ReasonTV
Published on 1 Feb 2019Promised an improved way of life, Remy does everything he can to believe in a new ideology – except the math.
Written and performed by Remy. Video produced by Austin Bragg. Music tracks and mastering by Ben Karlstrom.
Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
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LYRICS
Listened to those leaders so intently
Those Che Guevara shirts all seemed so trendy
Thought that things would be so good and friendly
So why’m I eating my neighbor’s dog Benji?Twenty million killed, sure, that’s stuff I don’t like
But I could stay on Momma’s plan for the rest of my life
A guaranteed job digging ditches? Well what’s not to like?
It’s failed miserably each time so trying again seemed wiseNow I’m looting, looting, looting, looting
Grabbing wieners like I’m Kevin Spacey
Told a crowd “we need free markets instead”
Now my neck is no longer attached to my headThey promised things would all be better now, better now
If pure equality was finally found, finally found
Now we’re all grocery shopping at the pound, at the pound
Said that we’d have everything
Now we don’t have anything
Whoa…How much plasma are they gonna take?
Before I finally have enough to trade?
For toilet paper or a rodent steak?
I keep on looking back on better daysThey promised things would all be better now, better now
If free expression it was not allowed, not allowed
But I just caught my Roomba texting Mao
Said that we’d have everything
Now we don’t have anythingThey promised things would all be better now, better now
If men with guns took farmers’ land and plow, land and plow
Now it’s another night of Rat Kung Pao, Rat Kung Pao
Said that we’d have everything
Now we don’t have anythingThey promised things would all be better now, better now
If we just nationalized oil in the ground, in the ground
Now somehow gasoline can not be found, not be found
Said that we’d have everything
Now we don’t have anything
February 2, 2019
Curing Tuberculosis – The Hero Koch – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 31 Jan 2019Fascinatingly enough, tuberculosis was actually considered “trendy” in the Victorian era of Europe — but Dr. Robert Koch, hero of the German Empire, was convinced that he could cure it. A British writer named Arthur Conan Doyle, however, was a little skeptical, and for good reason…
Enjoy today’s extra-Extra History! Dr. Robert Koch was going to save Germany, and the rest of Europe, from tuberculosis. Maybe he would even get his own institute, like his medical rival Louis Pasteur. He knew for sure he was on to something…
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Did People in Medieval Times Really Wear Lockable Chastity Belts?
Today I Found Out
Published on 28 Mar 2016Never run out of things to say at the water cooler with TodayIFoundOut! Brand new videos 7 days a week!
In this video:
The lasting images of what most of us perceive to be the “medieval times” includes heroic knights, stampeding horses, court jesters, giant turkey legs, ruling kings, and pure maidens wearing chastity belts. But the fact is that, besides the more obvious of those that aren’t accurate, most scholars believe that the chastity belt didn’t actually exist during medieval times, but rather is a product of 18th and 19th century obsession with masturbation as a societal ill and safeguarding women in the workplace.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p…
QotD: Le Corbusier
So the early modern period is defined by an uneasy truce between states who want to be able to count and standardize everything, and citizens who don’t want to let them. Enter High Modernism. Scott defines it as
A strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws
…which is just a bit academic-ese for me. An extensional definition might work better: standardization, Henry Ford, the factory as metaphor for the best way to run everything, conquest of nature, New Soviet Man, people with college degrees knowing better than you, wiping away the foolish irrational traditions of the past, Brave New World, everyone living in dormitories and eating exactly 2000 calories of Standardized Food Product (TM) per day, anything that is For Your Own Good, gleaming modernist skyscrapers, The X Of The Future, complaints that the unenlightened masses are resisting The X Of The Future, demands that if the unenlightened masses reject The X Of The Future they must be re-educated For Their Own Good, and (of course) evenly-spaced rectangular grids.
(maybe the best definition would be “everything G. K. Chesterton didn’t like.”)
It sort of sounds like a Young Adult Dystopia, but Scott shocked me with his research into just how strong this ideology was around the turn of the last century. Some of the greatest early 20th-century thinkers were High Modernist to the point of self-parody, the point where a Young Adult Dystopian fiction writer would start worrying they were laying it on a little too thick.
The worst of the worst was Le Corbusier, the French artist/intellectual/architect. The Soviets asked him to come up with a plan to redesign Moscow. He came up one: kick out everyone, bulldoze the entire city, and redesign it from scratch upon rational principles. For example, instead of using other people’s irrational systems of measurement, they would use a new measurement system invented by Le Corbusier himself, called Modulor, which combined the average height of a Frenchman with the Golden Ratio.
The Soviets decided to pass: the plan was too extreme and destructive of existing institutions even for Stalin. Undeterred, Le Corbusier changed the word “Moscow” on the diagram to “Paris”, then presented it to the French government (who also passed). Some aspects of his design eventually ended up as Chandigarh, India.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
