Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => The Coffee Corner => Topic started by: Slobodan Blagojevic on April 21, 2012, 12:15:11 pm
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A satyrical obituary (http://goo.gl/AB2ga) from Chicago Tribune.
My favorite part, at the very end:
"...Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion.
Services are alleged to be private. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that mourners make a donation to their favorite super PAC."
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I'd love to watch it, Slobodan, but I flat refuse to sit through the damned advertising that comes with clips like this one. As soon as I see it I kill the whole thing.
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Russ, I did not watch it either, for the same reason. Just skip the video, and read the article... well worth the trouble of scrolling down one screen.
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Thanks for posting the essence of it here, Slobodan. I think that says it all.
Eric
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You're right, Slobodan. It's a fair summation of the situation. If he'd added some more of the lies being tossed out during the current campaign he'd have made his case even more thoroughly.
The article reminds me of an essay I wrote 30 years ago for a discussion group on roughly the same subject. It's at http://www.russ-lewis.com/essays/commoncause.html if you're interested.
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The article reminds me of an essay I wrote 30 years ago....
So things were just as bad 30 years ago - but at some earlier time they were better? I sometimes think the notions of a past from which we have declined and of a future towards which we are improving are equally at risk of being no more than symptomatic of our own state of mind, or (in)digestion. Which is not to say that things don't change - just that I don't see much evidence for a uniform direction. We didn't invent spin, or lies, or social conflict.
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It's a fair question, Ken, but it depends on what you mean by "better." For instance, if you mean was there was a time when people went out of their way to avoid offending the others around them, and a time when most useful swear words hadn't lost their shock power through overuse, I can tell you from personal experience that there was such a time. One illustration was an antique picture on the cover of B&W magazine a few years ago of two depression-era hoboes getting out of a boxcar wearing suitcoats and hats. The were seedy looking, but they were trying to blend in with the people around them.
A key paragraph in my little essay was this:
"Though not everyone worked hard or followed the Ten Commandments, those who didn’t hid their sloth and sin as diligently as possible. Sinners, probably no less numerous then than now, at least were willing to genuflect to what everyone knew was 'right.'”
Things weren't "just as bad 30 years ago." Actually, they were a little bit better. The Western world has been in a continuous downhill slide since the mid sixties, and it looks as if we haven't yet hit bottom. But we will hit bottom, and history tells us that from the bottom, up is the only direction open. As far as your evidence for a uniform direction is concerned, since you didn't bother to tell us how old you are, I have no way of knowing how long you've had to gather the evidence that you "don't see."
No, we didn't invent spin or lies or social conflict, but we've certainly intensified all of them over the past five decades.
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No, we didn't invent spin or lies or social conflict, but we've certainly intensified all of them over the past five decades.
But the question then is; *how* did we intensify that?
What is certainly evident in the past 30 years is a steady decline in accepted quality. For some products and services that is probably fine, but most certainly not to the extend as we currently experience. Through consumerism we now have an unprecedented choice, yet not choice in quality, merely choice in similar crap with different coatings of spinning sugar.
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But the question then is; *how* did we intensify that?
What is certainly evident in the past 30 years is a steady decline in accepted quality. For some products and services that is probably fine, but most certainly not to the extend as we currently experience. Through consumerism we now have an unprecedented choice, yet not choice in quality, merely choice in similar crap with different coatings of spinning sugar.
Terribly true.
However, I do think that it’s more than a little subjective, this decline in standards. I originally noticed it in ’66 when I went to my first external pro lab to have some colour prints done for a client. Coming from a situation where I mainly was the colour lab, I simply couldn’t believe the cavalier attitude towards getting the optimum quality: commercially acceptable was the mantra to which these commercial printing people worked and declared themselves to be working.
That’s a lot longer than thirty years ago; but yes, even within the thirty-year space things have changed a lot. I see it also in television news features, where since the advent of commercial news channels in Britain, dross is suddenly of weight; actor and footballer private lives (if they can be called private any longer) become news. Important stuff is give a brief mention but minutes are spent on discussions and post mortems about team postions within various sports leagues… Once, a single person could read the news; now, we see teams of eye-candy girls reading from computers and even weather girls have to be displayed. Why? Of course I know why, but audience figures aren’t a measure of station value to me but they sure seem to be to the world at large.
Quality of clothing has also fallen dramatically: was a time when dresses had properly finished hems; zips, where they were used, didn’t start to snag on loose threads and freeze tight on the first day of wear. I have worn Levis for decades; a recent pair of them has bad workmanship around the button holes: the button at the belt can only be undone by trying to do it in an upward direction; do it the normal way and you could spend all day fighting the damn stud thing where it has become caught in the loosened threads in the button hole. And so on down the entire fly. Levi jeans, would you believe?
I could go on, but what’s the point? Mr Public appears happy enough; all he seems to wants is more money to spend on more of the same. That’s why I suggested it might be subjective.
Rob C
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If you wander around an American mall for a half hour, Rob, you immediately see why quality doesn't matter any more. In the mall I see grown men, some of them even middle-aged, dressed as if they're pretending they're in sixth grade, usually with at least one obscene slogan on a sloppy t-shirt. And I see women, even some I'd have called "elderly" not long ago, trying to look like street sluts, and succeeding.
For people like these, quality means nothing. And it's not just quality of products like clothes, prints, and reporting that mean nothing to them, it's quality of thoughts and ideas, which mean nothing, because if your upbringing and education haven't introduced you to quality thoughts and ideas, you have no conception of quality in anything.
There are plenty of exceptions to this situation out there, and, perhaps, they'll be the salvation of the whole lot.
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... And it's not just quality of products like clothes, prints, and reporting that mean nothing to them, it's quality of thoughts and ideas, which mean nothing, because if your upbringing and education haven't introduced you to quality thoughts and ideas, you have no conception of quality in anything...
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Exactly, Slobodan. Our universities stopped educating people a long time ago, and substituted training. Since very few nowadays are capable of distinguishing between education and training we've had to fall back on credentialism to distinguish between people. Our universities have become diploma mills the quality of whose over-priced product is about as high as Rob's jeans.
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Exactly, Slobodan. Our universities stopped educating people a long time ago, and substituted training. Since very few nowadays are capable of distinguishing between education and training we've had to fall back on credentialism to distinguish between people. Our universities have become diploma mills the quality of whose over-priced product is about as high as Rob's jeans.
Not what you meant, I know, but Rob's Levis were costing over €50 a piece several years ago. Brand value...
Rob C
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On the matter of education, it's a downhill struggle for many teachers, too. They have to deal with threatening parents who can't accept that their progeny can really be dumb, and that it is simply a matter of poor teaching. How easy to rectify it would be were that true. However, a whole political culture (and party) is built around the concept (or should that be creed?) that all brains are created equal. Strange, then, that not all products of the same school end up with the same successes in life, successes in whichever different path they take, I mean. products of the same school? Products of the same loins are often totally different in their capabilities.
Rob C
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A couple of further thoughts.
I hope Asimov isn't being quoted as supporting the view that things have changed for the worse. "There is a cult of ignorance...and always has been".
It isn't hard to come up with lists of "things that have changed for the worse in my time" (62 years, in my case, btw). But such lists don't prove an overall direction. We need to beware (be aware) of our personal disposition to notice only those things and overlook the counter examples of which, IMO, there are plenty. Fewer mothers and babies die in childbirth. We live longer (and for mine, that is a good thing, every minute is priceless). Black and white people get to ride in the same sections of public transport. Casual racism is socially unacceptable. Women get to work outside the home as well as in it (if they choose). If I want to find out about a painter or writer or photographer I have virtually instant access to his or her work and to facts and informed (sometimes) opinions. We have a better understanding of how to look after our planet (whether we are doing a better job is another question). I can afford a half decent camera.
When we remember a time when we were all polite and agreed with each other about fundamental values, we need to think about who was excluded from that happy consensus and be sure we aren't being sentimental about a time when white protestant males were the only people who mattered.
Belief in a golden age is a human universal. The ancient greeks believed in one. Undiscovered tribes in the amazon basin probably believe in one. Fair enough, but let's not confuse it with history.
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Okay, Ken, as Walter Williams would say, "let's look at it."
1. Fewer mothers and babies die in childbirth. That's a plus, but fewer of those babies have both a mom and a dad, and, in fact, there are fewer babies -- too few if you understand how our social welfare system is supposed to work.
2.We live longer. Until Monday, when I get in the car and head home for the summer, I'm in a retirement community where people are living longer, going around on their walkers, some with failed kidneys undergoing daily dialysis, some developing dementia, etc. All the joys of old age. It's a real blast!
3.Black and white people get to ride in the same sections of public transport and casual racism is unacceptable. No question that that's very, very much to the good. Unfortunately, with so many race hustlers at work it's still an ongoing process. When we all get to the point where all of us can listen together to "Amos 'n Andy" and get a belly laugh out of it, we'll be at the end of the process. Wish I could live to that day (without a walker), but I don't expect to.
4. Women get to work outside the home as well as in it (emphasis added). With the tax structure we have at the moment it's not so much that they get to work outside the home ad that they have to work outside the home. It's nice that the prejudice is gone, or at least, greatly reduced, but it's not all sweetness and light. Women have given up a lot to reach the point where they get to work outside the home. I hope they can recover it without losing what they've gained.
5. Yes, on balance the availability of information on everything imaginable is a boon to humanity -- or at least it ought to be. But on the downside of the information flood, there's also TV. I sometimes question whether on balance it's all a plus.
6. Who says we have a better understanding of how to look after our planet? When I was at University of Michigan at the beginning of the fifties geologists were so convinced we were about to enter a new ice age that at least one of my professors was learning how to build an igloo. Now we're supposedly heading into floods and famines because of estimated temperature levels often experienced by the earth in the past. The reason this new fad seems so different from the crap that was going on in the fifties can be found in #5, above.
6. You always could afford a half decent camera as long as you were willing to give up enough other things.
When was that time you remember when we all were polite and agreed with each other? And the idea that there was "a time when white protestant males were the only people who mattered" seems awfully Eurocentric, to borrow a term from the left-wing fanaticum.
But there's always been a golden age back there in history: it was when you were nursing.
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Okay, Ken, as Walter Williams would say, "let's look at it."
When was that time you remember when we all were polite and agreed with each other? And the idea that there was "a time when white protestant males were the only people who mattered" seems awfully Eurocentric, to borrow a term from the left-wing fanaticum.
But there's always been a golden age back there in history: it was when you were nursing.
Russ, I wouldn't dispute the proposition that there are downsides to my upsides. What I am arguing is that one needs to be very cautious about one's personal disposition to focus on the one rather than the other. My phrase about "the time when we were all polite..." is a reference to the essay you linked, in which you seem to be referring to a time of civility and social consensus which, in my view, is largely mythical. Similar comment about the "white protestant males" thing - I am arguing that the american social consensus you refer to in your essay was insufficiently inclusive, not that white protestant males were ever, in fact, the only people who mattered in the world.
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I can’t really imagine that anyone of pensionable age can doubt that things are not, overall, as bright as they used to be.
Women at work. Was a time when, for the average middle class couple, the man’s ‘work’ was sufficiently rewarded to provide for the family’s needs. The woman was able to run the home, bring up the children as well as she knew how, usually with help from the grandmothers, and provide the essential support system on which family life depends if it is to flourish. This was good for the older generation, too, because it provided a worthwhile sense of purpose that isn’t attained from sitting around getting bored alone or in equally boring company. Age requires the stimulus of youth; it’s a trade where one party gets brightness in life and the other help, both physical and, if needed/possible, financial. It’s not even something that only the middle classes understood and enjoyed: the so-called deprives families of the third world and poorer parts of contemporary Europe still have an enormous grandparental contribution in their lives: it’s where the home help comes from whilst the parents are out slaving.
The idea that, somehow, ‘women at home’ is a pejorative, some kind of life sentence of gloom and doom, is a nonsense born of libber sentiment and propaganda. My own wife and her contemporaries had a great life: not only did they have the joy of being with and seeing their young grow, they had time enough to go out socially wherever the mood took them. In our case, it appeared to be tennis, swimming at the local pool, going out to town now and again to see what new ideas the shops had to offer and probably squeeze in a bite of lunch. Nope, it didn’t take a husband earning a fortune: I was a photographer, remember, with all the mighty ups and downs that implies. It took a mindset that’s now vanished for anyone but the rich. The sisters have spread all too successfully this idea that running a home is a downer, a less-than-second-best option for the failures in life. Bullshit. And you know what? I can’t remember a time when I ever came home from the darkroom, even after midnight, and there wasn’t a great meal awaiting me! I remember steak, fresh peas and chips (that's fried potatoes, not those hard, wafer things from a packet) and then off to bed… Had I but the digestive system left to enjoy that now.
Juvenile delinquency is often blamed on lack of opportunity. This may well be a factor, but how will there ever be opportunity when so many youths are both illiterate, innumerate and in many other ways unemployable, a lifestyle they adopt at school? They can grow up with a permanent grudge on their shoulders (a chip might do) expecting the worst or, instead, go out into the world with the intent of causing as much havoc as they possibly can, secure in the knowledge that there will always be the bleeding-heart lawyer or politician who will excuse them, find them television news interviews (you should hear such interviews!) and find alternative places to deposit guilt other than firmly beside that chip/grudge already ensconced upon said shoulders. Where the parents are either both working to make ends meet, or there are not enough of them or they are also unemployed, the incentive to look after their responsibilities must rapidly vanish in a feeling of hopelessness, of living the treadmill.
Politeness? Of course we were polite; we were brought up to be and educated so to be. It didn't make us idiots, though, we just handled problems in a better way than by resorting to violence and oaths.
Rob C
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So, do tell, Rob - would you have been happy running a home instead of taking photographs? You seem to have had a choice in how you spent your prime years (you chose photography), but your wife had no option but to be satisfied ensuring that there was a great meal to which you could come home.
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I can’t really imagine that anyone of pensionable age can doubt that things are not, overall, as bright as they used to be
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Politeness? Of course we were polite; we were brought up to be and educated so to be. It didn't make us idiots, though, we just handled problems in a better way than by resorting to violence and oaths.
Rob C
Lots here that I could respond to. My difficulty is how to get from lists of examples, which can be multiplied and debated endlessly on both sides of the argument, to a conclusion about how things are "overall", with confidence that one's judgement isn't distorted by the various failures of mind and body that (for me at least) come with pensionable age, and the resulting difficulty in adapting to rapid change. Things may not look so bright, but how can you be sure it isn't your eyesight? My children, who, in their thirties, are just as polite as I ever was, see a lot of challenges and seem up for the task of overcoming them, as I was at their age. My grandchildren and their friends are literate, numerate, interested in school, and show no propensity to resort to violence or oaths. They give me what I consider to be good reasons to be hopeful, and I don't see why I should assume that everybody else's children and grandchildren are that different. I certainly agree that greed, hatred, ignorance, sickness, old age, death, and various species of idiot are just as prevalent as they always were, but I don't think they are any more prevalent.
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It is almost as if this was all some grand joke to illustrate the fallacy of the "golden age" ... sad, really.
Wake-up and smell the bullshit.
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I think there really was a Golden Age, but it was a long time ago. Many thousands of years ago. Before the first politicians came on the scene.
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So, do tell, Rob - would you have been happy running a home instead of taking photographs? You seem to have had a choice in how you spent your prime years (you chose photography), but your wife had no option but to be satisfied ensuring that there was a great meal to which you could come home.
Some assumption!
My wife was perfectly able to work (her number was physics and chemistry) and for the first few months of our marriage she did, but when motherhood came knocking at the door like the Avon Lady, she chose home. After the kids were old enough to be in school, she thought about having another crack at working, and she returned to college (and a job) to catch up with developments in her field. A year of that, of wondering if I'd got back home in time to make the kids something to eat for lunch (she didn't dig the idea of them eating school slop) and she decided that choices always have to be made, and hers was to keep the home as numero uno. You bet you never saw such contented faces!
What she experienced had little to do with work; it was all about the concept of personal validity: could she still cut it in the bigger world? Once she realised that she was just as bright as she'd always been, she passed.
Would I have been happy being a househusband? I think the question is basically flawed, and derives from the PC concept of the two sexes being the same. They are not; they are designed for different functions and it's something reflected throughout the natural world. You just can't take the maternal, the nurturer out of the equation and thrust those qualities/requirements onto the other gender. It won't work.
Rob C
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Lots here that I could respond to. My difficulty is how to get from lists of examples, which can be multiplied and debated endlessly on both sides of the argument, to a conclusion about how things are "overall", with confidence that one's judgement isn't distorted by the various failures of mind and body that (for me at least) come with pensionable age, and the resulting difficulty in adapting to rapid change. Things may not look so bright, but how can you be sure it isn't your eyesight? My children, who, in their thirties, are just as polite as I ever was, see a lot of challenges and seem up for the task of overcoming them, as I was at their age. My grandchildren and their friends are literate, numerate, interested in school, and show no propensity to resort to violence or oaths. They give me what I consider to be good reasons to be hopeful, and I don't see why I should assume that everybody else's children and grandchildren are that different. I certainly agree that greed, hatred, ignorance, sickness, old age, death, and various species of idiot are just as prevalent as they always were, but I don't think they are any more prevalent.
Ken, all of these exchanges of points of view are the same: they are coloured by personal experience and I can't see any way around that. My own grandchildren are far brighter academically than ever I was; they have sharper minds and are much more street savvy and aware than I have ever been. Equally, I can't remember an earlier time when I used to be afraid to walk by myself in our local park in Scotland. Today, having last visited the place about eight years ago, and with memories of the changes I saw, I'd be very concerned to wander there alone again. With a camera? Never again, and more's the pity as we used to have wonderful autumn colours in the trees every year.
But it doesn’t have to be something confined to cities, either. Here, on Mallorca, there is a couple of reservoirs up in the Tramuntana mountain chain where you can park and go for walks. When we first came here to live some thirty years ago, I would think nothing of parking, pulling out the tripod and doing some stock. Since then, tourists have been held up at knife point up in those mountains and I wouldn’t try doing any work up there today. Lonely rural places are becoming just as dangerous as the cities always were. This is all new here, there are no wild animals with four legs to fear, only the two-legged ones.
But hell, as you say, that’s probably only another item on a list, so I might as well just fold.
;-)
Rob C
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I think there really was a Golden Age, but it was a long time ago. Many thousands of years ago. Before the first politicians came on the scene.
Certainly before Columbus, for many.
Rob C
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Russ, I wouldn't dispute the proposition that there are downsides to my upsides. What I am arguing is that one needs to be very cautious about one's personal disposition to focus on the one rather than the other.
I'd be the first to agree with that, Ken. I see all sorts of bright spots in our future. At the rate technology is exploding we'll soon have the hardware and software to solve just about any physical problem that besets mankind. Of course that assumes we don't blow ourselves up like a kid playing with an adult chemistry set.
But in the moral sphere we're not doing so well, and sometimes it's necessary to rebut the short-term-memory idea that things are getting better and better. At the moment they're not, and a single statistic: that in the U.S. approximately 41% of children are born out of wedlock is enough to make the point. Unfortunately the trend continues to accelerate. And I don't use the term "moral" to mean religious doctrine. Morality -- treating your neighbor with dignity and consideration -- is essential to civilization, and our loss of civilization, as a result of our loss of morality has overfilled our prisons and turned once beautiful cities such as Detroit into disaster areas.
The problem is solvable, but to solve it we first have to recognize that it exists.
It is almost as if this was all some grand joke to illustrate the fallacy of the "golden age" ... sad, really.
Wake-up and smell the bullshit.
If you're going to talk about "bullshit" Jeremy you'd better specify what it is you think is "bullshit." It's also incumbent on you to tell why you think it's bullshit.
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If you're going to talk about "bullshit" Jeremy you'd better specify what it is you think is "bullshit." It's also incumbent on you to tell why you think it's bullshit.
Ken's done a great job of identifying and pointing out the biases. This is also well-traveled territory.
I'll just assert that a few hundred years ago, the world was a brutal, impoverished, unfair and filthy place.
How lucky you were to have caught this brief window of civility and perfection in between then and now ...
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I'll just assert that a few hundred years ago, the world was a brutal, impoverished, unfair and filthy place.
And it was even worse than that a thousand years ago, Jeremy. But what's that got to do with this discussion?
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Jeremy, I think you are unjustifiably harsh and uncharacteristically impolite. Too bad.
I also think that at such high level of generalization and abstraction, both sides could claim they are right, just like in the debates whether equipment matters. Generalizations require context to be understood properly.
However, it is perfectly human to lament the demise of something specific, like civility, in isolation from the grand scheme of things. And that is what Rob and Russ are doing, and I can totally identify with that. In other words, allow us to lament something without the immediate need to excuse our "weakness" by admitting that, say, life expectancy today is better than yesterday, or that there is a vaccine for polio.
I lament the demise of newspapers, for instance, although I can not remember when was the last time I took one in my hands, let alone paid for one (probably when I am on the plane, as they give them for free, hehe). I lament the times when my day would start with a newspaper and coffee. The paper I used to read was my trusted source, journalists working there were the best in their profession, building reputation carefully and steadily over the years. You could say: "i know it is true, I read it in..." and people would agree. I get my news on the internet these days. I skim dozens of "news" sites within minutes, and barely read further than the headline or a few introductory paragraphs. TMI (too much information), too little knowledge (I know it must be there, but probably buried under gazillion of other sources). And if I dared to say today: "i know it is true, I read it on the internet", you also know most reasonable people would be ROTFL (at this point, allow me to lament the demise of eloquent writing too, while we resort to those awful acronyms).
I lament the time when sexuality, like other private matters, was indeed that, private, not "proudly" paraded on the streets, in the worst display of public debauchery and decadence since Roman orgies.
I can only admire Ken for his parental skills, but my teenage daughter, and her female classmates, swear like a drunken sailor. There is certainly some guilt of mine in that, but it is so hard to overcome the peer pressure, Internet, media, YouTube, etc., which are much more influential (and omnipresent) source of education these days than parents and schools, and which make it "cool" for girls to swear (or gang beat the crap out of other girls and post it on YouTube, proudly).
Taken in isolation, certain things were better yesterday (just ask Stamper ;))
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Jeremy, I think you are unjustifiably harsh and uncharacteristically impolite. Too bad.
You are right ... my apologies.
What Ken said ... should have left it at that, he was doing fine until I fouled it up ...
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I lament the time when sexuality, like other private matters, was indeed that, private, not "proudly" paraded on the streets, in the worst display of public debauchery and decadence since Roman orgies.
Taken in isolation, certain things were better yesterday (just ask Stamper ;))
Yesterday afternoon I parked as usual in the Pollensa town carpark. There was an old Mercedes parked maybe twenty-five yards away, with a young couple hugging and leaning against it. I returned, perhaps an hour later (broad daylight) and the car was still there, but the pair now inside... I mean, can't they wait until its dark? It really won't go off.
Everything used as an example is in a state of isolation; it's just that so many isolated things add up to a pretty depressing whole, as we point out!
Rob C
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Lots here that I could respond to. My difficulty is how to get from lists of examples, which can be multiplied and debated endlessly on both sides of the argument, to a conclusion about how things are "overall", with confidence that one's judgement isn't distorted by the various failures of mind and body that (for me at least) come with pensionable age, and the resulting difficulty in adapting to rapid change. Things may not look so bright, but how can you be sure it isn't your eyesight? My children, who, in their thirties, are just as polite as I ever was, see a lot of challenges and seem up for the task of overcoming them, as I was at their age. My grandchildren and their friends are literate, numerate, interested in school, and show no propensity to resort to violence or oaths. They give me what I consider to be good reasons to be hopeful, and I don't see why I should assume that everybody else's children and grandchildren are that different. I certainly agree that greed, hatred, ignorance, sickness, old age, death, and various species of idiot are just as prevalent as they always were, but I don't think they are any more prevalent.
I don't want to beat it to death, Ken, but all four of my sons, who range from late forties to almost sixty, all eight of my grandsons, the youngest of whom is in his early twenties, and all six of my granddaughters, the youngest of whom will graduate from college next month, are, as you say, at least as polite as I ever was, especially taking into account that I was a professional soldier for 26 years. My sons have overcome multiple challenges too. My oldest is a software engineer competent enough that, though he works for a large company, recently spent a month doing his work on a friend's boat while sailing around southern seas. My second is a very successful attorney. My third is a software engineer/businessman who, with his partner, built a business they're about to sell for a lot more money than I've ever dreamed of. My fourth is an environmental engineer who, from scratch, built a company that has a huge yard full of trucks outside a large building, and that does environmental engineering through several states up and down the front range of the Rocky Mountains. My oldest granddaughter is a successful attorney, and all down the ladder of that generation my grandkids are overcoming their own challenges and certainly seem up to the task of continuing to overcome them.
My kids and your kids, and a bunch more like them are what will salvage the whole situation if we don't reach the point where the situation becomes unsalvageable. But beyond that, I'm not "assuming" anything. As I said earlier, it's not just the statistics that tell you how many kids are in trouble, and how many young black men are in prison, and how many people OD on a single day, etc., etc., etc., that should give you pause, it's simply walking into a local mall and looking around at the people and listening to them. You don't have to "assume" that anybody else's kids and grandkids are "that different." All you have to do is a little legwork. It's not that these are bad people, or that there's more greed, hatred, sickness, old age, death, and various species of idiot than there ever were. But I certainly believe there's more ignorance than there was fifty years ago, and, perhaps worst of all, there's almost no civility left. Without civility you can't really have a civilization.
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...sometimes it's necessary to rebut the short-term-memory idea that things are getting better and better. ...
I couldn't agree more. I would say exactly the same things about that idea as I do about the idea that they are getting worse and worse.
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I lament the demise of newspapers. . .
Slobodan, not all newspapers are in demise. Check the WSJ, which is growing, while it sits there and watches the NYT commit seppuku.
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However, it is perfectly human to lament the demise of something specific, like civility, in isolation from the grand scheme of things. And that is what Rob and Russ are doing, and I can totally identify with that. In other words, allow us to lament something without the immediate need to excuse our "weakness" by admitting that, say, life expectancy today is better than yesterday, or that there is a vaccine for polio.
Taken in isolation, certain things were better yesterday (just ask Stamper ;))
Rob at least was quite explicitly talking about how things were, and are, "overall". I have no problem with anyone lamenting the demise of anything and certainly don't regard that as a weakness. I too am keenly aware of a number of things that, taken in isolation, were better yesterday.
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...it's simply walking into a local mall and looking around at the people and listening to them..
I do spend time in malls and my legs, thanks to knee replacements, are still capable of a little work. I see evidence of greed, hatred and ignorance, but also families out together and kids having a good time. Not so much incivility - maybe I am fortunate in my locality. I get the feeling that some of what you and maybe others are lamenting is change in the USA. It was good to hear about how well your kids are doing.
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Slobodan, not all newspapers are in demise. Check the WSJ, which is growing, while it sits there and watches the NYT commit seppuku.
No wonder... being the paper "of the 1%, for the 1%, by the 1%", given that the 1% are doing quite good, while the 99% will indeed soon need to resort to seppuku (I know I will have to).
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Not exactly, Slobodan. If only the 1% subscribe to the WSJ, why is the WSJ circulation rising? I've never heard of 1% becoming some other %. If they become the 2%, then they're no longer the 1%. Are you saying that the number of people included in 1% is growing? Or that as the 1% becomes wealthier they take out WSJ subscriptions? If so, the people being added must be unionized government employees.
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maybe I am fortunate in my locality. I get the feeling that some of what you and maybe others are lamenting is change in the USA.
Maybe it would help to clarify things to know what your locality is. There's a place for it in your profile info.
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Some assumption!
My wife was perfectly able to work (her number was physics and chemistry) and for the first few months of our marriage she did, but when motherhood came knocking at the door like the Avon Lady, she chose home. After the kids were old enough to be in school, she thought about having another crack at working, and she returned to college (and a job) to catch up with developments in her field. A year of that, of wondering if I'd got back home in time to make the kids something to eat for lunch (she didn't dig the idea of them eating school slop) and she decided that choices always have to be made, and hers was to keep the home as numero uno. You bet you never saw such contented faces!
What she experienced had little to do with work; it was all about the concept of personal validity: could she still cut it in the bigger world? Once she realised that she was just as bright as she'd always been, she passed.
Would I have been happy being a househusband? I think the question is basically flawed, and derives from the PC concept of the two sexes being the same. They are not; they are designed for different functions and it's something reflected throughout the natural world. You just can't take the maternal, the nurturer out of the equation and thrust those qualities/requirements onto the other gender. It won't work.
Rob C
Oh, I see. The old chestnut of man=hunter, woman=gatherer.
Further discussion is fairly pointless at this stage.
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... Are you saying that the number of people included in 1% is growing?...
Well, that goes without saying: as the population grows from, say, 200 to 300 million, so does the 1% from 2 million to 3 million, a 50% increase in potential circulation. Btw, I have no idea whether WSJ's circulation is indeed growing, nor I care, I am just taking your word for it. And even if it is, it does not change the fact that, overall, newspapers are in decline.
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Maybe it would help to clarify things to know what your locality is. There's a place for it in your profile info.
Here (http://g.co/maps/dxtfd). I will put it in my profile. I am sure there are Australians who share your views. But I think we mostly treat each other with civility.
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Oh, I see. The old chestnut of man=hunter, woman=gatherer.
Further discussion is fairly pointless at this stage.
Snap!
Rob C
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Here (http://g.co/maps/dxtfd). I will put it in my profile. I am sure there are Australians who share your views. But I think we mostly treat each other with civility.
I agree. Unless you're a wanker in which case we tend to tell you so. Although there is a cesspit of incivility near you, Ken - parliament house.
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Here (http://g.co/maps/dxtfd). I will put it in my profile. I am sure there are Australians who share your views. But I think we mostly treat each other with civility.
Thanks, Ken. That explains a lot. At various times during my Air Force career I was stationed with Canadians, Australians, and Brits, and Australians are more like Americans than any other English-speaking people -- at least they were in those days. (Though they talk funny.)
In 1964 I was ops officer at a radar site at Ubon Ratchathani in Thailand, across the runway from an Australian fighter squadron detachment (been too long, but I think it was the 79th). A C130 used to fly in every Friday afternoon from Australia, and back home on Saturday taking along anyone going on leave. All of the dozen officers at our little 150 man base had standing invitations from Aussie officers to spend a week with them in Australia if we wanted to take leave with them. I'd planned to go, but I was busy working out weather recovery plans for the U.S. fighter squadron I knew we were soon to get, and I waited too long. Early in 1965 I got orders to command a radar site in the Vietnam delta and had to be there in two days. I lost my chance to see Australia and I've always regretted it.
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Just been over to your site again, Russ; '68 sure was a great visual year for you.
Not to knock any of the later work at all, but did you have a Damascene moment, a conscious change of direction after that?
Colour corrupts. I've just made a first test of a colour shot I originally worked on some months ago: my printer appears to have gone into a bitchy mood because of the long hiatus, even though it self-runs every twenty-four hours... though (or perhaps because) my shot is in colour, I yearn for the black and white that this HP does so well. I'm seriously tempted to buy an old 35mm Shifter (used to have a great one until I hit one of my middle-age crises) and use it to do 'street' in a sort of non-intrusive manner. As Fred said elsewhere, an attack of nutsness?
Rob C
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My condolences, Rob. I know how painful it can be when your printer starts acting up. Had it happen last summer with my beautiful new Epson 3880, which, incidentally, does some of the best B&W I've seen. Usually, when a printer starts screwing its prints the problem's a blocked nozzle that shows up right away as banding, or at least as a very pronounced color change. But with the 3880 it didn't. The color prints just "didn't look quite right." Finally I ran a nozzle check and found that the light magenta nozzle was blocked. Cleared it and the problem went away immediately. Which leads me to observe that although having nine or more heads in a printer can help the printer produce sterling work, it also can screw things up subtly enough that you don't really quite catch it at first. Next time I'll know. And there's always a next time.
Actually, I have to make a confession. I've dated virtually all the scans I made from negatives from about 1966 to 1972 as 1968. I made contact sheets of all the B&W's and carefully stored the transparencies back in the days when I shot them, but I screwed up and didn't date the contacts. On the other hand, I do have a series of comb-bound books I made with back-to-back, dry-mounted 8 x 10s, year by year and season by season, and the books are dated. If I ever got enough time to do it, I'd be able to associate the roughly dated prints in the books with the contacts. I know there are dates on some of the transparencies, and I could change the dates on those scans.
But why bother? I'll let some grunt in a museum do all that once I'm world famous. If I do it now, it'll spoil the poor guy's fun, and he won't be able to use the search and correlation for his PhD thesis.
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The printer got worse: it told me that it detected a long period of inactivity, then asked me to run a test with HP's own glossy paper, and when I tried, it didn't do anything other than run the sheet through and stop. Then when I pressed the X button, it sent the sheet back out to say hello. The thing's as dead as a dodo but still the light shines and the little screen tells me to WAIT.
Frankly, I don't think I'll bother getting it repaired. It's several years old and any work will be bound to cost more than a replacement machine. Anyway, I have so many prints just lying in boxes that it feels dumb simply to build up the numbers. Costs a fortune, and for what, exactly? Ego? Might as well just stick more stuff in the website or empty the one I have and start anew. Or not. Anyway, a limited number of existing prints might be more valuable after I've gone to that great beach location in the sky. Will I need to take a hat?
Rob C
P.S. Finally got it to run a Calibration test, and the report reads: Firmware Error... never!