Home » Open thread 12/26/23

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Open thread 12/26/23 — 23 Comments

  1. Hope everyone had a great Christmas, and that Santa brought you your Heart’s Desire.
    The Duck came out fine. For Breakfast the Much Better Half made Pecan Rolls. I got to watch Die Hard.
    Not going to say anything about the US or the World because the Video is Cute.

  2. Sorry to OT (as it were) but is the AI thread closed? Much difficulty posting a final point there.

    Please continue with the cuteness. 🙂

  3. Christmas was very stormy here. Hundreds of ducks and geese sheltering from the wind in my cove. Large flocks left in advance of the storm so these are ones that stay here all winter no matter what. Started feeling poorly during dinner prep. Skipped dinner and went to bed at 5. Spectacular moon last night though.

  4. I was scanning over both the Hamas Charter of 1988 and the 2017 one. There was something in one or both about how art is good if it promotes Islamic culture. I immediately I thought about how Western Art is under attack from within by the promotion of trashy modern art.
    More than a decade ago I read an article by a Brit who was claiming that the appearance of grotesque art in Britain was being promoted by the EU to destroy British pride from within.
    I suspect there is a blog in there somewhere about art and the concept of nations and cultures.

  5. the german word is gleischaustatung coordination,
    article 30

    The Islamic Resistance Movement hopes that all these groupings will side with it in all spheres, would support it, adopt its stand and solidify its activities and moves, work towards rallying support for it so that the Islamic people will be a base and a stay for it, supplying it with strategic depth an all human material and informative spheres, in time and in place. This should be done through the convening of solidarity conferences, the issuing of explanatory bulletins, favourable articles and booklets, enlightening the masses regarding the

    Palestinian issue, clarifying what confronts it and the conspiracies woven around it. They should mobilize the Islamic nations, ideologically, educationally and culturally, so that these peoples would be equipped to perform their role in the decisive battle of liberation, just as they did when they vanquished the Crusaders and the Tatars and saved human civilization. Indeed, that is not difficult for Allah.

  6. Well, it finally happened. I tried to continue my Christmas tradition of watching “It’s a Charlie Brown Christmas”, but my last working VCR quit working and ate the tape. It’s trapped inside the VCR. Powering on the VCR, pressing Play, or trying to eject the tape just causes the VCR to power on, buzz for a few seconds, and then power itself off. It last worked for “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” back on Halloween, so I didn’t bother testing it first with a test tape.

    Sigh. I know time marches on, but some traditions deserve to be continued.

  7. that happened under al quds brennan, most rapidly, thats why they got rid of petraeus, it’s just happenstance he stepped on his…

  8. Oligonicella:

    Your comment was getting trapped in the spam filter over and over. I don’t know why. But I liberated it and it’s showing now.

  9. mkent,

    You must be of the last people around still using a VCR. However, you can watch the full film on YouTube and it’s also available on DVD at Amazon.

  10. miguel c., Gleichschaltung. Yours looked more like “Gleichausstattung,” which would be an entirely different animal.

    mkent, that’s a pity! Maybe you can take it to a video specialist who could open the thing up and salvage the tape manually.

    I’ll make a suggestion for a Christmas movie that doesn’t usually get thought of, and I myself haven’t been in the mood to see it for several years: Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan. As a matter of fact, tonight would be a great time to watch it, because the movie is set in Manhattan over the couple of days to either side of Christmas. And it’s a kind of neat slice of 1990s student life, in a way; reminds me of what college-age youth used to look like in the Before Times.

  11. Re: “Metropolitan”

    Philip Sells:

    Big thumb’s up!

    I assume you meant “1960s student life”, particularly on the more elite side, just as psychedelics were entering that world.

    Whit Stilllman is the conservative Woody Allen (in the best sense). It’s a shame Stillman didn’t get the chance to make as many films. (I think his conservatism held him back.)

  12. Re: Gleichschaltung

    During the 2008 campaign Michelle Obama declared unto the world on behalf of her husband this wonderfully fascistic quote:
    _________________________________

    Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourself to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
    _________________________________

    Shortly thereafter Hugh Hewitt sprang this quote on Jonah Goldberg during an interview concerrned with JG’s book, “Liberal Fascism.” It was the first time Goldberg heard it and he sounded like he was snorting coffee out of his nose.

    Goldberg declared, correctly, it was a perfect example of the Nazi Gleichschaltung policies.

    It was a wonderful exchange. Once upon a time I could find this exchange by googling, but no more. Sorry I didn’t copy it to my own local storage.
    __________________________

    The Nazi term Gleichschaltung or “coordination” was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society and societies occupied by Nazi Germany “from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education”.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung

  13. huxley, re: my Metropolitan comment, no, I was thinking of 1990s specifically because it reminds me of my college days, which were not in the 1960s.

  14. Philip Sells:

    OK.

    I read the movie as at the edge of conventional 50s to mid-60s norms at the boundary of the counterculture — college students watching B&W televised debutante balls while gossiping about peers in regard to long hair, loose sex and psychedelic drugs.

  15. huxley, that’s a perfectly fine take on it. But did those college students then read Austen? 🙂 Not that there was ever a massive Austen revival in academia, nor will there probably be for many years yet – Dead White Person and all that – but it would be an interesting question to explore.

    Does anyone have any interesting Christmas dinner leftovers remaining? I have a bit of prime rib left to work through. I’ve been glad to see the tales about the duck. I think it was Shirehome, maybe, who made the stock?

  16. But did those college students then read Austen?

    Philip Sells:

    Can’t say, though I’ve known women in my cohort who were stone cold Austen fans! I’m pretty sure, Mark Twain to the contrary, Austen has always had her stalwarts.

    Whit Stillman is also an Austen fan. His somewhat recent “Love & Friendship” (2016) is not major, but still quite a wonderful, film — a version of Austen’s “Lady Susan.”

    I’m not an Austen guy, to the extent there are Austen guys, so I was confused when watching the film. The plot and dialog sounded so viciously manipulative while expressed in the loftiest Christian rhetoric that I felt myself insane.

    After a while, though, I realized I was hearing Austen loud and clear.

  17. @ physicsguy > “mkent,You must be of the last people around still using a VCR”

    There are a few of us yet, but damage from disintegrating tapes is always a possibility.
    The machine is usually salvageable but not the tape.
    We’ve replaced a lot of our favorites with DVDs, because I don’t trust streaming services or even libraries to keep them stocked.
    Of course, the Left will never admit they censor books and movies, but they do.

  18. ”Maybe you can take it to a video specialist who could open the thing up and salvage the tape manually.”

    I’m probably talented enough to get the case open and to salvage the tape but probably not talented enough to do so without destroying the VCR.

    ”You must be of the last people around still using a VCR.”

    I do have a DVD player and have slowly been replacing my somewhat sizable videotape collection with DVDs. But I still have quite a few classic movies — Casablanca, Quo Vadis, Doctor Zhivago, War and Peace, among others — on videotape that I haven’t watched yet. So I’ll probably try to get a VCR from a secondhand store at some point.

    ”We’ve replaced a lot of our favorites with DVDs, because I don’t trust streaming services or even libraries to keep them stocked.”

    Or unedited. However I slowed down my acquisition of DVDs when I found out they don’t last as long as videotapes. Twice now in the last year — Office Space and The Matrix — I’ve had a previously working DVD just stop playing on the second viewing. I’ve had videotapes last dozens of viewings.

    ”However, you can watch the full film on YouTube and it’s also available on DVD at Amazon.”

    I didn’t know that. I thought the DVDs disappeared when Apple bought the rights to all of the Peanuts specials. Thanks for the tip.

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