Simulacrum

First of all, grab Spotify or a similar service. You do not need to pay for it, but you need to have a way of sampling music instead of paying to try out shit you have no idea if you'll like. Look for Monteverdi, L'Orfeo, specifically the recording by John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists. What you are looking at is one of the first operas, the first that is still regularly performed. Play the ritornello, "Vi ricorda o bosch'ombrosi" (track 9 on the recording I recommended). If you like it, listen to some more. If you like this style of music, you like early music, at least in its opera form. Henry Purcell's The Fairy-Queen is another good option. It is in English and features quite possibly the most profound text in the operatic repertoire: "I'm drunk, drunk, as I live, boys, as I live boys, as I live, boys!" In general take a good look at early and Baroque opera. It doesn't get nearly as much attention nowadays as the big, fat Wagner and Puccini stuff, but it deserves it. In a similar vein you need to look at early church music. Let's see… songs I'd recommend include William Byrd's "Ave verum corpus" and the Agnus Dei from his Mass for Four Voices. Tomás Luis de Victoria is widely recognized by scholars as "the shit," and you should check out his "O magnum mysterium" and the motet "Versa est in luctum" from his 1605 Requiem Mass. (Do not confuse this with Alonso Lobo's setting of the same text, which occurs together with the Victoria mass on a Tenebrae recording; no offense to Alonso Lobo, but Victoria's setting is devastating. Lobo's is just a song.) And Palestrina is the favorite of my friend, who knows more about this shit than I do. She recommends his Missa Papae Marcelli; if you listen to nothing else from that piece, listen to the Agnus Dei movement. And if you like any or all of this, holy shit there is a lot of early church music out there. Basically just look at this and find stuff that you enjoy. Other standout names on that list, besides ones that I've mentioned, include Ockeghem, Dufay, des Prez, and de Morales. You say you already have everything Bach, so I'm just going to recommend in passing that you listen to it. Mozart, you have some. If you are going to have bits of the Requiem, you really should have the first and second movements (Requiem and Kyrie). Add the other Queen of the Night aria from Die Zauberflöte, "O zittre nicht, mein lieber Sohn." Absolutely add the overture and "Madamina, il catalogo è questo" from Don Giovanni; the latter is my favorite aria, ever, bar none. Gioachino Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia is a hit parade. Listen to the overture, "Largo al factotum della città," "La calunnia è un venticello," and "A un dottor della mia sorte." The first two will probably sound familiar. Other opera would definitely include Puccini and Verdi. For Puccini, if nothing else get "Nessun dorma" from Turandot. Look for Pavarotti's recording, since it's the signature piece of one of the greatest singers in the history of larynges. Verdi has all kinds of shit. "La donna è mobile" from Rigoletto is classic and "O patria mia" is one of those "Holy fuck how is she doing that?" sorts of things. And speaking of "Verdi" and "Holy fuck," check out his take on the Requiem Mass text. If you listen to the Mozart one you will hear the Dies irae movement, which is scary as shit. Well, Verdi's is scarier than shit. It is about the end of the world and I fully expect it to be playing in the background when the four horsemen actually roll around. No babbling about opera would be complete without Wagner. Some love him some hate him, but at any rate there is no excuse not to have bits of him around. The prelude from Tristan und Isolde is groundbreaking; it's often paired with the final aria from that work, "Liebestod," so you might as well get that as well. You will certainly recognize "Ride of the Valkyries" from Die Walküre. And if you somehow find Wagnerian opera enjoyable, you have all of the 15 hours of the Ring cycle to choose from. Brahms! His Ein Deutsches Requiem is classic, "Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen" being my favorite movement. His Academic Festival Overture is also well-known, to break up the vocal music a bit. This list has been heavily opera- and chorus-biased because that's the shit I know. One orchestral piece I would definitely recommend is Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6. Please do not clap after the third movement. Oh yeah, and if you aren't tired of listening to singing after all this, Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil is one of the finest articles ever crafted by human hands. Finally in terms of modern/contemporary stuff, there's always John Adams. On the Transmigration of Souls is good if a bit of a downer (tribute to 9/11 victims). And I noticed you don't have Beethoven. For something a bit different, check out his Great Fugue. Again I definitely recommend checking through a lot of this with Spotify instead of just downloading a ton of crap you might not like.

Meh. Barely a year.

It's not out of the question that you're right. However, so long as we're playing the long-distance blame game, why not also assign responsibility to, say, the Department of Defense for not exercising their opportunity to censor documents that they truly found dangerous? But from another angle entirely, and I think a more important one: how do those hypothetical deaths weigh against those caused by a military allowed to operate outside of civilian control?

Not that this isn't, per se, true, but you seem to take it as an indication that you're particularly clever and/or that you're surrounded by dumbfucks. I would instead take it as an indication that the economy harbors many unknowns even for its most adept students; if you think that you know why the economy is fucked, you're probably as lost as the rest of us.

Well, I have to say there are upsides to still being in college.

What are you talking about? Julian Assange is an organizer and a front man. The leaks that have already happened were managed by people other than him. Taking him down doesn't do a thing to the organization that actually obtains and releases the documents, and even taking down the whole organization would only make way for other organizations to keep doing the same thing.

WikiLeaks is more than Julian Assange and a bunch of DDoS attackers. When Lynx says that "WikiLeaks is now larger than any single person" and specifically refers to its ability to publish documents without Assange, the other people in question are the ones who continue to produce leaks in Assange's absence. Nothing whatsoever about script kiddies.

WikiLeaks has revealed plenty of abuses and coverups. Here is a haphazardly-presented listing. I've heard claims from far-right bloggers, but never anything from the military itself. The military also rejected invitations from WikiLeaks to recommend redactions for safety's sake prior to the cables' release.

I mean… I'm being a little coy in an attempt to get Aileron to spell out more clearly what he thinks the problem is, and how feminism is causing it. But here's what I see: Aileron sees himself as mistreated in not getting laid: "I am a far cry from a loser who would deserve the virgin treatment." A couple of things are done here to make Aileron's sex life look like a moral cause rather than a personal inconvenience. First, sex is treated as something that he can deserve; by doing the right things and having the right qualities, he works his way into a position where he is entitled to sex. Second, his virginity comes from a "treatment," an action, rather than a non-action. The framing here is that someone, or something, has to take an active role in causing him to be a virgin; it's not something that would just come about by a bunch of people all choosing not to have sex with Aileron. Feminists will obviously disagree with the idea that anyone can deserve to have sex with anyone by claim of merit. There is precisely one way that you can deserve to have sex with someone, and that is by that person's consent. Aileron's standard, on the other hand, is that women should want to fuck you if you're a manly enough man and you'll be able to raise their kids. It's not really a surprise that he's going by his own standards of what an attractive man should be rather than the standards of women; the crux of his assumption here is that he can deserve sex on his own, regardless of what anyone else has to say about the matter. We see this idea repeated when he minimizes women's right to be attractive without consenting to sex ("mocking me with their 'look but do not touch' crap"). The theme is that women's self-determination over their sex lives is an affront to Aileron's rights rather than an assertion of their own. Here, too, is repeated the idea that women are going out of their way to make Aileron not be having sex. They're mocking him. They're giving him the virgin treatment. Or, y'know. Maybe they just don't feel like having sex with him, and don't see general sexual availability as a precondition for looking good. As Aileron describes it, his qualifications for deserving sex boil down to his conventional masculinity, and particularly his ability to provide for a family. By contrasting himself with "effeminate" rivals, he establishes a masculine/feminine opposition between "*men* who are unyielding and stand firm amidst the storm, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer" and "childish, undisciplined, irresponsible, and unreliable boys." The problem with feminists seems to be that they do not fit this gender model: they are unyielding in their desire to "control everything," usurping the man's role at the head of the relationship; they reject the need for providers like Aileron, instead seeking income of their own; they choose to date people who are not as masculine as the 1950s middle-class standard. These are all attributes that Aileron praises in men, but in women they point to the moral disorder of society. When I said that I did't see the connection of people's relationship problems to feminism, I think I was reacting to those responses that reassure Aileron that, it's OK, women will still have sex with you even though you hate them. To me, these responses seem to maintain Aileron's assumption that feminism is only even potentially all right so long as, at the end of the day, we men don't have to change anything about ourselves and can still get laid. Fuck that. If women's equality means that we have to act differently, then refusing to change would not be "a mass movement towards a holier more fulfilling lifestyle." It would be an assertion that women's rights aren't as important as our penises. And that, I hope we can agree, is some bull shit.

At least his "information that I find inconvenient should not be shared" stance is consistent.

I'm not your buddy, pal.

I'm struggling to see what various people's relationship troubles have to do with feminism.

To quote the comments, it's easy to win a debate when you're both sides.

Strange that you should see this as a credit to yourself.

Just popping in to thank your for that insight and to confirm that I see what you mean by distinguishing between punishment and incentives.