You're just a lowly Cheddar Monk / Always running out of tricks

also two weeks ago I had an original post crack four-digit-notes-count for the first time ever (yes the leverage one)

and now i want to see who’s booping me so I think i’m just gonna give up on trying to backread notifications for the entire month of march.

[edit September 2024: I am sometimes checking notifications now but May Lapse Again]

And my manager was like no!!!! If that happened, I would drive to find you guys in my truck and we could eat stuff from my wife's garden and I would make sure everyone I know survived!! I would carry you all on my shoulders away from the zombies!!

UPDATE!

Read Foreach from the beginning HERE.

this is, of course, also a political mess

^this comment from a Croatian on Language Hat triggered an argument with another Croatian about how much Chakavian and Kajkavian is actually in Croatian standard speech (or writing).

there is no way to delineate South Slavic varieties natively spoken by Serbs and Croats (et. al.) from those spoken by Slovenians, and no way to delineate varieties spoken by Serbs from those spoken by Croats, without making the resulting groupings paraphyletic. Kajkavian exists on an unbroken continuum with eastern varieties of Slovenian, and both of them share multiple traits in common with central dialects of Slovak – formally classified as a West Slavic language. northern Čakavian is transitional with littoral varieties of Slovene, and Štokavian is a complete mess internally.

the reason why this is seems pretty obvious to me – we were stateless peoples until recently, and there was never an opportunity for us to flatten our internal linguistic diversity into something resembling national languages. (that is, until we didn’t start displacing ourselves instead of letting other nations do the displacing for us.) for what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s much use in insisting on a common term for what are today distinct national varieties even if they are, as a consequence of historic happenstance, all based on the same dialect. I personally happen to quite like how there’s more diversity within Serbian and Croatian than there is between the two languages.

(the comparison of Kajkavian with Scots only works if Croatia is supposed to stand for Scotland, in which case I suppose Serbia would stand in for England – though Štokavian displaced Kajkavian in Croatia well before the unification of Croatian lands with Serbia. in fact, official usage of Štokavian in Croatia proper predates even the adoption of Štokavian as it is spoken in Eastern Herzegovina as the basis for literary Croatian.)

I didn't want to copy-paste the whole Kajkavian-Scots analogy, but since you seem to have guessed incorrectly [instead of reading the link]: the parallel he proposes is Kajkavian:Scots::Croatia:United Kingdom::Serbia:United States. It was presented in the context of ISO language codes (where US and UK have their own country code suffixes, but England and Scotland do not). I'm not sure how well the analogy holds up in terms of historical development like you discuss, and the Croatians in the Languagehat thread had other nitpicks. But it probably worked well for its context, since Scot had recently gotten its own ISO code (and eventually, "literary Kajkavian" got its own ISO code as well).

the biggest hurdle honestly is probably just that at a certain point the rate of a device results in qualitatively different capabilities as you ascend the power-law curve. babbage could envision a general purpose computation device in the early 19th century, and the biggest conceptual leap from that to a cell phone is orders-of-magnitude improvement, but this gets you from "a way to speed up tedious by-hand computations for mathematics" to "a complete modern information-technology ecology," which is qualitatively fundamentally different. there are people who do grasp the Implications of that sort of thing intuitively (ray kurzweil predicting AI in the 2020s just based on increasing computational power) but there are a lot of smart people who have trouble with that sort of thing. and then of course "at a certain point of computing sophistication you can use statistical methods to train a machine on the whole corpus of human language and get a computer program that has enormous general-purpose capacities starting from nothing but blobs of random numbers" is also deeply counterintuitive. i still have trouble with it!

but i wonder how far back you can go and still find somebody smart you could Explain The Smartphone To. you would have to explain a lot more about the basic operation of electricity and magnetism to newton, hooke, and huygens; but they seem like they'd get there pretty quick. certainly newton would. and you don't have to delve into relativity here or anything that's really going to cause a philosophical headache: newton might be quite relieved that you can point to specific physical waves as your medium for electromagnetism, especially if you mention as an aside that that model works for gravity, too. i guess if you go back too far and you lose symbolic algebra--and concepts like "the square of the distance" become principally about geometry, and not a free-moving mathematical abstraction, you lose a major conceptual tool for the formalisms. and once you hit the 15th century you might lose inertia, momentum, and the idea that terrestrial and celestial matter all obey the same rules.

This might be a problem as late as Galileo or even Newton himself. Like, look at this extract from Galileo's Two New Sciences—it's very geometric in its reasoning.

Or look at the Principia—also a lot of geometry. That said, it's possible that this is just the mode in which things were formally published, and that Galileo and Newton were working things out algebraically and then publishing them in geometric forms

where do you lose the idea of an ordered, mathematical universe in general, the idea that abstraction and empiricism, and the formulation of quantifiable natural laws (and not of natures and ends) is how you understand physics? is that a 17th century/enlightenment thing? are there individuals before that transition who would still get it, or how complete and limiting was that sort of Artistotlean worldview?

To quote the central argument of a paper I wrote in undergrad, "it first became possible for someone in Europe to say that mathematics was the underlying structure of the universe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when mathematicians such as Galileo and Kepler began to challenge the late-medieval university’s assumption that mathematics was inferior to natural philosophy."

You do get some people interested in the underlying math of the universe earlier than that, though, IIRC; I think there's a neoplatonist movement in the 12th and 13th centuries that likes to cast God as a geometer.

Oh yeah, didn't Newton have a really weird geometric conception of derivatives, i want to say involving fluxions? I'm tired so not gonna research this rn, but I remember being told in highschool calculus that the notation and explanations we being taught owes a lot more to Leibniz. (Which might support your point that there was algebraic stuff happenig at same the time?)

Any time a meat eater succeeds in preserving the species to continue hunting it they are treating that species as a resource to be exploited, and in fact saying that any individual member of that species can be destroyed for purely selfish purposes, as long as the resource as a whole is stewarded for future generations.

But you are treating it primarily as a resource to be exploited, rather than a group of beings that have some right to pursue their own goals free of interference.

I'm not saying this is bad, but again, think of how it would be if you treated a group of humans like this.

"Anybody who regularly kills and eats Frenchmen doesn't care about the French." strikes me as... just obviously true.

And I think it would be fundamentally absurd to go, "Uh, actually I only hunt and eat Frenchmen sustainably, in fact I have donated a lot of money to the Louvre and various efforts to preserve French culture, so what right do you have to say that I don't care about the French."

And vegans are arguing that the same analogy is true of animals.

If you treat people purely as a resource to be exploited for your own gain, I think it's proof that you don't care about them, even if you treat them as a resource to be stewarded and preserved rather than a resource to be destroyed in a one-time orgy of greed.

A lot of vegans feel that this logic should be extended to animals as far as is practical.

The "stewardship" model is *better* than the "destroy the resource in a short-sighted orgy of personal greed" model, I agree, but I still think there's a strong case to be made that it's not really "caring" about animals in the way that Vegans mean.

I would never eat my friend's pet cats. I would never eat them even if they had kittens and I could eat one of his cats while sustaining the population of cats that live in my friend's apartment.

Now, personally, I think that's a pretty clear indication that I care about those cats more than I care about, say, the cow who died for the burger I ate yesterday.

I think it's the defensiveness I find really sort of irritating and, honestly, a little bit perplexing.

Again, it just feels like the cannibal above getting really irritated when you claim he doesn't care about the people he eats, and explaining that he actually does a lot of cultural preservation work, and he's donated way more to museums than most non-cannibals, so how can you sit there and act like the non-cannibals care more about French people than he does?

I guess I don't understand why you want credit for caring deeply about something you'll happily destroy and eat even in cases where you really aren't required to do so.

It’s trivial to imagine a character who “cares about” the French but routinely killed Frenchmen! “The French” is a group, and the character desires the group continues to exist. There is no contradiction between wanting a group to continue to exist and killing individual group members. If a vampire particularly likes eating Frenchmen, they are going to want Frenchmen to continue to be available for them to eat, and so may take action to preserve the French collectively.

And the Vampire gives a speech about all the efforts he's made to protect kings and empires, that's not... like... a heroic moment where we're proving the Vampire is a moral good guy and the guy getting his blood drained is a short-sighted fool who doesn't understand morality.

My real problem is not that I think it is immoral to care only about conservationism; it's that when a Vegan says people who eat meat don't care about animals it's very clear that they aren't talking about conservationism, and pretending that they are is just an obnoxious form of question-begging.

If a vegan says, "I don't think it's enough to merely conserve animal species, I think we need to start thinking of individual animals as being worthy of moral consideration beyond the question of what use a human might put them to."

Then, "Actually I contribute a lot to species conservation" is just... meaningless. It's not a retort to their position, it's not an argument for your own position, it's just going,

Yes, the immortal vampire who picks strays and homeless people off the streets of Paris while working to preserve the French Republic is demonstrating an internally consistent morality.

But like... When the crying person asks him if he has no pity or compassion for people, and he gives a monologue about his vast regard for empires and cultures, that's a villain monologue, right?

Because that tramp is obviously not talking about that. He's not concerned with whether the Vampire cares about the consistency of the French Republic, he's concerned with "How on earth can you think it's okay to eat me, personally".

And the vampire's decision to deflect from that obvious question, and instead airily address a different question which he can more easily justify himself from is part of what makes it a villain monologue.

He's not actually asserting a moral case for eating that tramp, he's simply declaring that "Is it okay for me to eat random tramps" isn't even a question he has to think about or answer.

It also works as a sketch of how a vegan would begin an argument that mere conservationism isn't sufficient. After all, for people, there is no amount of cultural or species-wide preservation that you can do which makes it okay to just kill and eat random people, and at least some animals seem to be analagous to people in the sense that they have brains, independent goals, the ability to feel pain and fear, etc.

That argument is, to me, obvious and sensible enough that it deserves more than a fart noise as a rebuttal.

Instead of actually justifying their position that animals shouldn't be treated like people in this particular way, people elaborately go out of their way to not understand the point these vegans are making, and that's a form of argumentation that deeply irritates me.

Second, I think you're missing the point? It's not actually about whether eating meat is right or wrong. It's about the definition of 'care', and who gets to decide what it is. You have to be aware that 'I care about animals and you dont' is an incredibly powerful statement. It's nuclear grade rhetoric; whoever gets to deploy this has made a major victory as far as optics go. (See also: abortion debate and how hotly contested it is to be the side that cares about the children)

And what you're doing is saying 'Okay I accept the vegan definition of caring about something meaning not killing it, so definitionally meat-eaters dont care about animals. Why not admit that? Why are you so defensive?'. But like we all know the asterisks here will get scraped away; what will spread around social media is 'meat-eaters dont care about animals'. This is a major loss for meat-eaters so they don't roll over and allow it. They get defensive. They point out that not killing something is a literal non-action while conservation represents a real material investment into animal welfare so maybe care should mean something different in the first place, and so on and so forth.

I think the crux, for me, is this:

I really don't think it is?

I live in the United States, and it's only really in the last fifteen years that you could even find vegetarian or vegan food here that wasn't complete shit.

A quick googling tells me that Vegans make up around 3%, give or take, of the US population.

I have to be honest with you: if only 3% of Americans thought that abortion was murder I wouldn't really give a shit what they thought either.

Not to mention that selling meat is an enormous business here in the US.

So on the one hand, supporting me is the vast majority of the country and several enormous industries, and on the other is a tiny minority. And of that 3% of vegans, some of them aren't militant vegans and wouldn't actually repeat these ideas that meat eating means you don't care about animals.

What exactly do you think the Vegans are working towards? Why this sort of bizarrely defensive and even frightened response to such a tiny, powerless minority of people?

If you want to say most vegans care more about animal welfare than the majority of meat eaters (who subsist on factory-farmed meat and don't think about livestock *or* wild game that much) then I agree, and I don't think that's controversial.

But you opened the post pitting two different small minorities with different values against each other, and saying that only one group's values count. That is exactly the definitions politicking that @mostguma is talking about, and replying as if you were talking about factory farming all along is dishonest.

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

…Then they put down a carpet, so that high heels didn’t clack on the floor,  and BOOM women were suddenly getting hired.

The rule of capital is thus easily able to give the appearence that women’s liberation is itself anti-worker when we do not see the role of the choice to use the labor commodity market system in producing the observed outcomes.

Why would people want twice as many orchestra concerts just because the hiring pool for orchestra performers got larger?

My understanding is that there’s a lot more aspiring professional musicians than there are crowds of people who care enough about music to want to go to a concert hall and pay a fee that covers costs like building maintenance and living wages for performers.

I spent almost an entire work shift drawing this tooth-rotting fluff