the most interesting activity available, or the tight-rocking "Good Ol Boy (Getting Tough)" in which Earle tells us "I was born in the land of plenty, now there ain't enough".   It's not the just the difficulty of the struggle here, though, it's the importance of it.  Earle doesn't airbrush the rubble, he just won't use the rubble as an excuse to surrender. "Guitar Town" itself, aside from being a near-perfect slice of rocking country, is focused on the importance of defiant movement - "Everybody told me you can't get far  On thirty-seven dollars and a jap [1] guitar" - and finding meaning amongst the humbleness of your own circumstances - I gotta two pack habit and a motel tan... With my back to the riser I make my stand".

And it seems to me that this is what country music is at its best; sifting through the detritus of the crumbling abandoned towns of the rural American south to find what gold it can. It isn't an easy job -  the slow, sweet strum of "Little Rock 'n' Roller" is about a travelling musician's long-distance call to his young son, and could teach any number of miserable rockers a thing or two about how to write a song about the drawbacks of the musical life - but it has to be done. Somehow that realisation soaks into the steel strings and bottlenecks.  Guitar Town is no exception.  The title track is, as mentioned, wonderful; so too is the sharp, humming "Someday", the upbeat music/melancholy lyrics combination that gives country and western its clearest right to exist. "Fearless Heart" is pretty tasty, too, the best of three songs on the album ("Goodbye's All We've Got Left" and "Down The Road" being the other two, both of which are solid rather than inspired) which extend the metaphor of constant motion to avoid decay into the realm of the heart, with mixed results.

That's three standout joints among ten tracks, with another six entirely solid offerings, based around a simple concept, simple lyrics, and simple music; all of which is exactly what was needed.  Lovely. And if "My Old Friend The Blues", the only dud on the album, seems to prove Carlin's point, my sympathies lie with Louis.  White people do get to complain, as long as they do it as well as it's done here.

Eight tentacles.

[1] I can't really frame this review around complaining rights across races and not note that this right here is pretty fucking not cool. I haven't been able to dig up anything about what the word is doing in the song; my assumption is its just a kind of nod to the "not American = bad" theory that permeates so much of the culture of our cousins across the pond. It certainly doesn't seem intended as a slur, but of course "I didn't mean to be specifically offensive, just generally dismissive of things I don't think are American" doesn't work too well as a defence. 

If, indeed, that would be the defence used. Whatever else it is, though, it's an important line in the context of the album, which is why I've included it here.

Friday Talisman: Brobdingnagian Bufonidae

Some weeks, you just have to paint a toad.

It's a bit hard to tell, because of the usual problem of focusing, and because I couldn't get the cracks big enough, but this base has been painted with Agrellan Earth, which is supposed to make bases look like cracked earth.  Maybe with a bit of practice I'll get it sorted.

Still.  Amphibians. They're pretty cool, right?