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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

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Re: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

#281

Post by wildmusings »

cb18 wrote: post #278
dclowd9901 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give me a break. "Taking our country back" is talking about wrestling power back from the political and cultural elite that has emerged in the last half-century. You mean people like Trump?

No not really. Going back millennia, there has always been an elite within a society. The difference that is recent to emerge is that there is a growing disconnect between the interests of the elite and the societies to which they supposedly belong. Nationalist vs Globalist is a pretty good summarization. The globalists seem primarily interested in using their positions of power to enrich themselves and gratify their…

>Yes I know this seems antithetical to the experience of many in SV, elite universities, etc. What these supposedly smart people fail to understand is that they are among outliers of outliers. Exceptions to rules are not unknown, but basing our policy on exceptions is an invitation to disaster.

I think you're giving them too much credit even. Their world view is ultimately incoherent, based more in "niceness" than in any consistent belief system. Contemptuous of Middle America for valuing cultural unity[1], they viciously demand adherence to their own rigid moral precepts, while also seeking to import mass numbers from populations that don't share one bit in those precepts.

[1] One of the wonderful aspects of American nationalism is that this unity is not racial, but cultural.

Re: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

#282

Post by cb18 »

jacquesm wrote: post #274
cb18 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're basically saying that all babies in the womb should be regarded as having an illness. The illness being whether or not the mother chooses to terminate the pregnancy in an unnatural way. Just think about that, the stark unnaturalness of abortion. What other animal acts in such a way? There is nary a stronger force in nature than a mother's protection of her young. What is it about our society that compels wo…

If you spend long enough looking at a problem you'll realize that there are a lot more 'edge cases' than there are 'normal' ones. Nobody undergoes an abortion for fun.

But if you're solving/addressing a problem efficiently, you should work out a solution where the event space can be mapped such that events classed 'typical' should far outnumber events classed 'edge.'

Yes it's never going to be perfect when trying to overlay a closed system of logic on the open system that is the universe, but we've shown ourselves pretty capable at getting to good enough.

In this case it is a question of what is "good enough"? Meaning, what are we trying to accomplish?

I'd always been mostly ambivalent toward abortion but thinking about it more recently, it does seem quite the tragic and brutal practice.

I'm inclined to believe you that no one does it for fun, at least in retrospect. I think there is a problem of too much of a glib attitude about it from the SJW/Tumblr types which hides a lot of the torment an abortive mother is likely to feel after going through with the procedure.

I'll repeat: What is it about our society that compels women to do this?

Re: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

#283

Post by sbmassey »

ptaipale wrote: post #72
stinkytaco wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They put coffee in their coffee in Brazil. It suppose it goes without saying, but that meme is some selective criticism.

Of course. Current youth generation's pop songs are always bad (mostly). "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. " - Socrates, circa 470 BC

Socrates would have been less than 1 year old in 470 BC, so I guess he was speaking about himself and his pals.

Re: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

#284

Post by pessimizer »

nabla9 wrote: post #9

Bob Dylan now has Nobel Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Officier de la Legion d'honneur, Pulitzer, 12 Grammy's, Golden Globe, Academy Award, ...

Baby Boomers run the world and dictate the culture from boardrooms, and he's Boomer Jesus. Newport 1965 is told just like the crucifixion story.

Re: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

#285

Post by wildmusings »

v64 wrote: post #279
wildmusings wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Immigration is a huge issue, and I really thought the GOP was turning the corner on it, but it's all fallen apart since the GOP decided it would rather pander to an angry white base. Amnesty for current illegal immigrants + improved border security and visa enforcement, so that it never happens again, is the obvious answer to the immigration problem. What many people don't know is that the American people were sold…

> The people are totally right to refuse to be fooled again. So are you saying we should just give up on the issue? We tried something and it didn't work. We should try again. The solution isn't "build a wall". > The funny thing is that the people beating the drums of climate panic tend to be the same ones that are opposed to nuclear power, which is the easiest and most obvious solution that doesn't require crippling…

>So are you saying we should just give up on the issue? We tried something and it didn't work. We should try again. The solution isn't "build a wall".

Part of the solution is certainly to build a barrier. Mind you, this was once uncontroversial when it was just a flimsy "border fence", which is already authorized by law with bipartisan support. Now it seems that some are scared that a proper barrier, combined with real internal enforcement, might actually work.

Now that the trust is gone, the government must prove itself on border security and immigration enforcement. Amnesty should only be considered when the people are convinced that this crisis will never happen again, that we will never again have millions of people enter the country against the democratic will of citizens.

>I agree, I think it's idiotic to vilify nuclear power. Catastrophes have happened, we learned from them.

I suggest then that you base your vote on this issue not so much on who "believes" in climate change or not, but who supports the actual policies that can actually solve it.

>When I rail against the War on Drugs, I specifically refer to the stance of incarceration rather than rehabilitation as a solution to the drug problem.

Yes, I agree that we should stop imprisoning people for possession. But I do think that trafficking should remain a serious crime. I think you'll find that the prison population won't change much under this arrangement.

And even if you did stop imprisoning for trafficking, it wouldn't necessarily change much either. Most people in prison for "non-violent drug offenses" don't have that as their most serious charge.

Re: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

#286

Post by wildmusings »

sbmassey wrote: post #280
v64 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would you rather have running the country? The alternatives aren't even viable.

If that is the case, we should consider splitting the country up into more homogenous chunks

Yes, some kind of federal system perhaps, with free movement between them, and a small national government to bind them together, so people can vote with both their ballots and feet. Too bad the progressive elite decided that system was too much of an obstacle to their agenda.

Re: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

#287

Post by rdiddly »

kristianc wrote: post #243
rdiddly wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear a whooshing sound. Reductio ad Trumperum or something similar (I'm not real 'up' on my Latin grammar) would presumably mean "reduce to Trump." You know, like summing up a complex & nuanced issue in terms of how it supposedly relates to Trump. You're saying people have been doing this -- as a -strategy- mind you -- since before Trump existed?

That's not what it means. Reductio ad 'X' means assigning guilt by association to X. I don't feel like I really need to make the actions of the Republican Party in the 1960s in the south (yes - southern strategy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy ) any more wrong by associating them with Trump. Lynchings kind of speak for themselves. Do I think that Trump is drawing on the same political tradition by '…

Since I'm probably getting some downvotes that belong to Trump, I think the dude stands for nothing in particular; he's been boring me since the 80s when I first heard the name, and he's pretty much the last thing I'm interested in talking about.

Looks like I got the literal translation of "reductio ad something" right though. Also seems like the spirit is the same between me and Leo Strauss about how said reduction results in something pat, neat, simple and intellectually lazy. That's what I experience every time someone tries to tie up something interesting & complex with a nice Trump ribbon. It has been "reduced to Trump."

Re: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

#288

Post by mundo »

kristianc wrote: post #205
1337biz wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is about time to officially introduce the 'Reductio ad Trumperum'.

Not quite - as a strategy by Republican politicians (and Democrats before that) it predates Trump by quite a long way.

Not for nothing has "demagogue" been in use for hundreds of years...

Re: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

#289

Post by owenfi »

jtwaleson wrote: post #213
tnecniv wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I don't know unless you are referring to some event I am not familiar with. Yeah he's not writing protest songs anymore (unless you ask him [1]), but since he went electric, he's been doing what he wants, not what's expected of him. I saw him on tour this year, and it was a strange experience. The performance, song choice, and delivery felt more like he was just doing his music thing and I was paying to watch --…

Experienced exactly the same thing. Surreal. Enjoyed the opening act (Mark Knopfler) more than Dylan, but at least I saw him live once ;)

And here's Knopfler playing Dylan's take on a classic Scottish folk tune (The Parting Glass)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fKszPYmj7s

Re: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

#290

Post by sbmassey »

wildmusings wrote: post #286
sbmassey wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is the case, we should consider splitting the country up into more homogenous chunks

Yes, some kind of federal system perhaps, with free movement between them, and a small national government to bind them together, so people can vote with both their ballots and feet. Too bad the progressive elite decided that system was too much of an obstacle to their agenda.

It's not so much the "progressive elite" as a general fact of human politics that in Federal systems power inexorably moves to the center as anything going wrong in the provinces will be taken over by the centralised state, but never vice versa. Nationhood is the only thing that seems able to resist this tendency at the present time.
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