jake
1mo ago
Why are you responding to the volume of reports from the black-and-jew-haters I have correctly identified and criticized in this essay? @coffee_enjoyer, after the jew-hate he doesn't remotely hide in his commenting here, has shown an astonishing lack of knowledge given the arrogance with which he writes; he doesn't know a goddamn thing about Hip-Hop or clearly anything more than some very basic sociology of black culture yet he gets no ding for making this discussion immeasurably worse. Every comment he has on this post is immediately disprovable and he started off with "Too long didn't read lol."
jake
1mo ago
I was clear. I don't consider the average Hip-Hop "unenjoyer" racist. I know for a good number of them they haven't listened to good Hip-Hop and they would like it if they did, I know for another good number of them it's just not their taste, like yourself and that is the most fair, I would never criticize anyone for simply not liking a kind of music. I also specifically said I'm not criticizing BAP and those like him for racism itself, I consider his transgression becoming a fool for his racism. Hating Hip-Hop because he hates blacks and jews is fucking stupid.
Saying that contemporary pop owes its style to hiphop may be a bit of an own goal, as I haven't heard a pop song released in the past decade that I would call "good".
If you enjoyed Lady Gaga then I have no doubt there are albums released after ARTPOP you would enjoy. I think you may underestimate and definitely limit yourself, there's a world of wonderful recently-released music. On the other hand you could choose to only listen to stuff released before 2000 and you'd never run dry for incredible music, so maybe I'm being a bit unfair.
jake
1mo ago
I'm receptive to the brilliance of Jazz, I just don't know it well enough.
Otherwise I disagree, I think I can be simple, I think if anything I used too much detail.
What constitutes the (non-instrumental) "song"? Lyrics and production. What genre is most represented in interesting lyricism? Hip-Hop. What genre is most represented in brilliant production? Hip-Hop. Do you like Daft Punk? They love Hip-Hop. Do you like Trent Reznor? He loves Hip-Hop. Do you like The Mandalorian theme? That guy got the job because of his work in Hip-Hop. Do you like anything in modern pop? You know where so much of that sound came from? The producers having worked on or been inspired by Hip-Hop. Take it away and music would be immeasurably worse. Of course it's the same for Jazz, since what I do know is Jazz led to Disco led to Hip-Hop and Hip-Hop samples Jazz and completes the circle.
Timeframe also matters here, I'm not comparing Hip-Hop to all music ever made, but since its emergence its impact on music has been uniquely profound.
jake
1yr ago
the rosenbergs were framed
those powerful who framed them is a question steeped in shadow
jake
1mo ago
Kanye's sampling and genre-bending. Acts were doing these in pieces, ATCQ, De La Soul, J Dilla (Ye fav) and Outkast among them. Kanye brought everything together, he was the fusion point. College Dropout showed the sampling all across the album, Jesus Walks as the notable genre bend with Southern Gospel. Late Registration with the incorporation of a full orchestra. Graduation with its use of electronic. Daft Punk-sampling Stronger was a huge hit, but Flashing Lights is also very good and prominently features electronic and it also had several violinists play on the production. And 808s is the reason most people, directly or by-effect, know what autotune is. It's trite now, it didn't start trite.
I can't help but feel that this perspective is, for lack of a better word, basic. Who cares about arena acts?
It wasn't an appeal to popularity. For artists in most genres, when they achieve the level of success where they can do arena shows, they lock-in, their sound at that point is their sound from then-on. Multiple Hip-Hop artists have reached that level but have continued to deeply experiment as they search for new and better sound. It would be a mind-blowing difference to go from a Kanye Graduation concert to one of the concerts Kanye put on for Donda. Elsewhere, unless Taylor Swift takes a hard genre pivot into more experimental work, I doubt there will be a meaningful difference between a 1989 concert and whatever her album concert is in 2027. It's that drive and willingness to change in pursuit of greatness I find so admirable, it's part of why I love Twenty One Pilots. Through Scaled & Icy every TOP album has been a different dominant genre. There is a core sound, but take a dozen of their songs at random and there's a pretty good chance you'll find those songs belong to a dozen different genres. Hip-Hop most definitely included.
jake
1mo ago
Who in this coomer era jacks off to images of any celebrity but teen boys who somehow can't access internet porn? Sure, I'd imagine not many guys jack off to Beyoncé, I'd imagine not many jack it to Sydney Sweeney either relative to the eyes on endless free porn. Also it's not top 1%, it's top <.0001%, and here you may find a useful rule: most of the women in that top .0001% have remarkably few Instagram followers.
Furthermore, there's a key difference between The Gallic Wars and US gang violence: sovereignty.
Ah man, if Caesar looked at the United States, he would be most confused by the "sovereign" and least confused by the gangs. Gangs occupy the exact social niche once filled by the warlord and his brigands; modern organized and disorganized gang crime is just modernized brigandage. It's actually a perfect example, we think there's something strange or novel about this crime, the tolerance of it is, but its existence runs deep in our history. Caesar would instantly recognize the phenomenon and understand exactly the gang's cause and purpose. Caesar would also get the incredible things Bukele has achieved, though he would wonder why Bukele didn't just kill every Salvadoran with MS-13 tattoos.
I don't attribute honor or anything else admirable to the gang, but I also wouldn't to raider bands of Vikings. Nevertheless I understand why these groups exist and existed. Violence is our history, we became "more civilized" but we didn't change. In many ways the peak of civilization, certainly at its time, was the tremendous effort American men spent to incinerate 100,000 Japanese civilians. The bombings were in equal parts absolutely necessary and the least honorable actions ever committed by man. It would have been honorable to march on Honshu and pile their bodies in the millions. Some honor.
What kind of man has his wife wearing a whorish 'outfit' like this, out in public for the world to see?
Clearly a guy who gets to fuck women like that, ie Kanye and never BAP.
jake
1mo ago
I can see how I came across as saying great music needs lyrics, but to clear that up I know it doesn't. Much as I like Hip-Hop, I listen to electronic more than anything, and of that I'd say half is pure instrumental. So if there's any bit of objectivity in music it's that music doesn't need lyrics to be good. The point I was working from is the idea of calling any music bad. Calling it bad invokes a standard, for lyrics and production.
jake
8mo ago
They're the same statement, his is the more intelligent way of phrasing it. This is my whole point: he shows clear care in framing his positions, meaning he could endorse Christianity without lying about what he believes.
Clause G addresses a specific failing of reason I've seen in doomsday AGI scenarios like the paperclipper. The paperclipper posits an incidentally hostile entity who possesses a motive it is incapable of overwriting. If such entities can have core directives they cannot overwrite, how do they pose a threat if we can make killswitches part of that core directive?
There are responses to this but they're poor because they get caught up in the same failing: goalpost moving. Yudkowsky might say he's not worried only about the appearance of hostile AGI, he's worried as much or more about an extremely powerful "dumb" computer gaining a directive like the paperclipper and posing an extinction-level threat, even as it lacks a sense of self/true consciousness. But when you look at their arguments for how those "dumb" computers would solve problems, especially in the identification and prevention of threats to themselves, Yudkowsky, et al., are in truth describing conscious beings who have senses of self, values of self and so values of self-preservation, and the ability to produce novel solutions to prevent their termination. "I'm not afraid of AGI, I'm only afraid of [thing that is exactly what I've described only AGI as capable of doing.]" Again, I have no disagreement with the doomers on the potential threat of hostile AGI, my argument is that it is not possible to accidentally build computers with these capabilities.
Beyond that, many humans assign profound value to animals. Some specifically in their pets, some generally in the welfare of all life. I've watched videos of male chicks fed to the macerators, when eggs can be purchased in the US whose producers do not macerate male chicks, I will shift to buying those. Those male chicks have no "value," the eggs will cost more, but I'll do it because I disliked what I saw. There's something deeply, deeply telling about the average intelligence and psyches of doomers that they believe AGI will be incapable of finding value in less intelligent life unless specifically told to. There's a reason I believe AGIs will be born pacifists.
jake
1mo ago
If it's a matter of a deep attribution of the pioneering of sound then we just fall back to Tomorrow Never Knows and A Day in the Life and Come Together and everything since 1966 is just riffing on the Beatles. Except, what about their inspirations? At what point are we just falling back to the guys who invented the piano, the guitar, the violin?
I didn't say Kanye invented it, I said "figured out," as in he figured out how to bring those techniques together in a way nobody had before him, or at least nobody since Lennon-McCartney. This is a fact, it's why everybody knows who Kanye is and the recognition falls precipitously for every artist you've named. Kanye knows them, surely loves their work, but the relationship is this: Kanye heard elements in songs he enjoyed, he put those elements in his music, and he experienced incomparably greater success than those who inspired him because he did it better than any of them. Kanye's peers and especially the young musically aspirant, heard what Kanye did and they wanted to do it too.
But you don't have to take my word for it, you can just look up all the artists who've named Kanye as their inspiration.
jake
10mo ago
the DOJ does not have the authority to investigate the former executive over the handling of classified documents as such. it is not possible to obstruct an unlawful investigation.
jake
11mo ago
desantis voters will vote trump because they would vote trump without desantis
the support of mcconnell, romney, jeb! et al. is toxic. a meaningful amount of trump support comes from whole-establishment hatred of him. in the event desantis gets the '24 nom he will be unable to draw on that support unless he heel-faces by torching establishment GOP.
desantis' manner and deed of pursuing the presidency prompts questions about his place in the GOP shift. as causing them to adopt certain populist positions or if they were already shifting, florida was a test, and he was just the lucky stooge. trump's 2016 win and 2020 turnout was enough for the GOP to change and the former implies contempt for the same old establishment desantis now gladly aligns with. priors go on the latter.
t. irrelevant demo
pigs are probably more intelligent than cows. if they are, and if cows do experience meaningful suffering in the environment of a factory farm, pigs subject to comparable conditions would suffer more. greater intelligence, greater awareness, greater experience of suffering.
if they're not, then i'd just strike "pigs probably suffer more." though i strike that already now, as i don't believe any common meat livestock has an internal observer capable of experiencing suffering.
jake
1yr ago
I have no trouble believing that cognition is at least simple enough that modern fabrication and modern computer science already possess the tools to build a brain and program it to think. Where I disagree is that we think iterating these programs will somehow result in cognition when we don't understand what cognition is. When we do, yeah, I'm sure we'll see AGIs spun up off millions of iterations of ever-more-slightly-cognitively-complex instances. But we don't know how to do that yet, so it's asinine to think what we're doing right now is it.
I don't pay attention to admin actions here, I think you all do a good job, I say that because I don't know and I'm not suggesting you only replied because of reports. But if you did--someone downvoting these comments is hitting the user and not the substance. They are here in bad faith; if they report, they report in bad faith. They should be ignored.
But also, someone who reports because they care about this place and they're following the spirit of this place, they would have reported coffee. "I didn't read that but you're wrong" is the antithesis of the Motte. It's a violation so apparent it needs no context, but given context they might also note how his arguments were at best contrived and detached from my essay and at worst asked and answered by my essay. Such a user would have also seen how after my initial harshness I praised him and even agreed with him on certain points. I engaged, he didn't, but he's not here to engage. He saw "On Hip-Hop" and thought it would be a good place to opine, began reading my essay and realized he was profoundly out of depth but rather than the healthy behavior, not responding, he charged ahead to betray his ignorance; to act like he understands subjects he clearly doesn't. I think my essay should be treated as adequate support for my labeling someone in this manner.
As for "pissant": If someone new to this place came in and gave loud and wrong opinions it's possible they could be swayed from their arrogance by a particularly thorough teardown. A user who's been here for years and has over a thousand comments knows better than to respond how he did. It's a bad debt for the spirit of this place when the long-present, loudly wrong but ostensibly properly spoken can escape the criticism they deserve and need. Discourse cannot be good if it refuses to include just rebuke and I'm not talking about a modded "Don't do this."
The person who has succumbed to extreme hatred of jews isn't going to be swayed with even the greatest of otherwise and only tone-neutral arguments. Hard antisemitism is the final deviation from thought norms and it requires strong emotional impetus. They don't believe any experts or evidence against them; they're prepared for those arguments anyway and they have their "experts" and "evidence" to fall back to if their preparation fails. They become walking confirmation bias feedback loops and it's all cemented with hate. BAP's gotta be pretty smart but the rant I linked shows the guy operating multiple sigmas below his actual intellect as he expresses his hate. It makes him dumber, it makes them dumber. You have to engage and give good arguments, absolutely. You must also absolutely target them in the same place their hate dwells, and that means making them feel shame--the shame from recognition of the deep iniquity within themselves.
But for your purposes, I can say I don't anticipate responding to a user like I did to coffee again.
jake
1mo ago
the overriding component for most people is melody, which hip-hop lacks nearly entirely.
I'm not sure what you mean. My impression is you refer to the lack of singing; if someone said they found no melody in Hip-Hop I would think they had either truly never heard a single song from the genre and were describing only what others had told them, or they had some neurological inability to process melodies, or at worst they were being grossly reductive. The three tracks I linked from the genre should resolve that, as should literally any track with rapping unless it's purely verbal. And a lot of Hip-Hop includes singing, those three tracks being immediate examples. Same for harmonies, very present in those songs.
Melody and harmony aside, the idea of a lack of instruments is also curious; there is a lot of synth production involved, but these guys have musicians in the studios playing on their albums. Pharrell has been working with Brent Paschke, a phenomenal guitarist, for over 20 years. On Sooner or Later the last 2 minutes of the song is Paschke just wailing to Pharrell's occasional lyrics.
Maybe your angle is about the lack of bands when the artists perform live. I think this is about a half-fair criticism. Not having the musicians on stage who contributed to the tracks may give a false impression of the product and surely boosts the ego of the rappers, but lead singers of traditional bands are famously egomaniacal. To be "fair" to them, this no doubt has a lot to do with how fans of those bands give the singers most of the love and attention, but that just means if rappers had supporting musicians with them they'd still get all the real adoration.
There's also the idea of being a studio act. I think plenty of rappers would do this if they could, in that they would prefer to not be dependent on the tour, but that's the state of the record industry. Greed reduces royalties to such trivial amounts most bands and artists can only make money by touring. When a dozen musicians are credited on an album that's a hard group to tour with, though if those musicians are getting royalties from airtime they're generally getting royalties from their work being played at those concerts, so at most it's an image thing.
I know there are people on the right who enjoy Hip-Hop, plenty of them. Kanye was pretty much unpersoned for so typically being ahead of the curve in voicing views he'd probably skate by voicing now, views those sufficiently familiar with Hip-Hop will know range from being the norm among black artists to comparatively tame. That's part of why what BAP wrote came across to me as so laughable, BAP, man, blacks really don't like jews. They just know better than saying it outside of friendly confines, they don't have Kanye's instability, they also don't have his genius.
The King of Hip-Hop released in summer 2021 Donda, what I would argue is not only his best record but one of the greatest ever produced. As-released Donda is 27 tracks running 109 minutes, the last 4 are alternate versions of previous songs on the record so ignoring those it's 87 minutes (if you're going to listen, change it to play Jail pt 2 instead of Jail as track 2). It's a record where the many artists Kanye featured included profanity in their verses, but in final editing the profanity is censored and there is no explicit variant of the album. There is no fucking hoes content and no shooting thugs content, in part because the album's tribute and namesake is Kanye's mother Donda West. Because of her, appropriately its genre is in fact primarily Gospel (And while Heaven and Hell is not progressive Hip-Hop, multiple other tracks show Kanye's continuing prog innovativeness.) Its religious genre is not something read into it by fans, not like Christians once arguing U2 is secretly religious, not Tyler Joseph where he's open about his faith and has spoken of Christian themes in his songwriting. Donda is purposefully Gospel. The most influential musician since Michael Jackson released an album that is arguably his best, and it's Gospel. I said it already, Kanye's a genius.
Music has been subject to repeated moral panics. There are targets of justified moral concern that were and are deliberately slandered as moral panics, but not music. There were panics about the Beatles and the Stones, Marilyn Manson and "Satanic Death Metal" and Hip-Hop and "Rap." Suburban mom WASPs blaming ills again and again on the Other rather than grappling with their inability to raise their children. Physician, heal thyself.
When the clueless blame Hip-Hop for hood culture, they are blaming rock for the decline in lasting relationships and the rise in casual sex and they are blaming GTA and Call of Duty and 2A for Sandy Hook. In Hip-Hop it is that most classic mistaking of cause for effect: Hip-Hop didn't cause hood culture, hood culture caused Hip-Hop. If it never emerged, black musicians would be singing about money, women and gang violence in Rock & Roll. If Rock never emerged and the most popular music in the ghetto was Yo-Yo Ma on Bach there'd still be drugs, tricks and drivebys. If that slice of ability in the community suddenly lost or never had that outlet, do you think those communities would be better or worse? Worse, obviously. Some of those artists, the few who did grow up in the shit, who do have a real brilliance, they'd have fallen into crime and not gotten out. They would have done very well. More crime, more violence, more kids, more deaths.
"That's their problem"? No shit, it's their problem right now. One of the reasons Kanye turned so hard, after either his instability or the people around him who actually seem to have been handlers and controllers engaged in constant psychic sabotage, is because he had so much hope for Obama helping Chicago and it didn't fucking happen. The hood already suffers in silence. What'd BLM do? Yeah, Black Lives really fucking Matter to the the movement that resulted in so sharp a spike upward in post-Floyd homicides and premature deaths.
Hip-Hop, good? I said I don't call music bad, so should I call it good? I enjoy it, I think its best has beauty in a way precious little other music captures. And I like that the best rappers and best producers are known. There's this French DJ who goes by Thylacine, he just released an album called "and 74 musicians", so it's "Thylacine and 74 musicians" (Spotify). It's an album of wonderful electronic-orchestral arrangements by an artist with under 80K subscribers on YouTube and not even an English Wikipedia page. How many of you have heard of him? People know Kanye, people know Jay-Z, people know Pharrell. I love Pharrell, for a decade before he made it as a white American household name he was doing some of the best production work in the business with Chad Hugo as The Neptunes. Then Daft Punk. I also love saying this in the rare times I get the chance: The song everybody knows by Pharrell called Happy isn't his best song called Happy. Seeing Sounds drags at points but Happy, Sooner or Later, and You Know What are phenomenal. It might seem like I'm arguing against my own point by highlighting obscurities of Pharrell's discography but no this guy is one of the best, and people know him, and he puts his best in the music he brings to them. The guys who break in and last make the music they want to make, they don't stay still, they're always moving. That is admirable.
And while Hip-Hop itself being good music I won't "answer" (I spent several thousand words saying it is). I will say with moral certainty the world would be less and worse without it. It is a good thing that Hip-Hop exists. It uplifts more than it degrades.
Getting into the weeds of English, "justified" most literally means "to make right." Deontologically, evil deeds cannot ever be right. My usage of "necessary" was deliberate. Murdering a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in two flashes was necessary to prevent a million from dying in a war on Honshu but it wasn't right. Tyranny can be necessary but it is most philanthropic to understand it as always evil lest we put ourselves on the path to endless destruction as we think we can do evil that good may result. The Nazis, Soviets, and Mao China (and still Xi China) were evil for what they did, not who they did it to or why.
The second part of the issue of Carlson was in my original comment. The right would be ecstatic if every grifter had his competence. As for "be afraid", it's me trying to subtly make people recognize calling him a grifter isn't the criticism they think it is. If he can explicitly say "I hate Trump" and then be welcomed in their circle and eyed for VP, his having ulterior motives would mean he's playing a vastly different game than simple profiteering and that would make him the most terrifying political actor in this country.
Finally, I said in my original postulation many months back I'm not certain of what happened, I'm only certain elections would be stolen if possible. Because of that the burden of proof rationally falls on those conducting the elections. As elected officials and public bureaucrats vested with certain powers of the people, they are specifically bereft of the right to claim a presumption of their acting in good faith (this even before but obviously intensified by the rampant corruption and general criminality), they must be able to prove it; so if they can't prove they didn't cheat, the presumption is they did.
jake
5mo ago
idiosyncrasy
I've actually grown tired of it, but I've been dealing with some monster writer's block lately and was hoping the "looser" nocaps would help get the ball rolling again.
jake
6mo ago
You equivocate; on the entity you call "Union" and conflate with its successor and on what "allegiance" meant to the man. Lee considered himself Virginian first, this is fact, the federalized gestalt US and notion of American first not existing until the 20th century, also fact.
And when I point out that “War of Northern Aggression” is a revisionist attempt to gloss over all the ways the South started it, your response is to cry Both Sides and insist that Southern suffering is overlooked.
This is very bad. It is low-effort, uncharitable and antagonistic. In a discussion about causes of the civil war, the south suffering from economic policies enacted to benefit the north is wholly relevant. Your poor mockery amounts to "but other than taxes, what did the south have to complain about?" Frame this in context just-antebellum America would know well: "But other than taxes, what did the 13 colonies have to complain about?" Or most crudely but certainly most accurately, "Aside from all that shit the north did to the south, what did the north do to the south?"
I can’t even tell why you’re quoting “die to free black men” as if it’s something I asserted. Again, I did not mention slavery at all until you brought it up. Perhaps it was buried in one of the sources you’ve tossed out? No?
Again low effort, uncharitable and antagonistic.
The Lincoln and Lee quotes were provided because they alone settle this matter. The President of the United States and the final commander of the Confederate Forces could have only been more plain in conveying "Slavery is not the cause of this war" if they said that verbatim. You, or rather those whose words you repeat, go to incredible lengths with total institutional backing and control to call liar on both sides.
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: the south suffered tremendously under tax policy enacted to benefit the north
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: the Corwin amendment would have made slavery constitutionally protected
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: two northern states refused to ratify the 13th amendment
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: northerners would not have died to free blacks from bondage
If two factions were poised for war and the supposed cause at issue was commonly viewed with apathy by one faction while the oppositional faction could have achieved their goals peacefully, why did they still go to war?
You must either contrive some many-stepped rationalization or take the simplest explanation: the cause of the war was something else.
It wasn't Fort Sumter. First shot, yes, in a war that was inevitable. A first shot there is no controversy(archive) in saying resulted from Lincoln's maneuvering. Please fully read that article as I expect the title may provoke misconstruing. A plain reading will enlighten you to that inevitability of conflict.
I hope you apprise yourself of my history here, the image you have of me is false. You do not know how I think, you do not know why I chose to comment on this. It was not to make demons of the north, nor martyrs of the south. I'll leave you on that, as your poor behavior has made me disinterested in dignifying your words again after this final reply.
jake
8mo ago
"Hoax" is the critical term. He didn't say "the climate change agenda is profoundly misguided and by design can't solve its claimed problems." He said it's a hoax, a malicious deception, the same "we don't need to do anything about it" as just saying climate change is a hoax. The reason he didn't say "climate change is a hoax" is because he didn't want that floating around as a weaponizable quote but you reading that into his tweet is the benefit anyone could see coming from his particular phrasing, something that is once again my entire point in this line of discussion.
Meanwhile, his stated policy does say he thinks it's closer to the "Chinese lie" side of hoax.
Drill, frack & burn coal: abandon the climate cult & unshackle nuclear energy (Heading 02)
jake
8mo ago
Yeah that was verbose.
Ramaswamy is a very smart, very successful guy who takes positions like "climate change is a hoax" and "we should give Israel less money." He knows what he's saying, he has a real ethos and speaks from it. Opening a list of tenets with "God exists" is endorsing religion, and since this is the US, it's endorsing Christianity, and he knows this. Why would he lie about what he personally believes while nevertheless endorsing the church when he could just not lie and endorse the church? Unwilling or unable, either would disqualify him.
jake
8mo ago
I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in
This is the second time I've seen this idea expressed. It's been funny both times because both times the commenters were praising Ramaswamy while they dismissed his statement realpolitik, not realizing they, you, are insulting the man. There's a reason he said "God exists" besides actually believing it, it's the idea he could have said without lying: "The Christian Church was foundational to modern civilization and remains the moral basis for all popular discussions of ethics, including those among individuals on the left whom espouse belief in obligate Christian treatment of others and not only sin but original sin and the perpetual atonement thereof. I forever reject their Godless branch of Christianity."
His religiosity would remain ambiguous, and were he an atheist it would mean he is not the sort of man to open a key political statement with a lie. "I'd totally vote for that [not-too-clever grifter]" isn't much for praise.
I'm no proselytizer, I'm not the right material for it and this isn't the place, not with its certain decorum. Decorum like I must be charitable, that I must take your comment as made in earnest and good-faith and originating from reason. Good-faith enough, yes, but the problem I face reading so much of the by-atheist, on-atheism comments here, like you saying Ramaswamy couldn't possibly be religious, is they do not originate from reason. You say this of Ramaswamy because of the solely emotional importance apropos your self-concept that intelligent men ought not be religious. Yet it takes little searching in our past to uncover rich fields of brilliant and highly religious men; it takes no searching at all to see the greatness of western civilization, directly resultant from biotruths Christianity identified and curtailed where degradative and saw flourish where beneficiary. What else is this but the final testament of transcendental intelligence? What would someone counter with, "appeal to tradition"? It worked then, it doesn't need to now, because now we "know better"? Okay--for its know-better Godless Christianity, Western Europe and the UK have maybe 25 years before war returns when the movements that rose a century ago rise again for bloodshed that will only be stopped with whichever side achieving permanent victory. At least we knew better.
jake
10mo ago
my side? what side? i'll answer: it's certainly not trump's. my side is the United States' Constitution and her people. so that in mind, let me say what "does not follow" is those who participate in discussing a matter of pure constitutionality when they lack the understanding of the constitution to contribute. the only way the documents would matter is if they contained state nuclear secrets. that's how to build nukes, the nuclear capabilities of foreign states are not nuclear secrets. since that's not what the documents contained, their contents don't matter.
It is a bad idea generally but especially in this place to speak confidently while betraying such ignorance on a matter. How do we have discourse on a topic you show you know nothing about?
Your pissant bit of writing was addressed in full in the essay, read it or don't, I wasn't addressing you. I understand your being and I know what's above can't crack your animus. You hate jews and viewing Hip-Hop as a tool of jews--it's been one moneymaking tool of many in the legendarily corrupt profiteering of the jew-dominated record industry, certainly--you hate Hip-Hop.
If you actually understood the problems of today you would laugh at calling Hip-Hop a problem. You bring up the Beach Boys? They were unique in how they were fairly uncontroversial to the conservative establishment of their era but who do you think the hippies were listening to during the Summer of Love? Yeah I think Good Vibrations got bit of airtime. Shit man, seems like their music wasn't particularly edifying after all. But you should know this, you see through the excess of modernity, you're not unimpacted because it impacts us all, but you remain yourself. You are authentic, and my respect for authenticity is a major theme of the essay.
The spirit is sick and there are places the music certainly reflects it; music as symptomatic would be fair so Hip-Hop as symptomatic is obviously fair. The disease is elsewhere, and this is what you surely understand. Like how these problems would still exist if Hip-Hop never emerged because the major points of shift in this country occurred long before Hip-Hop led in just black culture. The great disaster of our age is social medial and veritable epochs in internet time passed between [epoch] Facebook/Twitter, [epoch]Instagram/Twitter, [epoch]the preeminence of smartphones, [epoch] the explosion in Hip-Hop's popularity. Without Hip-Hop's dominance TikTok would still exist and still fill the internet with the shittiest, most cognitively degradative content yet devised and the laziest rap wouldn't be clipped a million times but there'd still be the million clips of the laziest rock and pop and country. Videos would still be plentiful of shitty shows where hundreds of girls dance while being recorded for their instagrams by others and righty commentators would still bemoan the state of the western woman. Even if you weren't wrong about the quality, on this matter you still would only be decrying the trappings rather than the thing itself: a thing that existed before ¥ was even born.
My children will be homeschooled and I will curate their exposure to culture but I will eventually show them everything--given, with my description and guidance on certain subjects rather than graphic depiction---because I will not be able to to guide my children at every moment in their lives, nor should I want to (beyond the father's healthy wish to always be there for his children). They will need to become adults and make good judgments on their own, so if my daughter at any time in her life were at risk in being negatively affected by hearing that music I will have failed as a father. This is something modern fatherhood has failed at and continues to fail at so often, but even recognizing that as an issue I'm still in the trappings. Far closer to the source, but still the trappings.
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