May 2013
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Tais-Toi!: A Couple More Thoughts on Savages
As their singer is French, I’ve wondered if that is a reason or inspiration behind the album title Silence Yourself - since the French verb is a reflex one, se taiser, or in its second-person form, tais-toi. Whereas in English ‘silence yourself’ is an entirely non-colloquial, highly formal construction, it is the literal translation of the French equivalent of ‘shut up’ (at least in a semi-polite...
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Support for suicide abortion down: Poll -... →
The headline on this story in today’s Sunday Independent - “Support for suicide abortion down”:
“A SLIM majority (53 per cent) finds abortion acceptable in cases of a threat of suicide – down five points in three months, according to the latest Sunday Independent/ Millward Brown opinion poll.”
There are at least two issues with this that I can see (although the...
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Irish income distribution 'more equal' than OECD... →
That’s the headline, but what’s the figure?
The report shows Ireland’s Gini coefficient stood at 30.7 in 2010, compared to an OECD average of 31.3.
Not much of a difference, really. ‘Close to the average’ would be a more honest headline. And not only that, but the report itself points out that the average is over a wide spread:
“Differences in levels of income...
Anilingus
citationneeded:
Not to be confused with Aer Lingus.
Link
Whatever Aeroflots your boat (not to be confused with…)
[actually, according to the Wiki article ‘Aer Lingus’ was an anglicized spelling of ‘Aer Loingeas’ (same pronunciation, more or less), or ‘Air Fleet’ in Irish]
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Editors - ‘A Ton Of Love’ (2013)
...
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Album reviews | Savages - Silence Yourself (Pop... →
Pretty good polemical review of the Savages album (which, as I’ve said before, I’m rather disappointed by) although I feel like the last third is unnecessary - or at least I don’t feel the need to judge their ideas, just that they don’t make a very interesting expression of them. That said, this is a great putdown:
“Everything about this record reeks of...
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On Self Destruction
Powerful quote from Adorno in this (itself excellent) Guardian piece about applying the Frankfurt School to the contemporary situation:
“The prospective fascist may long for the destruction of himself no less than for that of the adversaries, destruction being a substitute for his deepest and most inhibited desires … He realises that his solution is no solution, that in the long run it is...
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“Screaming is not the most popular thing. I run a risk doing it because I know,...”
– Mish Way of White Lung on screaming at The Talkhouse
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Bruton redux redux
andrewtsks:
hardcorefornerds:
[…]
Paul Krugman recently provided an excellent response to that line of thinking in his New York Times column. It wasn’t aimed at Bruton, but was a general response to that line of thinking (and we have a lot of political leaders here in the USA who totally approve of it). Here’s what I find to be the most relevant passage:
if you look at United States...
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Bruton redux
The ex-Taoiseach made a bit more of a splash today on Twitter with this:
Mr Bruton said: “I am not in agreement with President Higgins because it is not realistic nor moral to say that we’re not going to face difficult issues now, but instead we’re going to avoid them by borrowing money that our children or children’s’ children will have to pay.
“That is not...
Tumblr killed the music review (for me) (kinda)
I’ve been thinking about how I no longer ‘get’ the usefulness of album reviews as a way of learning about new music. Partly that’s because of the accessibility of music now (especially with Spotify), but even as a filter system to deal with that mass availability I don’t think reviews work very well. Instead, I take the virtual equivalent of word-of-mouth...
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The Bizarro Right
“Mr Bruton who now acts as an ambassador and lobbyist for the IFSC, went on to call for a more sustainable financial model, and one which had less regulation.
“We need to reign in regulation. It’s not substitute for ethics, morality or trust. It may help them but can never replace them and yet that is precisely what legislators seem to be doing. We cannot go on diverting...
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Mclusky - ‘No New Wave No Fun’...
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Savages - Silence Yourself →
interstate808:
Reviewed that Savages album. Didn’t really like it very much.
Something that has kind of occurred to me since writing this is the positioning of Savages within the “indie” world (indie as genre not set of ideals) and using this as a defence for their music, i.e. People saying “Oh, Indie music has been so soft and languid for ages, it’s good to see somebody roughing it up”. What...
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The falling Eurobarometer
following on from an earlier post about EU polling:
“It has been pointed out in recent weeks that faith in the EU has been declining, which is true enough. But what has not been said is that faith in government generally is on a downward slide. Eurobarometer polls show not only that the number of people who trust the EU institutions has fallen (from 57% in 2007 to 33% in 2012), but also...
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Drew Daniel > Trash Talk - The Talkhouse →
This is the best, or most interesting, writing I’ve read about hardcore in a long while, which I think is worth quoting at some length:
But even as the tempos and textures stay mostly fast and mostly hard, there’s an emotional valence from up to down that gives 119 range without costing it any sheer force. The titular declaration “Fuck Nostalgia” sounds like a case of...
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andrewtsks:
“Savages do recall a number of post-punk, no wave, and metal bands. “I call it the ‘Old Man’s Disease,’ which I had when I was 21,” says BBC 6Music DJ Marc Riley, debating whether the band’s originality, or potential lack thereof, matters. Riley was a significant enough early member of the Fall for Mark E. Smith to write at least three overt cuss songs aimed at him, and he gave...
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“The data visualizations in Global Risks 2013, network charts and scatter plots...”
– ‘The Slopes of Davos’ by Paul Cox in the new New Inquiry
Read this while listening to the last “goth-cabaret” track on the Savages album (which, eh… not so hot about as everyone else seems to be).
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“In this first phase of the industrial world, labor did not seem linked to the...”
– Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
lol JobBridge
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Husker Du - ‘Dead Set On Destruction’...
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Punktimism v. Poptimism
Very thoughtful discussion going on here which I was tending to avoid adding anything to, because I’ve been around in circles on the topic too many times before (although I agree with the last riposte here), but this point caught my eye:
“This isn’t to say that there isn’t still some good within “punktimism,” which is elitist but isn’t just elitist. For all its rigidity, punktimism...
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“They can be viewed as a 12-song soundtrack to whatever is going on at a certain...”
– Prowlster meets… Wounds | Prowlster
Hell yeah, punktimism!
I was reminded of the existence of Hybrid Theory a couple of weeks ago when someone in my Twitter feed posted a link to the Record Store Day release of it on vinyl, then cued it up on Spotify and listened to it for the first time in...
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Ireland to re-criminalise abortion (and pregnant...
From the General Scheme of the Protection of Life in Pregnancy Bill 2013:
Head 19 Offence
Provide that
(1) It shall be an offence for a person to do any act with the intent to destroy unborn human life.
(2) A person who is guilty of an offence under this head is liable on conviction on indictment to a fine or imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years or both.
[…]
Explanatory...
April 2013
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Cabinet agrees abortion draft legislation after... →
thewoodquarter:
Six doctors will be involved in process of assessment, say Government sources
At a first glance I would say: a) This is on shaky ground constitutionally:
It may actually violate the ‘pro-life’ 8th amendment on the basis of the 1992 X-Case ruling. The 8th Amendment states:
3° The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to...
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Still the best punk album of 2013 so far.
(words...
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“I’d love to see the development of a new umbrella term for this ethos that is...”
– Have ‘punk ideals’ become totally irrelevant for musicians? - The Talkhouse forum - Jenn Wasner
I could think up some kneejerk reasons to oppose this - historicity not necessarily being a bad thing, for one - but at a glance the idea kinda appeals to me. There are always new names for...
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New Year's Resolution
thisis:
Never click on a headline that:
has a number in it
ends with a question mark
starts with the words “why” or “how” or “I”
includes the words “actually” or “really”
is an imperative statement
Why Must You Click On This? Because 20,000 American Internet Users Really Can’t Be Wrong, I Think? (7 Easy Tips To Get A Better Life)
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“I suppose it depends on whether the anxiety and brutality goes straight to your...”
– The author of the MTV piece I referenced in the post below making an appropriately incisive point about Shaking the Habitual: it’s about privilege, duh.
(Still, that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t also be something beyond that, although you can argue about who should explain/write...
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The Knife Analytics
“When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (via Goodreads*)
I loved this book as a teenager, especially the parts about the “intellectual scalpel”. I find it difficult to take the metaphysics at all seriously now, mostly just because I’ve been...
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Money For Nothing
interstate808:
I don’t know why I did it really, but today after dinner I read through the Sunday Times Rich List supplement. Now, the Sunday Times supplements tend to annoy me anyway because they’re a gigantic splash of middle-class pomposity masquerading as vibrant culture (one pull-out is called Culture for fuck’s sake) and it’s all as empty as the souls of those who contribute. But the Rich...
