Weekly Reader

Pusmort Mixtape

https://signifyingnothing.net/uncategorized/pusmort-mixtape/

After last year’s popular Pushead Top 100 Of The Eighties podcasts, I thought it would be cool to do one more for Pushead’s label Pusmort. I want to do more of these in the future for labels. People have had nice things to say so far.

Septic Death-Glue/Step
Final Conflict-Constant Fear
Attitude Adjustment-Destruction’s Eve
Septic Death-The Evolution Garden
Septic Death-Hardware
Siege-Walls
Corrosion Of Conformity-Prayer
Inferno-Life
Execute-Going Back
Sacrilege-At Death’s Door
Poison Idea-Made To Be Broken

Final Conflict-Central America
Negative Gain-Nuclear Winter
Extreme Noise Terror-False Profit
Chaos UK-Skate Song
Septic Death-Terrorain
Systematic Death-Tonight
Christ On Parade-America The Myth
Septic Death-Dysentery
Attitude Adjustment-Rambo
Part 1-Black Mass
Neuroot-The Lie They Call The Truth

Stay On Script! Do You Want Chelsea Clinton To Lose In 2032?

One of the most maddening aspects of liberals' response to Edward Snowden and the NSA scandal was the talk about the Democrats potential loss in the 2014 midterms. The conversation would go something like "stop talking/hyping up X because there is an election coming in Y. Do you want 'us' to lose our majority!" This is the kind of asinine argument that keeps me up at night. It's troubling to me that people are so associated with a party that anyone who goes "off script," so to speak, is considered so dangerous. I am a human being, not a Democrat or Republican or Libertarian. To me, it does not matter what party you are in. What matters is specific issues and how they relate to me and my own personal values. If Democrats are so concerned about losing an election or congressional majority, perhaps they should not bullying people who dissent from their talking points. Perhaps as well, they could run candidates who actually stick to what they claim to believe in, or are not corrupt.

I find it insulting to me as a human being with my own views and soul that I must always conform and be constantly worrying about obeying some party creed because of a forthcoming election. A party whose members constantly rank on me for defying that will never get my vote.

Why I Do Not Allow Comments Anymore

Just a note to clarify why comments are closed on my weblog.

A few reasons come to mind. First, as Audrey Watters notes, aggressive and hateful comments are a pain to deal with. I have had some published on previous versions of this weblog, but many I chose not to allow. I have little patience for that nonsense. I have considered turning comments off on Signifying Nothing too because of this (always anonymous too...real "punk" of you to cowardly not use your name).

Second, and more importantly, is the no stop barrage of spam. Any modern CMS should have good filters either built in or available via a plugin, but I cannot be bothered.

Third, I resent how much scripting is involved with comments. I run No Script and always have a real problem trying to get comments to show up if I chose to view them. No thanks.

Finally, this weblog has shifted to being more about statements and/or announcements than discussion. Discussion can be found in email or on Twitter. I just don't think blogs are right for that anymore.

In Praise Of Daniel Suarez

An author I got turned onto by one of my students this year in Daniel Suarez. This summer, I have been listening to his books in the car and I am extremely impressed with them. Suarez writes "techno-thrillers" about modern technology and how it can be used to spy, harm, and kill us. Given the recent developments with the NSA scandal, these books are quite topical fodder. Freedom is a fantastic look at a future ruled by surveillance, online reputation, and a creepy, Google Glass looking interface to view the world. Kill Decision is about drones and what happens when they are given autonomy to kill based on algorithms.

Here are two interviews with Suarez. The first is from Adam Curry's Big Book Show and the longer one is from Leo Laporte's Triangulation netcast. Both are really good and go into great detail about Suarez's novels. I highly recommend them.

Jeanette Winterson

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular - an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

Outside of the rules of daily time, not to be is as exact as to be. We can’t talk about all that the universe contains because to do so would be to render it finite and we know in some way, that we cannot prove, that it is infinite. So what the universe doesn’t contain is as significant to us as what it does. There will be a moment (though of course it won’t be a moment) when we will know (though knowing will no longer be separate from being) that we are a part of all we have met and that all we have met was already a part of us.

Until now religion has described it better than science, but now physics and metaphysics appear to be saying the same thing. The world is flat and round, is it not? We have dreams of moving back and forward in time, though to use the words back and forward is to make a nonsense of the dream, for it implies that time is linear, and if that were so there could be no movement, only a forward progression. But we do not move through time, time moves through us. I say this because our physical bodies have a natural decay span, they are one-use-only units that crumble around us. To everyone, this is a surprise. Although we see it in parents and our friends we are always amazed to see it in ourselves. The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about ‘my body’ rather than ‘I’. We feel it as absolutely part but not at all part of who we are. Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise. And so we cannot move back and forth in time, but we can experience it in a different way. If all time is eternally present, there is no reason why we should not step out of one present into another.

— Jeanette Winterson
Sexing The Cherry

 

DuckDuckGo: My New Search Engine Of Choice

A change I have made recently is moving my searches on the web from Google to DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is a more private search engine that does not hold your private data or pass it along to third parties. Unlike, say, Google. I am finding this new search engine to be a joy to use. I do not see a lot of differences between results and without the "personal" results that Google adds when you are logged in, I think in some ways they are better. Google's results are often filled with garbage from social sources and informational link farms (many of my students fall prey to these too when doing research). If you are trying to divest a bit from companies that attack your privacy, DuckDuckGo is a great choice.