Snowden's Globe is Having Christmas Day Supper, Everyday
This week, I’ve got some links to Old Time Music archives, complicated monks, NBA industry politics, European doubt merchants, and fears about Ol' Black Phillip.
Congrats, everyone, you made it: we’re here. What’s that? Oh, and a “Happy Friday” to you, too!
Very excited by the updated Lomax Digital Archive. Every single Alan Lomax recording, radio show, and video clip is now available online. There would be no modern folk revival in the 20th century without Alan Lomax. It’s a browsable database, and is a great way to get any musically-inclined young folks in your life to browse the history of music.
A charming look at the daily life of Wilf Davies, a Welsh farmer in the Teifi Valley who has eaten the same supper, every day, for the past 10 years. I can’t really find any reason to quibble with his logic, and Wilf clearly has a deep connection to his valley, his herd, and his life. Seeing such pure contentment feels like visiting an alien planet and culture.
Money on the Left’s interview with Julia McClure, on the Franciscan Invention of the New World. (transcript included) The Franciscans were the first global religious organization, a revolutionary influence on the Western definition of property and poverty, and one of the biggest influences on how Europe interacted with the rest of the globe in the development of colonialism and the erasure of indigenous cosmologies. It’s a long and ranging interview, full of interesting little tidbits (I particularly liked the point that the Franciscans were the first hipsters, people of means who were playing at poverty.)
I finally got around to reading Aisling McCrea’s essay, Satanic Panics and The Death of Mythos, and boy howdy, is it good. The piece connects Karen Armstrong’s description of logos (knowledge gained through science, reason, material investigation) and mythos (those ideas and forces that go beyond the mundane, including emotions, spirituality, and psychology) to the modern evangelical fundamentalist’s suspicion of most things that are mythos. McCrea then expands out to the contemporary moment, how many people beyond the evangelical have decided to try and live without mythos in their life, to their own detriment. I will add an aside: while the evangelical fundamentalist is one of the strongest expressions of anti-mythos, it reaches much farther back. Western Christendom, for a number of reasons, has a millenia-old tradition of rejecting any serious research into psychology and the mind-body connection.
An interview with Tommaso Valletti, the former Chief Competition Economist of the European Commission. The interview centers on the challenges of antitrust regulation in the European Union, and how the centers of policy are dominated by industry-fueld obfuscators. From a sociological perspective, however, I think Valletti’s experience with the lobbyist and international legal profession is familiar to many people in public policy:
“…all these people in position of power coming from doing PPE [Politics, Philosophy and Economics] at Oxford University or similar. They are trained in the debating societies to argue anything, and the opposite, within 5 minutes. They are very eloquent. When I first came to the UK, I thought, as an academic, ‘how interesting, how witty, how intelligent!’ But it has actually been devastating. Because economic power will take exactly those kinds of people, then put them in front of a judge, or the Commission, and they will create smoke around an issue.”
Valletti on the dark art of agnotology and how it is designed to defeat academic research.
Steven Greenhouse at The American Prospect, on the growing collaborations between immigrant work centers and US organized labor. I’m a little biased, but the Twin Cities have some of the most exciting and encouraging green shoots of liberationary politics in the United States, and CTUL is near the top. Seeing the organizers and laborers of CTUL getting national attention is always a highlight. The relationship between labor unions and immigrants in the US has been slowly improving. It’s a shame that there isn’t a major political party that is interested in harnessing this energy…
Dwyane Wade and the rise of the Equity Era. This story stings, in part because I hate to bag on Wade, who is one of the best dudes in NBA history. Wade’s minority share in the Jazz franchise is symptomatic of a bigger trend in the NBA— the confusion of “a player with equity” with “players owning their product.” Initially, the idea of the Empowerment Era was that elite players would have the authority to decide where to “take their talents,” in contrast to the years when team owners would have strong control over where a player went. What ahs happened, however, is more elite players simply want to replicate the MJ model: become media enterprises, owners in companies, and manage elite boutique products like tequila or wine. We have to call it how we see it: all of those pasttimes aren’t the sign of players partaking in the bounty of the NBA’s global popularity— it’s an attempt for a few players to jump sides, to replace owners with a friendlier and more marketable face. Hell, I’m old enough to remember when the NBA recognized that the very term of “owning” an NBA team had creepy overtones, and should be ditched. In contrast, an actual step of player empowerment is the formation of the Basketball Players Union. In the developmental leagues, players are fighting to secure salaries better than $35,000/year, and looking for basic professional training facilities. That is what sharing the NBA’s enormous pie more equitably looks like. Also, players wanting to become owners is old and boring. I’m going to instead focus on players and families helping to feed 16 million meals to Oakland area children last year.
Fun Subreddit of the Week: r/NBGBBIIVCHIDCTIICBG, or, “Upvoted Not Because Girl, But Because It Is Very Cool; However, I Do Concede That I Initially Clicked Because Girl". Gotta respect the honesty!
If you have religious friends who are struggling with the question of “Defund The Police,” the Mennonite Church in the US has put together an abolition curriculum, “an initial guide for congregations who are desiring to begin or continue their reflection on what it means to engage the forces of state, their commitments to non-violence and how to act to end policing and police brutality. It looks like a superb resource for any faith group which wants to learn together about the issue of US Policing and the way we end it.
Enjoy your weekend, everyone. Me, I’m going to watch Mortal Kombat, like any god-fearing person should.