Obsidian Wings

What happened? A look back

by liberal japonicus

regular jrudkis suggested that a discussion about what happened in 2012 might be interesting, so here it is.

I googled some lists of the happenings of 2012 and I really only noted three big things.

1. the election
2. Hurricane Sandy
3. Newtown school shooting

I thought about including Benghazi and the killing of Trayvon Martin, but tragic as they were, it didn't seem to have the kind of repercussions that the above three things had. I suppose there are any number of discrete events within the campaign that could be highlighted, but they sort of all blend into a sort of grey mush.

There was also

1. London Olympics
2. Greek debt crisis
3. Syria
4. Obama coming out for gay marriage
5. The long and winding road of Obamacare

But these took the characteristic of background music. This isn't to dismiss them, but they seemed something that just happened to be on the radio. Similar to what Count-me-in noted in the previous thread, writing 2012 never really got imprinted in the muscle memory (though I did finally figure out that I only needed to add 12 to get the Japanese Heisei era dating, so the year wasn't a complete loss).

What about you folks?

Your new year's resolution Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

Well, yeah, it is that time of year. So what are your new year resolutions? 

Mine are

1. Commit to studying Vietnamese at least 20 minutes a day (got my iphone so that it hooks up to my car stereo, so I'm going to do some Vietnamese language learning podcasts.)
2. daily stretching in the morning and the evening

Sheesh! Got tired just writing those down! So what are your resolutions?

Snow at night

by Doctor Science

It's snowing lightly and sticking, for now, so we're seeing something a little like a White Christmas. Hopefully it won't be around tomorrow, when the Christians are driving down from Long Island.

Normally me, Our Guy, and the Sprogs celebrate on the 25th in the Tradition of Our People: Chinese food and a movie, which was going to be "Les Miz" this year (so I'm keeping away from lj's post for the nonce). Then the Christians arrive and we have Xmas dinner on the 26th. But this year they'll be here on the 25th itself, so Jewish Christmas is postponed until the weekend.

From Hiroshige's 53 Stations of the Tokaido Road:

16 Kambara:
A mountain village at nightfall under deep snow, through which three people are toiling, one with his head buried in a half open umbrella.

This was the first edition of Hiroshige's famous series.

Right after I noticed the snow, I happened across Adam Nicolson's review in The Spectator of Winter: Five Windows on the Season by Adam Gopnik.

Over the last 300 years, our relationship to winter has turned from one in which winter called the shots to one in which we do. The season once exerted a brutal grip on the populations of the northern hemisphere. The only correct attitude, Gopnik says, was to hold it at bay, to survive it.

... for Gopnik, the Romantics essentially invented winter, largely because they were living inside and looking at it from the comfort of their drawing rooms. ...

This reminds me of At Day's Close: Night in Times Past by A. Roger Ekirch, which made me aware in a way I hadn't been before that pre-modern people had, on average, nights that were fully 12 hours long -- and in the winter much longer. That was an awful lot of time to sleep, hang out, and not do anything you really need good vision for (=sex, gossip, nursing the baby, story-telling, sex). So when you're reading a story and travelers are keeping watch in shifts? That's *totally easy*, it's not like anyone's losing sleep, they're in the solid dark for 10-12 hours or more. Ekirch argues that in pre-modern societies most people slept in two 3-6 hour stretches, with a break in between for conversation, sex, or just thinking.

This would be even more the case at high latitudes in winter. Remember, humans are evolved for tropical and sub-tropical locations, where nights are from 10-14 hours in length. In England, though, nights may be 16 hours long in late December, and in Scandinavia longer still. That's enough time for monkeys to get *really* antsy, sitting in the dark. No wonder my Viking ancestors are famous for things like really long epic poetry, alcohol abuse, blackout rage, and vacations in Byzantium.

The Spectator review says that Gopnik writes

with deep regret [about] the banishment of winter by the insulating comforts of modern life. We have left behind the magical transition zone in which the culture lived from 1750 until 1950. ‘As safety grows, the sense of season flees from us. A sense of security is excellent for civic capital, bad for sensibilities.’ Winter is now over. All we have is shopping and television. ‘We have all gone inside, and may be some time.’

The South Pole Station and aurora australis, July 8. Photo by Sue.

Les Miz: musicals, artifice and realism

by liberal japonicus

I mentioned that I was taking my oldest daughter to see Les Miz (the movie of the musical). It premiered here in Japan on Friday the 21st, and we were going to see it on Saturday, but it was cold and raining, so we actually went this morning. In looking up stuff, I see that, for some strange reason, the movie opened 4 days earlier here in Japan than in the US Christmas Day opening tomorrow, though I don't think I need to include a spoiler warning...

Some videos and other stuff below the fold

Holiday swag Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

When I first came to Japan, it was at the end of the bubble in Japan, and they basically brought over a lot of college grads to work as assistants in the school system and paid them very well. I was on the program for 5 years, and so saw 5 years of folks go thru the program. Every year, a few people would be really excited about getting the salary they were getting and make every effort to save as much of that money as possible. They started in September and right around this time, they would crack and end up splurging.

At the lj household, a similar thing happened this year. We've been trying to keep expenses down all year, but the past week, it is as if we were trying to raise domestic consumption single handed. I basically follow around carrying the wallet. 

Still, there are some things that I want, and will dare to reveal them after the first 25 brave souls of the commentariat say what they are trying to score this year. Watcha want?

Cleaning out the spam filter

by Doctor Science

For some unknown reason a whole bunch of comments on my last two posts, including ones from me, have ended up in the spam filter. I'm cleaning it out now, so you should be seeing your comments -- but the conversation will be out of order, I'm afraid.

LJ, there are several comments on "The Long Goodbye" that you'll need to approve.

Graffiti in Paris by SPAM CREW. I have no idea if this is one person or a collective.

Guns and Contamination

by Doctor Science

As I predicted, gun sales are up in the wake of the Newtown massacre, particularly the type of Bushmaster assault rifle the killer used. This is par for the US gun massacre course.

Gun buyers all say that such post-massacre surges in popularity are because they're afraid that weapons associated with tragedy are going to be banned, so they're getting them why they still can. No-one has talked about how very peculiar this attitude is.

Usually, when there's a horrible public tragedy, everything associated with it gets contaminated with that horror. For instance, I remember grape Kool-Aid being pulled from stores after the Jonestown massacre, because of rumors that it had been the vehicle for the mass poisoning. No-one actually thought that the Kool-Aid in stores was poison, but the association with Jonestown was repulsive on a gut level. It was better for stores if customers couldn't even see Kool-Aid on their shelves to be repulsed.

This kind of repulsion-by-association or contamination is so strong and common I'm willing to call it instinctive -- a term I do not use lightly or metaphorically. This makes it particularly striking and even weird that guns do not get contaminated this way for gun buyers. Why isn't the normal instinct being activated?

I'm not really asking why gun buyers don't make a logical or rational connection between a massacre and a particular type of weapon. I'm talking about an emotional or gut reaction, something like, "well, that's another thing ruined for me now".

This is even more peculiar because, at least in the US, gun enthusiasts tend to be politically conservative, and conservatives tend to feel issues of purity and contamination are more important than liberals do. So why do conservatives not feel an instinctive sense of contamination in this case, only? Why are your feelings about guns teflon-coated?

In both the United Kingdom and Australia[1] gun laws were significantly tightened after horrific massacres in the 1990s. They weren't particularly difficult political decisions: both countries were united by grief, shame, and (importantly IMHO) revulsion, the urge to reject things associated with the horrors.

For the first time that I can recall, lots of Americans are starting to feel that kind of revulsion toward guns. Even though Bushmaster sales are up, some stores are pulling the weapon from the shelves. More significantly, investors are starting to reject gun manufacturers.

But I don't know if significant numbers of gun fans[2] are starting to have that reaction, that rushing out to buy a weapon famous for slaughtering little children is -- or should be -- repulsive, not an automatic response. And I guess I'm asking those of you who *are* gun fans what it would take to break that response, to make the weapons of mass murder seem hideous, not attractive.

Part of Red Bowl, an art installation by Andy Cao & Xavier Perrot at the Saint-Lazare Leprosarium, Beauvais, France. The design

recalls the way lepers once bathed in animal blood in an effort to cure themselves and avoid being ostracized to the one-time leprosarium where the installation is located.

Contamination, madness, blood: (part of) what we're talking about.

[1] In case you have seen pro-gun posts going around, about how the Australian gun laws led to an increase in crime, I refer you to Snopes. In brief, no.

[2] I'm not saying "gun nuts", and I'd appreciate it if other commenters refrained, as well.

Another neat invention

 

via liberal japonicus

This is, to me, 10 kinds of neat.

 

What do y'all think? If you like it, the website is here

'Grief is its own size'

by liberal japonicus

A little bit back, Gary Farber linked to this Playboy interview of Stephen Colbert on his facebook page. (apologies for the various stuff around the interview, but I can't find a way to just link to the frame) From the interview, Colbert talks about the experience of his father and two brothers dying in a plane crash when he was a teenager.

The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you. You know what I mean? I’ve always liked that phrase He was visited by grief, because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door.

more rambling thoughts below the fold.

Watering the Tree of Liberty

Another mass shooting, this time in an elementary school in Connecticut. I am ill with horror.

Have some predictions:

1. The shooter will turn out to be male.
2. He will turn out to be white.
3. He will turn out to be angry at a woman, or women in general
4. If he's angry at an ex (wife or lover), she either works at the school or he murdered her before going to the school.
5. More than half of the victims will be female.
6. The weapons will have been obtained legally.
7. There will be no legislation to make such weapons harder to obtain, stockpile, or use.
8. Most reliable of all: gun sales will increase, especially for the particular weapons used in the shooting.

I may not be right about all these predictions, but you can take that final one to the bank.

I absolutely think we need to talk about gun violence in America, and after this kind of massacre is no time to hold back. I also think we have to bear in mind that mass murder is different from normal American homicide:

1. Normal American homicide is black-on-black; mass murder is white-on-white
2. Normal homicide is male-on-male; mass murder is male-on-majority female

Read Mother Jones' overview of mass shootings in America for statistics and details, I don't have to stomach to wrap them up for you now.

Previously, I've talked about guns as macho fantasies, and paranoid delusion as a gun marketing strategy.

It is perfectly clear to me that the American Founders intended the right to bear arms to be the people's bulwark against government tyranny, specifically the threat of a standing army. It is also perfectly clear that that is not how firearms are *used*.

Most firearms in America are actually used to make men feel better about their dicks -- sorry, as symbols and reinforcers of masculinity. Men buy guns, telling themselves that they will use them in the masculine role of protector and defender. But in fact, guns are used to defend masculinity, first and foremost. Very occasionally, defending masculinity means defending others in your masculine role, but usually it means attacking other men for slights against your masculinity, or women for being uppity enough to disagree with you or reject you. Or children, for caring about anything other than Daddy. The god of masculinity is a very jealous god indeed.

Why else are gun defenders are so willing to water the tree of liberty with the blood of kindergartners?

The most respect I can show those of you who are gun defenders is to ask this: What would it take to break the cycle where every mass shooting leads to increased gun sales? What is the weak point in that feedback loop?

The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, by Jacques-Louis David. Because obviously when women kill their children they're Medea, horrible and crazy, but a man who sacrifices children for the tree of liberty is noble and tragic. Right?