I have been a musician for more than 50 years. — TheQuestioner

I consider your observation to be a creative insight. Up until the time when recorded music became at least fairly good, plentiful, cheap, and easily distributed, music could not be ubiquitous. All that happened between 70 and 90 years ago. Prior to that, hearing music depended on live performance. Now music IS ubiquitous--everything from early medieval to whatever crap was written yesterday is on tap and often of superb quality. Once the recording is finished, the producers of the piece can all drop dead but their music will live on.

Novels, painting, sculpture, opera, poetry, dance, music--all the arts--have become vastly more available to billions of people than they were before high speed printing, photography, motion film, radio, and television came along. What art hasn't been affected by this?

The role of the non-elite composer or performer has declined in value against the backdrop of the mass art market (of which recorded sound is a part).

I have no advice on the matter except to suggest doing something new and different, maybe.

How old are you now? Maybe age is snowing white hairs on your head; maybe you are past your creative peak? People peak at whatever it is they do--though some peak a lot later than others. I peaked around 50. I wasn't in the arts but I still had a creative peak. Since then bright ideas have been fewer and farther between. My depth has improved (I'm 74 now) but not speed, efficiency, or brilliance.

Where were you thinking Felonia should be? Depending on one's politics, Manhattan? Georgia? Los Angeles? Puerto Rico? North Dakota? Isle Royale (its in Lake Superior--(206 square miles--much bigger than Manhattan and unoccupied, except by wolves and moose)? Aleutian Islands? Or maybe Russia would rent us a couple of gulags in Siberia.

Banishment would have some real, positive benefits.

Given the high cost of crime and punishment, it behooves us to spend more money on prevention. Poverty + harshly uneven opportunity in education, employment, health, housing, and so on contribute to crime because it makes people bitter, resentful, and unwilling to abide by the social norms of polite society.

Granted, there are people who commit crime who had some opportunity -- and even made use of it. But a lot of crime comes out of a collective of bad circumstances.

A better society will probably produce less crime. No guarantees, but improving our society makes more sense than what we have been doing in the last 50 years (like the neoliberal regime).

So what evidence do we have that corporeal punishment (beating, whipping, caning, shock, etc.) works as a deterrent to crime, and what are the psychological damages to the person performing the whipping and the person receiving?

We need secure prisons for dangerous criminals who are likely to pose a serious threat to society. How many would that be? Far less than the present prison census. Violent gang leaders, hit men, serial murderers... yes. Lock 'em up for life or execute them.

Society has collective responsibilities to its members as well, and ought to arrange things so that being good, and not resorting to crime, is easier--a more difficult proposition than building lots of concrete bunkers to stuff people into.

Will we do a better job improving society so that fewer people turn to predatory crime? I'm not confident.

I think your guess is pretty much spot on. English didn't become a world language on the merits of the language itself. The British Empire projected English into North America, South Asia, and Africa. Later on, the United States continued the process. Conquest, trade, politics, religion, etc.

Latin and French, two other lingua franca, achieved their status in the same way.

The fussy French have guarded the development of their language much more closely than most languages have -- "The Académie française was established in 1635 to act as the official authority on the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language, and to publish an official dictionary of the French language. Its recommendations however carry no legal power and are sometimes disregarded even by governmental authorities."

Curiously, Google Translate French to English doesn't even recognize "lingua franca" as French. It thought that it might be Corsican.

Esperanto was invented to serve as a universal language. There are language hobbyists who learn it, but it hasn't caught on yet. It was created by Polish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887. There are a couple of million people who speak it. If someday you find that you have absolutely nothing else left to do, you could become the first Esperanto poster on this form.

Anything further you might want to add? — TheMadFool

Old English wasn't simple, but it was the Germanic language of an agrarian people who decamped from Western Europe and took up life in England. The Angles and Saxons pretty much dominated the people already living there, so they didn't have to borrow a lot of words from the natives. That changed in 1066 when William the Conqueror (AKA William the Bastard) invaded and took over England. The Normans didn't make any effort to stamp out Old English, but since they spoke Old French and were running things, it behooved the English to pay attention to French words. a lot of French was added to OE, and usage gradually changed OE into Middle English. Just one of many changes, pork (Fr.) was added to pig, hog, and swine (all Old English). Cow is from the Germanic, Beef (boef) is is from the French.

A lot of the complexity of Old English was milled out of Old English over time. Old English became Middle English, which with some effort and patience a Modern English speaker can learn fairly easily. Middle English became modern English as the result of use. Intellectuals began writing in English, and late Middle English had a relatively lean vocabulary. Writers reached into French, Latin, and Greek for more complex word-stock that could carry big ideas.

So, a lot of words were added to English in the 1400s and 1500s. By 1600 English had become pretty much the language it is today.

Bringing this back to God Almighty, William Tyndale's English translation of the Bible came out in 1525. It had a strong influence on a more famous version, the King James Bible, published in 1611. For his scholarly efforts, Tyndale was convicted of heresy, strangled, and then burnt at the stake in what is now Belgium. Tyndale had completed the NT translation, but hadn't finished the OT books when he was executed. Religious authorities were very touchy back then, and just didn't like democratizing the Word of God, which was their bailiwick.

You said something important! Damn my memory! It had to do with the masculine pronoun "he" and the word for god - "father" - not implying that god is male. — TheMadFool

Maybe that "he" is the English default for person. He, mankind, men... She, womankind, woman just isn't the default. If a writer says, "all womankind" one would assume the reference was to all women, not all people, while "all mankind" refers to both men and women. Some languages are gendered -- like French, Spanish, Latin, etc. Anglo Saxon may have been gendered (don't remember) but over time English became less and less inflected, so it became simplified. Mother, father, man, woman, brother, sister... are gendered while person and people are neuter. The pronoun for person is he, she. "It" is for objects, not persons, and gods are persons. So, god is either a man or a woman. Athena is a female, Apollo is a male. Jesus was a male, Mary was his mother, and God was his father. That's the way it was conceived, so to speak.

Sometimes woke writers will use "she" instead of "he" as the default. It is less jarring than it used to be, but still requires invoking a mental subroutine to acknowledge what the writer is doing and make allowance for it. I'm 74 and I'm not adopting major new linguistic habits here on out. English doesn't have a neuter gender for individuals, though "we" and "them" are neuter plurals (at least for the last several hundred years).

The masculine default is very deep in English, and might be the default across the Indo-European family of languages--but my knowledge of Indo-European is extraordinarily thin. I'd like to be an expert on everything, but... just wasn't paying enough attention in class.

As for the "fearsome" bit, it muddies the waters - how could someone being decapitated or having faer chest crushed in a vehicular accident be beautiful? — TheMadFool

OK, forget fearsome. I was thinking of a phrase from the Psalms, "Blessed are they who fear the Lord and walk in His ways". The blessed are not scared -- they are awed. But never mind, There is a better word -- sublime -- that describes a certain quality of great things -- like the universe, the earth viewed from the moon, or the starry night sky. The sublime is not merely nice, beautiful, impressive, etc. It is "used to denote the extreme or unparalleled nature" of something.

An ocean of ink has been spilt on such questions of whether God Is A He Or A She, so you have tapped into a deep vein.

God knows what I said about the matter at hand; I don't remember. Hopefully it was nice,

Third, I've almost never heard the words "beauty" and "beautiful" being used on men/males. Too, the personification of beauty in all cultures seem to be women/females. For men/males, the correct adjective is handsome. — TheMadFool

It's not the "correct" adjective, it's merely the current adjective. "Beauty" certainly can be ascribed to males in an entirely masculine way, and "handsome" can be applied to a very attractive woman.

Fourth, this suggests, if not implies, that the universe has a feminine character - the universe is beautiful (womanly) and not handsome (manly). — TheMadFool

The universe is awesome (in its formal meaning). Beautiful, sure, but not in a sexed way. It is fearsome, too. Ineffable. Manly or womanly are just too small terms to bother with.

is the fact that all/most works of beauty are the work of men indicate that women are aesthetically-challenged etc. — TheMadFool

Men may just be more visually oriented than women -- the male gaze, and all that. Camille Paglia pointed out that middle class/upper class women have long had access to arts education -- which they have made use of -- without producing a whole lot of great works.

Is God a male or a female? Why? — TheMadFool

In ancient and modern polytheistic religions, both. Some gods are male, some are female. The three middle-eastern Abrahamic religions happen to be monotheistic male sky god affairs. Why? Don't know.

But look: Human beings create religions, we create gods. Humans see constellations in the sky -- we imagine figures that are not really there. One of the interesting things about the Abrahamic god is that he was conceived to be above and beyond human understanding--not like us, not approachable. Invisible, present from the beginning and in all places. All knowing, Totally unlike us. Male, sure, but not the guy next door,

Religions are perhaps our greatest art form. We produced them. The gods are our work, not the other way around. If you want god to be female, she can be. If you prefer god to be male, he can be. You would not be the first person to call god mother, father, and both.

Some Christian denominations have been trying to de-emphasize the sexing of god--not neutering god, but using fewer masculine terms for... the last 40 years. "Lord" for some people is too masculine. Father is out the window for some. Jesus stays male in most groups, and the Holy Spirit is counted as female quite often. Degendering hymns, scriptures, and prayers can sound truly wretched, and I don't particularly like it. Tough bounce.

J. B. Phillips wrote a book in 1952 by the title of "Your God is Too Small": too limited, too anthropomorphized, too domesticated. He asked believers to think bigger.

God may exist, even if not the one that we created. If God really does exist, my belief is that this entity would be altogether unintelligible to us, not fitting into any category that we could devise. That sort of being doesn't generate a lot of warm fuzzies so wouldn't be very popular.

Academic thought seems rarely to be comfortable with presenting it's own views to a non-academic audience, and thus influencing their behaviour. — kudos

Universities do not operate as missions of enlightenment to the proletariat. One thing universities do is train people (including some proles) to reach ascending levels of knowledge and expertise. BAs make up the base of the educated, the professoriat fills in the peak. Another thing universities do is provide services to the corporate, governmental, and NGO elite. Whether it's electrical engineering, public policy, investment strategies, medicine, business administration, mathematics, geology, chemistry, and numerous other departments the university produces useful knowledge. It transmits this knowledge through specialized events, networks, publishing, consultation, and so forth.

The people influenced by the university are in a position to influence the rank and file. University geology professors don't drill for oil. Their students and the beneficiaries of university expertise do the drilling. Some corporations have research arms, but the local state university (Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota...) share (or increasingly, license) discovered technology. A lot of drugs have their beginnings in University labs. The internet began in a DOD/Academic partnership,

Some departments -- Classics, Philosophy, English Literature, etc. don't produce knowledge with as ready a market as mechanical engineering, The humanities are taught as part of "the reproduction of society" and as such are important. If university philosophers come up with ideas that find a market, then the knowledge will be transmitted, and will affect others.

One thing, the humanities are supposed to directly influence the students most of all. I hesitate to bet on the net benefit of the humanities, even though I was an English major a long time ago. (I would definitely do it over.)

his re-election would have been the end of American democracy — Wayfarer

Certainly another term would have enabled him to worsen the malignancies he found or started. Whether it would be the end of democracy, I don't know... Trump was unusually and crudely self-centered. Who knows what he might have done to satisfy his needs? CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases are among my biggest worries, and Trump just didn't seem to care about global warming. Pro or con, he just wasn't interested in it. Four more years of that would have been disaster plus. (Disaster plus might happen anyway.)

The fact that a simpl,e decent guy can beat that by popular vote shows that Amnerica lives! — Wayfarer

A lot of us Americans never doubted that America lives, even if the chief executive of the nation (along with a substantial following) was disgraceful. The President, no matter who he or she is, is not the nation. The Congress isn't the nation either. Neither are the courts or the military. I believe that this is true for all countries. Of course, that doesn't mean that "the people are all good". Sometimes the The People are mistaken, or a large share of them are.

I've been reading 1877: Our Year of Living Violently, by Michael Bellesiles (2010) about the election, presidency, and socio-economic-political events during Rutherfraud B. Hayes' presidency -- 1876-1880. It was a disaster for many people--many whites, but especially for blacks and native Americans. A lot of slimy stuff happened during that presidentiad. Roughly a century was required to undo the damage, though really, for most of those years there was very little effort towards change.

Republican obstruction during Obama's administration (and probably more of the same during this administration) will also take a long time to recover from.

Through the 1870s, through everything that happened since regardless of who was in office, there was a core decent America which has abided decade after decade. This isn't a rose-colored view of the past. Decent people, in any country including in the United States, are quite capable of at least tolerating bad things being done to which ever group is the underdog. No countries excepted.

I am very glad to see Donald Trump on the way out. Joe and Kamala will put on a more dignified show, which by itself will be a relief, but let's not get carried away.

70,000,000+ votes were for DT. This was no watershed victory. Even if Biden & Harris had unbeatable Democrat majorities in the House and Senate, and a liberal Supreme Court, I doubt that anything remotely radical will be proposed. Contrary to Republican certainty, the Democrats are not an insurgent socialist party. Alas, but true.

Covid 19? A lot of people are sick of the disease (so to speak), and unwilling to abide sensible public health measures. Thanks to Trump, the infection got out of control. It will be very difficult to get people to cooperate in suppressing it.

The President, let us remember, is not in charge of the economy. Business is profit bound, and if environmental safety requires significant business losses, then the environment be damned. (Besides which, a lot of undoable damage has already been done.).

The American economy is not in good shape, when you consider the long-term divestment in public services, infrastructure, health, and so on. There has been a long-term decline in wealth among most Americans. Biden can not throw a switch to change all that. The fact is that reinvestment in public service, infrastructure, health, education, environment, renewable energy, distribution of wealth--the myriad needs--is a 30 to 50 year project, not a single or double presidentiad period of time.

Still, I'm glad Donald won't be occupying 1600 Pennsylvania much longer.

racist, misogynistic, fraudulent, fascistic, infantile, corrupt lunatic fantasist moron — Kenosha Kid

What I am hearing you say is that you didn't like Donald Trump.

Here's a play you might want to read sometime when you have nothing better to do -- The Bacchae by Euripides. The tragedy features Dionysus and his mortal family.

At the present time, there seems to be an opposition between the philosopher, boundary-behaving Apollonian type and more experiential boundary-violating sex-drugs-and-rock & roll Dionysian type. For what it is worth, the Greeks contrasted these two types 2500 years ago.

In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of the sun, of rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity. Dionysus is the god of wine, fertility, ritual madness, and theater, and appeals to emotions and instincts.

We humans can not be one or the other: Too great a focus on the Apollonian mode leads to arid sterility, and immersion in the rites and rituals of the Dionysian mode lead to debauchery and Alcoholics Anonymous. We will inevitably blend the two; the trick is in the best possible employment of logic and rational thinking while also attending to both the pleasures and pains of the body.

Christian theology, at least -- and I suspect not at all alone -- has given much more attention to the mind and spirit and not nearly enough attention to the body--to our embodiedness, in whatever shape it appears. Philosophers follow in the footsteps of the theologians on this front.

The Classical Greek Sex, drugs, and rock and roll scene could be found in various places, among them worship centers around Eleusis, near Athens. The Eleusinian Mystery religion was aided by hallucinogenic drug-taking (as far as we can tell). Sex wasn't a big part of the Eleusinian scene, as far as I know, but arrangements were made for alcohol and sex elsewhere.

Classical Greeks with means liked to attend the mystery rites. It was, as we might say, a safe place to trip out.

One of the things that made the 1960s - 1970s so memorable was the blending of the Apollonian and Dionysian modes, with lots of sex, alcohol, and drugs coupled with heated political discussions, demonstrations, and lots of cultural consumption (reading, film, music, TV, etc.)

Calvinist, Catholic, Capitalist Culture just doesn't relate well to Dionysus. That's why one has to boldly break on through to the other side.

Everything you said in your post pretty much matches my understanding. And you are right about the utopias appealing to their authors.

Two interesting asides:

"Fascism" had a specific invention: "According to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's own account, the Fasces of Revolutionary Action were founded in Italy in 1915. In 1919, Mussolini founded the Italian Fasces of Combat in Milan, which became the National Fascist Party two years later."

Mussolini's urban rebuilding policy in Rome was apparently quite successful (I've never been there). And the architecture he liked was in general pretty decent (much better than Hitler's or Stalin's taste). Italian fascist-period design was a forerunner of the again-very-popular mid-century modern style. (There's no political connection between fascism and the mid-century style.

Here are two examples:

Hey, Charles: I'm not an expert on history; just giving it my best effort based on limited knowledge.

For my money, the major flaw of BLM is that they have not articulated any plan that would have any effect on black-on-black violence. And they should, because black lives matter as much as anyone's, and the death rate from violence is extraordinarily high in poor black communities, and it isn't police that are doing the lion's share of the killing.

The people who would become Nazis did not have a party at all at the very beginning. They took over a very little workers party in the early 20s and that became the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Hitler thought that communism was a Jewish creation, along with capitalism, and despised everything that he thought the Jews were responsible for. In both Italy (Mussolini) and Germany, communists and fascists were bitter enemies.

Kindred spirits? I don't think so--despite the fact that the Communists, German Nazis, Italian Fascists, et al produced brutal regimes. Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini were all three very bad hombres, especially the first two. However, their founding documents and their intentions were far different. The history of the Soviet Union is quite different than Germany's, and history of course has something to do with the way things turned out.

Utopian? Jesus! If you think the nazis were building a utopia, I hate to think what you would call a dystopia. Dogmatic? Yes. Totalitarian? Similar, certainly. Equally socialist? Hitler's Germany never approached liquidating the private ownership of the means of production. Most of German Industry under the Nazis was privately owned.

As for the scope of the Nazis and Communists -- both of them were intent on world domination. Hitler had big plans for the rest of the world; the communists did too.

OK, thanks for the encouragement. On closer examination, my arithmetic applied to the New York Times map shows Biden winning by a hair or two. But again, Biden will not signal any sort of Reformation, though it would be an enormous relief to see Donald Trump hauled away by solid waste removal.

it feels like something has to break — Mr Bee

This applies to either Biden or Trump, for different reasons, and things are already breaking. Public health efforts were sufficiently hobbled to prevent the pandemic from having free rein. At this point, Covid 19 is out of control. Forest fires. Near-term unsustainable policies that are unlikely to change under either presidency (CO2/methane emissions, for instance). Global warming -- the Arctic as prime example. ETC. Economic disaster? Already in progress for a large share of the population, and a bail out won't cure it.

Apparently 'the situation' of individuals in closely contested states precludes accurate polling. In states which are predominantly liberal or conservative, people seem to be more forthcoming about their intentions. And/Or the techniques polling companies employ are just not that good. Are the polling samples too small? Are the polling questions misstated? Are the statistical processing of the results erroneous? Don't know.

Maybe wishful thinking is the problem.

What's the comparative success of commercial market research? I don't know whether they can reliably predict whether a new brand of apple sauce will fly or not.

I don't happen to reside in a literal superpower state which has changed the course of the lives of billions for the worse. — StreetlightX

Where you happen to reside is neither a virtue you can claim nor a vice you can be convicted of. Unless, of course, you chose to live in a shit hole country so that you could help make it a worse shit hole, then that would count against you--which, by the way, isn't your situation as far as I can tell.

As for your arraignment of the United States, I pretty much agree with it. Once one gets behind the official version, one finds an appalling history. Slavery, of course; genocide, obviously. But then there is the history of how working people (minimum 90% of the population) have been exploited, suppressed, and thoroughly misinformed about it all, and have been fed a false narrative which cripples critical thinking. Then there is the US as Global Power, another trail of tears.

Early on Wednesday afternoon, 11/4/20, it looks like Trump will prevail. And if he doesn't, Biden's presidency will not be any sort of national reformation.

I can associate with the down feelings of the man in red. God, I just don't want to put up with another 4 years of that fucking asshole!

Nice outfit. Who is the depressed person supposed to be?

Those 100,000,000 mail in ballots are not all counted yet -- it's a slower process than scanning ballots at a poling station. The suspense is awful.

↪Wayfarer To be honest, I think typical conservatives are better at divorcing people from subjects and will happily vote for a douche if that means they get what they want. So Trump's behaviour is totally irrelevant to them as it should be. It should've been irrelevant to Democrats as well. — Benkei

A given conservative may not like aspects of Donald Trump, but in what he says--and how he says it--they see something very likable. They may not have much in the way of health insurance, but they do believe in reducing the weight of the government. Millions of Americans have had a hard on to cut the federal budget ever since there was a federal budget. They may be losing ground economically, but they don't see taxation as a tool of the 1% used against them. So when Trump flails away about cutting taxes, they like that.

The average conservative probably does not want to see the police gunning down every demonstrator marching for civil rights, safer streets, civil protection, a just economy (etc, etc, etc,) but they don't like seeing black people marching in large numbers; they don't want to see high school students demanding environmental protection. Why should that half-assed 17 year old be judging me for driving a SUV? There is a lot of stuff they just don't like at all, and Trump seems to be against what they are against,

There is nothing uniquely American about this. American politics are uniquely American, of course, but other countries have their own uniquely embarrassing practices and experiences.

I have been reading 1877: OUR YEAR OF LIVING VIOLENTLY. Rutherford B. Hayes [some people called him Rutherfraud...] had just been elected in a very dubious electoral process, and the country was awash in far more violence than we currently have to put up with. Much more. Corruption was rife. Capitalist exploitation of the workers was remorseless, and the robber barons of the gilded age reigned supreme. Strikes were suppressed by the arms of the state. Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and Native Americans were being ruthlessly oppressed and abused. The country was also in a severe depression, without any succor coming from Washington (or anywhere else).

From a distance of 140 years, we are likely to look back on the the last two decades of the 19th century as "the good old days". But as Otto Bettmann, the famous archivist said, "The good old days were TERRIBLE". Life sucked a lot more in 1877 than in 1977 or 2020.

getting worse precisely because of our aping Americanisms — StreetlightX

So you must live in "a shitty country filled with shitty people who have made the world a worse place to be for everyone". How are you not one of the shitty people?

The US doesn't have so much influence on the world because of our solid gold virtues; it's because of our extensive inventory of armaments and very large GDP. That is true for all other leading nations, past, present, and future. "Nice" is nice, but having nuclear subs and hellfire missiles launched from drones are features to think twice about. So is being one of the world's biggest consumers of the stuff everybody makes.

emotions, though difficult, even impossible, to put into words, are, at the end of the day, physical in nature. As per physiologists, emotions are simply certain biomolecules attaching themselves to receptors on neurons, these events causing emotions. — TheMadFool

The music begins. Molecules of dopamine and serotonin are emitted, circulated, received, and up took. Perhaps you are with your partner, both hearing the music; you kiss, cuddle, and canoodle and some oxytocin is added to the mix. Warm moist rose colored light suffuses all. Lovely.

If you think emotional experiences were purely physical, would administering the proper dose of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin produce the same experience for you, sitting alone in cool, sterile lab room? I would think not. Chemicals do not make the music resonate with you, and kissing and cuddling a plastic mannequin would not be a warm fuzzy experience. There's too much content missing.

It seems like what neurotransmitters do is to actualize the emotions arising out of experiences, memory, or Imagination. If spiders frighten you, it isn't cortisol that will cause fear. Cortisol will enable you to get away (or to attack the room-sized arachnid).

Contrary to the preceding, when people experience psychotic mania, perhaps the chemicals come first, stimulate all sorts of wild thoughts (hallucinations, paranoia, intense fear, anxiety, anger, etc.) In this abnormal situation, the chemicals cause the experience of emotions in a very crude way,

I am both a soft-core Marxist and a soft-core Christian. My doubly soft-core social conscience compels me to at least try to understand the causes of the major injustices to which people are subjected. There are a couple of books which I think do a very good job of explaining why so many black people live in abject poverty:

#1 would be A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America by Elliott Currie. Currie isn't focused on police violence; he's more interested in the extremely high levels of violence within the black community--black on black. Why some groups, and some parts of the country have much higher levels of violence than others can be analyzed and understood. This issue (regional disparate levels of violence) was first given serious attention in about 1880. Some of what was found in 1880 is still true. But highly uneven access to opportunity and deep poverty are leading causes. That plus a plentiful supply of guns.

#2 would be the The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. Rothstein shows how US Government policy, particularly through the Federal Housing Administration, systematically favored two generations of white families with plentiful assistance in obtaining new suburban housing, while forcing black people to accept inner city housing (which usually meant living in a slum). The upshot of FHA policy is that by the time it was ended, discriminatory policy had greatly enriched white families while greatly impoverishing black families. Having been carried out coast to coast, the bad consequences of FHA policy would be extraordinarily difficult to undo or redress.

BLM tends to be way too focused on police violence. It is entirely understandable that minorities should be concerned about police violence: It's official violence performed by some level of the state. The state is supposed to protect citizens, not selectively oppress them. However, internecine violence claims many times the number of black people than those killed by the police.

Well, I've never met the founders of BLM, or even local coordinators. Alicia Garza said (in a quote Google found) "“We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk”. And that is a significant achievement.

I don't know what "a trained Marxist" would look like. There are people who read and discuss Marx and Engels; there are a few people who teach Marxism, and there are a few people who belong to very minor political parties that are "Marxist" or Marxish.

"We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories." I too am super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. Maybe you are also, sort of.

The people I referenced--who wouldn't have been able to present a cohesive ideological point of view--were not leaders; they were neighborhood people milling around watching the fires burn. Which is what I was doing, too.

Certainly, insurgencies can arise from the left as well as the right. At least in the United States at this time (last 20 to 30 years) it has been the white supremacist / anti-government right that has been the source--such as the individuals conspiring to kidnap the governor of Michigan. In the 1960s and 70s groups like the Bader Meinhof gang were leftist, and exceptionally violent. The Chicago Democratic Convention riot in 1968 was leftish.

I don't think BLM and ANTIFA are synonymous; their tactics seem to differ significantly. For one thing, BLM is able to marshal much larger and more diverse numbers in most parts of the country and they do not ordinarily spar with their opponents or police in the manner of ANTIFA--at least like in Portland, OR. BLM can mount very large, and pretty much peaceful demonstrations. Large demonstrations--left, right, or center--tend to be inconvenient for those not involved.

The riots we saw in late May and June were not as much partisan as opportunistic. Incidents which serve as provocations and then receive social media distribution, coupled with inflammatory rhetoric, can quickly wind up into riots. There was a small number of specifically ideologically left and right people present in the Minneapolis riots. Most of the people there (black, white, hispanic, asian) would have been hard put to present any sort of cohesive ideological point of view.

Of course the riot in Minneapolis spiraled out of control because there were no controls. Nobody was in charge of the riot.

if a convict is also more likely to be prototypical of their Gender in appearance or even hyper typical — Benj96

Why on earth would a convict be proto- or hyper-typical of their sex?

are we then as a society negatively selecting those physical (biochemical) or psychologically traits that led this person to behave as a criminal? — Benj96

I was just reading a book, 1877: Our Year of Living Violently (2010) by Michael Bellesiles in which the author references the thinking of some late 19th century prison enthusiasts EXACTLY along the lines you mention -- life imprisonment of 'hereditary paupers and criminals' would over time result in fewer paupers, fewer criminals, and fewer crimes.

Even in those "unenlightened ages" others suggested that it might be the case that upbringing and the environment had more to do with pauperism and criminal behavior than heredity. Moreover, the 1870s saw the US in a severe multi-year depression with national railroad strikes and minimal resources available to charitable organizations. If there was more crime (there seemed to be) perhaps it was because of Very Hard Times.

Another reason there was a lot of crime was that the southern states allowed concealed carrying of firearms, and many people carried guns with them. Minor disputes could escalate into a fatal shooting. Even school children sometimes carried concealed guns and sometimes used them to settle disagreements on the playground, Sound familiar?

Another factor was that southern courts refused to recognize murder as anything more than self-defense (unless it was a black-on-white killing) and would not convict. One of the reasons the southern courts behaved this way was that violence was a central piece of punishing black people for their mere existence. It was a harsh regime, and poor whites too were expected to toe the line. So, a lot of people got shot for bad, very bad, and absolutely atrocious reasons.

The general principle that "anything worth doing at all is worth doing well" certainly applies to masturbation. The experience of billions is that masturbation is imminently worth doing as often and as well as possible.

Kant:

Masturbation has been considered "A Problem" for quite a while--a perversion, an act against god (one ought to fuck a member of the opposite sex and beget children), an act against the state, an act against whoever wanted to feel aggrieved about it. It has variously been considered unhealthy, a drain of vital energies (see books about tantric sex) and precious bodily fluids (see Dr. Strangelove), and a crime. Some guys think it is an insult to their manhood that they should ever have to masturbate--somebody should jolly well make themselves available to fuck.

Fortunately a lot of people have dispensed with the nonsense of ages past and no longer give a rat's rear end what Immanuel Kant thought about masturbation.

"the word fascist is intended to mean oppressive, intolerant, chauvinist, genocidal, dictatorial, racist, or aggressive."

I think it was Paxton in Anatomy of Fascism who said that fascism is characterized by a method as much as its content. It has tended to be ruthlessly indifferent to prevailing democratic norms. The National Socialists in Germany (Hitler), for instance, seized power. Rarely, if ever, did the Nazi Party ever do well in elections (except when there was no choice but to vote for them).

Fascist parties have usually had a devoted following -- sometimes composed of odd bedfellows. Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, the various South American fascist-type dictators, etc. Fascist totalitarianism (like Hitler's) didn't leave room for an opposition.

Does the United States have a fascist movement? Some of the white supremacist militia types resemble fascists. But it doesn't matter in the end whether they fit the formal definition or not (whatever one uses). What does matter is that crypto or pre-fascist groups not be allowed to develop into militias, parties, or gangs that have the power to disrupt democratic society. (That's different than preventing them from speaking their opinions.).

Is Trump a fascist? I heartily loathe and despise Trump and his party, but I don't think he is a fascist. His behavior as president isn't even all that original. We've had grotesques serving in the Presidential Office before, and as regrettable as they are, they aren't fascists. They aren't eligible for summary execution. They are just abysmal people who should never have gotten anywhere close to nomination, let alone winning an election. For that you can lay blame the political parties, the media, and the idiots who supported them early on--usually wealthy people, which was the case with Hitler and a few other fascist dictators.

I will try not to drown in the deep seas of the unconscious mind which I wish to explore. — Jack Cummins

You can't drown in "the deep seas of the unconscious mind" because YOU are the deep sea. This isn't Freud. My theory is that "I" exist in the unconscious. Not Freud's SUBconscious sea of unutterable wishes, but my sea of enormous back-office operations where I exist outside the view of my front-office public relations staff, spies (observed sensory input), and all the public stuff. The front office (consciousness) isn't writing this. The public relations people are watching this as it goes up on the screen. The big Composition Group in the back office is putting the ideas together and sending it out to a transmission desk where fingers are instructed to hit the right keys.

I live in the unconscious, but I can't consciously observe my unconscious self because I am not exterior to it. I am in it, the interior. What goes on here can't be observed by the front office - conscious mind. The front office gets its marching orders from back here, not the other way around.

In my humble (maybe quite mistaken) opinion, we (front office consciousness) give ourselves too much credit. We tend to think we are in charge. We have a little control, but it's the back office that does the heavy lifting, major decision making, decides on priorities (like ending up at our favorite pub even though we said we would be home at 21:00. The back office decides how much risk to take, or not, often before the front office even knows it will soon be doing something it didn't plan on.

How can you tell whether what you are reading or hearing me say is coming from the unconscious or the conscious mind? You can't. The flow of instructions from the massive unconscious back office to the small conscious front office is seamless. What you see and hear is coming from the real me (the real person).

That's my theory, none of which should suggest that we can't drive ourselves crazy. There have been some pretty ugly conflicts in my back office which disrupted business for years on end. I just couldn't quite get my several idealist / realist / dreamy / pragmatist political parties to cooperate. So I was often working at cross purposes with myself.

Peace has reigned between my ears now for... maybe 8 years. Age and circumstances I wasn't in charge of brought me to retirement and living happily alone again. If I could take "where I am now" back to the time I was 30, say, "I could have been somebody -- I could have been a contender" (as Marlon Brando said in On the Waterfront 1954). Oh well...

So, ONE OF THE TASKS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY OR SELF-ANALYSIS is to learn how our minds actually are working--especially if they don't seem to be working all that well.

Happy, fully functioning, highly productive, sophisticated people can, I suppose, get along just fine without thinking about how their fucking splendid brains work. Most of us, though, find there are problems upstairs that have to be dealt with.

So question, @Jack Cummins: Why couldn't I figure all this out when I was 30?

I will be wanting to find the evidence to check my own sanity — Jack Cummins

Having to prove one's sanity by finding a lost reference to an obscure story sounds too Kafkaesque.

"Your Honor, the defendant can't produce the reference, so Counsel recommends that the Court proceed with the involuntary commitment."

I know one person who has undertaken proper psychoanalysis. This fellow has a very vigorous / rigorous intellect, is very well read, and engages with people at a demanding high level. His two mainstay intellectual pillars are Freud and Marx. He claims that psychoanalysis helped him a great deal.

One has to undertake psychoanalysis; it isn't a therapy that can be applied to a patient in the way medication can. Any talk therapy requires the cooperation and active participation of the patient, but psychoanalysis is a major project. Surely a belief or confidence in its efficacy is essential. Stupid, neurotic thinking just has to be sorted out, and it takes a committed patient, a very insightful therapist, and time.

On the other hand, drugs for a lot of major mental illness--like bi-polar, psychosis, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorders, etc-can be given to the patient without a whole lot of belief involved. Thorazine suppresses psychosis whether the patient believes it will work or not. All the couch time in the world isn't going to help someone who is so depressed they are catatonic.

Still, there are millions of ordinary people who are screwed up by their upbringing, life experiences, or flaws in their mental apparatuses. Unraveling how one got screwed up (like feeling intensely guilty for one's rather pedestrian sexual desires, or the ways in which one defeats one's best efforts, or why one is such a domineering son of a bitch, etc.) isn't something that medication will help.

My best guess is that it isn't so much the particular theory on which psychotherapy is based, but the commitment of the therapist and patient to work together to produce insight and a path to changing one's thinking. In the end, therapy means change, and it can take a long time. Hence the requirement for commitment to the process.

Lots of pioneers in psychology have influenced the way we think about the world (philosophy). A simple example: early on psychologists learned that a variable rate of reinforcement is far more powerful than a steady rate of reinforcement. Gambling is attractive because we win (and lose) unpredictably. If we always (or never) won at poker it wouldn't have such attraction. Variable reinforcement explains some of our thinking and behavior. Habits (little apps of learned behavior) have something to do with our success or failure in life. So on and so forth. Psychology (and people like Freud) have dethroned the autonomous self-directed person. We are not masters of our own houses.

All that should have a significant effect on philosophy.

What Freud developed that was seminal and useful was a psychodynamic theory of personality development. The id, ego, and superego weren't merely levels, they were interacting forces, operating in the subconscious, and under social demands, all of which has to be continually resolved by the individual. (There's more to psychodynamism, of course, than id, ego, and superego.)

Yes, Freud got penis envy wrong; it's a problem for us guys--we all have one, but envy others. We at least make comparisons whenever we get the chance. Even guys with enormous penises aren't always satisfied; as one well endowed guy confessed, "they attract too much attention".

Anyway, here's a song by somebody that doesn't have penis envy.