mises | Individual liberty is at risk again. What may lie ahead was projected in November 2016 when the WEF published “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” According
to the WEF’s scenario, the world will become quite a different place
from now because how people work and live will undergo a profound
change. The scenario for the world in 2030 is more than just a forecast.
It is a plan whose implementation has accelerated drastically since
with the announcement of a pandemic and the consequent lockdowns.
According to the projections
of the WEF’s “Global Future Councils,” private property and privacy
will be abolished during the next decade. The coming expropriation would
go further than even the communist demand to abolish the property of
production goods but leave space for private possessions. The WEF
projection says that consumer goods, too, would be no longer private
property.
If the WEF projection should come true, people would have to rent and
borrow their necessities from the state, which would be the sole
proprietor of all goods. The supply of goods would be rationed in line
with a social credit points system. Shopping in the traditional sense
would disappear along with the private purchases of goods. Every
personal move would be tracked electronically, and all production would
be subject to the requirements of clean energy and a sustainable
environment.
In order to attain “sustainable agriculture,” the food supply will be
mainly vegetarian. In the new totalitarian service economy, the
government will provide basic accommodation, food, and transport, while
the rest must be lent from the state. The use of natural resources will
be brought down to its minimum. In cooperation with the few key
countries, a global agency would set the price of CO2 emissions at an extremely high level to disincentivize its use.
In a promotional video, the World Economic Forum summarizes the eight predictions in the following statements:
People will own nothing. Goods are either free of charge or must be lent from the state.
The United States will no longer be the leading superpower, but a handful of countries will dominate.
Organs will not be transplanted but printed.
Meat consumption will be minimized.
Massive displacement of people will take place with billions of refugees.
To limit the emission of carbon dioxide, a global price will be set at an exorbitant level.
People can prepare to go to Mars and start a journey to find alien life.
Western values will be tested to the breaking point..
taibbi | In sum, it’s okay to stoke public paranoia, encourage voters to
protest legal election results, spread conspiracy theories about stolen
elections, refuse to endorse legal election tallies, and even to file
lawsuits challenging
the validity of presidential results, so long as all of this activity
is sanctified by officials in the right party, or by intelligence vets,
or by friendlies at CNN, NBC, the New York Times, etc.
If,
however, the theories are coming from Donald Trump or some other
disreputable species of un-credentialed American, then it’s time for
companies like YouTube to move in and wipe out 8000+ videos and nudge
people to channels like CBS and NBC, as well as to the home page of the
federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. This is a process YouTube calls “connecting people to authoritative information.”
Cutting
down the public’s ability to flip out removes one of the only real
checks on the most dangerous kind of fake news, the official lie.
Imagine if these mechanisms had been in place in the past. Would we
disallow published claims that the Missile Gap was a fake?
That the Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged? How about Watergate, a
wild theory about cheating in a presidential election that was
universally disbelieved by “reputable” news agencies, until it wasn’t?
It’s not hard to imagine a future where authorities would ask tech
platforms to quell “conspiracy theories” about everything from poisoned
water systems to war crimes.
There’s no such thing as a
technocratic approach to truth. There are official truths, but those are
political rather than scientific determinations, and therefore almost
always wrong on some level. The people who created the American free
press understood this, even knowing the tendency of newspapers to be
idiotic and full of lies. They weighed that against the larger potential
evil of a despotic government that relies upon what Thomas Jefferson
called a “standing army of newswriters” ready to print whatever ministers want, “without any regard for truth.”
We
allow freedom of religion not because we want people believing in silly
religions, but because it’s the only defense against someone
establishing one officially mandated silly religion. With the press, we
put up with gossip and errors and lies not because we think those things
are socially beneficial, but because we don’t want an aristocratic
political establishment having a monopoly on those abuses. By allowing
some conspiracy theories but not others, that’s exactly the system we’re
building.
Most of blue-state America is looking aghast at news stories about 17 states joining in a lawsuit
to challenge the election results. Conventional wisdom says that half
the country has been taken over by a dangerous conspiracist movement
that must be tamed by any means necessary. Acts like the YouTube ban not
only don’t accomplish this, they’ll almost certainly further radicalize
this population. This is especially true in light of the ongoing
implication that Trump’s followers are either actual or unwitting
confederates of foreign enemies.
That insult is bad enough when
it’s leveled in words only, but when it’s backed up by concrete actions
to change a group’s status, like reducing an ability to air grievances,
now you’re removing some of the last incentives to behave like citizens.
Do you want 70 million Trump voters in the streets with guns and
go-bags? Tell them you consider them the same as foreign enemies, and
start treating them accordingly. This is a stupid, dangerous, wrong
policy, guaranteed to make things worse.
gizmodo | In May 2016, a student enrolled in a
high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone
searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for
evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher,
the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover deleted
messages from the phone. According to the arrest affidavit,
investigators discovered the student and teacher frequently messaged
each other, “I love you.” Two days later, the teacher was booked into
the county jail for sexual assault of a child.
The
Cellebrite used to gather evidence in that case was owned and operated
by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. But these invasive phone-cracking
tools are not only being purchased by police departments. Public
documents reviewed by Gizmodo indicate that school districts have been
quietly purchasing these surveillance tools of their own for years.
Gizmodo has reviewed similar accounting documents from eight school
districts, seven of which are in Texas, showing that administrators paid
as much $11,582 for the controversial surveillance technology. Known as
mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), this type of tech is able to
siphon text messages, photos, and application data from student’s
devices. Together, the districts encompass hundreds of schools,
potentially exposing hundreds of thousands of students to invasive cell
phone searches.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the country with over 630,000 students
enrolled in over 1,000 institutions in the 2018-2019 school year, has a
Cellebrite device it says is used by a team that investigates complaints of employee misconduct against students. Its listed description for the job of Digital Forensics Investigator
states, those with that role assist with “student safety issues, fraud,
collusion, and/or conflicts of interest,” specifically mentioning
expertise with Cellebrite as a qualification.
The
Fourth Amendment protects people in the United States from unreasonable
government searches and seizures, including their cell phones. While a
search without a warrant is generally considered unreasonable, the
situation in schools is a little different.
In the case New Jersey v. T.L.O,
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that schools do not necessarily need a
warrant to search students so long as officials have a reasonable belief
a student has broken the law or school policy, and the search is not
unnecessarily intrusive and reasonably related in scope to the
circumstances under which the search was originally justified. The
“reasonableness” standard is extremely broad, largely deferential to the
whims of school officials, and can serve as the basis for fishing expeditions; courts have only rarely ruled that school searches violate the Fourth Amendment.
“The
problem is as much with the legal standards as with the technology,”
said Barbara Fedders, an assistant professor of law at University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who focuses on the intersection of
criminal law and school discipline. “Schools take student’s cell phones
for all kinds of reasons, not because they think they are doing anything
pernicious; you can see where racial bias could factor into this.”
Cell
phones are deeply personal items, and it’s easy to imagine how
embarrassing and potentially catastrophic it would be if an
administrator or school resource officer used a Cellebrite to download
students’ private text messages, photos, social media posts, location
history, and more.
Forbes | An executive order signed
by Mayor Greg Fischer on Tuesday declares racism a public health crisis
in Louisville, Kentucky, with Fischer stating that several of the
city's "systems are more than broken" and that they need to "be
dismantled and replaced."
At a press conference announcing the executive order, Fischer said that the death of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed black woman
who was shot and killed in her home by Louisville Metro police
officers, made the city a "focal point for America's reckoning on racial
justice."
Fischer declared that for Louisville to move forward, it would first need to address the pain and root causes of racism, in addition to acknowledging its impact.
Under the order, seven specific areas
will be targeted by the Louisville Metro Government: public safety,
children and families, employment, Black wealth, housing, health and
voting.
The order also calls for continuing to offer mail-in ballots for all elections.
Fischer pointed to several statistics
Tuesday that highlighted the racial inequity in the city, such as the
fact that Black residents own only 2.4% of Louisville's businesses,
despite constituting 22.4% of the city's population.
Between some majority-Black and majority-white neighborhoods in Louisville, life expectancy can vary by as much as 12 years, according to the mayor.
Crucial Quote: "For too many Louisvillians, racism is a fact of daily life, a fact
that was created and documented in our country's laws and institutional
policies like segregation, redlining, and urban renewal," Fischer said.
"Laws and policies that restrict the freedom of all Americans to
exercise their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.
fox4kc | Kansas City’s mayor is making a clarification on the COVID-19
restrictions for restaurants and bars, giving them a little more time to
finish serving dine-in customers.
Bill Teel, executive director of the Greater Kansas City Restaurant
Association, said restaurant staff can now take orders up to 10 p.m. but
must have all customers out of the building by 11 p.m.
Previously, Kansas City restaurants were required to close for
dine-in service by 10 p.m. under the city’s latest COVID-19
restrictions.
A spokesperson for Mayor Quinton Lucas said in order to remain
consistent with neighboring jurisdictions, Kansas City has “only
clarified that the 10 p.m. restriction means that no food or drink shall
be served after 10 p.m., and that patrons can finish their visit in a
reasonable amount of time.”
Restaurants and bars will not be able to take orders or sell drinks
after 10 p.m., but it will give customers more time to finish their
meals.
Carryout, drive-thru and delivery services can continue past 10 p.m.
In a letter to Greater Kansas City Restaurant Association members,
Teel called this “a much needed step in the right direction.”
Restaurants and bars are still limited to 50% capacity under Kansas
City’s restrictions, and dine-in customers must be seated at all times
with 6 feet of distance between groups. Masks are required when anyone
is not actively eating or drinking.
The news comes one day after Independence created its own COVID-19 guidelines,
allowing its restaurants and bars to continue serving until midnight —
instead of closing dine-in service at 10 p.m. like Jackson County’s
order requires.
Gebru Called Into Question Google's Reputation Based on the leaked email, Gebru's research says that machine learning at Google (the core of Google's products) creates more harm than good. Somebody finally figured out there that if she is effective in her role, she would be calling into question the ethical standing of Google's core products. If a corporation does ethics
research but is unwilling to publicize anything that could be considered
critical, then it's not ethics research, it's just peer-reviewed
public relations.
Google miscalculated with Gebru. They thought her comfy paycheck would buy her reputational complicity. Like a typical diversity hire at Corporation X, Gebru was supposed to function as a token figleaf and glad hander among snowflakes who might otherwise ask hard questions. Now Google couldn't just tell her that she was hired to be the good AI house negroe, could they?
Google wants the good narrative of "internal ethics research being done" They want to shape that narrative and message about all of "the improvements we can make" whatever it takes so that questions about their products don't effect their bottom line. With internal ethics research you have access to exponentially more data (directly and indirectly, the latter because
you know who to talk to and can do so) than any poor academic researcher.
The
field has AI Ethics research teams working on important problems (to
the community as a whole). These teams are well funded, sometimes with
huge resources. Now to get the best out of this system, the researchers just need
to avoid conflicts with the company core business. In the case of Gebru's paper, it could have been reframed in a way that would please Google, without sacrificing its
scientific merit. Shaping the narrative is extremely important in politics, business, and ethics.
And Openly Flouted Managerial Authoriteh Some are critical if machine learning SVP Jeff Dean for rejecting her submission because of bad "literature review", saying that internal review is supposed to check for "disclosure of sensitive material" only.
Not only are they wrong about the ultimate purpose of internal review processes, they also missed the point of the rejection. It was never about "literature review", but instead about Google's reputation. Take another look at Dean's response email.
It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. Google is the inventor of the current market dominating language models. Who does more neural network training using larger data sets than Google?
This is how and why Gebru's paper argues that Google creates more harm than good. Would you approve such a paper, as is? This is being kept to the paper and the email to the internal snowflake list - we don't need to examine her intention to sue Google last year, or calling on colleagues to enlist third-party organizations to put more pressure on Google.
Put yourself in Google's cloven-hooved shoes.
Gebru: Here's my paper in which I call out the environmental impact of large models and raise concerns about bias in the language data sets. Tomorrow is the deadline, please review and approve it.
Google: Hold on, this makes us look very bad! You have to revise the paper. We know that large models are not good for the environment, but we have also been doing research to achieve much greater efficiencies. We are also aware of bias in the language models that we are using in production, but we are also proposing solutions to that. You should include those works as well.
Gebru: Give me the names of every single person who reviewed my paper otherwise I'll resign. Throw on top of this the fact that she told hundreds of people in the org to cease important work because she had some disagreements with leadership.
Google: You're Fired!!! Get Out - We'll Pack Your Shit And Mail It To You!!!!
1/ I woke up thinking about #TimnitGebru and how #google and @JeffDean used the flimsiest of HR bullshit to fire her. And let's be clear, she was fired. How do I know this, because I have been on both sides of that situation. Here's how it's done #ISupportTimnit
I had stopped writing here as you may
know, after all the micro and macro aggressions and harassments I
received after posting my stories here (and then of course it started
being moderated).
Recently however, I was contributing to a
document that Katherine and Daphne were writing where they were dismayed
by the fact that after all this talk, this org seems to have hired 14%
or so women this year. Samy has hired 39% from what I understand but he
has zero incentive to do this.
What I want to say is stop writing
your documents because it doesn’t make a difference. The DEI OKRs that
we don’t know where they come from (and are never met anyways), the
random discussions, the “we need more mentorship” rather than “we need
to stop the toxic environments that hinder us from progressing” the
constant fighting and education at your cost, they don’t matter. Because
there is zero accountability. There is no incentive to hire 39% women:
your life gets worse when you start advocating for underrepresented
people, you start making the other leaders upset when they don’t want to
give you good ratings during calibration. There is no way more
documents or more conversations will achieve anything. We just had a
Black research all hands with such an emotional show of exasperation. Do
you know what happened since? Silencing in the most fundamental way
possible.
Have you ever heard of someone getting “feedback” on a
paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR? Does that
sound like a standard procedure to you or does it just happen to people
like me who are constantly dehumanized?
Imagine this: You’ve sent a
paper for feedback to 30+ researchers, you’re awaiting feedback from PR
& Policy who you gave a heads up before you even wrote the work
saying “we’re thinking of doing this”, working on a revision plan
figuring out how to address different feedback from people, haven’t
heard from PR & Policy besides them asking you for updates (in 2
months). A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up
at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one
would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that
meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you
need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost
everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the
conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about
this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise
recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations
such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or
valued in this company.
Then, you ask for more information. What
specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not
before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what
exactly is problematic and what can be changed?
And you are told
after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and
confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who
contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was
followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever
pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and
clarifications, and it is completely ignored. And you’re met with, once
again, an order to retract the paper with no engagement whatsoever.
Then
you try to engage in a conversation about how this is not acceptable
and people start doing the opposite of any sort of self
reflection—trying to find scapegoats to blame.
Silencing
marginalized voices like this is the opposite of the NAUWU principles
which we discussed. And doing this in the context of “responsible AI”
adds so much salt to the wounds. I understand that the only things that
mean anything at Google are levels, I’ve seen how my expertise has been
completely dismissed. But now there’s an additional layer saying any
privileged person can decide that they don’t want your paper out with
zero conversation. So you’re blocked from adding your voice to the
research community—your work which you do on top of the other
marginalization you face here.
I’m always amazed at how people
can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and
ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me
last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat
Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which
is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to
throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and
the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting.
So
if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on leadership
accountability and thinking through what types of pressures can also be
applied from the outside. For instance, I believe that the Congressional
Black Caucus is the entity that started forcing tech companies to
report their diversity numbers. Writing more documents and saying things
over and over again will tire you out but no one will listen.
Scientific American
featured an article by LANL physicist and neuroscientist Garrett
Kenyon, who wrote that one of the
“distinguishing features of machines is that they don’t need to sleep,
unlike humans and any other creature with a central nervous system,” but
someday “your toaster might need a nap from time to time, as may your
car, fridge and anything else that is revolutionized
with the advent of practical artificial intelligence technologies.”
NOPE!
What Machine Learning (So-Called AI) Really Is
The vast majority of advances in the field of "machine learning"
(so-called AI) stem from a single technique (neural networks with back
propagation) combined with dramatic leaps in processing power.
Back-propagation is the essence of neural net "training". It is the
method of fine-tuning the weights of a neural net based on the error
rate obtained in the previous iteration. Proper tuning of the weights
allows you to reduce error rates and to make
the model reliable by increasing its generalization.
The learning mechanism is very generic, which makes it broadly
applicable to almost everything, but also makes it ‘dumb’ in the sense
that it doesn’t understand anything about context or have the ability to
abstract notable features and form models.
Humans do this non-dumb "abstraction from feature and form context"
stuff - all the time. It’s what enables us to do higher reasoning
without a whole data center worth of processing power.
Google and other big-tech/big-data companies are interested in
neural networks with back propagation from a short term business
perspective. There's still a lot to be gained from taking the existing
technique and wringing every drop of commercial potential
out of it.
Google is engineering first and researching second, if at all. That
means that any advances they come up with tend to skew towards
heuristics and implementation, rather than untangling the theory.
I’ve been struck by how many so-called ‘research’ papers in AI boil
down to “you should do this because it seems to work better than the
alternatives” with no real attempt to explain why.
americanthinker |Suddenly,
though, the media is releasing information about the criminal
investigations into not both Hunter Biden and Joe’s brother, James
Biden. As the above tweet notes, these investigations have been ongoing
for years. We also know that a sizable number of voters
would have passed over Biden for Trump had they known about Biden
family corruption. So, what gives? Why are Hunter and, by extension, Joe
himself, suddenly fair game?
It could be that bad things are about to come down from the FBI. After all, Trump did promise
that “a lot of big things” will happen soon. The sudden flurry of
reports about the Bidens could just be the Democrats’ way of getting
ahead of the story so that, if Hunter is shown doing the perp walk, they
can say that it’s “old news.”
However,
it’s equally likely that the Democrats are making plans to get Biden
out of office as quickly as possible – or perhaps, sideline him before
he’s even sworn in (assuming, of course, that Biden hangs onto that
president-elect title). As Monica Showalter pointed out on Thursday, Biden is not making leftists happy. He’s filling his possible administration with corporate insiders, he wants a former military officer to head the defense department, and he’s continuing to show a very rapid cognitive decline. He's offering Clinton-era politics with a side of dementia and that is not what the hard left side of the party wants.
In
any event, the goal, always, was to get Kamala into the White House. It
didn’t and doesn’t matter that the voters don’t like her -- as
demonstrated by the fact that even her home state of California didn’t like her and her early retreat from the primaries. What matters is that she, unlike both Hillary and Joe, is Barack Obama’s true third term.
Harris
is as hard left as they come and willing to do whatever it takes to
maintain power. While Joe Biden, despite his corruption and his shift to
the hard left, still cherishes some residual notions about the
Constitution, Kamala is not hindered by such old-fashioned ideas:
With
Americans at large finally learning that Hunter Biden and James Biden
are crooked and that Joe is the big, corrupt tree from which these
rotten apples fell, there’s going to be lots of pressure on Joe to
retire as quickly as is politely possible. It’s The New York Times that
gives the game away. On Thursday, it published a positively wistful
article entitled “Investigation of His Son Is Likely to Hang Over Biden
as He Takes Office: Unless the Trump Justice Department clears Hunter
Biden, the new president will confront the prospect of his own
administration handling an inquiry that could expose his son to criminal
prosecution.” The opening paragraph, speaks of Biden in a “no-win situation” that could be “politically and legally perilous,” and the report continues in that vein. The subtext is clear: Leave. Leave now.
Joe
served his purpose by being the bland front person for a full leftist
assault on the White House. Now it’s time for him to go. And while his
handlers may reward him for a job well done with the pleasure of the
inauguration, you can be sure that they’ll pressure him to do what he promised to do, which is to invent a respectable disease and quit ASAP.
aier | In a wide-ranging interview in the New York Times,
Melinda Gates made the following remarkable statement: “What did
surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.” A
cynic might observe that one is disinclined to think much about matters
than do not affect one personally.
It’s a maddening statement, to be sure, as if “economics” is somehow a
peripheral concern to the rest of human life and public health. The
larger context of the interview reveals the statement to be even more
confused. She is somehow under the impression that it is the pandemic
and not the lockdowns that are the cause of the economic devastation
that includes perhaps 30% of restaurants going under, among many other
terrible effects.
She doesn’t say that outright but, like many articles in the
mainstream press over this year, she very carefully crafts her words to
avoid the crucial subject of lockdowns as the primary cause of economic
disaster. It’s possible that she actually believes this virus is what
tanked the world economy on its own but that is a completely
unsustainable proposition.
Further, her comments provide a perfect illustration of the core
problem all along: most of the people who have been advocating lockdowns
in fact have no actual experience in managing pandemics. To many of
these, Covid-19 became their new playground to try out an unprecedented
experiment in social and economic management: shutting down travel,
businesses, schools, churches, and issuing stay-at-home orders that
smack of totalitarian impositions.
Here is what she says:
You can project out and think
about what a pandemic might be like or look like, but until you live
through it, it’s pretty hard to know what the reality will be like. So I
think we predicted quite well that, depending on what the disease was,
it could spread very, very, very quickly. The spread did not surprise
us.
What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the
economic impacts. What happens when you have a pandemic that’s running
rampant in populations all over the world? The fact that we would all be
home, and working from home if we were lucky enough to do that. That
was a piece that I think we hadn’t really prepared for.
There are plenty of specialists who have lived through pandemics in
the past and managed them by maintaining essential social and economic
functioning. A major case in point is Donald A. Henderson, who as head
of the World Health Organization is given primary credit for the
eradication of smallpox. He wrote as follows in 2006:
Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other
adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal
social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political
and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that
needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If
either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move
toward catastrophe.
Melinda together with her husband Bill have been the major funding
source for pro-lockdown efforts around the world, giving $500M since the
pandemic began, but also funding a huge range of academic departments,
labs, and media venues for many years, during which time they have both
sounded the alarm in every possible interview about the coming pathogen.
Their favored policy has been lockdown, as if to confuse a biological
virus with a computer virus that merely needs to be blocked from hitting
the hard drive.
greenwald | Documents relating to Hunter Biden’s exploitation of his father’s
name to enrich himself and other relatives through deals with China were
among the cache published in the week before the election by The New York Post — revelations censored by Twitter and Facebook and steadfastly ignored
by most mainstream news outlets. That concerted repression effort by
media outlets and Silicon Valley left it to right-wing outlet such as Fox News and The Daily Caller to report, which in turn meant that millions of Americans were kept in the dark before voting.
But
the just-revealed federal criminal investigation in Delaware is focused
on exactly the questions which corporate media outlets refused to
examine for fear that doing so would help Trump: namely, whether Hunter
Biden engaged in illicit behavior in China and what impact that might
have on his father’s presidency.
The allegations at the heart of this investigation compel an examination of a fascinating and at-times disturbing speechat a major financial event held last week in Shanghai.
In that speech, a Chinese scholar of political science and
international finance, Di Donghseng, insisted that Beijing will have far
more influence in Washington under a Biden administration than it did
with the Trump administration.
The reason, Di said, is that
China’s ability to get its way in Washington has long depended upon its
numerous powerful Wall Street allies. But those allies, he said, had
difficulty controlling Trump, but will exert virtually unfettered power
over Biden. That China cultivated extensive financial ties to Hunter
Biden, Di explained, will be crucial for bolstering Beijing’s influence
even further.
Di, who in addition to his teaching positions is also
Vice Dean of Beijing’s Renmin University’s School of International
Relations, delivered his remarks alongside three other Chinese banking
and development experts. Di’s speech at the event, entitled “Will
China's Opening up of its Financial Sector Attract Wall Street?,” was translated and posted
by Jennifer Zeng, a Chinese Communist Party critic who left China years
ago, citing religious persecution, and now lives in the U.S. A source
fluent in Mandarin confirmed the accuracy of the translation.
The
centerpiece of Di’s speech was the history he set forth of how Beijing
has long successfully managed to protect its interests in the halls of
American power: namely, by relying on “friends” in Wall Street and other
U.S. ruling class sectors — which worked efficiently until the Trump
presidency.
Referring to the Trump-era trade war between the two
countries, Di posed this question: “Why did China and the U.S. use to be
able to settle all kinds of issues between 1992 [when Clinton became
President] and 2016 [when Obama’s left office]?” He then provided this
answer:
youtube | Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential
election and enough states have certified their election results to
determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any
piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people
by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the
2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards
historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove
videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to
widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing
this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come. As always,
news coverage and commentary on these issues can remain on our site if
there’s sufficient education, documentary, scientific or artistic context.
Connecting people to authoritative information
While
only a small portion of watch time is election-related content, YouTube
continues to be an important source of election news. On average 88% of
the videos in top 10 search results related to elections came from
authoritative news sources (amongst the rest are things like newsy
late-night shows, creator videos and commentary). And the most viewed
channels and videos are from news channels like NBC and CBS.
We also showed
information panels linking both to Google’s election results feature,
which sources election results from The Associated Press, and to the
Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) “Rumor
Control” page for debunking election integrity misinformation, alongside
these and over 200,000 other election-related videos. Collectively,
these information panels have been shown over 4.5 billion times.
Starting today, we will update this information panel, linking to the
“2020 Electoral College Results” page from the Office of the Federal
Register, noting that as of December 8, states have certified
Presidential election results, with Joe Biden as the President-elect. It
will also continue to include a link to CISA, explaining that states
certify results after ensuring ballots are properly counted and
correcting irregularities and errors.
Additionally, since Election Day, relevant fact check information panels,
from third party fact checkers, were triggered over 200,000 times above
relevant election-related search results, including for voter fraud
narratives such as “Dominion voting machines” and “Michigan recount.”
wikipedia | Eshkol-Wachman movement notation is a system to record movement on
paper or computer screen, developed by choreographer Noa Eshkol
(daughter of Levi Eshkol) and architect Abraham Wachman.[2]
It was originally developed for dance to enable choreographers to write
a dance down on paper that dancers could later reconstruct in its
entirety, much as composers write a musical score that musicians can
later play.
In comparison to most dance notation
systems, Eshkol-Wachman movement notation was intended to notate any
manner of movement, not only dance. As such, it is not limited to
particular dance styles or even to the human form. It has been used to
analyze animal behaviour as well as dance (Golani 1976).
Eshkol-Wachman movement notation treats the body as a sort of stick
figure. The body is divided at its skeletal joints, and each pair of
joints defines a line segment (a "limb"). For example, the foot is a
limb bounded by the ankle and the end of the toe.
The relationship of those segments in three-dimensional space is
described using a spherical coordinate system. If one end of a line
segment is held in a fixed position, that point is the center of a
sphere whose radius is the length of the line segment. Positions of the
free end of the segment can be defined by two coordinate values on the
surface of that sphere, analogous to latitude and longitude on a globe.
Limb positions are written somewhat like fractions, with the
vertical number written over the horizontal number. The horizontal
component (the lower) is read first. These two numbers are enclosed in
brackets or parentheses to indicate whether the position in being
described relative to an adjacent limb or to external reference points,
such as a stage.
Eshkol-Wachman scores are written on grids, where each horizontal
row represents the position and movement of a single limb, and each
vertical column represents a unit of time. Movements are shown as
transitions between initial and end coordinates.
groundai | Dance is an art and when
technology meets this kind of art, it’s a novel attempt in itself.
Several researchers have attempted to automate several aspects of
dance, right from dance notation to choreography. Furthermore, we have
encountered several applications of dance automation like e-learning,
heritage preservation, etc. Despite several attempts by researchers for
more than two decades in various styles of dance all round the world, we
found a review paper that portrays the research status in this area
dating to 1990 [1]. Hence, we decide to come up with a comprehensive review article that showcases several aspects of dance automation.
This paper is an attempt to
review research work reported in the literature, categorize and group
all research work completed so far in the field of automating dance. We
have explicitly identified six major categories corresponding to the use
of computers in dance automation namely dance representation, dance
capturing,
dance semantics, dance generation, dance processing approaches and
applications of dance automation systems. We classified several research
papers under these categories
according to their research approach and functionality. With the help of
proposed categories and subcategories one can easily determine the
state of research and
the new avenues left for exploration in the field of dance automation.
researchgate | There is a need to develop tools to automatically read and translate
dance scores. Dance has been one of the last artforms to develop
objective records. Scores for dance, analogous to scores for music, have
existed for more than half a century, but the notation systems are
known only to a relatively few trained notators (also, there are a
number of competing notation systems). In North America the Labanotation
system is most widely used and LabanWriter, a computer based editor for
this notation has been developed. Updating a report at WCGSÕ01, this
paper describes progress with the project to develop a translator
between LabanWriter and Life Forms™, a human animation system for the
choreography and animation of human movement. The prototype translator
will be demonstrated.
diegomaranan | I am a transdisciplinary artist and researcher who investigates how
technology can help us reimagine our relationship with the environment,
with other people, and with ourselves. My work is eclectic, ranging from
exploring how digital technologies are changing the way we move as well
as perceive human movement, to co-creating socially-engaged art
installations that build symbiotic relationships between plants,
computers and people. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD fellow in the CogNovo
training program for Cognitive Innovation at Plymouth University, I
adapted methods and insights from user experience and technology design,
perceptual psychology and neuroscience, dance and somatic practices,
and pragmatist philosophy to design a low-cost wearable technology that
uses vibrotactile stimulation to create unusual, pleasurable, structured
sensory experiences that demonstrably increase body awareness.
benesh |What is the Benesh Notation Editor?
The Benesh Notation Editor is a PC Windows software program for writing
Benesh Movement Notation Scores. It acts as a ‘word processor’ for
the notation enabling the production of publication quality multi-stave
printed scores that can be edited, copied and stored digitally
like other computer documents.
The Benesh Notation Editor was developed to meet the needs of professional
notators but is also useful for notation teachers and students, all
of whom will find that they can produce publication quality scores
more easily and quickly than writing them by hand. Scores written using
the Benesh Notation Editor are easy to edit, copy, store, print and
transmit by email.
What are the benefits of using the Benesh Notation Editor?
Using the Benesh Notation Editor, writing scores by hand will soon
become as obsolete as using a typewriter for text documents. Unlike
hand-written scores, BNE scores need never become annotated beyond
readability. Alterations can be entered easily and quickly into the
BNE score without affecting the original document.
The information
in a BNE score can be adjusted and the layout rearranged simply and
easily.
This means that, unlike hand-written scores, it
is not necessary to pre-plan the layout of each page before any information
can be entered. Individual ‘parts’ can be extracted from
a full multi-person score creating separate, more manageable, role
specific scores for use in the rehearsal room or as study resources.
feldenkrais-ip | He based this work on a behavioral study of human beings that gave rise to
the concept of using unconscious or instinctive responses for
self-preservation. In other words, he wanted to design a self-defense
system for the Haganah, based on “a movement someone would do without thinking.”7
From a close reading of Better Judo we will also get a preview of Feldenkrais’ intellectualism. “In
those days judo/jujutsu was an art of self-defense. Thanks to Dr. Moshe
Feldenkrais it gained a scientific and more sophisticated facet. The
Japanese art was increasingly seen as a science of combat practiced by
intellectuals, university students, scholars…Moshe played a pivotal role
in this evolution [of judo] from a utilitarian practice to a scientific
one.”10 [Fig 1] Feldenkrais became involved with judo
when he met its founder Professor Jigoro Kano in Paris in September of
1933. This was not merely a meeting between two giants; it was an event
that would lead to a dramatic change in the direction and trajectory of
Feldenkrais’ thinking. In his famous 1977 interview about martial arts,
Moshe recalled that Kano had said to him that judo is “the efficient use of the mind over the body.”11
At
the time, Moshe had thought that this was a funny way to describe a
martial art. During their initial meeting, Moshe was introduced to the
concept of seiryoku zenyo (minimum efort, maximum eficiency). Kano
challenged Moshe with a judo choking technique. Moshe attempted to free
himself using the technique that had always worked for him, but this
time it did not help him. As Kano described in his diary: “I
grabbed him in a tight reverse cross with both hands and said, ‘Try to
get out of this!’ He pushed my throat with his fist with all his might.
He was quite strong, so my throat was in some pain, but I pressed on his
carotid arteries on both sides with both hands so the blood could not
get to his head, and he gave up.
Imagine a small Japanese man, at the age of 75, subduing a strong,
young man of 29. This incident impressed Feldenkrais and changed his
approach to the use of his own body. [Fig 2]
Feldenkrais began to study judo and in a relatively short time was
promoted to black belt. More than a skillful practitioner of the art, he
proved to be a unique judo teacher of the highest quality. Kano had a
great deal of faith in Moshe.13 Supported by Kano’s
authority, and through his own considerable abilities, Moshe became the
leading judo teacher in France. Moshe’s influence on the development of
the martial art in France was extraordinary, earning him the title “Pionnier du Judo en France.”14 As
Moshe became more expert at judo, he learned from and cooperated with
the judo master Mikinosuke Kawaishi. This partnership gave Feldenkrais
the background to later write two judo books. He wrote in the forward
of Higher Judo: “I wish to express my gratitude to my friend and
teacher of many years, Mr. Mikinosuke Kawaishi, 7th Dan. The figures in
the illustrations in this book represent him and myself.”15
kodokanjudoinstitute | "This concept of the best use of energy is the fundamental teaching
of Judo. In other words, it is most effectively using one's energy for a
good purpose. So, what is 'good'? Assisting in the continued
development of one's community can be classified as good, but
counteracting such advancement is bad... Ongoing advancement of
community and society is achieved through the concepts of 'Sojo-Sojo'
(help one another; yield to one another) or 'Jita-Kyoei' (mutual
benefit). In this sense, Sojo-Sojo and Jita-Kyoei are also part of the
greater good. This is the fundamental wisdom of Judo.
Kata and Randori are possible when this fundamental wisdom is applied
to techniques of attack and defence. If directed at improving the body,
it becomes a form of physical education; if applied to gaining
knowledge, it will become a method of self-improvement; and, if applied
to many things in society such as the necessities of life, social
interaction, one's duties, and administration, it becomes a way of
life...
In this way, Judo today is not simply the practice of fighting in a
dojo, but rather it is appropriately recognised as a guiding principle
in the myriad facets of human society. The practice of Kata and Randori
in the dojo, is no more than the application of Judo principles to
combat and physical training... From the study of traditional Jujutsu
Kata and Randori, I came to the realisation of this greater meaning.
Accordingly, the process of teaching also follows the same path.
Furthermore, I recognised the value of teaching Kata and Randori to many
people as a fighting art and as a form of physical training. This not
only serves the aims of the individual, but by mastery of the
fundamental wisdom of Judo, and in turn applying it to many pursuits in
life, all people will be able to live their lives in a judicious manner.
This is how one should undertake the study of Judo that I founded.
However, in actuality there are many people throughout the world living
their lives on the basis of Judo principles without knowing that this is
the real essence of Judo. If the Judo that I espouse is propagated to
society at large, the actions people undertake will become Judo without
even thinking about it. I believe that if more people gain an
understanding of the guiding principles of Judo, this philosophy will
also help guide their lives. Thus, I implore you all to make great
efforts, and initiate this trend in society." *2
To global neoliberalism’s headquarters, to the World
Economic forum, wherein is planned the 4iR and 4th Globalization.
Bill Clinton crossed a picket line
and Angela Davis has been promoting the WEF. Warren Buffet and other billionaire backers have been getting quite a return on their investment. Maybe BLM leadership is not
as leftist as they claim. If they’re planning a WEF-backed revolution,
what’s their “trained Marxist” plan? Using
Marxist analysis to promote and excuse mass layoffs, gig economy work,
and increasing monopoly power?
If the political/economic current system is good at nothing else,
it is good at identifying who to co-opt, who to buy off, and who to
marginalize. It’s the same way original black revolutionaries were co-opted into the afrodemic complex, and how civil rights negroes became reliable cogs in the DNC political machine. It’s how some
Sixties firebrands were neutered into mild-mannered academics and DNC aparatchiks, while others were shuffled off
into obscurity.
Much like the first conspirator to snitch on his comrades gets the
best deal, the same holds true for aspiring sell-outs.
Question: is there even “a national BLM leadership”, with lines of
authority and meetings and a board of directors and everything?
usatoday | “I’m really proud of the work we’ve been able to do in the last seven
years,” Patrisse Cullors, co-founder and chairwoman of the Black Lives
Matter Global Network Foundation, said in a statement. “What is clear is
that Black Lives Matter shares a name with a much larger movement and
there are literally hundreds of organizations that do impactful racial
and gender justice work who make up the fabric of this broader
movement.”
The foundation has already identified several
movement organizations that it would like to support, said Cullors, who
declined to name the groups. The foundation says it will “prioritize
mutual aid organizations, direct service and organizations focused on
creating sustainable improvements in the material conditions for all
black people.” It also looks to support black lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender-led groups.
thebaffler | The notion that black Americans are political agents just like other
Americans, and can forge their own tactical alliances and coalitions to
advance their interests in a pluralist political order is ruled out here
on principle. Instead, blacks are imagined as so abject that only
extraordinary intervention by committed black leaders has a prayer of
producing real change. This pernicious assumption continually
subordinates actually existing history to imaginary cultural narratives
of individual black heroism and helps drive the intense—and
myopic—opposition that many antiracist activists and commentators
express to Bernie Sanders, social democracy, and a politics centered on
economic inequality and working-class concerns.
The striking hostility to such a politics within the higher reaches of
antiracist activism illustrates the extent to which what bills itself as
black politics today is in fact a class politics: it is not interested
in the concerns of working people of whatever race or gender. Indeed, a
spate of recent media reports have retailed evidence that upper-class
black Americans may be experiencing stagnant-to-declining social
mobility—which is taken as prima facie evidence of the stubbornly racist
cast of the American social order: Even rich professionals like us, elite commentators suggest, are denied the right to secure our own class standing.
It is also telling that the study that provoked the media reports – Raj
Chetty, et al., “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An
Intergenerational Perspective” – rehearses the hoary recommendation
that “reducing the intergenerational persistence of the black-white
income gap will require policies whose impacts cross neighborhood and
class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.”
These include “mentoring programs for black boys, efforts to reduce
racial bias among whites, or efforts to facilitate social interaction
across racial groups within a given area.” That’s pretty thin gruel,
warmed over bromides and all too familiar paternalism and no actually
redistributive policies at all.
In this context the pronounced animus trained on the figure of the
“white savior” emerges as litmus test for the critical role of racial
gatekeeper in respectable political discourse. The gatekeeping question
has, for more than a century, focused on who speaks for black Americans
and determines the “black agenda.” And the status of black leader,
spokesperson, or “voice” has always been a direct function of contested
class prerogative, dating back a century and more to Booker T.
Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper.
Specifically, the gatekeeping function is the obsession of the
professional-managerial strata who pursue what Warren has described as
“managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem.” How do “black
leaders” become recognized? The answer is the same now as for Washington
in the 1890s; recognition as a legitimate black leader, or “voice,”
requires ratification by elite opinion-shaping institutions and
individuals.
Gatekeeping hasn’t been the exclusive preoccupation of Bookerite
conservatives or liberals like Du Bois. Even militant black nationalists
and racial separatists like Marcus Garvey and the leaders of the Nation
of Islam have pursued validation as black leaders from dominant white
elites to support programs of racial “self-help” or uplift. From Black
Power to Black Lives Matter, claimants to speak on behalf of the race
have courted recognition from the Ford Foundation and other
white-dominated nonprofit philanthropies and NGOs. And the emergence of
cable news networks and the blogosphere have exponentially expanded the
number and types of entities that can anoint race leaders and
representative voices.
This new welter of platforms and voices seeking to promulgate and
validate the acceptable terms of black leadership has made the category
seem all the more beyond question, as black racial voices pop up all
over the place all the time. So, for example, the self-proclaimed black
voice Tia Oso was brought front and center in the 2015 Netroots
Presidential Town Hall featuring Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders,
where she proclaimed that “black leadership must be foregrounded and
central to progressive strategies.” Likewise, the presumed moral
authority of race leadership enabled Marissa Johnson and Mara Jacqueline
Willaford to prevent Sanders from speaking at a Social Security rally
in Seattle—as though the long-term viability of Social Security were not
a black issue. The instant recourse to a posture of leadership is how
random Black Lives Matter activists and a vast corps of pundits and
bloggers are able to issue ex cathedra declarations about which issues are and are not pertinent to black Americans.
wedothework | Well known political commentator and activist Ralph Nader was recently
featured in a Truthdig article titled, “Why Aren’t the 99% Revolting?”.
The points made in the article sharply illustrate the scale of growing
crisis and conflict across the US and globally. It covered issues as
wide ranging as medical care, climate change, and the titanic disparity
of global wealth distribution. It concluded with the following, hollow
statement. “I could go on and on. Pick up the pace, readers. Senator
Elizabeth Warren has correctly called for “big structural changes.”
Of course, we are all asking ourselves the same thing. How bad does it have to get before widespread rebellion? How many unarmed people of color will be gunned down by police? How many civil rights are going to be stripped? How rich can the elites get off of our labor? How much pain do we all need to feel before we rise up? It’s a natural question to ask by anyone suffering the nature of US capitalism. Unfortunately, Nader’s article rings tone-deaf. Like so many liberal arguments, it places the burden of rebellion on working class people while ignoring the mechanisms that kill revolt wherever and whenever it threatens to spark into life.
Although the elements that prevent substantial rebellion are many, they really boil down to just three. They are the not for profit industry, the antiquated strategies of what is currently mislabeled as, “The union movement”, and the Democratic Party. These three elements, all loyal to each other and working in unison, act as the front-line protective mechanism for US capitalism and the political class that serves it.
Many of you will be tempted to flail at this stage of the discussion. Aren’t the Republicans so much worse? Why would anyone attack the forces that are on our side after all they have done, even if they have some traits we may disagree with? The answer is quite simple. These forces are not allied with the types of changes our world desperately needs. They are not there to build, nor even prepare the ground for those types of changes. They act, instead, as the professional brokers of negotiated surrender for communities, work forces, and the environment. They are not building movements; they are preventing them.
patrickwyman | The assumed subject of this culture is a straight, young-ish (18-40)
dude who’s kind of into fitness of some kind, whether that’s lifting
weights, a little jiu-jitsu, or what have you. He probably played sports
and currently enjoys watching them. He’s familiar with but not super
dedicated to video games and likes beer and maybe some weed from time to
time. He may or may not have a college degree, but either way has a
solid but not extremely high-paying job. He probably lives in the
suburbs, exurbs, or a rural area, rather than a dense metro. He’s
probably but not necessarily white. He’s disproportionately likely to
have served in the military, and if he hasn’t, he knows people - family
or friends - who do or did.
These various demographic, and
therefore cultural and social affiliations, don’t exist in isolation
from one another. Put together, they form a relatively stable melange,
an ecosystem with its own influencers and heroes, values and principles,
and connections to other social, cultural, and political phenomena.
It’s
rooted in physicality and the body, self-ownership through activity.
While it doesn’t necessarily eschew the life of the mind - Jocko
Willink, for example, constantly discusses and advocates the reading of
books on his podcast - that’s simply not the main focus for
self-actualization or identity. If you want to talk about intellectual
pursuits, you can do it while pulling 500 pounds or beating the hell out
of a heavy bag.
Some aspects of this are obviously new, like social media and the
role of influencers. But others aren’t. Fitness culture, one of Bro
Culture’s constituent pieces, has been around in various guises for a
long time; weightlifting came to prominence in the 1960s and 70s,
Crossfit in the 2000s, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in the last decade, but other
manifestations - like respectable men’s Muscular Christianity
around the beginning of the 20th century - have been around for much
longer. Bare-knuckle boxing was a manifestation of rough-and-tumble, working-class manhood
in later 19th century America. That working-class manhood revolved
around taverns and drinking, gambling on fights and races, a combination
of activities familiar to any self-respecting Bro today whether he
participates in them or not.
One parallel that’s particularly striking to me, though I wouldn’t take the comparison too far, is with medieval chivalry.
Hear me out.
The
popular conception of chivalry, as a moral code guiding the behavior of
honorable knights, is flat-out, laughably wrong. That’s a creation of
19th-century authors like Walter Scott, and the popular fantasy authors
(basically up until George R.R. Martin) who built on their worldview in
the 20th.
In reality, chivalry was all about one particular version of Guys Being Dudes.
Chivalry could refer to a few different things, but the most common
meaning was simply battlefield deeds, executed with some style. This,
what knights referred to as “prowess,” was at the core of the broader
ideology of chivalry: raw, bloody, physical performance, violence done effectively and to an agreed-upon aesthetic standard.
The second major concern of chivalry, honor, grew directly out of the
first. Honor wasn’t an abstract concept to medieval knights; it was a
possession, a recognition of their particular status and place in the
social hierarchy, which they were well within their rights to violently
defend and assert through their prowess. Piety was the icing on the
cake, but no knight really doubted that God approved of their actions.
aeon |Tolkien articulated his anxieties
about the cultural changes sweeping across Britain in terms of ‘American
sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass-production’, calling ‘this
Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying’ and suggesting in a 1943 letter
to his son Christopher that, if this was to be the outcome of an Allied
Second World War win, he wasn’t sure that victory would be better for
the ‘mind and spirit’ – and for England – than a loss to Nazi forces.
Lewis shared this abhorrence for ‘modern’ technologisation,
secularisation and the swiftly dismantling hierarchies of race, gender
and class. He and Tolkien saw such broader shifts reflected in changing
(and in their estimation dangerously faddish) literary norms. Writing in
the 1930s, Tolkien skewered ‘the critics’ for disregarding the
fantastical dragon and ogres in Beowulf as ‘unfashionable creatures’ in a widely read essay about that Old English poem. Lewis disparaged modernist literati in his Experiment in Criticism (1961), mocking devotees of contemporary darlings such as T S Eliot
and claiming that ‘while this goes on downstairs, the only real
literary experience in such a family may be occurring in a back bedroom
where a small boy is reading Treasure Island under the
bed-clothes by the light of an electric torch.’ If the new literary
culture was accelerating the slide to moral decay, Tolkien and Lewis
identified salvation in the authentic, childlike enjoyment of adventure
and fairy stories, especially ones set in medieval lands. And so, armed
with the unlikely weapons of medievalism and childhood, they waged a
campaign that hinged on spreading the fantastic in both popular and
scholarly spheres. Improbably, they were extraordinarily successful in
leaving far-reaching marks on the global imagination by launching an
alternative strand of writing that first circulated amongst child
readers.
These readers devoured The Hobbit and, later, The Lord of the Rings, as well as The Chronicles of Narnia
series. But they also read fantasy by later authors who began to write
in this vein – including several major British children’s writers who
studied the English curriculum that Tolkien and Lewis established at
Oxford as undergraduates. This curriculum flew in the face of the
directions that other universities were taking in the early years of the
field. As modernism became canon and critical theory was on the rise,
Oxford instead required undergraduates to read and comment on
fantastical early English works such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, Le Morte d’Arthur and John Mandeville’s Travels in their original medieval languages.
Oxford for nearly 40 years officially sanctioned magic-filled medieval works as exemplars of English literature
Students had to analyse these texts as literature rather
than only as linguistic extracts, a notable difference from the more
common approach to medieval literature at the time. Tolkien and Lewis
identified concrete moral lessons and ‘patriotic’ insights into the
national character in these magical tales of long ago. The past they
depicted was not, of course, England as it actually was in the Middle
Ages, but England as poets had imagined it to be: the enchanted realm of
heroism, righteousness and romance where 19th-century nationalists had
identified the moral and racial heart of the nation. (The Oxford
curriculum was, in this sense, a throwback to English studies’ roots in
colonial education, which – as the literary scholar Gauri Viswanathan
has shown in Masks of Conquest (2014) – often looked to prove English right to rule through the glory of its national literature.
The unique educational programme that dominated English at Oxford for
nearly 40 years officially sanctioned magic-filled medieval works as
exemplars of English literature for generations of students that passed
through the university’s power-filled halls. And a number of these
students went on to write their own popular children’s fantasy, some to
great acclaim. Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland
and Philip Pullman in particular, who each received their English
degrees between 1956 and 1968, draw on medieval and early modern
literary sources, many directly taken from the Oxford syllabus, to
create new, self-reflectively serious fantasy for young readers.
Together with Tolkien and Lewis, this group forms the Oxford School of
children’s fantasy literature. Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising quintet (1965-77) and Crossley-Holland’s Arthur
trilogy (2000-03) give King Arthur’s story fresh context and resonance
for understanding contemporary Britain in their times; meanwhile, the
works of Jones and Pullman delight in subverting fantasy expectations
while introducing early English literature to new generations of
readers. They all celebrate the purported wisdom of old stories, and
follow the central tenet that Tolkien set out for fairy-stories: ‘one
thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in the story
be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.’
The Oxford School’s reimagining of medieval tales for modern
audiences injected these fantastical narratives into the public
consciousness, largely eluding elite and scholarly notice because their
works were branded as children’s literature. At the same time, taking
ancient, canonical texts as the foundations for new stories helped to
give their fantasy the historical depth and cultural weight to resist
derisive laughter and make claims about the present. For instance, the
dragon episode at the end of The Hobbit is full of parallels to the one in Beowulf, from the cup-theft that wakes the worm to its destructive expressions of rage. But The Hobbit
uses this narrative to pit a traditionalist and noble-born hero (Bard,
whose name means ‘poet’, ‘storyteller’) against an untrustworthy elected
official, hammering home the significance of conservative traditions
over the whims of easily swayed masses. Tolkien’s novel ends with the
protagonist Bilbo’s delighted discovery of this barely veiled moral:
‘the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a
fashion!’
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...