Sun, 30 Jan 2005

More Mor Lam

Good to see some Wikipedia has an excellent article on Mor Lam music, complete with articles on my favourites, Jintara and Banyen. Now I know the amazing little acapella sections at the start of some Mor Lam tracks are called Gern.

I'll be off to Thailand again Real Soon Now, apart from some fun family stuff to do I can update my Morlam CD and VCD collection. Interesting that one sensible approach to preventing music piracy that I have seen in Thailand is by.. actually pricing the CDs reasonably.. with legit audio CDs and VCDs costing only a few baht more than the badly made pirate copies, buying the real deal is a no brainer there.

Posted at: 22:35 | category: /bleeps | # | 0 comments

FUTON = GET FUCKED ?

Interesting to note that one of my current favourites, Anglo/Thai electro band Futon have a member who was involved in English dark tech/house act Get Fucked, their album Dot to Dot was quite a fave of mine a few years ago.

Posted at: 21:57 | category: /bleeps | # | 0 comments

if it's the religion of truth..

..then why tell lies?

but all of this can be understood perfectly in the the context of a particularly vicious struggle between two similar but competing meme complexes.

Religions are special because they use just about every meme-trick in the book (which is presumably why they last so long and infect so many brains). Think of it this way. The idea of hell is initially useful because the fear of hell reinforces socially desirable behaviour. Now add the idea that unbelievers go to hell, and the meme and any companions are well protected. The idea of God is a natural companion meme, assuaging fear and providing (spurious) comfort. The spread of the meme-complex is aided by exhortations to convert others and by tricks such as the celibate priesthood. Celibacy is a disaster for genes, but will help spread memes since a celibate priest has more time to spend promoting his faith.

Another trick is to value faith and suppress the doubt that leads every child to ask difficult questions like "where is hell?" and "If God is so good why did those people get tortured?". Note that science (and some forms of Buddhism) do the opposite and encourage doubt.

Finally, once you've been infected with these meme-complexes they are hard to get rid of. If you try to throw them out, some even protect themselves with last-ditch threats of death, ex-communication, or burning in hell-fire for eternity. - from here

Posted at: 01:34 | category: /rants/religion | # | 0 comments