My notebook: sexual objectification, how sounds become emotions, and fake Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza
Not all facts, ideas, insights, and experiences are created equal. Here are the best things I encountered, learned, experienced, or thought about recently.
Sexual Objectification
Here’s something I want to explore in a future article…
People as objects versus people as subjects.
This has to do with the concept of sexual objectification. Sexual objectification is treated as such a horrible thing, but is it really?
People act as if viewing someone as a sexual object precludes your viewing them in any other way, or that it requires you to forget every other aspect of their being.
Really? Why should that be true?
And if sexual objectification really is so bad, what is the opposite of that, and is that opposite inherently good?
If you want to see what I do with these thoughts, once I get around to them, please subscribe. It’s free.
How do sounds become emotions?
What the hell are musical modes?
Why is there more than one musical scale?
What is meant by musical terms such as Lydian, Major, Mixolydian, Dorian, Minor, Phrygian, and Locrian?
And how on earth do composers use these different scales to create different moods and make us feel different emotions, using mere sound?
This short 13-minute video does an excellent job of answering these questions using a classic Beatles song, Norwegian Wood by John Lennon. The host, David Bennett, uses software to make minor changes to the song that recast it in all the various modes/scales. This allows us to hear what each one sounds like, and the different emotional impact each scale makes.
The Lydian, Major, and Mixolydian modes are considered major scales and convey a brighter mood and happier emotions. The Dorian, Minor, and Phrygian are labeled as minor scales and evoke darker moods and emotions, while the locrian scale is so dark that composers consider it largely unusable.
I highly recommend this video. At some point, I would also like to explore the underlying neuro-chemical aspects of this incredible alchemical transformation of sound into emotion. I’ll write about it here if I do.
Fact of the Day:
The problem is that all the Secret Service agents in Dallas that day were in the motorcade rushing toward Parkland Hospital, with no other agents in any other location.
Now, how could that be? Who could arrange for fake agents with fake Secret Service IDs to be in Dealey Plaza after a lone nut killed the president on a spur-of-the-moment whim? Did Oswald arrange for that? Or, do we need to invoke some other kind of, dare I say it…theory…to explain this startling fact?
Quote of the Day:
“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.” — George Orwell
Verse of the Day:
Prohibition is an awful flop
We like it
It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop
We like it
It’s left a trail of graft and slime
It’s filled our land with vice and crime
It don’t prohibit worth a dime
Nevertheless, we’re for it
- Franklin Pierce Adams
You can quote me!
This is from a book of aphorisms I’m writing…
Emotions should be interrogated before they are indulged. — Perry Willis
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Copyright Perry Willis © 2023
Thank you to John McAlister for making my work possible.
Perry Willis is the co-founder of Downsize DC and the Zero Aggression Project. He co-created, with Jim Babka, the Read the Bills Act, the One Subject at a Time Act, and the Write the Laws Act, all of which have been introduced in Congress. He is a past Executive Director of the national Libertarian Party and was the campaign manager for Harry Browne for President in 2000.
