While we're posting metal videos on our blogs...

Darian Worden's latest post at his blog inspired me to find an equally-fitting metal video to post here. Granted, not many things can equal performing with a viking ship on stage and billows of live flame shooting up whenever you growl the word "Fire!" But I think I found something fairly close.

In the late 1930's Sergei Prokofiev wrote the score for a Soviet war propaganda movie entitled "Alexander Nevsky", based on the historical and legendary figure of the same name. The music, and the movie it's written to accompany, can count as good examples of Socialist Realism - simple musical and literary themes, unambiguous moral virtues of the good guys and unambiuous evil of the bad guys, heroism of the crowd, cheap jabs at the rich, etc. - though this particular movie is probably more of a "let's kill Nazis" movie than a "nationalize the means of production" kind of movie. The villains are blond-haired German knights who wear scary helmets that have funny statuets on the tops of them, who lead thousands of faceless pawns, and who receive spiritual support and justification from pale, sunken-eyed black-hooded monks whose empathy for lost souls leads them to do the sign of the cross in front of each Rus child who is then thrown into the fire.

The Russian band Merlin made a death metal cover of one of the songs in the score, and very appropriately made a music video with footage from the 1938 movie.



I have but one criticism of the song - I wish they had included a choir. A choir would have made it WAY more epic. But I guess they didn't want something that sounds like they just added bass drums and guitar distortion to the orchestral and choral arrangement.

Another Email from My Friend - This Time About Child Sexuality

"My mom regularly gets books from the library, as she really likes to read. Today I saw she has a book called "Too Sexy, Too Soon", about the "sexualization of childhood" and "what we can do to protect our kids". As if kids who sexualize each other or adults either don't exist or are simply confused. She should read "Harmful To Minors" to balance it out (which I haven't in fact read myself, but definitely want to one of these days). In any case, I doubt I could ever have a mutually understanding conversation with her about childhood sexual feelings and their role in shaping how kids develop into adults. Not that I really would necessarily want to, anyway."

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"Actually, on further examination, the book is called "So Sexy, So Soon". And the rather odd thing of it is, I can agree with a lot of the messages in the book, at least as described on the inside front cover. Basically, the book is about commercialism and how children are born into a culture that tries to sell them values, so to speak. I can certainly agree that the images used in advertising and television present a narrow view of the world, and embody a passive mode of understanding that eschews critical thinking (and yes, I used the word "eschews" mostly just to sound cool). I can also agree with ideas like encouraging kids to play and invent their own imaginative, creative games, and express themselves more.

"The connection to sexuality, however, is where I get lost. It seems that not only does the book attempt to replace one form of repression and value-foisting with another, but it seems to relate two things that have little in common except being "fashionable" to worry about. If I wrote a book discussing the implications of school shootings that were supposedly shown by high obesity rates, people would shake their heads and wonder whether I really think that the students at Columbine turned to playing with guns because they didn't know how to exercise. Similarly, why is precocious sexual behavior now a symptom of commercialism? Do kids become curious about genitals after watching people experience wardrobe malfunctions while wearing the latest fad outfit?"

You know it's a good song when

lots of people cover it. You know it's a great song when lots of people sample it. This song (or rather, this chord progression) easily gets stuck in my head, and that's all right - it's the kind of tune you don't mind getting stuck in your head. Even though in high school my brother and I listened to a show named after the original song, I never heard this chord progression until the music video at the bottom came out. I was a freshman in college then. It was the first year I had a computer in my own bedroom. First year I stayed up all night with a person of the opposite gender. First year I tasted alcohol, first year I smoked anything, first year I seriously explored religions other than fundamentalist Christianity, and the first year I voted - and though I was a Republican among Republicans, I didn't vote for the Republican presidential candidate. For some reason.

International Read a Book Day

"We can actively work towards an open and informed society, or we can be complacent to paranoia and tribalism. I choose the former." -- Me

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Salmonella, Egg-laying Cages, and Prop 2

There is something to be said about the role that agricultural subsidies have in the scale of farming, and thus in the existence of factory farms where cramped conditions can lead to higher risks of infection. But the most you'll hear about it is the cursory comment in a documentary or at a book talk. The policy proposals made by food justice advocates always include subsidies for local and urban small-scale organic farms and gardens; they never talk about getting rid of agricultural subsidies all together, and I personally have never seen or heard any support in the food justice movement for even slightly cutting federal spending on big ag (if any of you have, please send me a link!). Guess it's less of an uphill battle to get pork for the good guys than it is to get rid of bad guys' pork. This is a problem that both sides of the aisle face. Even Tea Party candidates would be reluctant to propose slashing Big Ag welfare (this isn't to suggest that Tea Party candidates would ever propose federal subsidies for urban agriculture).

So I'm not surprised, or even all that disappointed, that tax subsidies for Big Ag weren't mentioned in the Chronicle's article on inhumane farming and the egg recall.

Now, a few words on Prop 2, since that's what I originally wanted to write about in this post:

The Chronicle's article linked to above mentions that animal rights/welfare advocates, including the head of the Humane Society's anti-factory farming campaign, are under the impression that Prop 2 will prohibit egg-laying cages completely. But that's not what I get when I read the text of the new law. Prop 2 mandates that farm animals including egg-laying hens be allowed to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs, and turn "in a complete circle without any impediment...and without touching the side of an enclosure." There isn't a single word in the entire poposition even suggesting a prohibition of all egg-laying cages. A plain, straightforward reading of the new law shows that come 2015, egg-laying cages that are packed in a way that hens have enough room to lie down, stand up, and turn in a complete circle without any impediment and without touching the side of the cage would be perfectly legal (assuming a more strict law doesn't get passed and come into effect before then).

Granted, those cages would probably still be inhumane by most animal welfare advocates' standards (and by my standards). Instead of standing flat on a floor, the hens would probably have to constantly cling to wires below them, and foot and joint problems might still be a normal fact of an egg-laying hen's life. But Prop 2 doesn't say anything about being able to stand on a flat, solid surface. If the Humane Society wants to make a court case out of this, they would have to be doing some legal gymnastics to get a prohibition of all egg-laying cages out of Prop 2.

Let me be clear that I'm not defending bigger egg-laying cages as an alternative to battery cages. I oppose all egg-laying cages. I oppose animal agriculture. I don't think sentient beings can legitimately be owned as property. I just think that Prop 2 is a small step forward (some abolitionists disagree) which does not ban all kinds of animal abuse, and one of those kinds of abuse it doesn't ban is egg-laying cages.

And while we're on eggs and salmonella, here's a neat post by David D. Friedman on voluntary certification and safety measures in egg production in the UK.

Censorship of Certain Acts in the UK

This article is almost a year old now, but I hadn't realized that this small step forward was made in the UK.

Last week, female porn director Anna Span triumphantly announced that as a
result of her intervention the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) had
over-turned a long-standing ban and allowed a film that included images of this
phenomenon—also known as "squirting" or "gushing"—to go on general release.

I thought I should post the link to the article here, since posting this link directly onto my Facebook wall would be inappropriate in the eyes of my more conservative Facebook friends (and probably in the eyes of "the law", who might not take too kindly to me making an article about sex and porn openly available to my friends who are younger than 18). So if you're under 18, don't click on this link. If your parents catch you reading this and then have a cow about it, just know that I warned you.

And parents: if your kids are growing some adult anatomical features, they probably already have some adult desires, and the best way for you to react to that is not to construct some little cardboard cut-out world for them where everyone pretends they don't have any inborn curiosities. (And kids! This does not mean you should disobey your parents!)

Rating Websites

For quite some time I considered rating websites to be a very feasible path to incentivize socially-expected behavior in a complex society. Some of my readers know that I have an arm-chair interest in gift economies, and anyone who thinks for 2 minutes about gift economies knows that the success of deferred non-explicit reciprocity depends on peer pressure - there have to be ways people can share not only their expectations of how productive and generous people should be, but also their assessment of each other regarding their productivity and generosity. In short, you typically need face-to-face interaction for gift to go well, and in a large urban or suburban community you need a way to openly and instantly praise good behavior and reproove bad behavior.

That's what I thought something like Yelp could do - until some really lame daycare moms who got pissed off at my mom for kicking them out of her daycare went ahead and made incorrect allegations about her online. One of the ladies first did it on yellowbot - which I was unable to give two shits about, given that pretty much nobody uses it. Then she did it on Yelp, and a second lady who got kicked out of my mom's daycare went and seconded everything that the first lady wrote. That's when I got really agitated. I use Yelp. And I take it very seriously. I do have my ways of telling how descriptive a rating is, but this still worries me. If I hadn't known my mom, I don't know if I would be able to tell whether the first lady's allegations could hold any water. And that's a threat to the usefullness of credit rating websites.

Part of the problem, I think, is that while there is an openly-known target of criticism, the criticizer is more or less anonymous. Were the criticizers subject to the same standards to which they are subjecting their targets, would people be as willing to post untrue statements about their targets?

There might be another issue besides that. Even if everyone were required to state their whole name and post a picture of themselves on their user profiles as a condition of use, there's still the possibility that they might not feel any negative repurcussions for making untrue statements on the rating website. This might be especially true for people who have no vested interest in the accuracy of their ratings - people who post to the website for the sole purpose of shit-talking my mom, and have next to nothing to do with it after that.

For that reason, I have three suggestions for rating websites (and especially for whoever makes a rating website for a network of gift circles):

1. No anonymous posting - everyone who wants to post should be required to complete an accurate user profile, with a picture of themselves, and any comment completed through an account that lacks a complete and accurate profile should be deleted;
2. Possession of a user profile should be conditioned by long-term contribution to an individual or group effort which is itself subject to ratings in the website;
3. Users themselves should be subject to ratings regarding the helpfullness of their reviews (Yelp already allows users to rate each other's comments, but I don't think it allows users to rate each other).

I'll probably come up with more, but I just had to get this off my chest for now.

And for the curious, here's what a Yelp user profile looks like.