mahiwaga

Rock rarely if ever acknowledges its intellectual and artistic debt to black musicians, so I always feel a small sense of justice whenever hip-hop reappropriates it.

(crossposted on Facebook)

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

How Measurement Fails Doctors and Teachers • 2016 Jan 16 • Robert M. Wachter • New York Times

“The secret of quality is love” — Professor Avedis Donabedian, University of Michigan School of Public Health

Measurement is necessary and inevitable but often times there’s not enough inquiry as to whether a measurement is statistically let alone scientifically valid.

Measuring a whole bunch of numbers without at least having a working theory of what those numbers are supposed to represent—what they mean in the big picture—is simply bad science.

(crossposted on Facebook)

Despite the well-documented existence of systemic/institutionalized racism that exists as a superset of overt racism, many naive antagonists still retort with “anyone can be racist regardless of skin color” as a way to deflect criticism of inherently racist structures.

It’s true that anyone can be racist regardless of skin color, but the fact of the matter is that that discrimination is still often times in service of white supremacy, one way or another.

It doesn’t take a white person to support and advocate for white supremacy.

So I’ve taken to just talking about white supremacy instead of even bothering with talking about racism.

The Toast brings up the fact that Middle Earth is a post-apocalyptic ecocatastrophic feudal dystopia and that Aragorn’s ascension to the throne was totally illegitimate.

The Illegitimacy of Aragorn’s Claim to the Throne • 2016 Jan 19 • Austin Gilkeson • The Toast

The fact of the matter was that Gandalf practically ensured that any of Gondor’s ruling elite who weren’t pro-House of Elendil ended up dead.

Certainly there were factions that would’ve fought under Denethor’s and/or Boromir’s banners had either of them survived the War of the Ring. Convenient, isn’t it?

(crossposted to Facebook)

Allowing Boromir to journey with the guy who was likely to usurp his claim to leadership was already a fraught situation, and Gandalf was probably counting on Aragorn to take care of any dissension in whatever way was necessary. It’s just that history is written by the victors and they even made it look like Boromir died with honor to allay any suspicion.

And Gandalf spent years actively poisoning the relationship between Denethor and the only other guy who would’ve been his staunch ally. Despite his pro-royalist stance, I doubt that Faramir would’ve gone head-to-head against his own father in a war of succession.

Given that the Númenoreans ruined their civilization to the point that it was personally destroyed by God Himself, the Gondorrim probably shouldn’t have been so quick to crown a long-lived, pure-blooded Númenorean like Aragorn.

The pro-royalists like to blame Sauron for the Akallabêth but everyone else knows that Ar-Pharazôn was already a raging, raping dickhole. All Sauron did was give words to what was already in Ar-Pharazôn’s heart.

There was someone who laid claim to the throne of the Roman Empire in the 20th century but that’s only really about 700 years from the fall of Constantinople compared to over 1,000 years after the fall of Fornost Erain.

Eugenio Lascorz • Wikipedia

What goes up must come down. Entropy wins in the end and you’re gonna die.

But gravity doesn’t always mean crashing down onto the ground. If your velocity is high enough, you can harness the gravity to send you sailing to the next star. (Sure, it will take a few hundred thousand years at sublight speeds, but you understand the sentiment….)

[The] art to flying… lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.