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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Answer: no, 2016 isn't going to fucking quit. He isn't a famous person, but a preemptive R.I.P. to Scott Eric Kaufman (of Lawyers, Guns & Money, Raw Story, Salon, The A.V. Club, and other sites) is in order, as he just opted to be taken off life support and is not expected to recover. He was absolutely hilarious and posted some of the most insightful analyses I've read of shows like Game of Thrones. This year is the fucking worst.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
SEK died yesterday. If you wish to express condolences to his friends/family, LGM has a post up. This one hit me really hard even though I knew it was coming. I never actually directly interacted with him, but I've been reading him for so long that it feels like losing a friend or family member.
R.I.P. also to Mose Allison, age 89. Rock audiences will probably know him best for "Young Man Blues", which The Who covered on Live at Leeds, but he had a prolific catalogue that drew covers from artists as diverse as the Clash, Leon Russell, and Elvis Costello. Pixies' song "Allison" is named in honour of him, and Van Morrison recorded an album with him.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
The BBC is reporting that Fidel Castro has died. Not much else known at this point.
e: link that I didn't have time to post before coming home from work. Source is evidently Cuban state media so it's probably legit. CNN and Australia's ABC have also run with the story.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Like most of us, I suspect, I am not sure what to think about Fidel Castro and whether to celebrate or mourn his passing. On the one hand, the establishment here and in the US can't be trusted when they tell us what a baddy he was, but by the same token, the anti-establishment hero figure is equally uncompelling.
Dr. Denise Baden has something a bit different, and refreshingly so:
Castro was a complicated man who did many good things and many bad things. One can’t evaluate all of these in a vacuum, either; many of his actions were direct responses to world conditions created by other actors who also did many good things and many bad things. It’s natural to feel conflicted about his death. Erik Loomis’ take at Lawyers, Guns & Money is a particularly nuanced one that supplies some valuable historical context for understanding him, and I am cribbing substantially from both Loomis’ take and some of the comments for the remainder of this reply. An important thing to consider is that, while Castro was certainly a dictator, there is substantial reason to question whether a democracy in Cuba could have survived in the 1960s and onward, particularly given what happened in other countries in the same region that tried democracy in the same time frame, such as Chile and Guatemala. The United States had a nasty habit of, when the populace of a Latin American country voted in a way they didn’t like, overthrowing their governments. One also has to question whether the United States’ constant attempts to undermine his government and assassinate him contributed to his paranoia and made him more authoritarian than he would have been without our involvement. It’s certainly a credible interpretation.
Not everything Castro did was defensible. However, not all of his bad actions seem all that bad in comparison to the acts of contemporaries, either. Castro wasn’t exactly progressive on LGBT rights, but Ronald Reagan turned a blind eye to the AIDS crisis, and Mike Pence, who supports literal shock conversion therapy for LGBT people, is currently the Vice President-elect here (though in our defence, there is substantial reason to suspect electoral fraud contributed to that, and certainly he did not come even close to winning the popular vote). “Both sides do it” isn’t a defence for horrible acts, but one also has to judge the acts of people from the past on a curve. Saying that Castro was doing bad things while we were (and still are) simultaneously doing comparable bad things rings empty. We can certainly call out others for their failings, but at the same time, if we want to be honest, we have to call out our own as well.
And Castro certainly did some good things for the world. He opposed the apartheid regime in South Africa while the United States was supporting it (for ideological reasons, no doubt, but that doesn’t make his actions any less beneficial to the people of South Africa), and Cuba’s extremely well trained doctors have been sent out to places desperately in need of them, such as Africa and other parts of the Third World, for decades. He also raised the standards of literacy and health in his country immeasurably, and everyone who wasn’t rich probably saw their standards of living rise. (Cuba evidently had an average daily calorie intake of 1,500 in the ’60s, meaning that most people on the island were malnourished. Today it’s closer to 2,500.) He also reforested significant amounts of land, meaning that Cuba now has one of the most intact ecosystems in the Western Hemisphere. He fought against racism in his own country (although he certainly didn’t eliminate it), and he instituted substantial gains for women’s equality.
But he certainly was still a dictator. He executed and imprisoned people for political reasons. He instituted a repressive system that stifled innovation and relied on a single export, sugar, for much of Cuba’s economy. The nation drifted after the collapse of the Soviet Union until Chávez came along and was able to provide cheap oil. There is a significant problem that one simply can’t build socialism on a single product. While Castro’s policies helped lift Cubans out of poverty, it also meant their standards of living did not improve substantially for decades, so this part of the revolution can hardly be judged an unqualified success. And, of course, we can’t forget the Cuban Missile Crisis, either.
There is far more to say about the man, and I’m not qualified to say all of it. He did far more both good and bad than I could hope to summarise in a few paragraphs here. I felt conflicted when I heard he had died, and I still feel conflicted. I don’t expect that to change. Castro was a complicated person, contrary to the assertions of both those who want to demonise him and those who want to lionise him, and thus it’s natural to have complicated reactions to him even in death. Overall, I feel the same way about him that I do about our lolberts: he was right on some issues and wrong on others. (Notably, it’s almost the exact opposite issues in each category between him and the lolberts, with a few exceptions.)
In a related note, as long as we’re talking about reactions to people who have recently died, LGM put up this page collecting SEK’s writings and reactions to his death, although amongst the latter, this one has yet to be added to the list. I haven’t read all of the tributes yet, but all the ones I have read were worth reading. I will probably be perusing SEK’s many writings I hadn’t gotten around to yet for at least months to come, and LGM is also evidently planning to publish an anthology of his writing in book form.
Also, fuck this year for taking Ron Glass from us too, and fuck Fox for cancelling Firefly long before its sell-by date. The people responsible for cancelling it will end up in the special hell with child molesters and people who talk in the theatre.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
So I'm sure I've told this story here before, but I feel like telling again how my mom was heavily suspected of participating in the Cuban revolution.
She was a college student in 1959, and she used to just kind of go around and do stuff, you know. And one thing she did, without telling anyone ahead of time, was that she and some friends went to Cuba to go spelunking at the exact moment that Batista was overthrown. You know, people figured these liberal US college students just HAPPENING to visit Cuba to go exploring caves right during that final push was kind of fishy. I've seen a couple of articles about it, and they are extremely cynical about their excuses for being there.
As far as I know, she really was there for the spelunking, and my mom didn't seem to idolize Castro or anything, but she sure did hate Batista, so I grew up seeing Castro from that angle and taking the anti-Castro propaganda with a big grain of salt. I distinctly remember some apparently newsworthy story about him getting Jeopardy on tape, watching it ahead of time, and then watching it with other people so he could impress them by knowing the answers, and thinking that they should have come up with something slightly less cute and funny if they were trying to make him look bad.
This is the reason I can't just clear out the things my mom left in storage in my basement, because she has a letter from Castro in there somewhere inviting her to come visit him anytime, and she doesn't remember where she put it. It's also a major contributing factor to our familial security clearance ceiling.
This is the reason I can't just clear out the things my mom left in storage in my basement, because she has a letter from Castro in there somewhere inviting her to come visit him anytime, and she doesn't remember where she
Well she can't go to visit him now. Problem solved.
Long ago when I was heavily into chess, I got a great deal of enjoyment playing over Taimanov's games. Unfortunately, he's best know for getting steamrolled by Bobby Fischer in a 1971 match on the latter's march to the 1972 world championship. Here's a nice Taimanov win against long-time world champ Anatoly Karpov.
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
From Lake's website
Yesterday, December 7th, I lost my best friend to a long and stubborn battle with cancer. Greg Lake will stay in my heart forever, as he has always been. His family would be grateful for privacy during this time of their grief.
Many thanks,
Stewart Young
Seriously, 2016? You couldn't give it a rest? After giving us Brexit, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the Loser President, you had to take 2/3 of ELP from us?
I'm probably tempting fate. I hope Carl Palmer is in good enough health.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Re: BREAKING: Sometimes Famous People Die
Linear Mode
