I really liked this post, but this:

The People are weighed down with small-minded prejudice.  It’s true in politics, and it’s no doubt why the Ramones just couldn’t sell records like they should have.

is a bit over the top. Is it genuinely a sign of small-minded prejudice every time a good band doesn’t sell a whole lot of records?

What was the line about the Velvet Underground?  Something like:  they only sold a couple hundred albums, but every person who bought it ran out and formed their own band.

I like this post a lot. Recently I’ve been wondering how much to tone down my apparently radical politics when talking with people off-blog, but I am coming to realize that to do so often requires conceding to use their philosophical/ethical framework to argue from, which means my arguments have to be watered down to almost nothing and makes my position look weak. On blogs, I don’t worry about tact or trying to convince the opposition that my position is the better one, but I think in person I became way too concerned about offending others to really challenge them (as an academic, I’ve heard the “elitist” thing way more than is justified).

I’m also getting really tired of the meme that the idealism to make this country better for the majority is somehow unsophisticated and something to mock (yes, I am looking at you Trey Parker and Matt Stone) or somehow undemocratic.

So in a sense, you’re saying that Dennis Kucinich is a member of the political version of The Ramones. I can get behind that.

To reach a large audience, avoiding offense tends to matter more than inspiring people

In politics, though, that formula seems to only apply to Democrats, judging by the just-ended Republican Convention. The right has gotten as far as it has by systematically denigrating large subgroups of the US population and passing it off as cute irreverence. Which ties in with the whole “defensive aesthetic populism” theme, come to think of it.

So in a sense, you’re saying that Dennis Kucinich is a member of the political version of The Ramones. I can get behind that.

Johnny Ramone’s spinning in his grave at that, which makes me laugh much more than I should.

Whether or not somebody was popular 20 years ago shouldn’t be a determining factor in whether they’re currently embraced, but it should be a factor in whether somebody gets a little recognition when they pass away, especially if they were instrumental in the formation of a scene (80s LA metal), no matter how reviled now. Anybody featured in the “Yacht Rock” series would have gotten some significant publicity if they died now, but only because they re-become popular as cheesy, hipster camp.

And, in any event, the Ramones were way more popular in 2002 than was RATT; Stephen Pearcy didn’t get to say “Up yours, Springfield!” on the most popular sitcom of the time, after all.

The right has gotten as far as it has by systematically denigrating large subgroups of the US population and passing it off as cute irreverence. Which ties in with the whole “defensive aesthetic populism” theme, come to think of it.

Fortunately, though, due to changing demographics, that’s becoming a losing strategy in large parts on the country, not to mention on a national scale. It’s at the heart of a lot of the really shocking political bumper stickers and pins and t-shirts, etc that have come out this year. A colleague of mine, Prof. Jane Caputi, just opened an exhibition last night at my university—it’s a collection of sexist, racist, (and a couple of ageist) items from the last year or so. I took some pictures there last night, if anyone’s interested.

Mnemosyne,

What was the line about the Velvet Underground?  Something like:  they only sold a couple hundred albums, but every person who bought it ran out and formed their own band.

The other related crack is that Jonathan Richman was at more VU shows than Lou Reed.

On Amanda’s post…one of the really terrible things about Palin being picked is that it’s likely to cement populism as a right-wing movement.  The US has been much more tolerant of right-wing populism than left-wing populism for maybe 40 or 50 years at least.  And now the Dems are going to have to respond to McCain/Palin’s populist attacks on “media elites” and “liberal bureaucrats” and their appeals to nationalism, racism, and militarism by saying, “Now, let’s just calm down with the partisan rancor, and let some adults run things for a change.”

We desperately need populism.  But we need, just as desperately, for it not to be based on whacked-out Fundie identity politics and white, male resentment.

Populism is what makes it difficult to attack Sarah Palin. Point out that being mayor of a small town and brief governor of a lightly populated state makes you unqualified to be president, and you’re instantly a big city liberal effete latte sipping blah blah blah. Of course many of those conservative pundits who laud small town America don’t actually live there, but hey, that’s the right for you.

Yer dead wrong, amanda. For one thing, the Ramones are more the anarchists of rock - coming from far left field, taking ideas which were thought buried and using them to create a precise, extreme vision of cultural utopia which never seems to evolve (though the actual means may pay lip service to contemporary culture) no matter how long they push it. You’re thinking more of a band that was progressive but which still tailored its ideas to the mainstream, like Combat Rock-era Clash or the Pretenders. New wave.

As for the Klosterman thing, it’s necessary because hipsters too often judge music, not from its intrinsic value but from what music critics and alternative fashion magazines class as trendy, placing anything they like which falls outside that space as ‘ironic’ until it becomes old and distant enough to claim as their own (hello Duran Duran, Black Sabbath, Led Zep, Wham, etc.). Most of us liked good AND shitty music when we were growing up and Ratt probably meant a lot to at least as many bedroom-bound 15 year olds at the time than the Ramones did in theirs.

Oh, and of course for the general analogy to make any sense whatsoever, there would need to be a contest between bands culminating in said winner being able to define what music the country listened to for the next four years (okay, perhaps it isn’t THAT silly).

In politics, though, that formula seems to only apply to Democrats, judging by the just-ended Republican Convention. The right has gotten as far as it has by systematically denigrating large subgroups of the US population

With the exception of women, not so much. The right has gotten a long way denigrating gays (~3% of the population, but gay marriage was one of the major planks of their presidential platform the last three times running, and a huge factor in 2004), illegal immigrants (~3%, and another major perennial platform plank), Muslims (<1% of the population, but another huge red-meat issue), non-Christians generally (10-20% of the population, depending on how you slice it), Jews (3%, and the GOP has toned this one down more recently), and blacks (13%, and the right has been making a few overtures toward them now, too). Basically, they are afraid to pick on anyone who’s not outnumbered at least 8:1, and preferably 30:1, but have gotten tremendous traction whipping up their base’s fears about tiny proportions of the population.

The major exception, of course, is women, who are a majority of the population but the invariable punching-bags (sometimes literally) of right wingers. That issue is complicated by the counter-programming women themselves get to discourage their demanding their own liberty, by the religious, physical, economic, and legal shackles that have been put in place to prevent their doing so, by the inherent confusion that comes from being oppressed by your own friends, family members, boyfriends, and husbands, whom you are connected to and want to think well of otherwise, and by the need to protect your own children from the same people who are oppressing you. The GOP, with its organized-religion co-conspirators, has garnered major payoffs by stoking misogyny to attract right-wing men, and banking on the ties that keep women connected to misogynist men to staunch their losses among women. The result has been a persistent gender gap, beginning with the rise of the political religious right in the 1980s, of about 10% lower female GOP voter registration and 5-10% lower GOP female vote percentages, offset by a greater gap in favor of the GOP among men.

But other than, of course, for women, the GOP’s stock in trade is convincing the white Christian majority that they’re in deadly peril from groups so small they have almost no political power or social clout. It’s not just bigoted and false, it’s cowardly, absurd, and quite calculated - they only pick on people who can’t fight back, because that gives them the approval of the much larger group they need to get elected. If the groups they denigrated really did constitute significant voting blocs, they couldn’t do it - they could at best resort to the splitting tactics they use against women and blacks, which isn’t nearly as effective as turning the entire country inside out over gays, a group so small nobody even knows which single digit represents their population percentage.

The specific fact that palin ran a small town doesn’t disqualify her for the veep spot.  I am sure there are some small town mayors who would make excellent veep candidates.  The mayor of my city of 60K being one example.

So in way, we’re being somewhat disingenuous with the line that running a town of 6K isn’t a qualifier for the veep job.  It could be, if, and of course, this is a huge if, if said mayor was intelligent, well-educated and intellectually curious (amongst other things).

The problem with palin is that the entirety of her experience is pta, small town mayor, governor of the largest but most sparsely populated state and, and this the key part and where the wingnuts are being grossly disingenuous, a rabid fundy whose views are far out of touch with mainstream America (to again name just one problem with her).

The whole small town mayor thing is a red herring in a very real sense.  palin is an “outsider” only in the most technical sense of the term.  She’s as crooked as most big time rethugs, her interactions with stevens and her actions as governor speak to that.  To reduce it down, she’s a crony.  A small minded, fundy with little to offer other than her pseudo-cred as an outsider.

I think we miss the bigger points talking about her small town roots instead of her positions (what little we know them that is).  Her views aren’t views shared by most people, small town denizens or big city elites (or insert your favorite stereotype here).

palin’s weaknesses are the same bobby jindal’s or mike huckabee’s.  Their views are views that most Americans do not agree with.  Most Americans aren’t secessionists.  Most Americans think all women, not just their own daughters, should have a choice over what happens to their body.  Most Americans would think that there is nothing “maverick” about a mayor who wanted to ban books and arbitrarilty fire people who did not support their re-election or a governor who used their connections to get their brother-in-law fired.  There’s nothing rebellious about that.  That’s just self-important cronyism.  I would bet that most Americans would say they’ve seen enough of that lately.

This post put an arrow through my heart

“In politics, though, that formula seems to only apply to Democrats, judging by the just-ended Republican Convention. The right has gotten as far as it has by systematically denigrating large subgroups of the US population and passing it off as cute irreverence. Which ties in with the whole “defensive aesthetic populism” theme, come to think of it. “

Oh yes.  But since their entire political philosophy is based on selfishness, greed, and callous disregard for the welfare of others the sky’s pretty much the limit where being offensive is concerned.  We Dems try not to offend because we have compassion for even the most noxious wingnuts.

I also make my own bread (and croutons and bread crumbs) because it’s cheaper than buying the damned stuff.

My favorite part about this overarching meme is the idea that doing things that are rather conservative (in the “small c” sense) and old-fashioned, and which save money and resources and prevent waste are somehow ELITIST. 

I was talking last week with My Conservative Family about, of all things, the fact that I buy “green” household and cleaning products (i.e. septic friendly toilet paper, recycled paper towels, baking soda and vinegar, reuse jars and plastic containers, etc).  Many of which are cheaper than name brand or comparably priced, and some of which drastically cut down on my need to buy other kinds of disposable crap.  I was told that all this “green” business is just a racket to get stupid elitist liberals to part with more money.  Uhhh, yeah—I can pay $0.99 for generic paper towels, $1.29 for Seventh Generation, or $1.69 for Bounty.  You do the math and tell me who’s getting duped.

I’m also goddamn sick and tired of being told that eating meat is “cheaper” than being vegetarian—I’ve compared the grocery bills myself, and no it’s really not, unless by “eating meat” you mean eating Hamburger Helper three meals a day, which you probably don’t.

Yep.  I think a big part of itis that they seem to think that my choice of something that is supposedly “moral” - for instance recycled paper products or organic food - is somehow a direct insult to people who don’t make the same choice.  As if shopping at my neighborhood farmer’s market is motivated, not by me wanting to get good quality food which is healthy and tastes good, at a competitive price (and, hey, it’s also better for the environment, the community, and the local economy, not to mention a more enjoyable shopping experience), but because I want to put one over on all the asshole conservatives who buy cheetos and go-gurt at the supermarket. 

Seriously, I don’t care about Jenny Repub and where she gets what kind of food.  I care about my tastebuds, my wallet, my neighborhood, and my region of the country.  To bring it back to the original topic of aesthetics and populism, I’d also imagine that Ramones fans aren’t buying Ramones records as a deliberate insult to Ratt fans, they’re buying Ramones records because that’s what they feel like listening to, the kind of band they feel like supporting, sold in the kind of music store they like to frequent.  Get Over It.

Fuck, Karl: you beat me to it.

a mayor who wanted to ban books

I’m just wondering: has anyone heard (from any source) precisely which books she wanted to ban? I’m pretty sure that finding out specifics like Huck Finn or Harry Potter would make her look much, much more ridiculous, as well as making an excellent talking point. And given that there’s no press release explaining that she tried to ban the Mein Kampf/Karma Sutra omnibus from the children’s section, I can’t help but assume it really is something that far out. Which means finding out the name of the book, and the reason for her attempts to ban it, would be priceless.

I don’t see how Sarah Palin can get away with this image as Everywoman.  To me she comes across as the quintessential member of the In Crowd.  She’s a bully and she think she’s hot shit.  She’s like Dubya only without the blue blood.  I didn’t like those kinds of people winning student council elections in my high school, and I damn sure don’t want them winning real elections in my fucking country.  We can’t let her claim that she’s the outsider.  She’s an insider, just from elsewhere.  I knew people like that in my hometown, despised them, and that’s why I don’t have much desire to go back to my hometown in adulthood.  So if anything, I’d think that populist resentment could be turned _against_ her.

Basically, they are afraid to pick on anyone who’s not outnumbered at least 8:1, and preferably 30:1, but have gotten tremendous traction whipping up their base’s fears about tiny proportions of the population.

Which is funny, because they then prop up other tiny proportions of the population as the only “real” Americans.  Only about 4% of the US population hunt, for instance.  While “Christians” make up a majority of the US population, Christians who actually attend church on a regular basis are probably no longer a majority, and Christians who belong to a denomination seen as legitimate by the Republican base are a distinct minority. 

Pro-lifers?  Minority.

Good Country People?  Minority.

Single-income households (where a man brings in said income)?  Minority.

Nuclear families?  Soon to be a minority, if not already.  I read somewhere recently that only 25% of adults live with a spouse of the opposite sex and minor children (though of course that ignores empty nesters and is probably skewed by older teens and young 20-somethings who are unlikely to be married yet and don’t count as minors if they still live at home).

The fabulously wealthy?  Minority.  Shit, I think even people who would be considered upper middle class are probably a minority.

The funny thing about the Republicans is that they’re still able to win elections even though the vast majority of Americans simply aren’t on their radar in any capacity.

That’s the argument of right wing populism—-only be everyone embracing the lowest common denominator can we get some semblance of fairness.  If you try to improve yourself in any way, then you are making people who haven’t made those improvements feel bad about themselves.

Which sort of works (stupid, but OK, kind of logical) if you’re talking about an obvious moral or improving choice.  For instance I think this is what riles up so many people about No Impact Man.  Doing something so extreme, and for specifically altruistic reasons, kind of threatens people who just can’t make the choices he’s made.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense if all we’re talking about is baking your own bread (which a lot of people do because it’s fun, tastes good, and is cheap, not because it’s a moral activity), or something somewhere in between and done for only nebulously “moral” reasons, like buying recycled stuff.  If I buy Method brand dishwashing liquid because it smells nicer than Dawn, does that make me an elitist or just someone who prefers “Pink Grapefruit” to “Rainforest Mist”?

My favorite bit of Klosterman’s defensive asthetic populism is in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, where he lauds Country Music, but not the Johnny Cash kind of country music, rather “Wal-Mart” country music like “Toby Keith and the Dixie Chicks”.

Whoops!

Just curious, though:  Why so much hating on Billy Joel?  At least, why so much hating on the pre-“Innocent Man” Billy Joel?  I realize Klosterman wrote a chapter on him in SDaCP, and made the same delineation, but just because Klosterman said it doesn’t make it wrong.  I’m not going to say Billy Joel is the greatest thing evah, but as bad as Ratt?  Really?

Please enlighten me, then, on what makes 70’s Billy Joel crap.  I might not have songs like “Everybody Has A Dream” or “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant” in my permanent rotation, but they’re pretty good songs, IMHO.  Your view seems to be widely held by many people who’s musical taste I otherwise respect, but I’ve never heard any actual reasons for deeming it crap.

Also, why should earnestness be scorned, even if it leads to failure?

NYX—I agree that earnestness shouldn’t be a hallmark of badness (I think it’s a corollary to irreverence or irony being a hallmark of excellence, when, ah, not so much).  And, frankly, I think the reasons why it’s treated as such are highly gendered:  earnest = sentimental = gushy = feminine; not caring (in either sense, as throwaway or as ironically detached) = skeptical = critical = masculine.  But I’ve attempted the argument many times and never really persuaded anybody.  Maybe I should learn from that…

Of course, there’s always the record company argument.

That sure, they could sell more records, but that’d cost money, and they return on investment just wouldn’t be there, so they didn’t make more records.

If you only make 200 records, and sell out, you still sold less records than the band that made a million records and sold 500.

I’ve compared the grocery bills myself, and no it’s really not, unless by “eating meat” you mean eating Hamburger Helper three meals a day, which you probably don’t.

Feh. You can afford to eat three meals every day?

You elitist. You probably can’t even remember how many homes you own!

That’s the argument of right wing populism—-only be everyone embracing the lowest common denominator can we get some semblance of fairness.

Agreed. And, hilarious irony - as the right races to the bottom to enact the world of Harrison Bergeron, I think it was IO9.com that described it as a “liberal dystopia.”

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, sometime.

I’m not offended by people buying organic produce. The sentiment is good, and I shop at farmers markets myself. But as somebody who works in agriculture, I also recognize that organic food is a niche product.

But it’s SO true that earnestness and sentiment are coded “female,” and that’s part of why it’s Bad Stuff.  These are works (songs, speeches, etc.) that are trying to make you cry, and not falling for it proves you’re tougher than that.  That whole interaction is jacked up with gender norms.  I suppose you could say that the schlockmeister is _relying on_ an emotional reaction, and is thus treating the audience as “female” (as well as gullible) and by not falling for it you flip the script.

So I still think that it’s not just that schlock is emotionally manipulative, but that schlock is designed to make you react Like A Girl, and in fact that reaction is one of the telltale signs that you’re in the presence of schlock.  Case in point:  the “chick flick,” or Celine Dion.

(This is kind of tangential, I realize, but I’m suspicious of antisentimental rhetoric because I think sentimentalism can be politically potent for progressives.  Think of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ or the films of Douglas Sirk.  Or, to put it another way, not all sentiment is *cheap* sentiment.  So sentiment-bashing raises my hackles, or would, if I knew exactly what “hackles” were, and if they were near the mysterious “craw” that things stick in.)

Closer to the original post, it’s funny that some of the same people who strut their populist cred against “elitists” who look down their noses at what’s good enough for God-fearin’ simple small-town folk… also profess alarm at crude, oversexed, and violent popular culture.  The latte-swilling elitists are liberals, and the smut-peddlers are also liberals.

So I still think that it’s not just that schlock is emotionally manipulative, but that schlock is designed to make you react Like A Girl, and in fact that reaction is one of the telltale signs that you’re in the presence of schlock.  Case in point:  the “chick flick,” or Celine Dion.

I think Flip’s right.  It’s not irreverence—it’s the stance of being emotionally detached, and so therefore SO much more rational than everyone else.  It’s the same mentality that says that being angry about something just proves that you’re an irrational person who can’t be trusted.  It’s the stance that emotions themselves can’t be trusted, so any piece of art that plays on your emotions to get you to sympathize with the characters is automatically bad.

Sure, there’s a lot of cheap emotion-tugging out there (Celine Dion), but we’re talking about the people who automatically distrust any piece of art that has an emotional effect on people.  And 90 percent of the time, that distrust translates into, “Emotion is for chicks, but I’m not a chick, so something that tries to make me feel emotional is automatically cheap and tacky.”

Think of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ or the films of Douglas Sirk.

Or Max Ophuls.  The Earrings of Madame de ... is finally FINALLY coming out on video.  His films are hard to find on DVD in the US because most of them are about romance and relationships and, well, chick stuff.  Even Letter from an Unknown Woman, an acknowledged Golden Age of Hollywood classic, is unavailable.

Whatever happened to tough-guy sentimentalists like Sam Fuller?  Damn, I love the women in his movies.

“It’s the same mentality that says that being angry about something just proves that you’re an irrational person who can’t be trusted.”

But, if you are angry, or have some other very strong emotion, does that mean that your views are more valid than those who hold less emotional views on the same subject?

You may passionately believe that electrons in a single atom may simultaneously hold all four quantum numbers at the same time, but the passion of your belief would be meaningless because you would be dead wrong.

Passion and emotion are not reliable indicators of truth.  Your most deeply held beliefs do not override, for example, the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

Watergate,

Can you provide an example of a passionate song that refutes a scientific theory (past or present)?

I mean, the only song I can think of that even discusses a scientific theory is Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements”, and while it’s clever and entertaning, I can’t say it’s passionate.

(And by “passionate”, I mean something that really grabs at you emotionally, regardless of your viewpoint.  The kind of stuff they show in Jesus Camp doesn’t cut it, since you have to be predisposed to take it in.)

Anyhow, Flip got me thinking about this, because a lot of the earnest stuff that I’m willing to listen to (at least for a while) is by men (Billy Joel and U2*), while earnest stuff by women (“Wind Beneath My Wings”, and yes, I know it was originally a Willie Nelson song) I tend to tune out.  So I think there might be something there.

Still not clear why earnestness (or any other quality) should demand greater volatility in assessing it’s artistic value.  If we punish someone for trying something with a particular quality that doesn’t quite cut it, doesn’t that discourage anyone from trying something with that quality, and therefore cause more people to play it safe, which leads to more mediocrity?

*For both, it’s their earlier stuff I have tolerance (and joy) for.  Just so we’re clear.

sheesh, why is it always billy joel who gets mentioned first in these kinds of things?  even if his music is the “crappiest” stuff out there, when I listen to the 70’s/80’s channels on xm its got to be the best crappy stuff on those channels and that
\s gotta count for something, the next time i hear air supply im gonna stab someone.

The implication is clear: If you are one of those snobs who clings to your Ramones records while sneering at Ratt fans, you are downright undemocratic.

Why sneer at people for liking different music than you? It seems like pointless assholery.

There’s no objective standard to measure leaders by, and if there were, then the “how to govern” question would be much different.

And what’s the objective standard to measure music by?

Running dumb is a necessity.  Every political television ad ever made has been deceptive or misleading or content free.  Every slogan has been bullshit.  Every wedge issue is a crock. 

The electorate is dumb.  Dumb is a majority.  You can win without blacks.  You can win without Jews.  You can win without a majority of white men, or all men, or all women.  But you cannot be president of the United States unless you get the majority of the dumb vote.

Every candidate runs dumb.  Barack Obama is a law professor in real life.  On the campaign trail, he is Dr. Phil.

Hillary Clinton is a policy wonk in real life.  On the campaign trail, she pounded shots and demanded a gas tax holiday.

John McCain is a pretty serious guy who has drafted some intelligent legislation and is passionate about certain policy issues, and he’s right a lot of the time.  But he erased Obama’s lead in the polls with “Drill here, drill now,” a slogan and a policy package that wraps a nougat center of greed in the creamy milk chocolate of stupidity and a candy shell of jingoism.

There are swing states where thirty percent of the electorate has less than a high school diploma.  Three quarters of the electorate has less than a four year degree, and most people who went to college are still fucking idiots.

Call them whatever you want. “Swing voters.” “Downmarket whites.” “Working Americans.”  They’re dumb as hell, they consider their dumbness a virtue, and they expect their dumbness to be treated with reverence in an election year, because they pick the president. 

And don’t be fooled; these people’s taste in politics is as crass as their taste in entertainment or religion.  People who are reading “The Shack” and listening to American Idol runner ups are not going to suddenly make intelligent decisions when it comes time to vote. 

These assholes regularly elect transparently crooked or insane people at local and congressional levels. The only reason these people haven’t picked a president who destroyed the entire world yet is that the candidate selection process for statewide offices and the presidency tilts strongly in favor of picking the inoffensively mediocre instead of the batshit insane.  But most voters are too dumb or addled to tell the difference.

“For one thing, the Ramones are more the anarchists of rock - coming from far left field, taking ideas which were thought buried and using them to create a precise, extreme vision of cultural utopia which never seems to evolve (though the actual means may pay lip service to contemporary culture) no matter how long they push it.”

What is it about the Ramones that cause people to write such tortured apologias, as if these guys were situationist intellectuals rather than the bunch of dumbshit Jersey kids they were?  Those guys stopped pushing the very limited boundaries of what they created almost the second they created it.  They were seminal, boundary-crashing, yes, yes, yes, but the failure of the Ramones to reach the mainstream, while unfortunate, is largely the product of the fact that by the time the Ramones realized that there was even an outside chance of doing so, they had already started to suck.  “A precise, extreme vision of cultural utopia?”  Give me a break.

But as somebody who works in agriculture, I also recognize that organic food is a niche product.

Of course that’s true.  Any product that isn’t corn or soy beans is a niche product. 

In terms of crops intended for direct human consumption, though, no, organic food is not, in and of itself, a “niche” product.  Or at least at this point it is far less so than was true 10 years ago (every supermarket in the country sells organic vegetables these days), and if we have any hope of preserving the USA for human habitation over the next century or so, it had better get a lot less “niche”, fast.

if we have any hope of preserving the USA for human habitation over the next century or so, it had better get a lot less “niche”, fast.

Only if you don’t want to drink water, and want to have enough food to eat.

Moving exclusively to organic agriculture would spell the death of millions, if not more. It’s a dangerously inefficient way to farm.

This is the way I’ve seen this play out, Chet:

Industrial Agriculture < High Intensity Organic Agriculture < Sustainable Agriculture

High intensity organic, in other words, those plastic-encased salad greens you see at the supermarket (and not stuff like farmer’s markets, backyard gardening, CSA’s, and the like), is better for the environment than “conventional” industrial agriculture, which to be very realistic, is potentially catastrophic for not just “millions”, but all of humanity. (which I can explain if you want, though it’s very off topic for the thread and I wish you’d just take my word for it, or possibly accept the recommendation of some reading material).

High intensity organic isn’t the solution, but it’s a start.  If you live in the middle of suburban hell and can’t get any access to local and sustainably farmed foods, it’s a better choice than industrially farmed produce. 

I don’t really see what you mean when you say that organic agriculture would spell the death of millions.  Unless you mean the fact that getting rid of industrial agriculture would produce less overall food, and that there would be nationwide famines*.  Which, frankly, is patently untrue.  Industrial agriculture actually produces far more food than the US population could ever possibly eat.  Since the sixties, the chief aim of the big agriculture has been to figure out how to get people to eat exponentially more calories than they need (see also the obesity epidemic, fast food, High Fructose Corn Syrup, etc).  Because if agriculture were capped at what people could reasonably consume, or what people actually wanted to eat, profit would have ground to a halt 50 years ago. 

If we scaled back down to agriculture that worked to feed people, and not as an industrial commodity meant to create profit, people would not starve.  Not to mention, of course, that it’s not a binary system—if it was discovered that 300 million people simply could not get an adequate number of food calories via purely sustainable agriculture, we could easily develop small pockets of commodity-based farming meant to boost output to a point where all Americans could eat their fill.  As opposed to this funhouse mirror system where non-industrial foods are the exception.

* Not to even begin to go into the fact that famines aren’t caused directly by crop failures or food shortages, but by genocide, war, and gross mismanagement.  I’d also add that if you want to start thinking about agricultural practices that could potentially result in starvation, you might want to go look up the Irish potato famine and compare those root causes (hee!  pun!) to the current practices of companies like Monsanto.

A lot of stuff that’s objectively shit gets coded as feminine because we know it’s shit.

Which, I think, is why a lot of people consider artists like Billy Joel “feminine”, even though they do actually have penises.  There’s a certain brand of over-earnest schlock developed, played, and sung by men which is still considered “chick music”. 

Which isn’t to say that there’s no shitty “dood music”, but in my experience shitty dood music gets ragged on via feminization—“faggy”, “cutesy”, “precious”, “you can’t even tell whether they’re guys or girls or what”, “plays like a chick”...

I like this post a lot. Recently I’ve been wondering how much to tone down my apparently radical politics when talking with people off-blog, but I am coming to realize that to do so often requires conceding to use their philosophical/ethical framework to argue from, which means my arguments have to be watered down to almost nothing and makes my position look weak.

history_mom, apologies if you’re already aware of this stuff, but check out George Lakoff’s Moral Politics or Don’t Think of an Elephant. His work is all about how to speak from philosophical frameworks that help people recognize progressive ideas as their own. More at http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/ and http://www.rockridgenation.org/

A world without mockery, satire, and shit-giving is a world I don’t want to live in.  A world where everyone is thin-skinned sounds like a dull world indeed.

Whatever. What’s the objective standard to measure music by? Or do you just use music as a way to start pissing contests?

Whatever. What’s the objective standard to measure music by? Or do you just use music as a way to start pissing contests?

An insufferable music snob would never flat out tell you what the standard is. Nice try, though.

It’s not that scrubbing toilets is considered bad because it’s coded feminine—-it is bad, thus we code it feminine.

Is scrubbing toilets coded as feminine?  It’s also cited, along with ditch-digging, as the terrible fate of people who drop out of school.  So it’s class-coded, as manual labor and as “unskilled”...

Oh, you mean as a household chore, I guess, in the way that taking out the trash and stepping on bugs are considered masculine.  OK.  Have you seen the car commercial whose tagline is that their car is everything you’ve been waiting for, which opens with a hot shirtless dude making reservations for his 6-month anniversary, ironing his partner’s dress, and then at the end scrubbing the toilet?

Anyway, I guess I’d say that there are phenomena that are coded as bad because of an association with the feminine, and those that are coded as feminine because of an association with the bad.  But, as a professor of mine said about the notorious Freud comment “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” you can never be sure when.

After all, we have one gender that is allowed to make fun of mullets and yell ‘EPIC FAIL’ at their friends when they screw up on video games.  And to balance the universe, we have another gender whose job is to press their lips together and say, ‘That’s not very funny.  Why can’t you be nice?’ before they go make everyone a sandwich.

Oh my god.  This is the last week of my life, nay, my entire family dynamic (I’m the only daughter in a family of stereotypical rough and tumble “boys will be…” sons).  Half my life as a feminist is fighting tooth and nail against the pressure to be that cat-butt mouthed uptight/“nice” big sister who grows up to be the sandwich making, shit-work doing martyr Just Like Mommy.  Since cat-butt mouth is my entire social upbringing, it can be really hard to work around.  Maybe I should take IMS lessons.

As a Ratt fan and Ramone fan, I can definitively say they both suck.  Long live Ratt and the Ramones!

I know some people’s idea of paradise is a world where we all join hands and sing folk songs all day, but that’s my idea of hell.

Granted, but all the music you like sucks.

Just so you know.

For everyone who’s claiming earnestness is somehow female, haven’t you ever heard any prog rock? It’s the most unrelentingly earnest genre around and the music’s almost universally created and consumed by men. Perhaps it’s the dragons and swords that make it male?

And st, who says it was either tortured or an apologia? The Ramones created their own cultural vision made up of girls, leather jackets, beaches, junk food, movie weaponry and three chord rock n’roll, and as you said, it didn’t evolve. So what’s yr beef, chief? How about reading the comment through before your knee starts jerking next time?

It’s emotional singer-songwriter earnestness that’s (seen as) feminine. Prog earnestness is more a nerd earnestness. And at least in popular music, instrumental virtuosity seems to be for men only.

@ Rockit:  Maybe I’m not progged-up enough to recognize it, but I never would have said that prog was “earnest.”  It takes itself seriously, but to me that’s not the same, because it’s trying to be _smart_ rather than _moving_.

“who says it was either tortured or an apologia?”

Well, I did, and it was both.  You implied the Ramones never “tailored their ideas to the mainstream,” but they did try, and failed, not because (here comes the tortured part) they were “the anarchists of rock” or creating “a precise, extreme vision of cultural utopia,” but rather because they were a bunch of yobbos who couldn’t play very well and whose extremely limited musical vocabulary couldn’t really take much tailoring. 

And I did read the whole entire post before responding?  Can I have a cookie now?

Oh, and rockit, in fairness, great point re: prog.  There is nothing so ploddingly earnest as one of the midseventies prog epics.  And oh, lord, flipyrwhig, those things were supposed to be smart, moving, the operas of the age!  All of the skinny guys in the jeans, flowing hair, weedy little beards and jean jackets with the hand-drawn band logos on the back were meant to be weeping.

Hmm.  I knew a guy with a Jethro Tull airbrushed denim jacket, and he didn’t look like he was too likely to tear up…  But it’s not a scene I knew much about.  I’d still maintain that there’s a small but significant difference between experiencing music as “deep” and experiencing it as tear-jerking, but it could be that it’s smaller than I realized.  Or maybe the drugs help a lot too.

Maybe it’s just because I never liked it, but I was always under the impression that art rock/prog rock was supposed to be intellectual and artistic, not emotional.  There would be emotions in it, but they were very stylized and intellectualized.  And like today’s emo kids, it was usually all about ME ME ME! whereas I think the kind of music that Flip (and I) are talking about is usually telling other people how you feel about them (like “The Wind Beneath My Wings”).

It’s a fine line I’m trying to draw, but it’s the difference between telling your mother that you love her and she’s been a great mother and telling her that you yourself are such a wonderful person that you can tell she must have been a great mother to you.  I’m still working this out, but does that make sense?