nurple
Honestly? Andrew Lloyd Webber. All of his shows are cheesy and flawed but damn can the man write a moving melody.
One of the saddest, most touching songs I’ve ever heard.
hey wake up
When playing Cosmic Encounter I’ve sometimes felt the minute turn timer is just a touch too short. By the time you take stock of everything the other player has and start to actually discuss it you’re almost out of time.
Could you replace it with a 90 second or 2 minute timer? Simple negotiations will still go quickly but that way more complex ones will have a bit more time to breathe.
90 seconds feels right to me.
God Only Knows by The Beach Boys
The arrangement and instrumentation are incredible.
Pet Sounds is Brian Wilson’s magnum opus and a great place to start, but beyond that it gets…complicated. After Pet Sounds he started work on an even more ambitious album, Smile (which is where Good Vibrations came from). This produced dozens of hours of content but the album was shelved, unfinished, when he wasn’t able to put it all together due to his worsening paranoia / schizophrenia.
After that album fell apart they released a series of albums in the 70s that were composed of stripped down versions of songs originally meant for Smile (like Vegetables and Surf’s Up) alongside compositions by other Beach Boys members and the occasional new material from an ailing Brian Wilson. Those albums have some absolute gems (like “Til I Die” and “Time to Get Alone”, which both give you a peek into where his mind was at in the 70s) but are very very hit and miss. Surf’s Up and Smiley Smile are probably my favorites as complete albums.
The Smile Sessions was released in 2011 which includes an approximation of the full Smile album as it was intended. I say “approximation” because it’s still pretty clearly unfinished in spots, but there are some stunning compositions in there and overall you can see what he was going for. It also includes hours of studio sessions and instrumentals which can be really interesting to listen to. I find the instrumental tracks from Good Vibrations really neat - tons of sections that sound awesome but ended up being cut.
Brian Wilson also released a “completed” Smile under his name in the 2000s, but I don’t enjoy it as much because (a) it still feels unfinished (b) some of the arrangements feel worse than the original and © his voice just has not aged well.
Then there’s their earlier stuff which is pop Americana but if you’re into that it’s honestly quite good.
I think part of your premise here is flawed; the median Democratic lawmaker has drifted left in the past few decades quite significantly, as blue dog democrats and moderates have been slowly replaced. The Biden administration is also, in terms of supported and enacted policies, slightly to the left of the Obama administration and considerably to the left of Clinton.
I struggle to think of any issue where the Democratic Party of today is further to the right than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
That shift has happened for a large number of reasons, but one of them has been support from progressive voters replacing, in many areas, the electoral need to pander to center-right voters.
The overall country’s drift to the right has been largely driven by GOP electoral victories and the ramifications of those (like the three Supreme Court justices Trump appointed).
Given your edit I feel compelled to point out that two things are true simultaneously:
- Direct action is effective and necessary
but also
- Direct action is not mutually exclusive with voting in any way.
Voting takes a couple of hours per year (at most) and is a tremendously effective way of keeping fascists out of power and reducing overall harm while we concurrently pursue direct action and systemic change.
I believe it is our moral obligation each day to do what we (reasonably) can, within the circumstances and powers we’re given, to ease suffering in our community and our world. On most days that’s direct action. On election days it’s spending an hour voting for harm reduction. Participating in our shitty electoral system is not an endorsement of it any more than paying taxes is an endorsement of military funding or having a credit score is an endorsement of Equifax. It’s simply the reality of having to live within a system we did not create and have limited control over. Refusing to engage with the realities we live under doesn’t make them go away - it just means more people get hurt.
I’ve ruminated and ruminated and ruminated on all of this and I can’t find any compelling philosophical or moral argument for allowing the greater evil to take hold, unless there is an imminent, likely possibility of a more just outcome following soon behind. If there was a groundswell of support in the US for a left revolution then perhaps a fascist victory could be the spark to push us towards structural change. But as it stands a plurality of Americans want (or are fine with) fascism, and they’re armed to the teeth. The most likely outcome of fascists winning the election is that fascists take over and keep power, and that will cause unfathomable harm far beyond the disgusting shortfalls of our current administration.
It’s a trolley problem, essentially. The trolley is coming down the tracks and all we can do is pull the lever to have less people die. I find that a lot of modern discourse around this in left-leaning spaces essentially comes down to “well I don’t like either option” or “there shouldn’t be a trolley!” or things like that. You know what? I agree. I don’t like either option, and there shouldn’t be a trolley. I hope we can take more direct action so there are less trolleys and less people tied to the tracks in the future. But here we are, right now, and the trolley is heading down the tracks, and we cannot stop it. It doesn’t matter that there shouldn’t be a trolley. It’s here. Not pulling the lever doesn’t make it go away, it just means that more people get hurt.
So please, by all means, prioritize direct action. Get those trolleys off those tracks. But once we’re barrelling down the hill it is our moral obligation to spend an hour pulling the lever in whatever direction necessary to minimize harm.