decmusicology.bsky.social
Professor of Music, Bates College
*The Jazz Bubble: Neoclassical Jazz in Neoliberal Culture* (University of California Press, 2018)
Doomscrolling glumly with Elbows Up
he/him
3,219 posts
898 followers
342 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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Awesome. What's your project for the summer?
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Jeffries has not been great. He asked Dems to pull their punches on CECOT (which allowed voters to forget about the disappearances and allowed Trump's approval on immigration to creep back up)
When an evangelical nut job murdered Minnesota legislators, his response couldn't even point at the right
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Dems being "better" on these issues scarcely matters if their leadership strategy on these things is to hunker down until the 2026 primaries and hope we all give them another shot
For example I feel like, apart from Gavin Newsom, the Dem leadership has been nowhere on the military occupation of LA
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Okay, but you realize that to make inroads with the Republicans you actually have to convince Dem officeholders to get off their asses, right?
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I mean, I honestly didn't need to know anything about his gubernatorial term (which I realize sucked) beyond his sexual harassment allegations
A mayoral election is not a court of law; the threshold is not "proof beyond a reasonable doubt." It's, "JFC; why even take a chance on this guy?"
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Not my recollection of things.
In any case, now that the second Trump term is upon us, a good chunk of the Dem leadership class has stopped doing any of that. Look at Hakeem Jeffries, completely allergic to confrontation, telling Dem reps to stop traveling to El Salvador to make noise about CECOT
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Great episode. Having had the opportunity to hear Chenoweth a few months ago, their argument seems to be a lot more nuanced than the public fixation with this "3.5% rule" would acknowledge
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IOW there may be fence sitters within a given administration or regime, and they may be susceptible to persuasion or leverage
It's worth thinking about how this happens in an admin with such a rigid cult of personality and where even its "normiest" figures have thoroughly drunk the Kool Ade
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I dunno, it's a fk of a lot more interesting than the 70,000th poster saying "Down With Cheeto Hitler" or whatever
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What gives me a sinking feeling is that to make a fascist party unpalatable to a country, that country often has to go through a calamity of staggering proportions
Like, firebombing of its cities and a devastating military defeat
That’s what it took to give Germans the normie Christian Democrats
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You rebuild the baby in the aggregate
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-- Mitch McConnell doesn't scupper the Merrick Garland SCOTUS appointment in 2016
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Yeah, the trucker convoy of a few years ago was definitely Not Normal
Going back to visit in the late 2010s, I was seeing a lot of very angry F*ck Trudeau bumper stickers on Ford Super Duties. Also, you don't get Poilievre in the mix without some level of political polarization
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I'm sorry, but they sound less like a wizened revolutionary than like an annoying hipster c. 2004, mad that their favorite band blew up and the normies listen to them
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one complicated thought: out of the box/on the free tier, chatgpt is a dangerous product for the majority of users, in that it is capable of doing real harm, mostly invisibly. it takes a _huge_ amount of time and effort to resolve into a useful tool and the system basically fights you the whole way.
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You know there’s nothing about taking the NY Times columnist position that automatically makes his opinions shittier, right?
If you begin to see bad Times apologetics creep into his work, or he actually fails to speak truth to power, then by all means go off on him
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I remember very specifically a Fox News reporter using the word teabagging while brandishing, teabags, seemingly unaware of its dual meaning. This was specifically lampooned by Jon Stewart on the daily show. I doubt that I’ll be able to find the clip.
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Alongside the use of "Frak!" as a substitute f-bomb, my favorite idiosyncrasy of Battlestar Galactica is how they made everything in the show octagonal
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Wow, even in thoroughly Nazified Twitter, there's still some folks plugging diligently away at Community Notes, doing the Lord's work
I would've thought the last folks capable of objecting to misinformation had already decamped to Bluesky
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But in hindsight we could see that that was an important first step to Patel and Pam Bondi and all the rest of it
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it turned out not to matter to the same degree that one might imagine. This was in part because a good chunk of the audience had already made their minds, but those who remained on the fence were evidently responding to different cues than what Ivy League debate clubs might want them to
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One of the problems with seeing, say, the presidential debates as a useful metric for a candidate’s performance in the campaign is that both Clinton in 2016 and Harris in 2024 have shown how inaccurate that is
In both cases, they clobbered Trump by any reasonable metric of persuasive argumentation
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I first remember seeing him during coverage of the family separation crisis during Trump 1. Always a tremendous moral clarity to his reporting
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The reason is that, despite his dreadful take on Democratic politics, he does have a capacity for political combat that the Dems are sorely missing
He just doesn’t always choose to use it
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She just never misses, does she
It’s a combination of a solid moral compass and an incisive shrewdness about the political landscape
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It’s really beginning to matter that none of these tech bros even understands the humanities, let alone values them
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I feel bad for the rank and file soldiers, who are undoubtedly getting reamed out by their NCOs tonight for the most lackluster drill imaginable
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First AI, now this, ffs
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"You put together that monster truck rally?"
"Sure did, boss, real fuckin' sudsy just like you asked."
"What"
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But there are people who can do drill in the US military. I mean look at this, FFS
If they can do it for Aaron Sorkin they can do it for the fucking president lol
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I saw clips of the Bastille day event that so impressed him. The drill was immaculate; everyone was in their ceremonial dress uniforms; the dress and cadence and everything was spot on
I guess I thought the units they brought in for the birthday boy parade would have, like, practiced their drill
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Her entire deal just eludes me
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"We fought a king in 1775. We fought a dictator in 1945; We will fight whatever the hell this is in 2025."
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Exactly. I don’t know with the 2028 primary field will be like, but I’m imagining a reprise of the shellacking that Elizabeth Warren dished out to Bloomberg during the 2020 primaries
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Exactly.
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I had overlooked that they were going for historical accuracy with the uniforms, which I guess comes across easier in combat uniforms. Maybe they didn’t feel the need to have full on military drill in those circumstances.
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And now I'm looking at the Bastille Day parade that Trump attended with Macron, and that evidently made him jealous enough to try to rustle up an imitation
I'm sorry, but Trump must be feeling pretty ripped off right now www.youtube.com/watch?v=-333...
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LOL that's so funny. I helped direct a concert band at a summer music camp last year -- middle school students, mostly -- and we closed out with "Old Time Rock and Roll." It was probably the same arrangement -- complete with handclaps on 2 and 4!