scarecrowbob

I mean, everything is an "emergency" if you squint and have no regard for the humans you harm.

I'm not the biggest fan of Orwell but the idea that authoritarians work by asking us to stop using language in normal way has been unfortunately helpful.

Folks have been crossing that border since before there was a border. The border is the created problem, not folks moving around.

I mean, yeah.

Though you're the one comparing getting a 50-year sentence for being a member of a signal chat to "only 36 presents for his birthday".

I am sure you have a reply but "it can only get worse".

By your standards you should have started worrying a long, long time ago.

The problem is that I say things like that and folks respond "well, what do you mean". But of course, by your standards you -also- don't know what folks in general are complaining about because you don't pay attention.

If you've been paying attention to radical politics in the US, you will know that the state has been consistently infiltrating and destroying groups of folks who are legally organizing since the 19th C labor movements. You'd consider the genocide of indigenous folks, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombings and understand that the US does all the same repressive work, but the citizens in the US think that is a "good" thing.

The fact that it can always get worse means that it's tautological to say "it can get worse".

Or, given the fact that normal folks come here and live normal lives contributing to their communities, the US could just make easier paths to citizenship.

Your position only makes sense if you think that the groups the US gov operates against aren't "regular citizens".

The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not.

Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example.

For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups.

Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other.

Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning.

That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle.

Ok boomer.

I believe this first sentence to be true, but I'm skeptical about the last sentence.

For a while in the oughts I taught a film history class, though, and even 2 decades ago the kiddos thought anything in black and white, much less with no sound or with subtitles, was literally unwatchable. I'm okay with the idea that the students' tastes in media are legitimate, though I have my own tastes and think they are differently-informed.

And further, I dunno if "silly jokes and narrative in favor of spectacle" are new. Think Keystone Cops and Busby Berkley.

I like Battleship Potemptkin and Citizen Kane as much as the next person, but that's not all of what was popular.

Paring the thousands of films from the 80s down to a list of 10 does a lot of work to make that looks like it was better, when in fact I was in middle school and I could literally go see a movie for 75c. I remember some really bad ones, and I am certain I've forgotten a lot of bad ones.

I also have problems making a list of good films from the last decade, but I think that's because I got burnt out and stopped watching long-form video mediums when I left my PhD program. I am not sure I have seen 10 long form narrative works in the last 5 years.

There are, and occasionally I have heard them.

I suspect, though, that many of those patterns are inaccessible by an audience, or even the other musicians. Or sometimes to the person performing said patterns.

I play quite a lot of jazz, among other things. On several instruments, mostly clarinet lately by I've performed with bands large and small on piano and upright bass.

Having participated in a lot of free improv music (one of my cohort has a grammy related to it), I am not sure if there really are a lot of patterns going on there. I am not a fan and it doesn't feel fun for me in the way that sitting with a band and playing Django-style music ("Tears" or "Swing 42" or "September Song").

I don't think it's a noise thing, I think there just isn't much "signal" getting compressed so the decoders are doing way more than they should.

One thing I have found in playing a lot of jazz off of lead sheets is that while you can really play some deep and idiomatic music in all the jazz forms, it's almost impossible to recreate much of modern rock by compressing it to a lead sheet.

Especially with the less progressive forms of rock that I enjoy more than the "pedantic" stuff (like various flavors of progressive metal), it gets hard to make "the thing" based off of a reduction of the music to a form.

Like, you can play the fully-notated versions of metallica songs and pull them off, but without a whole lot of notation and rehearsal you're going to have a hard time getting "the thing".

And you're really going to have a hard time pulling off the noisy parts of Neutral Milk Hotel I loved so much without notating a whole lot of that noise which becomes important to the work- so much so that in those generas people don't even bother to play other peoples' work because you only get into an uncanny valley around the artist's affective presentation and personality. That might be the excess you're describing as "more than"- I'd point you to Georges Bataille if you're actually interested in that kind of thing.

What I enjoy about that noisy music is the noise, which is difficult to notate and compress and transmit to other musicians; from where I stand as a musician, noise is what is lost when the art is compressed to its formal notation.

With all the older blues and jazz forms I enjoy (Django or Louis Armstrong or Danny Barker) I can get on stage and perform fairly complex music with minimal or no rehearsal- as long as someone knows the melody the tunes are playable. The "essential" parts of the music are not simple, but there is a lot of history and education in the players about how to properly rehydrate the music.

I wouldn't say that old jazz music or the musicians are "good-er" than the rock and metal folks, though most of the jazz musicians I know also do play pop gigs while pop musicians might have a harder time sitting in.

But it's just not as fun to solo over the changes to Iggy Pop's "I wanna Be Your Dog" or the Ramones "I wanna be sedated" and the skill sets for being able to come up with a part on the fly are different than they are for prodigiously performing a piece note-for-note (which is the same in classically oriented music as it is in indy rock bands, though the memo-ization methods are much different).

While I can't say the music is better, I personally find the chord progressions of older jazz forms easier to solo over because they have more interesting (to me) features. Lately I have a harder and harder time finding engaging-to-me things to play over a 2 chord funk jam or a 3 chord country song, whereas I really enjoy blowing over stuff like Basin St. Blues or Nuages.

My point being that the decoders for these improvisational forms often are doing a lot more interpretive work in decompressing a lead sheet out into music-in-the-world than the folks who are playing note-for-note parts that they've worked out from recordings and that are specific to the tune.

Since the decoders are doing more work, the music becomes quite a bit more "compressible" while retaining a lot of its complexity. "Autumn Leaves" is not "simpler" than "I Wanna Be Sedated", but it more easily compresses into a transmittable form without losing that essential excess that makes me like the Ramones.

With the jazz or blues or bluegrass or old-time or older country dance music or folk, the decoders only need someone in the band who knows (most of) the chords and the lyrics and the complexity of the resulting music is largely up to how the folks playing it decide to play it.

Tonight I am playing pedal steel at a dance and have never played with the band, and that's not big deal because a) I have stored reduced versions of the tunes in my body and b) I have a bunch of strategies for quickly decoding what the other musicians are doing and responding appropriately.

But the music itself isn't simple. "Friends in Low Places" (and much of country and western swing) has more in common with older jazz than with modern rock, and I have worked with a lot of truly bad musicians who think that because a lot of the songs are 3-chord tunes the music doesn't require some attention to play idiomatically.

So with music, it's easy and fun to add the noise back in if you know what to add, but it's not (in my opinion) the case that "simple" music is easily compressed: the "simpler" the music is (at least in the west) the more it relies on the specifics of the noise it produces in order to create its artistic effects, and thus simpler music less compressible.

So from my standpoint, it's very difficult to compress good, "simple" and "noisy" rock music, whereas the more specific designs of stuff like jazz is much easier to compress and transmit.

Yeah, I am off-grid in rural Colorado. Although I have a couple of side hustles, it would be really thin pickings without some "passive" income and without having set myself up so the big expenses are mostly taken care of.

The last several folks I've dated have been very odd people, mostly living in vehicles.

I don't have health insurance, either. Or indoor plumbing.

But I do play a lot of music, have time to volunteer, and only take work that requires an alarm clock when I feel like it.

You think so? I don't.

I think "the authorities" don't care and that they seem to be able to force these systems on folks anyhow, and that the if->then syllogism you propose doesn't work.

The people committing these kinds of crimes don't seem to understand them as crimes and believe they will not and should not be punished. Further, the people who those folks report to seem to feel the same way.

I see them as crimes.

I am, however, ambivalent about what punishment should look like because the entirety of the carcerial system in the US (and the so-called immigration systesm) are so rotten to their cores that I just give up on them. It doesn't matter -what- I think because, as this kind of event shows, we do not in fact live in a system that represents me in any meaningful sense.

That's bad, and and it's not local to me. After all "those who make peaceful change impossible..." and such.

But I don't agree that they won't get the politically orthodox folks in the US to accept these systems; they seem to already have accepted them.

Dango, I started reading at the bottom of the thread and thought you were supporting Palestinians with this comment.