As it seems especially relevant today. It's a song about the killing of civil rights activist Medgar Evers by a poor white farmer in the 60's. Dylan addresses the civil rights movement in a way that avoids laying the blame squarely at the feet of the angry racist who pulled the trigger, instead placing the blame with politicians who sow hatred, insecurity, fear and division for their own ends and don't care what mess they leave behind.
When I see Trump rallies today full of angry people complaining their country has been 'taken from them' I can't help but think of that song.
>When I see Trump rallies today full of angry people complaining their country has been 'taken from them' I can't help but think of that song.
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. This elite formed when 1) all of the smart kids started going off to college together and forming their own social bubble, 2) they began invariably marrying people they went to college or work with (while in earlier times, the successful were typically married to very average middle-class people they grew up around), and 3) the economy shifted to highly rewarding intelligence while wages for lower-skill work collapsed. This has led to the splintering of American society. It has nothing to do with race.
I recommend Charles Murray's book Coming Apart, which is a thorough sociological study of this phenomenon and its effects.
> 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.
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 egos, and they perhaps feel they are doing something right in their policy prescriptions, but it is driven by complete lack of understanding of human nature.
The nationalists understand that humans have concentric (genetic) loyalties, from self, to family, to nation/race. These are just facts of nature, fighting against them is a losing battle and arranging our societies along these natural lines will produce the best outcomes.
The nationalists want the best for the whole world, not just a tiny trans-national elite.
Trump is a nationalist.
(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.)
There's nothing new about the current 'disconnect' between American elite and others; people pull out the same rhetoric every few years, it seems. And there is no long-term adherence of others to populism (which is being expressed by you as nationalism).
It's not a social truth, despite attempts to raise above reproach its horrible behavior and worse consequences, it's just an old political technique used by some political leaders for their own purposes, as Bob Dylan pointed out, a brushfire they set which now has turn into a raging, out of control forest fire. We can do something about it.
> These are just facts of nature
We can say murder and rape are facts of nature; is it 'elitist' to outlaw them? I don't feel they are 'facts' of my nature, in that they somehow inevitable, and neither is racism.
There are far better angels of our nature, and America was founded on them. 'All men are created equal' and liberty for those men (and women), not just people you happen to like. That has resonated with people's natures for centuries now; I think we can say it's not longer an 'experiment', as Lincoln called it, and it's attracted immigrants from every culture and inspired many more around the world. A lot of those populist 'white' people, as they call themselves, used to hate each other as Irish and Italians and Germans and Poles, Catholics and Protestants and Jews. It turned out those divisions weren't in their natures after all.
Nicely said -- however I would disagree with the claim that our best achievable society is no longer an experiment. To remove beta status and pretend it is an understood phenomenon leads to thinking like the parent's more so than thinking like the rest of your comment ...
>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.
I too can wholeheartedly recommend Coming Apart. I think Mr. Murrays synopsis of why we've had a splintering post WWII is great and probably pretty accurate. I just wish I knew an easy solution to fix it. But there is definitely a loss of shared values among Americans. I'd also recommend Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam as a starter on this topic.
To say it has nothing to do with race, you'd need to prove race has no effect on whether you go to college and become a member of the elite.
Or am I misunderstanding the "it"? Do you mean "taking the country back" has nothing to do with race? For you, it sounds like that's true, so that's good. That's all I can conclude however. I can conclude nothing about Trump. Literally nobody has any idea what Trump's really about. He's juuuust incoherent enough that he never manages to actually, successfully say anything. In that way he succeeds at being all things to all people. Anyone can project anything onto him without fear of being contradicted. Including his opponents. You say he's about SOCIAL EQUALITY. His opponents say he's about RACISM. Who's right? Nobody knows.
Edit: Same is true of Clinton, for different reasons. The words are more coherent, but they're so vague and full of platitudes you can't really say what she's about either.
It's possible that incidental racial correlations exist. He obviously meant "race is not a driving factor". By your logic, it would also be anti-male, because fewer men go to college than women.
The Republican Party failed to field a credible candidate that spoke to Middle America. They, too, were blinded by the elite bubble. Trump saw the weakness and jumped on it.
The Republican Party has failed to field a credible candidate for quite some time. If you believe in science and equal rights for women and minorities, those damn "elites" are all we have.
For what it's worth, most HNers would be considered part of the "elite" (college-educated, a good portion have graduate degrees, employed and in the top 10% of the income bracket) by most people out there. So it makes sense that people on HN would support the policy of other elites in general.
Mitt Romney was a very good candidate, except for his ultimate lack of fight.
If you really believe that women and minorities don't have equal rights, then I can only urge you to dig a little deeper. Gender wage discrimination is a made-up problem, the statistics that you hear don't control for career choice, hours-worked, positions-sought, etc. The problem with our police force is that it's not professionalized once you get below the federal level. Police are too aggressive and quick to use force, but it's not a racial issue.
SJWism is a cancer on Western civilization and it's one of the most pressing problems we face, because it prevents us from having honest conversations about any other problem. Debates these days always devolve into accusations of racism/sexism/"ableism", or whatever the latest boogeyman "ism" is.
I agree with you, Romney has been relatively much more sane than other Republicans. I would have even voted for him if he was able to run as Massachusetts Governor Romney and not Pandering to the Insane Right Wing Romney. But he's certainly an outlier among the present class of Republicans.
I think the Republican Party's pro-life position to be discriminatory against women. No one can force you to be an organ donor. Even if donating your organs would save someone's life, you have autonomy over your body and you are allowed to decline to be an organ donor. How is abortion any different? Even if you could save the baby's life, a woman should have complete autonomy over her body, period.
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. Hopefully Trump will lose big and the GOP will actually follow the research they did in 2012.
You sound like a reasonable person. I agree that wage discrimination and police violence aren't black and white issues. I agree that SJWism stifles honest debate. But I believe that climate change is real. I believe that marijuana has medicinal benefits and that the War on Drugs has been a colossal waste. I believe that religion has no place in government or political discourse. I believe that it doesn't matter what your sexual orientation or gender identity is. These aren't partisan issues in my mind; it's reality. Romney seems to understand this. But I'm from East Texas, and I know for every one of him, there's a dozen Louie Gohmerts. The GOP needs to get its shit together and jettison the insane branch of its tent before we end up with a de facto one party political system.
>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 on just that in 1986. It was a great compromise, a great humanitarian action, worthy of a great nation.
Too bad it was a total lie. Amnesty was granted, but the improved enforcement never came. The Democrats were happy to keep importing voters and keep a hot-button issue alive. The Republicans were happy to keep importing cheap labor. The people, who wanted an end to uncontrolled immigration, were the suckers. Sanctuary cities that refuse to hand over dangerous criminals for deportation, and a federal government that usually declines deportation anyway, have only added fuel to the fire.
The people are totally right to refuse to be fooled again.
>But I believe that climate change is real.
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 our economy.
>I believe that religion has no place in government or political discourse.
I disagree completely. The government should certainly not favor one religion over another, but the religions are the source of our moral values, even for most of the non-believers among us. We take for granted just how much Christianity has shaped our secular culture and morality. If you believe in your heart that abortion is the taking of a human life, then you have a duty to fight to end it.
>I believe that marijuana has medicinal benefits and that the War on Drugs has been a colossal waste.
I agree for the most part, but I've lately had doubts about my previous position that we should just legalize all drugs. Drugs like heroin and meth and cocaine rob people of their agency, of the will to direct their own lives. They should not be available for purchase.
> 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 our economy.
I agree, I think it's idiotic to vilify nuclear power. Catastrophes have happened, we learned from them.
> The government should certainly not favor one religion over another, but the religions are the source of our moral values, even for most of the non-believers among us.
We agree to disagree then. I believe religion is a highly personal issue that has no place in public discourse. I do not see Christianity's influence on our culture and morality as a positive thing.
> Drugs like heroin and meth and cocaine rob people of their agency, of the will to direct their own lives. They should not be available for purchase.
I agree. 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.
>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.
> 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.
How is the GOP going to put out an actual policy to solve climate change if they don't believe it's even a problem in the first place?
>the religions are the source of our moral values, even for most of the non-believers among us.
I disagree in absolute. In my view religions do far more harm than good, and to claim religious thought is the basis of morality even for non believers is somewhere between condescending and insulting.
I say this as a non-believer myself. I don't mean that modern western atheists are picking up their moral code directly from religions, I'm saying that the secular western moral code largely grew from Christianity.
Anyhow, my broader point is that religions are a source of moral conviction for people. And moral conviction is totally legitimate basis for political conviction.
> but the religions are the source of our moral values
The US government is not founded on enforcing morals, but guaranteeing rights. For example, the 10 Commandments and the Bill of Rights are at distinct odds with each other.
> The Democrats were happy to keep importing voters
I think it's important not to discount the difficulty of securing the border because of the size of it. And as you mention, American companies (like Smithfield) are happy to create incentives for border hopping because they can use the threat of calling INS to keep wages low and prevent unions from forming.
The problem with the idea of widespread voting fraud is the data doesn't support it, at all. Bush's DOJ came up with an estimate of %0.00000132 of fraudulent votes in federal elections, for instance. Note that by then it was explicitly illegal for aliens to vote in federal elections.
> We take for granted just how much Christianity has shaped our secular culture and morality.
I'd argue that across peoples and times you see more variation in theological doctrine than moral teachings in the various religions. Hinduism, for instance, is practiced by different people differently and encompasses polytheistic, monotheistic, and even atheistic traditions. But morality remains a feature, specifically the concept of karma. Sweden is by some counts 85% atheist, but I'm not aware of anyone calling it a den of iniquity. Certainly my Muslim-American friends are moral.
In other words, people tend to be recognizably moral regardless of their very divergent beliefs about other things. That points to a general human capacity for morality, rather than one specific to any one religion (that the others, even those predating it, were presumably lucky enough to develop independently).
Certainly moral codes differ. But they also differ within the same religion across time -- for instance, the modern Christian view of divorce vs. the ancient one.
Christian orthodoxy varies. Ancestor worship is common in African Christian sects. Protestant and Orthodox churches abhor the Roman Catholic practice of praying to statues. Unitarians discount the trinity. Sure, there's a common thread of Christian morals there, but I'd argue that it's the same thread you find everywhere, modulo views on homosexuality and a couple of other things.
I don't mean to be cruel but I find the assertion that America gets its morals from Christianity to be somewhat narrow in that it presupposes that Christians got theirs from on high, and ignores the similar moral teachings you find throughout the world and throughout history.
It also runs contrary to the founders' explicit intentions for the role of religion in government, and I would argue that it does a large disservice to your fellow Americans who aren't Christian.
I'm not talking about fraudulent voting by illegal immigrants, I'm talking about the fact that they eventually become citizens when amnesty rolls around, and their kids become citizens automatically by birthright.
But the children who are citizens automatically by birth, you don't think they're more predisposed to want to stay here and to improve their communities if they end up staying? Are you suggesting that their allegiances ultimately lie elsewhere? Does that extend to children of immigrants born here legally?
If so, this is the same rhetoric used to discriminate or marginalize the early generations of immigrants in NY last century; my grandparents went through it. Not a lot of fun.
And if this is a ploy to gain sympathy to a particular party, I think that party deserves that continued support. Trust extended to the outsider begets trust as that outsider lays downs roots, and those children and their children would be likely to vote the same way by gratitude or tradition. Even if it distorts the way they would vote without that influence, I think the country overall benefits when immigrant communities feel supported, looking forward, participating in society, not isolated from it. It's how our country changes, grows, adapts.
How is the pro-life position discriminatory against women? The question is one of line drawing of when life begins that needs to be protected. The pro-life position believes that life should be protected earlier than the pro-choice position. That is not discriminatory against women.
We are obviously setting side abortion in cases of rape. So the pro-life position is equal in it's belief about women's autonomy over their bodies. It's only that the pro-life position believe the fetus should be proetect earlier the women's autonomy over her body is equally protected.
> How is the pro-life position discriminatory against women?
In that you don't already comprehend, I doubt I'll be able to aid in your understanding, but here goes nothing.
The state allows men to exercise control over their own reproductive systems more completely than women.
It really is that simple.
Men have all options available e.g. vasectomy, wearing condoms, etc. Women on the other hand see the "party of small government" lead the charge into their hospital rooms, dictating to them what rights they have insofar as control of their own reproductive systems goes.
If men also could get pregnant, it wouldn't be discriminatory. That the only reproductive control technique to be denied women is a technique only available to women, any laws to restrict such techniques are inherently discriminatory toward women.
The attempts to restrict abortion effect women's rights directly, far more so than men, many of whom vanish before a child is even carried to term.
>If men also could get pregnant, it wouldn't be discriminatory. That the only reproductive control technique to be denied women is a technique only available to women, any laws to restrict such techniques are inherently discriminatory toward women.
This is preposterous logic. Women have the same access to birth control than men do. In fact, as it stands now, the options available to women are vastly superior, i.e. the pill.
The fact that only women can bear children does not make the regulation of abortion "discrimination". Discrimination would be if both sexes could bear children, but only abortion by females was banned.
Do you think that abortion on the day before birth should be legal?
> Women have the same access to birth control than men do ...
As it stands the opinions of people who have zero involvement in a woman's reproductive cycle easily exert legislative and legal control over the options available to women.
Can you provide even a single instance of male reproductive regulation subjected to similar legislative control?
> In fact, as it stands now, the options available to women are vastly superior
You think of abortion as a form of birth control because your involvement in the process is essentially binary. Either you want a child or you don't. Either you wear a condom or you don't. For women exercising control over their reproductive rights isn't restricted to the timespan of a sexual encounter. An association between birth control and abortion in the greater context of reproductive rights seems to me indicative of a singular and fairly rigid perspective.
> The fact that only women can bear children does not make the regulation of abortion "discrimination".
Perhaps you should study the definition of discrimination. My OED lists two definitions to include: "the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex" and "recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another". In its most neutral definition, that is in the sense of differentiating two things, discrimination is rendered necessary by laws regulating abortion specifically as a direct result of the fact that women are the only ones who can become pregnant. The definition with more negative connotations makes reference to prejudice. The Wizards of Ox define prejudice as "preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience", or alternatively "harm or injury that results or may result from some action or judgment". Give that anti-abortion laws are passed, in part, by men whom by definition have no actual experience with the subject of legislation, it doesn't seem much of a leap to interpret such behavior as being prejudicial and thus discriminatory.
> Do you think that abortion on the day before birth should be legal?
In some cases, absolutely. Consider a premature baby born five months before it should be with no hope to survive, or the case of last minute complications that threaten a woman's life, or last minute discovery of terminal congenital defects.
>As it stands the opinions of people who have zero involvement in a woman's reproductive cycle easily exert legislative and legal control over the options available to women.
Are you for real? I don't think access to contraceptives for adult men and women has been a real political controversy for at least 40 or 50 years.
By your definition of discrimination, regulation of any industry is discrimination, since it doesn't apply to the other industries. Property tax is also discriminatory, because it only affects people who own property. This is transparently puerile logic.
> I don't think access to contraceptives for adult men and women has been a real political controversy for at least 40 or 50 years.
Contraceptives? I was talking about abortion, not about contraceptives.
contraceptive |ˌkäntrəˈseptiv|
adjective
(of a method or device) serving to prevent pregnancy: the contraceptive pill.
Abortions don't prevent pregnancies from occurring, they terminate pregnancies that have already occurred. Clearly not the same thing. This would by why abortion isn't listed under Oxford's definition for contraception.
To wit: "contraception |ˌkäntrəˈsepSH(ə)n|noun the deliberate use of artificial methods or other techniques to prevent pregnancy as a consequence of sexual intercourse. The major forms of artificial contraception are barrier methods, of which the most common is the condom; the contraceptive pill, which contains synthetic sex hormones that prevent ovulation in the female; intrauterine devices, such as the coil, which prevent the fertilized ovum from implanting in the uterus; and male or female sterilization."
To say that women have access to "contraceptives" as if such is a viable response to my comments about abortion illustrates your own ignorance of the facts.
Still if you consider abortion to be a form of contraceptive, I'll happily refer you to Roe v. Wade, countless bombings and arsons of abortion clinics, assault and murder of personnel at abortion clinics, etc.
Once again you're looking at things through a male perspective and seeing abortion as a contraceptive as that's the only aspect of reproductive control that you understand.
What you think carries little weight compared to what I know for fact. I've actually volunteered for non-profits that have distributed contraceptives and I know exactly what kind of challenges such organizations face.
The fact of the matter is, as I said before: "As it stands the opinions of people who have zero involvement in a woman's reproductive cycle easily exert legislative and legal control over the options available to women."
You respond to comments about abortions (termination of pregnancy) with talk about contraceptives (used to prevent pregnancies).
Such a retort is little more than a straw-man.
> By your definition of discrimination
I'm pretty sure I used Oxford's definitions and I'm pretty sure that was made clear. I'm also pretty sure I'm not an editor at Oxford ergo those aren't my definitions, but rather a standard on which the world for the most part agrees.
I saw what you tried to do there, and I didn't like it.
> regulation of any industry is discrimination
Not at all. People aren't corporations. They don't have gender or ethnicity. I can't say that I'm surprised that you equate women with corporations given the need of corporations for external entities i.e. executives, staff, etc, to direct their function. It says a lot about how you think of women, i.e. that they need somebody to control them and make decisions for them.
> Property tax is also discriminatory.
Once again the negative definition of discriminate is to "make an unjust or prejudicial distinction in the treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, sex, or age".
Discrimination in the first sense, that is of differentiation, does apply to property tax as the law must differentiate between those that own property and those that do not.
Discrimination in the second sense, with its associated negative connotations, is a bit more difficult to argue for in the case of property tax as the courts have found the laws as regards such taxation to be just, that is to say, not prejudicial.
You're ignoring a crucial aspect of the negative definition of discriminate, that referring to which is unjust or prejudicial, just for the sake of the argument that you want to make.
Once again there are two definitions to include one that is neutral from the perspective of morals and values and another which is not. You're using one definition where it is convenient for your argument, and ignoring another, again where it is convenient for your argument.
Adding to that, you respond to statements about abortion with off-topic comments about contraception?
> The pro-life position believes that life should be protected earlier than the pro-choice position. That is not discriminatory against women.
I disagree. I think it's absolutely insulting to say that an unborn, memoryless fetus/embryo/cell cluster has more of a right to life than the living, breathing, self-aware woman its inside.
> We are obviously setting side abortion in cases of rape.
This isn't obvious. Many conservatives believe abortion should be universally disallowed, including pregnancies resulting from rape.
>I disagree. I think it's absolutely insulting to say that an unborn, memoryless fetus/embryo/cell cluster has more of a right to life than the living, breathing, self-aware woman its inside.
I think it's telling that instead of defending the core of your position, that abortion should always be allowed, you're falling back to periphery issues, such as what to do when the life of the pregnant woman is threatened by the pregnancy. Many (most?) pro-life people would agree with allowing abortion in such cases, and it's really a sideshow to the main question.
What I'm saying is that no matter what, a woman gets the final say over what happens to the undeveloped fetus that's inside of her. At the extreme end of that position, if one of them has to die, the woman gets to make the choice who, not the fetus, not the state. But even if the woman's life isn't at risk, the choice should still be her's.
> Many (most?) pro-life people would agree with allowing abortion in such cases
It doesn't matter, because they are many more who want to ban it entirely. Many religions, such as the Catholic Church, teach that there are no circumstances in which abortion is acceptable. Women have died in Catholic hospitals because of this doctrine. If we say some abortions are allowed, and some aren't, then we're politicizing what should be a medical decision between a woman and her doctor.
I think you missed the point of my analogy on abortion. Let's say there's someone you know who's going to die in 24 hours if she doesn't get a kidney transplant. She's too far down on the list to get one in that timeframe. Out of all the people she knows that have been tested, you're the only one who's a match.
If you donate your kidney, she lives. If you don't donate your kidney, she dies. Either way, the government cannot compel you to donate your kidney to save her life. You can say "This is my body, my choice" and the woman dies.
Same with abortion. The woman makes a choice about her body, the baby dies. This isn't the government's business.
> Opponents of abortion simply feel that much abortion is highly questionable ethically and feel that a society's treatment of the weakest and most defenseless among them speaks much about the character of their society.
Then by that logic, they should be arguing for organ donation to be mandatory.
> In modern society women do have complete autonomous control over their bodies in determining whether or not to become pregnant.
Tell that to a woman who gets pregnant from being raped.
Thomson grants for the sake of argument that the fetus has a right to life
Thomson says, abortion does not violate the fetus's legitimate rights, but merely deprives the fetus of something—the use of the pregnant woman's body and life-support functions—to which it has no right.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion
This has a real sleaziness to it. Her argumentation is to separate into two, something that cannot logically be separated.
It's like saying you have a "right to breathe all you want from our oxygen rich biosphere," ... while in outer space.
I'll say this again, because it has just struck me so strongly, and it is so strange. What is it about our society that we have people so passionately arguing for killing off our progeny?
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?
> I'll repeat: What is it about our society that compels women to do this?
I don't think society has much to do with it. Pregnancy is an incredible ordeal for a woman to go through. Not only does it drastically change a woman's body, sometimes permanently, but it's also a process the woman has to endure for nine months. I don't see how it's surprising at all that this is something some percentage of women simply don't want to endure at all.
If you want to look at societal factors, I think a major one is that when an unwanted pregnancy occurs, the man is the one who has the ability to walk away. Faced with 18 years of single parenthood or an abortion that can reset everything to how it was before the pregnancy, the latter is the better option.
Some people say abortion is morally reprehensible. But like religion, I think your morality is a personal issue. If you're against abortion, then when you get pregnant, you're free to keep the child. If you're religious, pray for them. But in a free country, I don't believe you can make that choice for others. Homosexuality, interracial marriage, women not wanting to have children, these are all things that some group has argued as immoral at some point in history, but society has progressed. I hope abortion will progress similarly.
Race does. There's no doubt that being born into a inner-city black community is a devastating hand to be dealt. Such children are likely to be raised by single mothers, surrounded by violent crime, in schools with rampant gang activity, and in a culture that devalues success as an act of racial betrayal.
But racism is not a significant factor these days. In fact, minorities who do escape the fatalism of these communities are advantaged by widespread affirmative action, not just in school admissions, but in hiring, business loans, professional recognition, etc.
I disagree. The reason that being born into an inner city black community is a devastating hand is precisely because of racism.
Race does not exist in a vacuum. Look at the legislation that makes possession a crime. Look at the way selective enforcement results in blacks being over represented in prison systems.
Look at the way the urban school districts are underfunded. You can pretend that the system is not racist, but when one racial group suffers disproportionately from legislation that is regressive, unfair and has not been repealed or changed since the era when Jim Crow was wakking, you have a racist system.
We can put feel good bandaids over some college admission laws and we can even elect a black president, but until we fundamentally rework the laws and institutions of this country, we cannot call racism dead. That is the opinion of someone who has not been pulled over for driving through the wrong neighbourhood.
Did Obama help to initiate any tangible change with respect to norms and institutions? What kind of changes happened in the inner cities during the past eight years? [I am an outside observer who really doesn't know]
>SJWism is a cancer on Western civilization and it's one of the most pressing problems we face, because it prevents us from having honest conversations about any other problem. Debates these days always devolve into accusations of racism/sexism/"ableism", or whatever the latest boogeyman "ism" is.
Maybe if you look outside your bubble aka in the internet you can come to realise in the real world this isn't nearly a big and widespread of a problem as some people make it out to be.
>Maybe if you look outside your bubble aka in the internet you can come to realise in the real world this isn't nearly a big and widespread of a problem as some people make it out to be.
Ah, but it was in meatspace that I became alarmed by them. I saw them ruin my alma mater, go after freedom of association, smear everyone who dared oppose them racist. I saw the spinelessness of leaders who instead of fighting back would just capitulate. I saw the Obama administration embrace their cause and turn college sexual assault tribunals into modern Salem witch trials, where a mere accusation is enough to ruin a life forever.
This has spread beyond academia. I saw what they did to Brendan Eich in Mozilla, I saw the chill that has set in among my conservative friends, who dare not speak their opinions lest they be outcast from their industries.
Maybe it's you who needs to step out of whatever bubble you're in.
You suggest that the mechanism by which honesty is removed from debate is by dishonest application of a highly sensitive mechanism for measuring social missteps. This does occur in real life scenarios but you are wrong to attribute SJWism as the cause for the lack of honesty in debate. The dishonesty did not get applied to the situation as a result of the existence of social justice causes -- it got added because of the nature of tribal political blocks. Removing social justice issues won't remove the effects of tribal motivations from the debate.
Furthermore, your position is self inconsistent -- any attempt to wield your highly sensitive SJWism sensor will lead to the same variety of dishonesty that you claim of others holding similar sensors for other social topics.
You are right that there are specific instances where tribally motivated groups explicitly misuse social arguments in a way that disadvantages their opponents -- you are wrong to imply that all occurrences of disadvantage based on this pattern are misuse.
You've attributed a lot to me that I never said. I do not call for a purge of SJWs, as you seem to imply that I do. I'm happy with winning the argument. I see no need to try to ruin people's personal and professional lives.
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.
Humanity decided long ago that running our own lives as hunters and gatherers wasn't the best we could do, and we came together to form societies and governments. No matter how you feel about it, you live in a society and have benefited from its public services, and there has to be some group of people to administer those public services.
I've often though Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changing was analogous to Barlow's 1996 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace[1] (not that I thought that was a great document, but it is a convenient symbol).
The optimism and feeling of change was the same.
The Altamont concert[2] was the end of that feeling in the 60's, just as the 2016 US election campaign has been the end of it now.
Randy Newman says that racism and bigotry are not just limited to southern politicians and that it is a universal problem, at least that's what he says with 'rednecks'; i think that Randy would really deserve the price, but you can't get one for humour/satire, as satire is considered to be a minor muse.
My guess is that Dylan got the price because his generation is aging and they want a statement of that it all really mattered in the larger sense.
It did matter in a larger sense. This is a so much better world than it was 60 years ago.
We still have a long way to go, but imagine if we wouldn't have taken all the small steps that actually were taken, and imagine if we wouldn't have had the leaders and singers that gave us a direction.
the counterculture was very vocal and very interesting phenomenon, did a majority of the young people of the day subscribe to it? I don't think so. Did they really change things in a larger sense? Don't know, might be 'too early to say'.
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 'othering' Mexicans, LGBTs, Blacks to win political support? Do I think that most of Trump's political constituency comes from the 'base' that the likes of Karl Rove built? Do I think that 'liberal political elites' is a dogwhistle for 'progressive social change I don't like' - you bet.
Edit: By reductio ad 'X' I mean in reference to Reductio ad Hitlerum (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum), which as commenter below points out is actually a bastardization of Reductio ad Absurdum
I think what 1337biz was trying to point out is that mentioning trump sullied your point. Perhaps it was impossible to make your original comment without mentioning trump, but now you have "Godwin'd" your argument in a way, and have precluded any room for nuance in either discussing Bob Dylan, or the current political environment. Now it's all Southern Strategy -> Bob Dylan -> Trump.
Sure, Trump has tapped into a certain political current that has long existed in American life (since at least Andrew Jackson), but there are other reasons for his (un)popularity and are worth understanding in their own right.
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."
It's funny because when I think of "politicians who sow hatred, insecurity, fear and division for their own ends and don't care what mess they leave behind" I would first think of the Democrats.
He's pointing out that the Republicans are objectively the more divisive party in 2016. To be fair, it goes back and forth - 10 years ago I would have agreed with you.
But, as you say, it goes back and forth and in the 19th Century it was the Democrats who were known for this. Neither party has a great history with race.
Black unemployment peaked at 16 when the national rate was 10. It dropped to 9.1 when the national rate is 5 so blacks did significantly worse than society as a whole.
I am confused. How can a decrease in unemployment from 16% to 9 not be an objective improvement for american blacks in years?
Do they look back from todays "hellscape" recovery and remember the wonder days when we wondered how many people would lose their jobs or homes to foreclosure? Or did they rejoice when black RNC head Michael Steele was forced to kowtow Rush Limbaugh after Obama was elected?
Because unemployment improved for everybody, but it improved for a significantly smaller percentage of blacks that it did for the population as a whole.
It is a well documented strategy for left-leaning politicians to import voters through unchecked immigration in an attempt to create an unassailable electoral base.
In this case, the politicians who "sow hatred, insecurity, fear and division for their own ends and don't care what mess they leave behind," are the leftists.
See the rapid, shocking, galling decline of civil society in some western European countries in recent years.
These mass immigration leftists sow hatred and insecurity when they act as if the natives of the western world(genetic Europeans,) are somehow in debt to the rest of the world for past sins. Strangely overlooking the fact that the entire modern world with all its convenience and affordances, huge improvements in health and nutrition etc. etc., are more or less entirely the product of Europeans. All peoples can look at some past actions with regret, but Europeans have clearly been a net positive on the world at an unprecedented scale.
These mass immigration leftists sow fear and division when they support the importation of huge population groups with the bonkers notion that these groups will then start behaving along the societal norms of the country they've been imported to, rather than the country they came from.
So the Trumpers are right, their country is being taken from them in this way.
But before we get too far in the weeds on a patented HN thread of only the most tenuous relevance, Congratulations Bob!
And another example of how wrong you are about rising tensions in the US, how many times in recent years have we seen some huge clusterf*ck about a supposed murder in cold blood that turns out to be perfectly justifiable? (Where is any coverage of frequent and horrendous, totally unjustifiable black on white crimes?)
It's gotten to the point where we see all pretence dispensed with and we now see regular race riots in the US when someone is justifiably killed by the police.
All thanks to a get out the vote effort of Democrats and their media compatriots in the form of falsely portraying blacks as victims and stoking racial tensions, encouraging the tensions along with violence in many cases.
And a deafening silence in public discussion about the huge disconnect in rates of black on white crime vs white on black.
One must wonder, what is the endgame for these people? Facts can't stay hidden forever.
I like that pithy statement, Facts can't stay hidden forever. I have big dreams about big data proving various forms of rhetoric false and enumerating all the counter examples. For the time being I think we'll have to manually aggregate the examples like Heather MacDonald often does.
Totally 100% well deserved. Just imagine the 13 year old out there discovering "Masters of War" or "Idiot Wind" for the first time today. Their entire point of view is about to change. Mind upon to hitherto unknowable vistas. Ergo, the absolute benchmark of what Great Literature strives to embody.
Also worth checking out is Dylan's controversial speech upon receiving the the MusiCares Person of the Year 2015 award. I wonder what he'll have to say to the World when he gets to Stockholm ;)
Read Bob Dylan's Complete, Riveting MusiCares Speech
And of course some essential viewing. D.A. Pennebaker's seminal documentary classic Don't Look Back which follows Dylan on his concert tour of the U.K. in 1965.
Inside Criterion's Incredible Restoration of Dylan Doc 'Don't Look Back'
That MusiCares speech is a great read if you have 30 minutes to spare. A few favorite bits:
On Dylan's immersion in classic folk:
>If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me – "John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I'll die with that hammer in my hand." If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.
On what's often missing from rock & roll:
>The other half of rock & roll has got to be hillbilly. And that's a derogatory term, but it ought not to be. That's a term that includes the Delmore Bros., Stanley Bros., Roscoe Holcomb, Git Tanner and the Skillet Lickers... groups like that. Moonshine gone berserk. Fast cars on dirt roads. That's the kind of combination that makes up rock & roll, and it can't be cooked up in a science laboratory or a studio.
The MusicCares speech is great; thanks. An interesting excerpt:
I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them, back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that's fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.
Does Dylan allow bootlegging? Are his songs libre? Does he limit their use or charge royalties? Can I sample one without his permission?
EDIT: The very last line of the speech, as printed: Copyright 2015 Bob Dylan
I think hes talking mostly about the folk song tradition. If you look in both blues/folk there are a lot of songs that are very similar, with almost interchangeable lyrics by many different artists.
The song Little Sadie is one example - its been known under a variety of names, with variations of lyrics. All the John Henry songs - they have been sung by blues and country players alike for almost a century.
If someone makes a song that sounds a lot like a Dylan song, it would be telling how he would react. He's taking about musical evolution, not free streaming.
Based on what I know about folk music - at one time I listened to a bunch of it and learned about its traditions, but I'm hardly an expert - that's not true.
By that tradition, folk songs are for everyone to play and sing, not only for a professional to perform for you. There's a communal, shared, DIY philosophy behind it; it's art by and for regular people (folk art), to be shared; it's not about profit, and intellectual property is almost an opposed concept. To a degree, it's like free/libre software and makers.
IIRC, folk music legend Woody Guthrie kept his songs simple so that anyone could play them. And a more recent folk singer printed (maybe still prints) on all her recordings, where the copyright info usually appears, Unauthorized reproduction, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing.
>> There's a communal, shared, DIY philosophy behind it; it's art by and for regular people (folk art), to be shared;
Yes, I agree. I guess I dont see the conflict. If you play any of these songs, change a few verses, some melody and some chords, then you can claim the copyright just like Bob Dylan did. That is what I think he is trying to get at in that speech.
Notice how is says the following in his copyright claim:
"Basis of Claim: New Matter: rev. melody & new music." [1]
There are many artists that have copyright claims for the same essential song title. Search for Walking Blues, John Hardy or any old fiddle tune like Shady Grove, Blackberry blossom, man of constant sorrow etc. There are a ton of these songs out there where anybody can make their own mark and claim the copyright because literally everybody does it.
Try doing that with 'Times are a changin' and I can guarantee you its not the same unspoken code because its not one of those tunes that have been passed down by generations of musicians and told and retold. The bar will likely be much higher for you to claim your artistic expression on that copyright.
That was the point I was trying to make here. I mainly objected to your 'Can I sample one without his permission?' since I don't think its the same thing.
> I mainly objected to your 'Can I sample one without his permission?' since I don't think its the same thing.
I understand your point and I agree that's the reality of it, but I'm saying that isn't how it has to be. It isn't the same thing in some qualitative ways, as you say, but mainly because Dylan chooses to make it different. Like all the FOSS developers, all those Grateful Dead bootlegs, and all those traditional folk tunes, and some folk singers (and other musicians) in the recorded era, he could have made his libre. My guess is that like Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, and many others, he wouldn't be homeless, that is unless he prefers to keep traveling.
> Does Dylan allow bootlegging? Are his songs libre? Does he limit their use or charge royalties? Can I sample one without his permission?
I'm not sure of the legal rights involved, but he spent nearly the first half of his speech thanking individual artists for covering his songs, so I'd say it's fair game in his eyes.
Musical covers are allowed under mechanical copyrights.
For live performances, the venue carries an ASCAP license, I believe on an annual rate. I don't know how royalties are attributed to individual songwriters.
For recordings, the recording company is, as I understand, responsible for paying royalties to the songwriter.
Note that songwriters and composers get royalties, but recording artists are typically only compensated for their studio time. This bit of legal context for revenues is a reason for the difference between recording artists (much better deal for the studio) and singer-songwriters (much savvier for the artist).
>The other half of rock & roll has got to be hillbilly. And that's a derogatory term, but it ought not to be. That's a term that includes the Delmore Bros., Stanley Bros., Roscoe Holcomb, Git Tanner and the Skillet Lickers... groups like that. Moonshine gone berserk. Fast cars on dirt roads. That's the kind of combination that makes up rock & roll, and it can't be cooked up in a science laboratory or a studio.
Considering that most of the rock & roll I listen to comes from Britain, I have no idea what he considers rock & roll to be. It's certainly not american folk music.
Keith Richards and his school buddy, Mick Jagger, bonded by nerding out over American folk music ('Life' is a fun read), including both rhythm and blues and the kind of hillbilly stuff Dylan refers to. So did Paul McCartney and John Lennon. It's kind of amazing how rock and roll became so much greater when it was exported and imported.
The same Led Zeppelin that borrowed all those American blues and country riffs throughout their career?
If you educate yourself on American music from the 20s-50s you'll realize the true extent of the influence on the British music of the 60s and 70s. It's a lot more than Rocky Raccoon but if you're ignorant of country music you're not going to hear the guitar licks, drum patterns and vocal inflections that show up in many of the recordings by the Beatles.
There's no shortage of literature on these influences so how about we just leave any additional education on the matter to personal study, eh?
Well, you hear it in Led Zeppelin, too. While the members were heavily influenced by the blues artists of the time, songs like "gallows pole" and "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp" and "Hey hey what can I do?" show that influence. They also have a variety of songs heavily influenced by the Rockabilly genre, which also has a folk-roots influence. "Hot Dog", "boogie with stu", and "Candy Store Rock" all count in that regard.
Rock and Roll has key influence from both the folk traditions, and the blues ones. And in many ways, baroque and early music which influenced bluegrass.
"The band's heavy, guitar-driven sound, rooted in blues( and psychedelia on their early albums, has earned them recognition as one of the progenitors of heavy metal, though their unique style drew from a wide variety of influences, including folk music."
"The four played together for the first time in a room below a record store on Gerrard Street in London.[17] Page suggested that they attempt "Train Kept A-Rollin'", originally a jump blues song popularised in a rockabilly version by Johnny Burnette, which had been covered by the Yardbirds."
A lot of great rock-and-roll has come out of Britain... if you trace how it got there, it comes back to the same people Dylan is talking about (not solely, but the Hillbillies are there).
If you search for the story of how they met, McCartney played Lennon some Little Richard (R&B) and some Gene Vincent (Hillbilly), both US imports. It impressed Lennon and his buds enough that they decided to invite McCartney in to the band. Listen to their earliest records, and look at who they cover, and you'll find more.
The Crunge is a James Brown tribute. When the Levee breaks references the American Blues tradition pretty explicitly (I'm going to Chicago). In My Time of Dying is an old gospel tune from Louisana. Dazed and Confused was a cover of an American blues tune, etc.
Clapton was a similar story. He's the first to say his biggest inspiration was Robert Johnson.
The Beatles had a much stronger US influence in their earlier work than their later work. They had multiple singles that were Chuck Berry covers.
"What goes on", from the British release of Rubber Soul, is pretty country sounding. I like the song, but it certainly isn't one of their more famous, though.
I'd encourage you to investigate the link between Clapton and American folk music. I could post links, but I'd just be doing what I'm encouraging you to do - research this a bit.
I mean I realize the link—assuming you're calling american blues "folk", that is—but it's just that, a link, not an identity. Clapton certainly sounds unique. I'm more interested in the fact that he thinks rock & roll is actually a discrete genre rather than a band format.
I'm also not a huge fan of Clapton sans Cream OR the Stones, so maybe I just don't like american flavored rock & roll. It didn't really click for me until Iggy Pop showed up. It didn't feel right to be caught halfway between him and Woody Guthrie—both ends make sense, but the middle sounds terrible to me.
I don't know. I like Dylan's music alright, but reading the lyrics posted here and imagining how they would sound on their own (If you've heard the songs, you tend to impose the music on them when you read them), I don't think they're particularly impressive. If you slipped, say, "The Ballad of a Thin Man" into a poetry anthology I don't believe many people coming across it blind would consider it one of the greats.
Works for the Tao Te Ching, and others. You lose something but not enough you can't see the genius if it's there.
For Dylan I'd actually prefer to consider his lyrics without the music since sometimes I can't really understand what he's singing. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLCewTcb-jc)
I don't know what the official criteria are but I'm going to think of the prize decision as recognizing his incredible songs as art in themselves rather than just the lyrics as "literature".
Maybe. I took the fact that this is a Nobel Prize in Literature and that the site states that they awarded it to him for "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition" as meaning this was about his lyrics.
I was probably 13 or so when I bought a "Freewheelin Bob Dylan" cassette out of a bargain bin for maybe a dollar. I thought then, and think now, that "Masters of War" was embarrassingly juvenile. I mean, come on:
And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
Til I’m sure that you’re dead
Really right up there with "Suicide is Painless". And rhyming deathbed and "you're dead" is an awkward classic finish. I wouldn't bother opining this way but that dumb song's reputation is truly bizarre.
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 -- he wasn't trying to entertain me.
Reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre's letter in which he rejected the Nobel Prize:
> The writer who accepts an honour of this kind involves as well as himself the association or institution which has honoured him,” he said at the time. “The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honourable circumstances, as in the present case. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/05/sartre-nobel-p...)
In the time since Dylan started signing black people went from having very limited rights to winning a presidential elections. Obviously, there are many more factors than Dylan at play, and establishing causality, or the lack of thereof, is impossible. But, in my opinion, saying that society has not changed would be a big mistake.
Attributing any of that "progress" to Bob Dylan is a huge reach. He has a lot of fans and reached some segment of the population with his act, but he's basically just another guy peddling records and tap dancing for nickels.
This is an unfortunate outlook in my opinion. Art and literature are definitely more important than mere entertainment. The greatness of an artist is determined by how much impact they had on a society.
You don't need to attribute the change to him for it to not be sad if he joins the mainstream. If mainstream values converge with Dylan's, why shouldn't he?
Found this 1968 song from an Israeli singer a couple of weeks ago, whose title says it all: "The Hippies Of Today Are The Assholes of Tomorrow" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joZU1fMFCAo).
Great song - for those wondering, it is The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol by Bob Dylan. I think the lyrics are more powerful in context of the rest of the song[0].
Although listening to that song now I find it somewhat sad and dispiriting, because the "change" that came in the decades following that proclamation, was it really a change? Looking at politics and society? I think of that song in the context of its use in "Watchmen" [0] as more realistic.
That film is without question my favourite set of opening credits, and honestly I think that short outdoes the rest of the film by an order of magnitude.
Despite being a massive admirer of Dylan's work, I'm not sure that I'm good with this
> for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition
There's no doubt he did this, but ... do songs count as literature? I'm not really sure they do, and much as I love the songs, the lyrics by themselves don't have anything like the impact (on me at least) of top-notch poetry
>There's no doubt he did this, but ... do songs count as literature?
They should. Literature and poetry started from rhapsodies, sagas, and other forms of song-based storytelling, and it's not very good that it diverted so much to some kind of literary ivory tower.
Playwrights have won several times. The problem with screenplays, as they exist today, is that they basically never really have 'an author' in the traditional sense.
Most early poetry was sung, and we're fine with calling that literature. Calling Dylan's work poetry does step over some normative lines, but they're fairly arbitrary lines.
I know you were being sarcastic, but your comparison isn't really apt. Novels are not a lyric medium: they're prose. Song lyrics are lyrics set to music. Some poetry is "lyrics" without the music (although lyric poetry is not quite the same thing).
>the lyrics by themselves don't have anything like the impact (on me at least) of top-notch poetry
To you they don't, to me and others they do. To the current Nobel committee they did this year.
At the end, Nobel prizes are highly subjective and people dependent recognitions - so arguments of the form of X deserves and Y does not are not too meaningful.
Really? I've spent pretty much all my spare time and money on music for the last 30 years, but no lyrics by themselves have ever had the effect on me that, for example "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" has had
... but then maybe I'm looking at this wrong, and the prize is being awarded for the songs rather than just the lyrics. If that's the case then I guess the prize is well-deserved
Tambourine Man definitely struck me in a similar way to Prufrock. In fact, I don't think songwriting gets the credit it really deserves. Dylan is verbose, but most great songwriting is better equated to a sonnet than Prufrock. And an album to a sonnet sequence.
One example I might offer on the same line as Prufrock is Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel. From "Save the Life of My Child" all the way to "At the Zoo" we follow a life (or many lives) and its roller coaster. "America" and "Hazy Shade of Winter" are particular favorites.
(as an aside, one of my favorite lyrics of all time is by Gordon Lightfoot in his excellent "Black Day in July" -
Science? No. People will disagree on whether some person who didn't get the price really should have gotten it, but no scientist disputes the value and importance of the work of the people who did get the prize.
In science, perhaps there are people who should have gotten the Nobel prize but they didn't. However, few people would say that the people who did get the prize didn't deserve it.
With Peace and Literature, people do this all the time.
Even in science there is a fair amount of subjectivity to the prizes. It was fairly questionable to give a Nobel to Kary Mullis for PCR, for example (the technique is certainly useful, but maybe not that deep scientifically and Mullis is kind of a nutjob who has used his fame to promote pseudoscience), not to mention prizes to work that hasn't held up well -- frontal lobotomies are not considered a great solution to mental illness anymore despite Egas Moniz's 1949 prize for it.
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. "
I believe this quote is apocryphal. AFAIK it's actually quoting a play by Aristophanes that poked fun at Socrates -- a play that put these words in his mouth.
It is worth adding that though I agree that songs can be literature, songs also have non-literary elements, which means that songs that are not literature can still be good songs. Here I'm thinking of artists like DJ Shadow or the Beastie Boys, where some other element such as the soundscape or even just the beat carries the music.
I'm not a Bieber fan, but I think it's unfair to judge him strictly by his lyrics. Or Sinatra for that matter.
And telling the stories in poetic form and then singing them was a way to memorize them and teach them to next generation at the time when people had no skill to write and read.
Stephen Sondheim wrote that you can't fit as much complexity into sung lyrics as into read poetry. I wish I had the book in front of me to provide more details, but he reveals a lot about his craft here:
(For those not familiar with the genre, many think Sondheim is the great composer of musicals of all time; you might have seen some of his on film, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, recently. His lyrics (and stories) are not of the fun, clever, vapid variety often associated with musicals, but brilliant, creative, and multi-dimensional. - For those interested, Company and Sweeney Todd are probably good places to start.)
My understanding is that Homer's poems were recited or sung along with musical accompaniment. I'd agree it's an open issue as to whether this is analogous to Dylan's singing.
I feel ambivalent about this nobel prize. I absolutely feel Dylan is deserving of an award on this scale, and I have no problem viewing his work as literature. So in that sense, I have no real objection.
Still... novelists, playwrights, poets, there were a lot of people practicing more pure literary forms who were passed over here... and they certainly aren't going to be considered for any music awards. I'm just not convinced this was the right way to go. I do feel a kind of unease about it. I'm not really the best one to make the case against it, because I'm not convinced it's the wrong decision either.
There was a Spanish band which used to take poems by various authors such as García Lorca and make songs from them. Did this mean the poems suddenly became worse?
Now, I do agree that you can have a great song with lyrics that wouldn't be that great by themselves. But that doesn't mean genuinely good poems can't be written as lyrics.
They could. The psalms were originally set to music and are still quite popular works despite the music they were set to being long lost. But whether Dylan's lyrics really work on that level, well, that's a different question.
C'mon, look at 'Hard Rains Gonna Fall'? Writing something with such wisdom and poetic deft at 22 years old? This award is massively overdue - not undue.
I can't upvote this enough. I have a degree in physics, but even so every year around this time for about the past decade I pay more attention to the literature prize, waiting for him to get recognized. The last chapter of Colorless Tsukuru hit me so hard I cried, and immediately went out of my way to get an autographed copy. His novels have certainly helped me transition into adulthood, and I think he definitely deserves the prize.
I wish I had a reaction as emotional as yours, but I still understand your sentiment. They're quirky, yet so relatable. Ultimately, Haruki literature resonates with the loneliness felt in the cold, detached 21st-century society.
Yeah, I just happened to read that last chapter of Colorless Tsukuru at the right time in my personal life where I could relate directly to just about every sentence, and at the end I just felt empty in a satisfying way, if that makes any sense. Then again, I find that with age I'm becoming more susceptible to melancholic or sappy fiction, even if it's not particularly well done (as in the case of some TV shows).
Unpopular opinion, but they're both overrated. DiCaprio just overacts and people interpret it as a sign of good acting (c.f.: "he cut his hand and kept acting!"; method acting is also given too much credit these days as well) I've read Murakami and it just felt soulless and bland, like he was just appealing to "lonely and lost" people, but not in any meaningful way. Just my personal opinion.
Lastly, if someone keeps getting passed up for an award, it just signifies that there are people who deserved the award more, not that they deserve the award by virtue of not receiving it. That's why I think it's silly that he won the Oscar for The Revenant, which was certainly not his best performance. You can make a case for someone deserving an award for cumulative achivement, but then there are even more worthy candidates.
>if someone keeps getting passed up for an award, it just signifies that there are people who deserved the award more
I would be less salty if another author received it over Murakami, but to make the jump to songwriter sets a precedent I don't particularly like. You can make a reasoned argument for authors who deserve it more than Murakami, but to switch genres sort of implies that either all the Nobel caliber authors have been exhausted, or that nobody cares about literature anymore, or that the Nobel committee made this pick to satiate the complaints over the lack of American laureates, and Bob Dylan was the best the US could offer. In any case I find it troubling.
Yes, I totally agree. I like Dylan's music a lot, but I cringed this morning when I read the news. Murakami deserves the prize. I suspect he'll get it one of these years, but I think his body of work has already made the case.
Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are also quite good. His tone can vary a lot from book to book, from absurdity (Wild Sheep Chase) to straight up nostalgic, umm, romance(?) (Norwegian Wood).
Technically, Dylan has written a number of novels, short stories and Poems and as such would not really qualify as a "pure singer-songwriter", even though the Nobel Prize comittee's reasoning references his work as a singer-songwriter...
At the other end of spectrum is 'Changing of the Guards' in which Bob Dylan seems to be intentionally parodying his own songwriting (still an enjoyable song though).
>"Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts": an amazing example of musical story-telling
This song and 'Tangled Up In Blue' and 'Hurricane' are practically novellas in song form. I think the 'long form storyteller' Dylan is often the least acknowledged, but probably my favorite Dylan song format.
I started typing out a list, but there's really too many to name. Pretty much anything through Desire is definitely worth a listen, and he has some gems from past that period, too.
Winston Churchill also won the Literature Nobel Prize (for his book on the second world war). Writing history is probably even better than songwriting as an alternative to fiction.
A real testament to the power of imagery when skillfully and artfully handled.
Dylan himself was something of a hustler in his own way (not being negative here: he was also quite an amazing person) but he worked hard at his craft, delving deeply into Lord Byron and many others to hone his poetic skills - and it showed! So many artists gained fame doing his songs owing to the limitations of his own signing voice (his has a raw quality that is appealing in its own right but probably more for specialized audiences as compared to what the signing groups with more of a popular bent could achieve). "Can't sing, can't play" was one putdown popular in that era. But oh how this music soared from one with a raw force, a poetic inspiration, and a truly superb talent whatever the technical limitations - and all wrapped up with the zeitgeist of the times, perfectly capturing the sense and urgency of the civil rights movement.
Very nice to see the accolades now being bestowed on a man who effectively changed a generation in profound ways.
I love how so many on the thread have Dylan lyrics to contribute. Seems like empirical evidence for his impact. I listened obsessively to every shred of Dylan I could lay my hands on when I was a teenager.
Everything is Broken always felt like a theme song for my job in telecommunications at a service provider. Especially the parts about broken lines and broken switches. That's just how universal Dylan's literature really is:
This goes up there with Obama's Nobel for peace. It's an insult to the thousands of more deserving real authors. Baby Boomer's 1960s pop culture has been overhyped for so long that it's just exhausting at this point. I always find it disgusting that Dylan is celebrated as anti-war even though he wrote Neighborhood Bully, a rabid defense of Israel's wars where he ridicules calls for peace.
I disagree with the Nobel committee here. They choose to ignore numerous deserving, hard-working writers toiling in obscurity and instead heap more praise on one of the most worshipped musicians of the era.
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
"Visions of Johanna"
I don't think that anyone in modern culture has impacted society in the ways Bob has.
I have always wondered what is blowing on the wind, it seems Dylan must have captured something important, I am still wondering many things and thinking that wind curves are very windy.
Added: For a good singer it must be fatal to be poisoned with the virus of fame, you become one more commodity, good for selling books and records but no more genuine value.
I hope the next Nobel in Literature to be for a twitter writer, I don't have anything against Dylan, it is only that I find his works are not Literature but very good songs.
My main complaint about Dylan is his terrible singing voice. Imagine what could have been if he had swallowed his pride and teamed with a great singer!
Of course, this complaint is invalid for a literature prize, so I can only say it's well deserved.
Maybe this can open up for film and TV writers to be considered. They're the ones mostly filling the storytelling needs book authors did when Nobel instituted the prize.
I watched this great documentary on Ramblin Jack Ellis, I highly recommended it, and one thing I learned was "singing pretty" was against the aesthetic of that folk movement.
So, no I don't think he should have teamed up with a singer.
Do you mean Ramblin' Jack Elliot? If so then it's ironic because Bob Dylan wrote in his autobiography about Elliot's voice and guitar playing and that he was jealous when he first heard it because it was more or less what he wished he could sound like. I personally also think he has a great voice.
I always love playing "Lay Lady Lay" for people and asking if they know who it is. His voice is unrecognizable due to the months in the hospital w/o cigarettes.
He's always ... distorted his singing voice. The motorcycle wreck was 50 years ago and he about broke his neck. He cracked a vertabrae. At least in recordings his voice was different after that, but it's impossible to say how much was mechanical damage and how much was his Bobness reinventing himself again.
I've seen him in concert twice, once about ten years ago and another about 15, and though he didn't sound great, they were still great concerts. Lots of singing along and crowd pandering. He was clearly enjoying himself and so did we.
Two famous laureates are Sartre and Bertrand Russell. Both wrote more in more conventional genres for the prize, but most think the prize was awarded not simply for the literary quality of their work.
Another thread connecting their awards with Dylan is that all three authored widely read and acclaimed autobiographies or memoirs.
It's important to note that Sartre refused the Nobel Prize because he felt that a writer should not be part of an institution. That's a moral courage that's rarely seen.
As part of the Bootleg Series, Dylan released recordings of the Rolling Thunder Review tour where this song features. It's one of my favorite live albums and Dylan at probably the most satisfied and happy point of his career.
I'm not sure literature would be as highly esteemed if oral history and the bards / singers / poets had not established roots in various cultures as the way to convey large, abstract or emotional things. They're good relatives I think. Writing by the masses is still fairly new in the grand scheme of things. Singing songs to each other, quite a bit longer tradition, from what I can tell looking through some stuff back in uni (including an Early Middle English course).
"Bob Dylan hasn't Recanted Praise for Rabbi Meir Kahane.Yes, you read that right. Bob Dylan said Meir Kahane, who favored the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland and whose racist Kach party has since been banned from Israeli politics, is “a really sincere guy” who’s “really put it all together.”
https://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/bob-dylan-joins...
The Nobel peace prize has little to do with the 'real' Nobel prizes or Nobel committee. It's administered by an entirely different organization, in a different country and with different rules and criteria.
> It's administered by an entirely different organization, in a different country and with different rules and criteria.
This part is true, but that's because Nobel explicitly specified it this way. The peace prize is one of the original "real" ones. As opposed to the one for economics, which was made up later by others.
(And, well, that contributions to world peace are judged by "different rules and criteria" than physics... makes some sense.)
You're right that a basic failure here is the way the prize was set up. Unlike the Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Literature prizes, which are awarded by actual practitioners in those fields, the peace prize is awarded by whatever 5 people the Norwegian Parliament selects that year. Neither these people nor the Parliament selecting them necessarily have anything to do with "work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses", unfortunately. As a result, they don't seem to have quite as strong an incentive to make good choices, on either a personal or institutional level, as the selection processes for the other Nobel prizes.
I think this difference in _who_ is doing the awarding and how they are related to the people receiving the awards is what dagw was trying to get at above. It's the difference between experts in a field selecting prizes for other members of their field and democratically-elected politicians playing political football with prizes in a field they themselves are totally not involved in and likely not much interested in to start with. :(
Chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine are sciences that have practitioners. Literature is an art that has practitioners. But peace is not a science nor an art. Nevertheless, Alfred Nobel saw fit to set up the peace prize. The rumor is that he did this because of hurt feelings after being accused of profiting from munitions manufacturing (he made his fortunes through inventions in explosives).
Of course there is a difference in who is doing the awarding. Nobel's decision to give the prize-awarding responsibility to Norwegian parliament might have had something to do with knowing peace activists at the time when Sweden and Norway were approaching the dissolution of their union, and there was fear of war.
I can't really point out any significantly better subject matter experts in working for peace than Norwegian Parliament.
You may be right that at the time there were no better subject matter experts. That doesn't make the Norwegian Parliament any good as subject matter experts in perpetuity, unfortunately, and I think the spotty history of the Peace Prize awards and the resulting disdain for it is evidence of that. Not least because the priorities of both the electorate and their elected representatives can change. So we certainly have evidence of failure; it's not clear whether the failure could have been avoided.
In hindsight, it _may_ have been a good idea to have a process in place for handing off to a better-suited body at some point (e.g. past prize recipients, the UN). Hard to say, of course.
No, I trust the Norwegian parliament and its assigned panel a lot more. Nobel Peace Prize and its reputation is theirs. So far they've done a decent job, even if some of the appointments - like the premature selection of Obama - are disappointing.
All of the Nobel prizes are awarded by entirely different organizations except for Physics and Chemistry. The Nobel peace prize was established by Nobel's will exactly like the other Nobel prizes. It has just as much claim to being a real Nobel prize as any of the other Nobel prizes.
>giving Obama the peace price after he failed to shut down Guantanamo
That is a weird way to put it, considering that nominations for the peace prize closed just 11 days after Obama took office, and the prize was awarded 9 months later.
It's more reasonable to say that prize was given to Obama based on his campaign promises, before he even had any actual chance to close Guantanamo. (Which he still hasn't done, because obviously it is much easier to talk about it in a campaign than to really create a sustainable policy for what to do with the detainees.)
I think the president of Colombia is not an unreasonable choice. The selection criterion set out by Nobel in his will for the Peace Prize is "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". He has in fact been doing work in those directions, and it has in fact been good work. It hasn't been completely successful, but it also hasn't entirely failed yet (e.g. FARC is not back to open fighting, now is it?) and I think there is a very good chance that it will in fact succeed. We can start arguing about whether it was "the most" or "the best", but I think it's hard to argue that it wasn't substantive work aimed at the things Nobel's criteria indicate.
The Obama thing I agree was rather ridiculous, as were various other Peace Prize awards.
It seems right to me to applaud effort in this way even if perhaps I wouldn't make all those specific awards. Shining a spotlight on those statesmen trying to make the world a better place.
The music industry packaged up singers like Dylan for whichever vertical they needed. Anyone who was able to navigate that system as successfully as he did was certainly not a rebel and the music itself was nothing extraordinarily unique if you look into the long tail of music being made at the time. It's like saying 7-Up is the uncola and you are rejecting the establishment by drinking it instead of Coke.
I think you are looking at things from an incorrect lens here as far as "the system" goes. To give some context, the music industry was a whole different animal when Bob Dylan started in the 1960s. The "establishment" back then could be represented by, say, musicians from the Grand Ole Opry type of tradition, and the long tail end of the crooner / sweet music / big band era. Maybe some of the doo-wop which got popular in the 1950s was kind of "establishment" by then.
Folk along with rock and roll were the rising youth movements of the time and I'm not sure the older generation at the time understood it very well. Today it does seem like much of top pop promoted music is half "written by committee" but I'm not sure that was the case back then (see Frank Zappa's take on this from the eighties, which I personally think is even more true today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP4wsURn3rw)
Look at the top of the charts from 1962 when Bob Dylan released his first album. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_sin...) There's some R&B and rock for sure but also a heck of a lot of big band / jazz type instrumental (your Kenny Balls, Acker Bilks, David Rose, etc.), some country as well (Johnny Tillotson, Claude King, etc.), and cutesy pop numbers (the "Mashed Potato Time" is #3 for 1962).
The "folk music revival" Dylan started in was also fairly massive in the early 1960s but I would say at the time the top was represented by Peter Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio (both are on the Hot 100 chart in 1962). Bob Dylan won't appear on the Hot 100 until 1965, #41 for "Like a Rolling Stone". (Of course, Peter Paul and Mary brought Dylan to a national audience with "Blowin' in the Wind".) In 1962 this wasn't even a decade out from when Pete Seeger / the Weavers got tangled in that McCarthyism drama, so it's fair to say that the whiff of anti-establishment the folk revival movement had was a somewhat justified feeling.
Of course, Bob Dylan went well beyond the folk revival. I personally don't get the vibe that Dylan was quite as anti-establishment or political as many of the others in the folk revival, nor do I imagine that he thinks of himself as a "rebel". He's more of a poet plain and simple; what makes him unique is more his words / lyrics than anything else.
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
"You got more than blacks, don't complain
You're better than them, you been born with white skin" they explain
And the Negro's name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KY2lQV3ADfc
As it seems especially relevant today. It's a song about the killing of civil rights activist Medgar Evers by a poor white farmer in the 60's. Dylan addresses the civil rights movement in a way that avoids laying the blame squarely at the feet of the angry racist who pulled the trigger, instead placing the blame with politicians who sow hatred, insecurity, fear and division for their own ends and don't care what mess they leave behind.
When I see Trump rallies today full of angry people complaining their country has been 'taken from them' I can't help but think of that song.