There is little doubt…that Curtis Scherr intended to inflict severe emotional distress on his daughter-in-law and succeeded in doing so. – Richard Posner
Not too many good links this week; the World Cup and hearings on the new Canadian Prohibition dominated my timeline, so if there were any other good links I missed them. Most of these items are wholly absurd; some are funny-absurd and some horrifying-absurd, but most point to a world gone mad, especially where politics is concerned. Everything down to the first video is from Grace; the links between the videos are from Jasper Gregory (“war”), Michael Whiteacre (“LOL”), Popehat (“bureaucracy” and “trademark”), and Mike Riggs (“horrible”); and the second video (via Brooke Magnanti) is the world’s oldest surviving song, which may help you relax after all the brain-strain produced by the other items.
- Cop arrests man for refusing to let his house catch fire.
- “Kafkaesque” is too weak a word.
- I hate it when this happens.
- War is hard!
- I genuinely LOLed.
- Bureaucracy at work.
- The absurdity of modern trademark law.
- Proof that government will ban literally anything it can.
- One of the most horrible excuses for a human being ever.
From the Archives
- A thorough debunking of the oft-repeated claim that “human trafficking is the third most profitable crime”.
- The government just can’t resist trying to control anything involving sex.
- The ridiculous & harmful consequences of laws against consensual acts.
- Government “study” made to justify sexist “trafficking” preconceptions.
- Reinforcing whorearchy is not the way to win right to employ whores.
- How to support decriminalization without revealing personal interest.
- Wealthy control freak wants everyone on the “sex offender” registry.
- Politicians are usually forgiven; those whose lives they destroy, not.
- Other things FBI agents believe in besides rampant “sex trafficking”.
- Irish nuns abducted children from mothers, sold them to Americans.
- Australian prohibitionists say that poor Asian women are all stupid.
- Cops, thieves, Popeye, sociopaths, Florida, prisoners and slinkies.
- US blocks sex workers from conference, so they set up their own.
- No, a camera doesn’t magically protect sex workers from arrest.
- More sophomoric “humor” from sadistic New York “authorities”.
- Yet another case of government interference magnifying harm.
- Swedish feminist wants ban on drinking alcohol near children.
- At least Argentinian “survivors” don’t support criminalization.
- Swedish prostitutes win the right to claim social benefits.
- Shamans punish teen girl for possession of taboo object.
- Mainstream media begins to discover Dr. Laura Agustín.
- The true story of a Nigerian sex worker in Amsterdam.
- When governments ban things, they magically vanish!
- Interview with an escort arrested for looking young.
- The beginning of my guest blogging on The Agitator.
- An anti-criminalization article in The National Review.
- Chinese “authorities” evict activist from her home.
- Why I have no sympathy for dangerous enemies.
- French sex workers protest the Swedish model.
- Could bitcoin help in the Greek monetary crisis?
- New York’s most famous madam of the 1920s.
- Five whores protest their pimps’ prosecution.
- The outing of prohibitionist shill “Stella Marr”.
- Using the passive voice to shift the blame.
- My second and third anniversary columns.
- Somalia sets age of majority to 40.
- Another week, another rapist cop.
- R.I.P. Petite Jasmine.
- A mysterious gift.
The oldest surviving written song maybe.
There’s good reason to believe some of the songs still sung in this part of the world are tens of thousands of years old.
Eurasian civilisation is just a baby.
True, but oral traditions shift more than written ones; at which point does a song change so much that, like the language it’s sung in, we start calling it a different thing? It may be that some songs sung continuously for the past 3000 years may sound even less like their original performances than this Hurrian one no doubt does. Even when time doesn’t obliterate the work of humans, it usually changes it beyond recognition.
Umm, do you really think Sumerian as reconstructed today would be recognisable to an ancient Sumerian? They’re clay tablets, not CDs. The scholars are divided over interpretation and admit that they are just guessing as to the rhythm. It’s not even likely that a modern Shakespeare scholar would have understood spoken Elizabethan English (of any of the dialects spoken in England at the time) much less a modern Sumerian scholar being able to reconstruct the spoken or sung language of Ugarit.
OTOH, Aboriginal culture has been remarkably stable for millenia according to evidence from stone tools, rock art and linguistic drift. The songs here are used to navigate and many Central Australian landforms have remained virtually unchanged since humans arrived here around 60,000 years ago.
I’d bet there are songs sung around corroboree fires today that are much closer to those of 34,000 years ago than Ms Kilmer’s composition is to anything sung in Ugarit 3,400 years ago. And as the rhythms come from nature I bet they’re close to the originals too.
Besides, you are falling into a conceit common to literate people if you think oral traditions are inherently more likely to shift than written ones. Songs, poetry and chants in particular are an excellent way of handing down information through the generations with high reproductive fidelity. The Buddhist Suttas were composed as an oral tradition – which is why they are so ponderous and repetitive on the page. The Koran has been committed to memory and handed down for generations among illiterate villagers without deviation from the written text – even among non-Arabic speakers.
I meant no disrespect; I do realize that the song in this video may sound very different from the way it was originally sung, which I noted. But I must point out that even if the oral WORDS changed little, we know nothing about how the music – the tune, rhythm, even cadence – may have changed in thousands or tens of thousands of years.
From Wikipedia on Songlines:
i.e. If you’re out of tune or miss the beat, you’re lost.
Besides, I don’t think the rhythm of kangaroo jumps or the melody of bird calls have changed much over the past hundred thousand years or so and that’s where the music comes from, though some songs come from totemic animals now long extinct so I guess they’re harder to validate.
I think I’d probably have to listen to a lot of these songs (in the company of someone who could explain) to really grasp what you’re talking about here; I think I understand somewhat, but I probably don’t.
That sounds reasonable to me, but if you ever find yourself in Australia try to get away from the coastal cities and main roads for a bit. Time runs deep here and you can feel it. I reckon that will show you more of what I mean than anything anyone can tell you.
If you check out some of the traditional Aboriginal music on Youtube your spine will tell you something about its age.
A more appropriate word would be “stagnant”.
And I would argue that the aboriginal culture really doesn’t exist anymore in significant form.
Human history demonstrates over and over again – that if a culture isn’t dynamic and changing … it is supplanted by something else. The fact that Aboriginal culture exists at all today can be attributed to a rather new concept of Western Civilization … that of attempting to “preserve” stagnant, archaic cultures.
Too bad it didn’t happen for the American Indian in time.
But the aboriginal culture is destined for the dust heap of history too. Proof of that is that very few aboriginals live the way they used to – and just about all of them have adopted Western ways of living. Getting together and dancing naked around a bonfire a few times a year doesn’t count as real “culture” … it’s more like … “camping”.
Just to clarify … when I say it doesn’t exist in “significant” form – I’m saying that it’s like the Micronesian Kingfisher – which is a bird you can only see in a zoo – as it no longer exists in the wild anymore.
Another example is my mother.
As far as I know she’s never attended a corroboree, never eaten a goanna and couldn’t track a wallaby if her life depended on it. But the vilification she suffered at school left her in no doubt whatsoever that she is an Aborigine.
She paints primarily in oils on masonite and her style is strongly influenced by white artists such as Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale. But no Australian Aborigine would doubt for an instant that her works such as “Thursday’s Child” or “Empty Lands and Hollow Men” (named from the Eliot poem) are Aboriginal art. Last I heard “Thursday’s Child” was in a private collection of indigenous art somewhere in the US (the curator wrote to her in the 1990s to learn about it’s origin and inspiration).
The only ‘preservation’ she gets comes from Revlon and Max Factor.
I think you are confusing “culture” with “race” … they are two separate things. The Aboriginal race exists – and will for quite some time to come – but the culture is on the rocks.
I’m also detecting a lot of “spiritualization” in what you’ve been writing here. Don’t get me wrong, I respect all beliefs (with the exception of perhaps Muhammadism and Mormonism) … which is why I often defend Christians and Jews and Hindus, even though I don’t subscribe to those beliefs.
I think you’re confusing culture with cliche. Aboriginal cultures are no more about nomadic hunter gatherers sitting around a fire chomping on charred snake (which is delicious, BTW) than American cultures are about riding around the prairie in a ten gallon hat with a big iron on your hip.
Look up the videos I recommended and see if you think it’s about race or culture. Yothu Yindi has always been a multi-racial band but it’s cultural orientation is unmistakable even to those who know sweet FA about Aboriginality. Ditto with the Warumpi Band, Coloured Stone and lots of other Aboriginal bands.
One of the main defining factors of modern Aboriginal culture is the experience of invasion and colonisation. We’ve all got stories of family members being stolen by the government solely because of their race and lots of us have even worse tales to tell. It is even more of a cultural touchstone to us than the Holocaust is to the Jews (unlike them, pretty much *all* Aborigines were subjected to eugenic government policies for over half a century up until the 1970s. Before then they just exterminated us as vermin. Federal Aboriginal policy was under the the Flora and Fauna Act until 1967).
It’s only post-enlightenment Westerners who distinguish between spirituality and everything else they do. What’s culture if you strip the spirituality out of it?
Yep, the songlines tell the stories of creator spirits as well as providing an eminently practical means of safely navigating vast tracts of desolate countryside. And unlike a lot of ‘scientific’ medical therapies they work whether you are a believer or not.
There are a handful of particularly stupid right-wing Australian historians who would agree with you there (e.g. Keith Windschuttle). But they also argue that Aborigines are recent blow-ins who supplanted some mysterious Negrito people who were the original inhabitants but who somehow left no skeletal, genetic nor linguistic remains, that the smallpox epidemic that devastated Sydney basin Aborigines within a year of white settlement had coincidentally spread all the way from Indonesia without affecting other populations on the way and that no significant massacres of Aborigines by white settlers ever took place.
Everything is eventually supplanted by something else but the problem with the spirit of your thesis is that Aboriginal culture has persisted for at least ten times longer than any Eurasian or American civilisation has thus far. I bet it will still be around long after the US empire has gone the way of Ozymandias too. That’s because it arises from The Land instead of fighting against it all the time. And The Land abides.
Not even the most ignorant Australian rednecks make that claim – except inasmuch as some would argue that traditional Aboriginal cultures still extant in the Central Desert, Kimberleys, Arnhem Land, Cape York, etc only survive by virtue of government handouts. Dealers in Aboriginal art know better.
Unless by ‘preservation’ you mean the laws that restrain those who would still like to see Aborigines completely wiped out. And I doubt they could succeed even with full government backing any more than the Nazis were able to extinguish Jewish culture.
Australian racists often use Aboriginal groups who retain millennia old traditions to argue that syncretic and urban Aboriginal culture is somehow inauthentic because they use acrylic paints, electric guitars or Photoshop. You might as well claim that true white American culture is dead because you don’t see too many people getting around in ‘coon skin hats anymore.
Look up some Yothu Yindi music or Bangarra Dance Theatre productions on Youtube and try to tell me it’s not Aboriginal because it’s changed a bit in the last century or so or because their members sometimes chow down on a Big Mac. Yothu Yindi is one of the most commercially successful bands ever to come out of Australia and they sure don’t owe their existence to balanda ‘preservation’ efforts.
Cab …
The Aboriginal culture really doesn’t exist now. You are going off on tangents that I never explored – and aren’t relevant. You cannot change the fact that most Aboriginals have either adopted Western culture in total – or they have adopted huge portions of it to the extent that the Aboriginal culture plays a secondary role in their lives. I don’t care about identity politics – or someone who THINKS they have the Aboriginal spirit inside them while they have an iPod plugged into their eardrums playing Katie Perry.
You are also mistaking the “American Empire” for Western Culture – why did you even mention the “Empire” – when it’s really irrelevant to the culture? The American Empire could be gone tomorrow – so in that case, yes … some “semblance” of Aboriginal culture would have outlasted the “American Empire” – but who cares? And … as I have stated – that primitive culture exists only as a “curio” today.
Something lasting for “tens of thousands of years” … is really not that special if it never changes … or if it never really impacted the world as a whole. The Aboriginal culture never had far-strung lasting impact on the world that the Greek and Roman ones did. I say this as guy who’s ancestors were neither Greek, nor Roman. My ancestors cultures were run over by those cultures – because they were stagnant.
In fact … any impact the Aboriginal culture had on the world was courtesy of Western Culture … in exporting it as a curiosity to places like the United States – where you can buy a didgeridoo or a boomerang in trinket shops here. We’ve seen “Crocodile Dundee” – so we are familiar with Aboriginals. I have actually been to Oz and met Aborigines … in Western bars and nightclubs.
The White Aussies I’ve met complain about Aborigines getting too much support from the government. I don’t have a dog in that hunt … but I shall make the observation that if it’s true – it’s another example of that “evil” Western Culture giving “mouth-to-mouth” to a primitive, outdated and irrelevant culture in an effort to keep it around a bit longer.
Don’t take this hard … I myself have a good bit of American Indian in me … and Scot Highlander – and those are two irrelevant cultures also. I can deal with it though … because I can’t change the past and I understand the natural law that if you aren’t changing and moving … you’re dieing.
But I take a hard view of the world. I don’t expect people to be “fair”. If I don’t keep myself in shape and some guy “tries” me and beats the shit out of me (for no reason at all) … who’s to blame? I would blame myself. I left my house unlocked once and got robbed in San Diego. I wrote it off as my fault – my open door was an open invitation to thieves. So I’m not hung up on some White men running over my Indian ancestors – they lost the game because they were stagnant and undeveloped – and, to a large extent you can blame their culture for that. Why? Because it was tied up in spirituality in the land and never looking outward … never looking to improve itself.
Same with the Highlanders – their culture kept them from uniting to defend their lands. They got run over.
But the only thing I really share with those ancestors is some blood. They’re not me. I don’t revere their cultures – they were weak and had flaws. I do not desire to have either – so I have moved past that.
I just rethought all this … after it occurred to me … “Why am I arguing with Cab about culture – when I really don’t believe in the concept?”
Because I would argue that Western Civilization has NO unique culture. It’s an amalgamation of a lot of different cultures that existed and traditions and practices created on the fly to suit certain circumstances – which are discarded often when the circumstances that created them cease to exist.
This is superior to “culture”.
And I should know – having served the US Navy for decades, an organization so bogged down in “culture” it often gets in the way of getting things done. Air Force guys, when they watched how we did things – were simply dumbfounded at how tied to culture we were. They were right – we could have been an order of magnitude better had we said … “Well this piece of culture is GONE! Because it’s just getting in the way!”
I take a very “Darwinian” view of things – the strong survive. For that to happen, the strong need to adapt, overcome, improvise. The problem with Western Civilization right now is we are turning away from that – and starting to envy “cultures” that we previously supplanted.
But “culture” is like an anchor around your neck – and makes you completely predictable to your opponent. For a civilization to survive – and history has proven this – it needs to be able create new culture, borrow good culture from others, and discard old, outdated ones.
If the Aboriginal “culture” survives – this is how it will do it. But then again – it would be fallacious to argue that the end result would be anything approximating ancient Aboriginal culture. Therefore, the “thousands of years” argument would be pointless.
Ditto for Aboriginal cultures prior to white invasion. Even more so since then.
It’s the same here. Naval officers are, by and large, the most incompetent wastes of space in the Australian military – so we give them control of our most expensive hardware. The promotion system has more in common with 18th Century British class nepotism than military meritocracy. The government likes to appoint senior naval officers as military policy advisors because they will kiss arse and only say what the pollies want to hear.
I wonder what it is about Navies. Too fond of rum, sodomy and the lash? (Alcohol has sunk nearly as many Australian warships as enemy fire).
And Australian Aborigines (some of us at least) have the longest surviving continuous cultures on the face of the planet with the likely exceptions of the San in Africa and Andoman and Nicobar Islanders.
Most ‘dynamic’ cultures eventually go into decadent decline without any help from external invaders. The barbarians at the gates only provide the coup de grace. And a heck of a lot of them screw themselves by raping their own land. A lot of the problem is belief in the myth of progress. Nothing grows forever without fouling its nest and choking on its own shit.
Which is exactly what Aboriginal cultures have been doing for the past few centuries – though some ignorant people believe that has made them no longer Aboriginal.
And again I would emphasise that if you want to learn about cultural survival you should really take a harder look at the reigning champions. Aborigines.
So the more white American culture diverges from that on the Mayflower the less it becomes American culture?
If Aboriginal culture survives the next few centuries it will be because it teaches us to respect the Land we live on. European based cultures are unlikely to be so lucky.
Then I guess you’re totally alienated from American culture if you’ve got the keys to a Japanese bike in your pocket. And if you listen to blues you must be a wannabe African American.
Of course US culture is dominated by the 2000+ year old superstitions of illiterate Semitic tribes, so there probably *is* no American culture for you to adopt when you get down to it. It hasn’t died out because it was never born.
It changes when it serves a purpose to change. There’s no need to change something that works and Aboriginal culture has been providing stable and rich lives to millions since Europeans were screwing Neanderthals. But when Europeans rolled up and started screwing *us* it had to change. So it has.
Shit. We didn’t inflict napalm, the Academy Awards and world-wide junk food chains on the world. We just minded our own business and lived happily and in harmony with our environment instead of looking for neighbours to destroy. What a bunch of failures we are.
If you take a look in your history books you’ll find that cultural dynamism has never provided much protection against genocide. Ask the Hungarian Jews.
On the contrary, many Aborigines believe that ‘sit down money’ is one of the main things that cripples Aboriginal culture. But for a lot of people, when your land’s been stolen and jobs are denied you (unless you are prepared to give up your culture entirely and climb onto the very lowest rung of white society instead) it’s welfare or starvation. Dying tends to cramp your culture too.
Actually a lot of things white Americans believe to be their own culture have been appropriated from Native American cultures. It was the Iroquois who taught you about Federal democracy wasn’t it?
Ditto here. The famously dry, laconic Australian sense of humour that Americans have so much trouble understanding? Aboriginal. The belief in egalitarianism and disrespect for official authority? Aboriginal.
I think you’ll find the belief that contemporary mainstream US culture is an improvement on what the Native Americans had is a minority viewpoint outside your borders.
Wow! A perfected being! I never knew that Disneyland and Dunkin’ Donuts was so enlightening before.
I always know I’ve won an argument – when my opponent stops listening to me and starts throwing out strawmen. I never said I was perfect or that anything you could call American “culture” was perfect. What I said was – it’s all dynamic. It’s the people who DO NOT change who are the ones who are arrogant enough to think they are “perfect” like er … primitive civilizations such as the Aboriginals.
I think I stated as much – that there is no monolithic culture. Thank you for hearing that. Perhaps you also heard the part where I said basically that this is the superior condition of mankind – not being anchored to a set culture that one can’t shed when necessary without going extinct.
Because, as we all know – eating ants and running for your life from wild dogs is … “something that works”. LOL Cab … how many ants would you say you’ve eaten in your life? Your Mom, I’m assuming – is Aboriginal … you’re on the internet. Your ancestors, who created your culture, might think that the internet was some kind of evil spirit. Now, before you throw out a strawman here and say that mine would too … of course they would. But I don’t live, or even claim to live in, or identify with, my ancestor’s culture. If Aboriginal culture “works” and is so “rich” – then why have so many abandoned it?
You also never put a man (actually MANY men) on the moon. You never created a spacecraft that left this solar system. You never invented manned flight or airborne passenger transportation. You didn’t invent a REAL medical system that has saved the lives of MILLIONS on this planet. You never eliminated a disease like smallpox. You never came up with written histories so that generations could actually learn from the mistakes of the past (and no – oral histories are NOT a replacement for that – if they are, they’re a very poor one). You never attempted to understand the scientific foundation of the universe or even of this planet. You never created energy systems that have allowed the lives of humans to become comfortable … and casual.
Couple things … are the Aboriginals the same as American Indians who said … “No one owns the land” ??? If so, how can you say their land was stolen if they, themselves claim not to have owned it? Second thing … and you’re gonna have to help me with this one. But just when was the last tract of Aboriginal land stolen? You see … I hear this all the time with the Mexicans saying “YOU STOLE CALIFORNIA AND TEXAS” … no … no one alive today “stole” California or Texas (if it was ever really stolen) and … no one alive today had California and Texas stolen from them. Remember the line from “Kingdom of Heaven” … “We fight today over an offense we were not alive to give … against those who were not alive to be offended”. Get over the past, Cab – the world is how we found it – that cannot change. The Highlander’s aren’t getting their land back and they shouldn’t. Neither will the American Indians. The claim to the land belongs to those who are strong enough to claim it and hold it. That is the law of nature and man – the strong rule. The weak serve. Always. To borrow a line from the Athenians … “We didn’t create this rule, it was here long before us and will exist long after we are gone.”
Opinions are like assholes, Cab – everyone has one. They do not matter. What matters is fact and when a culture is so rigid it will not advance technologically to improve the lot of the people – it will be replaced. The one in US will be replaced one day … the one in Australia likewise. But don’t expect to see it supplanted by Aboriginal culture – that train has passed. Unless of course, there’s some kind of nuclear holocaust that blows us back to the dawn of man – and in that case I reckon the survivors may be happy eating bugs and believing in spirits.
This is not the way to get under my skin. As I’ve stated, I deal in what’s real and “real” means the world the way I found it. I’m pretty sure I have some Neanderthal DNA in my makeup – though I haven’t checked. My ATF has 4%, because she checked – and she’s a blonde haired blue-eyed hottie. In fact, I’ve heard that it may have been the Neanderthal DNA that created blonde and red hair.
And … in addition to Neanderthal DNA, statistics say that within my DNA makeup is the blood of rapists, pedophiles, thieves, genocidal maniacs, tyrants, murderers … and maybe a few guys and gals of genuinely good character.
The good – the bad – I don’t identify with them, Cab. An insult to them is not an insult to me. I haven’t screwed any Neanderthals … though if I found an attractive one that was willing to do a bit of trimming down there and shave her pits … I probably would. No strike that … I DEFINITELY WOULD. LOL
I laugh at people who tell me … “I just did a genealogy thing and I have ROYAL blood!” Good for you! When are you getting the fuck off food stamps? You could tell me that I’m a direct descendant of Julius Caesar – and I wouldn’t even mention it to anyone, it’s not important in the real world that I live in. I’m certainly no Julius Caesar by any stretch of the imagination.
By the way … take none of this as an offense. I didn’t know until today that you were Aboriginal. But … I consider that to be your race – and I have made no derogatory statements against the race. What I am criticizing, is the romanticism with ancient, replaced cultures that were clearly inferior or they would not have been replaced. In my view, saying that Aboriginal culture was inferior – is not a statement against you. You do not live in that culture – you have adapted and embraced other cultures as a part of your daily life. In my view … there is no “magical string” that connects you with the Aboriginals who lived in Australia before the arrival of the British prisoners – or whoever they were. There is no “magical” connection between me and the Native Indians … nor with the Highlanders.
If you imagine such … that is your issue and not mine.
For anyone interested who is unfamiliar with the place of song in Aboriginal culture I’d recommend checking out this Wikipedia entry.
The songs of Aborigines are not written on anything as ephemeral as paper or clay tablets. They are written in The Land. Their fidelity is assured partly by natural selection. Get the words wrong and you’re likely to perish in the desert.
A Chicago police officer who’s a complete bastard? I’m shocked. SHOCKED, I tells ya!