Blog Stuff

A friend and I are starting a music blog! You can see our initial posts at elasticresonance.wordpress.com.

SCOTUS Stuff

The Supreme Court term ended today. The amazing thing is Justice Kennedy who was in the majority in all 5-4 decisions, and only dissented twice all term. Basically, what Kennedy says, goes.

Catch-22 Stuff

So, one blogger is getting a lot of blog coverage for calling Catch-22 the most overrated book of the twentieth century. His review is here, and here is Marginal Revolution discussing it.

I absolutely loved Catch-22, it’s my favorite book, so I feel that I have to defend it.
1. The book is not about how and why military people are stupid and evil. It’s about how one guy deals with the fact that the people around him and the bureaucracy are stupid and evil. The question of the book as I understand it is not ‘why do military people do bad things?’ but ‘what should people do if the norms of those around them, and those with power, are bad?’ I might add that I’ve met people who have dealt with the military bureaucracy and who recognize the attitudes present in Catch-22, so it’s not like this is a radical description of the military bureaucracy, just one exaggerated for humorous effect. Also, the book discusses capitalism and religion, as well as the military.
2. The book explicitly tries to not make an argument. Again, it is not about why we should not have entered World War II, nor is it a psychological study of why people go wrong. It’s about individuals surviving in an evil system.
3. The tone is called black humor, and it is very powerful. I felt that the destruction of Snowden at the end of the book was all the more powerful because the narrator seems to be unable to discuss his death in any way other than off-color jokes. That’s a fairly accurate representation of how many people deal with unbearably painful memories. The reviewer’s statement that he felt ‘trapped inside the mind of someone whose mind I don’t want to be in at all’ is exactly right and intentional, given that it’s a book about insanity. The reviewer felt a moral outrage that he didn’t like and felt impotent to stop. The author is a success.
4. The book isn’t just clever on the surface, but I guess that’s hard to prove. Suffice it to say that I still think about how the book deals with death and the body. It’s impressive and thoughtful.
5. Again, saying that a work of literature is as good as its argument misses the point entirely.

Lastly, as a general note, comedies are underrated. It is at least as difficult to make people laugh as to make them cry, yet, I skimmed The Guardian’s list of top books and only a few were comic, 14-5 tops. It’s just not fair, I think, something caused by the fact that English teachers like to feel deep and depressed. Catch-22 is fantastic comedic writing.
Also, comedies often rely on flat minor characters to give people someone to laugh at. This is a genre trope. Reading the use of this genre trope as indicating a lack of psychological understanding or as an unwarranted attack is a really bad move. Instead, look at the excellent use of psychology in the narration and Yossarian. These show that the work has depth. Then notice how the evil and stupidity is a) genuinely funny and b) uses the psychology of laughter to make the reader irrationally reject the military. Yep, it’s not much of a rational argument against the military that its attitudes are so fucked up, but it is very persuasive. That’s how comedy works. Similarly, Borat did not show WHY an American he meets at the rodeo wants to kill gay people. It just shows the guy, accurately, as he is, and when we laugh and are appalled, we are persuaded at a fundamental irrational level that we don’t want to be like him. That’s how comedy works. That’s what makes it powerful. Arguments, by contrast, rarely really convince people of things they don’t already believe. They are polite and rational. Comedy is a loose cannon, freely destroying and desecrating anything and everything, and that’s what makes a good comedy incredibly important.

New Liars Track!

Yeah, OK, exciting-est thing ever.

Liars is one of my favorite bands currently producing music. Now that Sleater-Kinney is defunct, I’d say they’re my… say, 5th favorite current indie band (after TV on the Radio, Blonde Redhead, Thermals, and !!!. I’m making this listing up off the top of my head, based off their most recent output, and a vague definition of ‘indie’ and ‘band’ that excludes a lot of stuff). Their new album, the self-titled Liars is my most-anticipated album for the second half of this year.

Basically, their first album was angry dissonant dance-punk. They sounded amped up and ready to kill. Catchy as fuck. Their second album was weird, experimental shit. And their biggest failure. Their third album was even more weird experimental shit. A mix of kraut-rock and tribal drums. But it’s magnificent. Hard to listen to, but powerful.

What was weird about this was that they almost sounded like two different bands: A punk band and an art band. So now you know what I’m gonna say: Sure enough, it sounds like their next album is going to be a mixture of these two wildly different styles. How do I know? Pitchfork just released the newest Liars track, the first one off their next album, as a stream on their website. I was also able to find a download on Hype Machine. This track (Plaster Casts of Everything) is so awesome, it’s insane. You’ve got the frantic, angry, primitive drumming and strange voices of the art music, set in beautiful counterpoint to… a fuckin rock song. It’s big, brash, and tense. Totally awesome.

If this predicts the content of their next album, a) it will be incredible, and b) it’s so appropriate that now that their two halves are merging, they’re finally releasing a self-titled album. It’s a statement about who they are. Damn straight.

I Spawn More Comments

So, the post I linked to last time now has more comments, agreeing and disagreeing with me. And the guy who runs the blog ran another article, on a very related topic. Here. I loved it because the new post recognizes many of the concerns I wrote about. So I’ve contributed to a discussion. Yay. And I also think the post is pretty brilliant.

Excuse me while I talk to myself for a while. All this may be drivel, but it helps me to think to write it.

I would like to say one thing that makes me think my contribution to this discussion is valuable: People are not prepared for the example of ‘people in Idaho are hicks who have a cultural norm against education.’ They are prepared for ‘women like babies.’ The reason is that the latter is a good example of the nature-nurture debate because there is a legitimate argument from the side of nature: Different hormones, different genes, etc. lead to different results. The former case is hard to fit into a nature vs. nurture paradigm. People in Idaho do have different genes from the rest of us (they’re homogenous and White, for one), but somehow it seems difficult to argue the nature side. Thus, my example comes as close as any example to a pure case of nurture, which makes the traditionally conservative ‘nature’ side irrelevant and thus puts the whole argument in a liberal context. If nothing else, it’s a good rhetorical move.

I think that many people are bothered by the existence of cultural norms and feel comforted when they see issue after issue where cultural norms are not the full story. Seeing individuals as distinct and separate, exercising the preferences that come to them naturally, leads us to comfortable conclusions. We’re not patriarchal males who enforce an idea of how women should behave: Women want to behave that way. And the fact that this is true to some unknown degree is very uncomfortable for leftists. But the case of Idaho is not one of inter-group societal norms, but intra-group societal norms. Nature arguments die when faced with the simple fact that rural Idaho and rural, say, Virginia, have minimal genetic differences. Attitudes about education among White people are clearly social norms. As the post says:

This point cuts especially deep when we acknowledge that preferences are not formed in a cultural vacuum, but can and often do reflect entrenched prejudices and social expectations at odds with a decent measure of individual autonomy, a requirement of equal opportunity.

So here’s the challenge: There’s a social norm creating bad preference generation. In other words, all the social values we like (liberty, equality of opportunity, utility, etc) would increase if the social norm were to change. If this is true, don’t you have to be a leftist? That’s why the right works so hard to fight the factual claims about patriarchy, not the moral claim that if there is massive patriarchy, we should work to change our mindsets.

Thus, there are cases where radical leftism is obligated, under almost any value system. By radical leftism, I mean ‘the personal is the political’ kind of individual activism/protest in daily life: Trying to persuade people that the norm sucks, and even perhaps trying to make legal remedies (increase school scholarships for the rural poor?). I will say no more now, as this is already so lengthy it’s becoming meaningless.

More Thoughts on Income Mobility

A post on one of my favorite blogs bothered me today, so I posted a lengthy comment in reply. Basically the post said that:

Point of conceptual clarification. As far as I can tell, income mobility studies don’t actually study mobility in the sense of the ability to move. They study actual movement in incomes. Mobility is a dispositional term. If I have been immobilized, I am prevented from moving. If I am immobile, but not immobilized, then I could have moved, but didn’t. If I sit in my chair all day, my measured physical movement for the day will be low, but I may also be a spectacularly mobile person, able to run marathons, climb sheer rock faces, swim channels, etc. What we are interested in normatively from economic measures of mobility is whether there are structural barriers to upward movement, especially for the less wealthy, not the average deviation from parents’ earnings. Can people earn more if they try? Once the average income reaches a certain threshold of material comfort, we should expect people’s labor market choices to reflect preferences for many things other than income. So relatively low measured mobility (generation 2’s income highly correlated to generation 1’s) could indicate that people are fairly well satisfied with their parents’ level of income and are optimizing on other margins. The better off people become materially, the less you ought to expect actual measured intergenerational movement in average income to reliably indicate the opportunity to move.

This is true, but I don’t like it. For context, the owner of this blog uses himself as an example: He chose to make less money by becoming a policy analyst. A commenter on the blog says that he also chose to make less money to pursue a possible career in indie rock. Here’s my comment:

I hear you, but have two things to say:

First, I think the general agreement is that there are barriers to people from low-income backgrounds becoming high-income people. Like, we can see those barriers in the real world. While admittedly, no measuring of income movement can really quantify income mobility, a) nothing else really can either unless you can control for how hard people try, and b) I think it’s generally believed that choosing to make less money is a smaller issue than the barriers to mobility. I mean, this choice theory implies that poor people are more likely to not work hard than rich people. You have a theory about why this might be (they satisfice with regard to income and choose their parent’s income as the ‘right’ level of income) but off hand, this seems like a pretty small cause of the difference. It sounds like both you and the other commenter are examples of relatively wealthy people who chose not to work hard: Surely this goes against your claim, which would imply that wealthy people try harder… What you need to prove your point is evidence that poor people start indie rock bands and become educated policy analysts, not rich ones.

Second, my general observation is that people from low-income backgrounds don’t know how to become wealthy. When my parents moved me from a private school in California to a public school in Idaho, I discovered that people in Idaho did not have a culture which valued education. The generic profile of the average Idahoan is of a person who attempts to work their way through Boise State University and fails to do so, dropping out before graduation. In general, parents refuse to put their children through college, which is seen as unnecessary. I met some very smart, very focused people in Idaho, but many were never encouraged to become educated. I guess what I’m saying is something like the generic critique of sociologists on economists: economists imagine that preferences are fixed, and thus the fact that some very smart people achieve nothing is either because of barriers, or because they didn’t want to. Sociologists say that preferences are socially determined. If people I knew had been told from the time they were small that their identity should be bound up in how they do at school, and were rewarded heavily for their progress, as I was, they would have chosen to invest much more heavily in education, and thus in their future income level. Thus, I do not see this as individuals freely choosing to live their parent’s lives, but individuals put in a position where they were incredibly unlikely to choose education, because no child values education unless they are rewarded for it in the short-term. I’m reminded of Thoreau’s “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I think many people look back on their lives and regret that they did not work actively to improve their situation because, without even realizing it and because they lacked a broader perspective, they were conforming to a social norm that significantly harmed them.

A little long-winded perhaps, but I think that’s a pretty good summary of what I think about poverty and such. In a nutshell, education is first and foremost an issue of social values. Any analysis of education which seems individualistic and rational is totally wrong, because children, a major player in education policy, are irrational and dependent, not rational, independent actors. Thus, an economic perspective can be helpful: There really are people who choose to make less money and who would make that same decision under a variety of social conditions. But an economic perspective is so limiting, it’s ridiculous. Social norms affect children enormously, particularly parental and peer norms. Those norms are in the process of becoming character traits for the children. And those traits are what determine preferences. Thus, fixed preferences, a sticky point for all kinds of economic analysis, are a particularly bad assumption here.

The New Jesu Album

Sadly, it’s not as good as last year’s Silver EP, which was kinda unbelievably good. But it’s in the same league: There are still a bunch of powerful songs here. Basically, Jesu are a bunch of ex-metal guys working on some kind of shoegaze/noise rock stuff. It doesn’t really sound like typical shoegaze though: It’s a little more ‘metal’, yes. But not as much as you’d think. Actually, the biggest difference is probably how emotional and pop it is, and how it integrates a kinda post-rock sound.

Here is the big album centerpiece “Weightless and Horizontal”. It’s a really well-constructed track, but maybe a little hard to get into.
So here’s the album closer: “Stanlow”.
Here’s Hype Machine on Jesu.
I recommend every track on this album: The album’s only problem is that it’s perhaps a little too similar from track to track. But that’s a minor quibble.

Sea Monsters

Buzzfeed has a great list of clips of sea monsters. It’s amazing.
See an Octopus fight a shark here.
If I flunk my sociology midterm, this is why.

A song I really really like

So, all of a sudden, this 90’s shoegaze/IDM band called Seefeel has become really trendy. I guess their work was always underrated, and now people are realizing. So, Pitchfork uploaded one of their songs (Plainsong), and I really like it a lot. It reminds me of the new Blonde Redhead album in its ‘it’s ambient noise but oh wait it grabs your attention’-ness. I’ve listened to it like 20 times so far, but haven’t downloaded the album yet. I’m working on finding more of their work.
Basically, the song sounds like layers of electronica and almost white guitar noise, but is somehow very pop/hook-oriented too. I don’t know how they did it, but it’s brilliant. The rhythm section is flawless, and the vocals are so fucking cool, in that 90’s shoegaze ‘what are they saying? oh who cares it’s gorgeous’ sort of way. Amazing.

Bush Vetoes Iraq Pullout

Shocking, I know. OK, so we all knew it was coming before the bill was even passed, but still, it’s a terrible, terrible shame.
Congress also failed to override the veto. Bummer.
I note that the veto argues that setting a date for withdrawal is always a bad idea, letting your opponents know your plans. This leads me to wonder: Exactly what’s the alternative? How else can we leave this fucking disaster? This implies that Bush still believes that his commanders will one day announce that every terrorist is dead and we can all go home. Bunnies and rainbows will dance in the sunlight, and terrorists will convert to Christianity. How beautiful.