chumbalumber
@chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Girl power 9 hours ago:
do you think the responder is serious. do you.
- Comment on I like this text. In which Lemmy community can I best share it ? Thanks. 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, agreed.
- Comment on I like this text. In which Lemmy community can I best share it ? Thanks. 2 weeks ago:
I disagree with your sentiment, and think the examples work. If your aim was to run a coffee shop forever and you quit, then yes you have failed. If, on the other hand, your aim is to enjoy and have the experience of running a coffee shop, then doing so for two years and stopping is a success. Similarly with a relationship. You can have succeeded in having a mutually fulfilling relationship that you both have happy memories from, even if you then grow apart. It succeeded in its aims of spending time enjoying being a relationship.
- Comment on Smooth 2 weeks ago:
Sung to the tune of Iron Maiden’s ‘Hallowed be thy name’
- Comment on 400,000 species 5 weeks ago:
Just want to say I entirely agree with you and that I’m really not sure why the other person doesn’t get it. Any musician knows tone/timbre is really important. I play the violin; you can play really fast and that takes skill, but there’s also a hell of a lot of skill involved in getting a nice sound out of a sustained note.
- Comment on 400,000 species 5 weeks ago:
I don’t know quite why you seem to be so hostile to the blues, or anyone that wants to defend the skill of the musicians that play it. If you want to see a skilled blues guitarist doing all the twiddly bits, then I’ll happily point you in the direction of Gary Moore, or blues-adjacent Steve Vai.
And if you’re a metal fan, then maybe you’ll find Metallica’s respect for Gary Moore persuasive.
- Comment on I'm guilty, lol 1 month ago:
My personal sign off is :)
- Comment on Let's goooooo 3 months ago:
My personal view is that you should always be wary of people asserting “this is how it is”. We’re in a science sub; we know that the purpose of a hypothesis is to rigorously attempt to disprove it and find counterexamples.
To discuss an area that I know some specifics about and can be more confident on: the historiography of the French revolution. Starting with George’s Lefebvre, the Marxist historians had a clear idea of what the revolution represented: a movement from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist, and so while their work is incredibly important and academically worth studying, they also tend to go into their work with a clear idea of what they wanted to find. So when the revisionists (starting with Cobban) come along, they find a lot of inconsistencies; the facts of the period don’t directly align with what the Marxist narratives wanted it to be (his disagreement is that he thinks the feudal mode was near extinct by the time of the Revolution, and that it was more a political conflict than social).
Bringing it back to your question: I disagree with the narrative I put because I think reductive narratives aren’t helpful, and cause us to miss a lot of nuance. The nuclear family was dominant in England from the 13th Century onwards, but to leave it there misses a host of interesting social structures and changes (e.g. the role of the church and monasteries as social institutions that exist wholly separate from the family).
As for reading, Foucault on how we like to categorise everything is quite interesting. If reading isn’t your cup of tea, the Thinking Allowed podcast from the BBC has an episode on Foucault that covers him that’s worth listening to.
- Comment on Let's goooooo 3 months ago:
It’s a very interesting article. I broadly think its argument is sensible, but there’s a couple of places I’d offer some dissent:
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I think the idea of greater socialisation of child raising is framed as avoiding turning back the clock to a time when the nuclear family was stronger. I’d disagree with this framing of the suggestion; in many ways this is a return to tradition. Capitalism and the autonomy it represents has led to a loss of the kinds of community the author is describing. It has allowed the destruction of the ‘village’ in the idiom ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. There is now enough wealth for parents to leave the extended family and the local community to form their own, isolated nuclear family, which I personally think can be damaging for children’s socialisation.
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I think the author makes a good point about ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ as identies having the space to exist as subcultures with the greater autonomy afforded under capitalism, but I would take issue with the suggestion that queer identities are only able to exist as a result of capitalism. There are numerous examples of historical transgender and homosexual identities, not just behaviours (e.g. two-spirit people in Native American culture).
Overall I think it’s an interesting narrative and a good point about the distinction between homosexual behaviour and desires, and queer identity.
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- Comment on Let's goooooo 3 months ago:
Thanks – I’m familiar with some of Engels’ analysis on it, but will have a look at this. Seems interesting!
- Comment on Let's goooooo 3 months ago:
This is patently absurd. For one thing, the nuclear family itself is not currently what the vast majority of the population wants; if you look at the global population, both now and historically, the extended family is dominant. I might as well argue that children abandoning their parents and home is an unnatural construct, that’s replacing the ‘tribal’ way of living that was natural for humans for millennia. I could further argue that (since the nuclear family only became the most common type in the US in the 1960s and 70s), that it was done in corporate interests to sell more cars and suburbs, and that it is in fact you that is slobbering all over corporate cock.
But I wouldn’t make that argument, because it’s reductive and, frankly, a bit silly to let a narrative take the place of actually reading some sociological studies.
- Comment on Anonette gets sent to conversion therapy 4 months ago:
Feels; fuck anon’s parents and I’m glad she found a new family.
- Comment on Truly inspirational 4 months ago:
It’s not necessarily malicious – given general humour in this country, it’s likely he wanted to lose weight and asked his friend to text him that daily as a form of motivation.
- Comment on Milk 7 months ago:
It’s cos it tastes better in tea.
I don’t like the fatty bit in tea. I like it in coffee, but not tea.
- Comment on I'm his biggest fan! 7 months ago:
C’mon man, if you’re going to put a Beatles song up there, surely it’s got to be the one that literally has the lyrics ‘I am the egg man’.
Either that or
MichelleMe Shell. - Comment on Tony Blair says junk food should be made too expensive for the poor to afford through new sugar and salt taxes to tackle obesity 7 months ago:
work requires long hours to get by doesn’t have the time to make food from scratch every day entirely their fault
???
Not to mention the cost of electricity has skyrocketed in recent months, so cooking (esp. using an oven) is massively expensive.
I cook my own stuff from scratch, but that’s because I have a job that I can work from home for, and that I can flex hours with. But I have the empathy to recognise that I’m privelaged in that regard.
- Comment on Do political assassinations generally help or harm the cause of the person that was assassinated? 8 months ago:
True; my only question is whether it was inevitable that peace talks would have broken down anyway, and all the assassination did was slightly hasten the collapse. It’s like the question of whether the assassination of Ferdinand caused WWI. No-one would argue that it wasn’t the trigger, but in the counterfactual case tensions were so high that a conflict was really inevitable.
- Comment on Do political assassinations generally help or harm the cause of the person that was assassinated? 8 months ago:
It depends on the context and the motivation. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, I’d argue was a success – it halted any momentum the reconciliation movement had at the time, and led to the situation we’re in today. Would talks have broken down anyway? Who’s to say.
By contrast, the assassination of JFK, though the purpose is unknown, allowed Johnson to galvanise his party in support of a raft of measures.