That's a lotta marinara

A couple of years ago I tried watching Dario Argento's The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and wound up bailing pretty early. Tonight I gave Argento another go, watching the original Suspiria. I don't know that giallo is my scene, but I'll give the movie this: It's nuts, and there's a kind of commitment in it being just this nuts.

Jessica Harper plays a new student at a ballet school in, I think, Germany. It's a (really gory) horror flick, so there's a killer and there are witches and some other awful stuff. But just getting around the town and dealing with the people feels like enough of an ordeal. I suspect the movie was sponsored by the Americans Stay The Fuck Out of Europe Council.

The Goblins' musical score is really hyperactive, with rinky-dink keyboards paired with proto-black metal vocals.

You know. For kids.

In recent years it's often seemed that left wing ideology has gained its greatest power―or at least institutional acceptance―just as it's lost touch with human values. And that's probably not a coincidence. It wouldn't be the first time those two traits have gone together.

As Matt Taibbi notes in the preamble to this interview, Tim Robbins has frequently drawn fire for his political outspokenness. And he was and remains a man of the left. But he has his own values above political fashion. I'd heard about his opposition to the vaccine requirements held by the big acting unions before, and this is an opportunity to find out more of where he's coming from. Quite refreshing.

The designer t-shirt gang

So protesting by destroying, damaging, or at least threatening art is definitely a thing now. For the Earth and the climate, sure. The relationship of protests to topic is rather Underpants Gnome, but there you go.

I've heard it suggested that the real purpose is to provide an excuse to pull these works of art out of public view. How surprising would this be, really? If there's one thing that unites CEOs, nonprofits, and the activist class it's the belief that regular people shouldn't have nice things. Now to do something about it.

The why of science

I came to this blog post through Tara Ann Thieke's Twitter feed. It raises some questions and provides some context that I've thought about and read about before, but puts it all together in an original and thoughtful way.

Essentially the question comes down to what science is now? Is anyone still practicing it? And if not, if they're doing something else and calling it science, what exactly is it they're doing?

The younger generation of scientists are like children who have been raised by wolves. They have learned the techniques but have no feel for the proper aims, attitudes and evaluations of science. What little culture they have comes not from science but from bureaucrats: they utterly lack scientific culture; they do not talk science, instead they spout procedures.

It has now become implicitly accepted among the mass of professional ‘scientists’ that the decisions which matter most in science are those imposed upon science by outside forces: by employers (who gets the jobs, who gets promotion), funders (who gets the big money), publishers (who gets their work in the big journals), bureaucratic regulators (who gets allowed to do work), and the law courts (whose ideas get backed-up, or criminalized, by the courts). It is these bureaucratic mechanisms that constitute ‘real life’ and the ‘bottom line’ for scientific practice. The tradition has been broken.

Viewed in this way, science is a microcosm of human thought in general. Society, or at least a big visible portion, has enshrined obedience as the prime value in a way not previously seen in modern times. Just the basic human ability to reason and create has been denigrated of late. The cargo cult worship of AI is sufficient evidence of that.

Anyway, many such cases.

No service

Web surfing recently I saw an article on Stephen King's Salem's Lot and the difficulties of adapting it (as the studio keeps shifting the release date of an upcoming movie). It's not a bad piece and I certainly don't want to pick on it given the paltry sums that online entertainment pieces tend to bring in. But a passage stuck out to me:

Salem’s Lot also, in the final analysis, needs to be a period piece like Scott Derrickson’s recent The Black Phone. In the current age of smartphones, GPS, internet, and social media, there’s no way that the population of an entire American town, no matter how small, could disappear into thin air without the outside world noticing.

How long have I been hearing variations on the argument that horror and thriller plots are obsolete because cell phones? If this observation were human it could vote, join the army, and―this is the good news―go into a bar for a drink. So I guess that's why nothing bad or weird ever happens anymore.

Salem's Lot is about an ancient vampire traveling with a fussy antique dealer as his Renfield and how they cause havoc in an already soapy Maine town. It's far-fetched by definition. I'm not sure how putting it in the present would strain your suspension of disbelief any further.

Deliverance

Recently my building got a new lock on the door, so we all got new keys to get in. Nice looking key, too. Only problem was, at least initially, the Post Office didn't get a copy of this key. Meaning there was more than a week that we got no mail.

This agitated me, although I didn't put it together at first. I thought it was just me and the PO somehow thought I had moved or died. Eventually I figured it out.

A very nice and savvy neighbor took care of things, so we have service again, hallelujah.

Sick of...

I'm now reading Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. It's not the first book I've read by Illich, but it holds a special place, I think, in terms of his coming into his own as a writer and thinker. In a number of places you could even call it prophetic. A passage:

Diagnosis always intensifies stress, defines incapacity, imposes inactivity, and focuses apprehension on non-recovery, on uncertainty, and on one's dependence on future medical findings, all of which amounts to a loss of autonomy for self-definition. It also isolates a person in a special role, separates him from the normal and healthy, and requires submission to the authority of specialized personnel. Once a society organizes for a preventive disease hunt, it gives epidemic proportions to diagnosis. This ultimate triumph of therapeutic culture turns the independence of the average healthy person into an intolerable form of deviance.

In the long run the main activity of such an inner-directed systems society leads to the phantom production of life expectancy as a commodity. By equating statistical man with biologically unique men, an insatiable demand for finite resources is created. The individual is subordinated to the greater "needs" of the whole, preventive procedures become compulsory, and the right of the patient to withhold consent to his own treatment vanishes as the doctor argues that he must submit to diagnosis, since society cannot afford the burden of curative procedures that would be even more expensive.

In these two paragraphs you can see the root of some things that would grow to immense proportions. The ability of a single disease to dominate the entire public agenda as long as government favored scientists choose to make it the top priority, perhaps for more than two years. Countries with legalized euthanasia getting trigger happy with it. The driver of much of this is the increased power of the pharmaceutical industry, which in many cases becomes untouchable. This is a danger Illich saw coming as well.