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This Day in History
Seven hundred fifty-nine years back, Mongol invaders occupied Baghdad and drove out the last defenders of the Abbasid Caliphate; forty-eight years subsequent to that conjunction, more or less two thousand miles North in Scotland, in 1306, the assassination of John Comyn contributed to igniting revolutionary wars for Scottish independence; another forty-nine years onward, in 1355 near Oxford, an imbroglio at a pub led to an outbreak of essentially civil war against the ‘scholars’ in residence at the university in which sixty or so of them and half as many locals died; exactly four centuries later, in 1755, the brilliant French philosopher Montesquieu died, at the start of the Seven Years War; eight years subsequently, in 1763, a Treaty of Paris accorded England control of French Quebec as part of the deal that ended the Seven Years War and its French-and-Indian component; one hundred eighty years before today, the brief life of genius Russian author Alexander Pushkin came to a close; MORE HERE
The musical tones of any language give a clue, at a minimum, about original melodies and harmonies that quite probably underlay the origins of linguistic legerdemain itself, which includes the metric of flow and pause, of click and wind, of lilt and rasp, that every tongue defines with its own signature despite all of their presences in the present pass’ resulting from a common ancestor, an Ur-source for the entire diaspora of sound that envelops human culture in a babble of translational inference and choice, the ultimate upshot of all of which might include that combination, on the one hand, of ubiquitous and inherent musicality and, on the other hand, of adaptive and inevitable attempts to communicate with and understand each other, the subversion and enervation of which universal qualities unavoidably subverts and enervates, and ultimately destroys, the entire social experiment on which human life ultimately rests.
The theater-goer in conventional dramatic theater says: Yes, I’ve felt that way, too. That’s the way I am. That’s life. That’s the way it will always be. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is no escape for him. That’s great art — Everything is self-evident. I am made to cry with those who cry, and laugh with those who laugh. But the theater-goer in the epic theater says: I would never have thought that. You can’t do that. That’s very strange, practically unbelievable. That has to stop. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is an escape for him. That’s great art — nothing is self-evident. I am made to laugh about those who cry, and cry about those who laugh.
- Bertold Brecht “Entertainment or Education? (1936)
democracy OR "majority rule" OR "popular rule" participation OR engagement power OR empowerment grassroots OR populace OR "common people" active OR dynamic OR vitality boost OR support OR manifest OR develop technology OR technocracy OR sts "artificial intelligence" OR ai OR singularity analysis OR scholarship marxist OR radical = 1,180,000 Citations.
TODAY’S HEART, SOUL, & AWARENESS VIDEO
POLITICS & POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ‘EXPLICIT’ CENSORSHIP
In what could arguably become a standard weekly dose of sense and insight for scrappy scribes and stalwart citizens, from Spy Culture, another Clandestime podcast with Tom Secker, who reports from Yorkshire England’s ‘grassy knolls’ about mediation and ‘intelligence’ operations of various sorts, deconstructing that aspect of the world today that revolves around spectacle and social control and the propagation of critically important propaganda, in the event a historical and conceptual contextualization of the evolution and current role of the ratings system that determines ‘appropriate’ levels and types of violence that viewers of different ages and sensibilities should imbibe, as usual an utterly fascinating presentation that threatens both to make sense of the world and suggest ways for members of the ‘common herd’ to make their impacts on process and protocol more tangible and potent, in the arena of such masterful deconstruction a likely spot for Mr. Secker to view and proffer for his readers an excerpt from a recent Screen Actors Guild award speech by the cast representative of the popular, and now ‘award winning,’ Netflix program, Stranger Things, which in the midst of many powerful and persuasive contentions advocated a pugilistic level of violence against the ‘bad guys’ on the ‘other side,’ without of course making any sense of the political components of ‘good and evil’ or the arguably critical class basis for the ‘sides’ of things at present.
Nearly Naked Links
From Thursday’s Files
Capital on Strike – https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/capital-strike-regulations-lending-productivity-economy-banks-bailout/
Covering Up Animal ‘Nudity’ – https://priceonomics.com/the-hoaxster-who-revealed-sad-truths-about-america/
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