We're WEIRD. Get over it.

[pbrower2a]

(09-29-2020, 12:23 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(09-27-2020, 08:19 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(09-26-2020, 01:59 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(09-26-2020, 10:12 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(09-25-2020, 09:25 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I assume that you're not seeing, paying as much attention or  becoming more aware of the blue violence that the rest of the country has been seeing and watching  on a regular basis for months these days. The same stupid shit, night after night, month after month. I assume you are able to associate what they're doing with tribal thinking but you seem to be unaware that what you're doing and saying which is similar what they're thinking/believing and using as an excuse or justification   of what they're doing and attracting the interest of a large portion of the country that still believes in the age old American concept of might makes right and the idea of using American  force to establish order and make things right again for most of the country. You're still a member of the blue tribe right. You're a Weird member but you're still a loyal member of the blue tribe right. Eric can let go of the blue tribe and pledge allegiance to the green tribe because Eric has dual citizenship.

Rather than reply directly, I'll let you review the video response of someone who should be a member of your clan ... or maybe not.  The 6 minute video explains the 3minute song at the end of his most recent album, but it deserves attention on its own merit.  In short, it's a WTF to his own people*.

* The reference to the Battle of Blair Mountain deserves a look too ... a good long look.

Well, I think you should have picked a better person to use as an example myself. I mean, a recovering addict who started out by excluding himself from preaching prior to preaching tells me he ain't quite thinking straight and tells me the position he is in right (pretty much broke with nothing of value to show for it) now as far as his life and career. And what he has to do and say in order to restart his life and rekindle a career and be given a chance to release an album that's guaranteed not to flop these days.

FWIW, he's a major star in root music, and doesn't need validation by you, me or anyone else.

Classic-Xer Wrote:I've heard the NFL has lost 25% of it's viewership. I don't mix business with politics myself. I prefer doing business with whole markets myself.  So, how many fisherman with kids in the boat are shot by game wardens? How many game wardens are overly concerned about being shot or stabbed by a fishermen or a hunter for that matter these days? How many big city cops would prefer to be a game warden or a suburban cop or a private sector cop these days?

He was making the point that the same things can happen to anyone given the right circumstances. He picked the examples he did to bring that home to his mostly working class Appalachian audience.

Classic-Xer Wrote:Personally speaking, I don't care if you and the Democrats go down with Black Lives Matter. You and them don't seem to care either at this point. So, I'd say both side content with nature running it coarse and nature to determining the winner. So, when we're done with them and the rich supporting them and its time to mop and let other hunt people like you down, do  you see yourself still being  around/alive or not? I figure the bulk of the Left Wing politicians are going to jump shit or opt to lay on their swords. Does that sound about right to you?

Let's assume that Trump and the GOP lose big this election (ignore the possibility that Trump may try to steal it anyway). How does the anger he's generated in his followers get released?  The odds say that result is more likely than not and by a substantial margin. Are you and yours ready to start an anarchist revolution?

If he doesn't/didn't need validation then why did go against his own judgment and contradict himself?  I think he did it as a means to save face with his kin/ fans, protect the future of his musical career and please his corporate masters myself but you're free to think/ feel otherwise. So, why do you keep underestimating the power and influence of the American Right and continue to believe inaccurate polls and continue to believe the Left Wing media and continue to believe minorities are all the same and women are all the same and gays are all the same and and Democratic people are all the same and so forth? Why do you tend to forget that you still live in an American country and forget that Americans have the Constitutional right to defend themselves and their country? Dude, we won't be anarchists, we'll be directly engaging with anarchists and waging war with anarchists and when we're done with them, we'll be coming for you and whoever is left as far as your politicians/government officials and rich people.  It's a bummer that PB has a mental disorder that hampers his natural ability to see and think straight these days.

This is difficult to figure out. Are you talking about Donald Trump or about Tyler Childers?

... As for Tyler Childers, he is in some ways the freest person in the world, someone who knows that he is dying but who can still leave a memorable legacy. He can make final statements that offend the sensibilities of employers, critics, and other authorities . He need not concern himself with his career or any income stream from it. 

At one time, country music derived from folk music. Before the music business transformed it (like practically all popular entertainment) into a money-making proposition more than art or personal expression, popular artists (even country) were able to express the sensibilities of the common man on economic issues such as pay, working conditions, and dignity on the job that all often proved substandard due to the choices of employers. Country music almost never expresses the plight of the working class and social pariahs because such would trouble the music business. Country performers may be slicker than they used to be, but topics have become 'safe' for the corporate bosses in the music industry. Country music can be honest about such topics as family break-ups, failed love lives, and drunkenness and can be adapted to the meat-market of dating (largely, I assume for blue-collar workers), but there are topics seemingly off limits today -- like economic inequality, foreign policy,  inadequate education, poor medical care because profits come first, labor-management issues, gun violence, police brutality, and climate change. Such topics are streng verboten now in Corporate America. You can trust that anyone who challenges the corporate autocracy will be directed to change the lyrics from such a topic as gun control to something 'safer' as an expression.

I can hardly imagine a better medium for reaching America's white cultural proletariat than country music. I am not denying that it has some influence in some of our giant cities, but my idea of where country music is most popular is among blue-collar white people in rural America, heavily in the parts of America that still have forests and farms and where a man is the master of his castle even if such a 'castle' is a Victorian-era hovel too dilapidated to have any charm. These places are where people fall for gas-guzzling vehicles that give a sense of personal importance in contrast to some city slicker's Chevrolet Malibu or Honda Civic. (I am not knocking such bloated vehicles if one needs them for the requirements of a job. If one has such a vehicle as an expression of personal masculinity, then one has some problems).

Just try to figure where one's career goes if one tries to put some conscience into music as did Tennessee Ernie Ford in Sixteen Tons, or later what Johnny Cash got away with. Take This Job and Shove It? Possible at one time for Johnny Paycheck years ago, but we are now expected to be thankful to Corporate America that we have a job, any job, and the Corporate elite would love to free us from a minimum wave, the right to organize a union, not getting to impress the boss by putting in unpaid overtime for the sake of the only things that seems to matter in neo-liberal America -- profit and executive compensation. 

It was once possible to look to popular culture for access to memes that challenged the reality that rapacious plutocrats and executives seek to impose upon us. That is over. The material that does that is now simply old. Oldies but Goodies, maybe, and often better than the pap that the 'culture' industries wishes that we consume. I look at mass marketers of sound equipment, and what do those allow us to listen to to determine how good the stuff will sound? Contemporary country (which sounds the same no matter what one plays it back on) or rap, which simply isn't music.  It is an aside, but this is what I tested music systems with  a couple decades ago:





String instruments are the most critical instruments to make sound good on a sound system. If string instruments as in this work (two violins, a viola, and two cellos) come off well, so can just about anything else except for perhaps a pipe organ. (If you really want to hear what some great organ in Germany sounds like, then you need to take the trip to Germany and hear it. Aside from pipe organs for which the cost of replacement is incalculable, then just think of how expensive a Stradivarius is. Relatively small objects, they are the most expensive instruments that can travel in a cab or a truck. Subtlety of sound quality is essential to all stringed instruments of the symphony orchestra. 

This said, even classical music which has no overt meaning has largely disappeared from the marketplace. It takes too much time and often offers some catharsis. Who needs catharsis when the current ethos is that people must live on the edge because fear motivates them to do what they hate doing? 

..........

If America is such a happy country, then why do we get so few immigrants from the First World now? It may distress you as it does Donald Trump that we are getting most of our immigrants from rotten places due to their poverty and due to regimes that treat people badly? Go ahead, Classic X'er... you know the world; I am too decent to use it. Why would someone leave a country whence Trump would love to send us more immigrants (that is Norway) just to find lower real pay, less economic security, and a gun culture? If I were a Norwegian I might want to visit Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and maybe some great city... but by now I would pick Lisbon over San Francisco. That is not due to the lesser cost of travel, shorter air time, or accommodations. 

Trump is doing much to wreck America. Make America Great Again? One can read into that whatever one wants. I'll pass on blood-alley roads between big cities, polio, worthless patent medicines, McCarthyism, 70-hour workweeks and 40-year lifespans for industrial workers instead of the opposite. Jim Crow? The KKK? Need I be black to see something terribly wrong with those?  Maybe people look back in time and see what a $1000 investment in Apple Computer would now make them, or getting fantastically rich by owning some Texas rangeland under which bubbles copious crude oil... 

Oh by the way, here is my mental disorder:

If you know that you have it and handle it right you can be a very productive member of society.

One good thing about Asperger's is that one has no tendency toward addictive behavior. The problems include, though:

1. Your love life will be messed up.
2. You might have arcane interests that others rarely care about.
3. Because your expressions don't match your words, you create the impression of a liar.
4. You must act as if on stage just to avoid seeming weird. 
5. Anxiety follows you everywhere.
6. Ho9wever much people say that the like people who think outside of the box, you put people off doing so.