When posting on a public forum, our opinions are bound to clash, we all have different tastes and (dis)like different things, more so when it comes to discussing sensitive issues like religion or questions of race. Please, try not to personalize your comments and agree to disagree.
I have a plan: attack!
i think there are many members here who have wonderful musical taste. i wasn't implying that i'm above the rest, please - get real. somebody in here asked me what i listen to because he was baffled by my hip hop criticism, so that comment addressed him.Originally Posted by ghideon
Ghideon calls me blatantly arrogant. i said elsewhere that ad hominem is an indication that either you lost the argument or don't have one. in your case, both are true.
and yes, hip hop lacks a sense of place, i know what i said. hip hop doesn't capture the struggle of hard working families in the city or the myriad of individuals railing against the ghetto raging outside their windows, like parents working two-three jobs to keep their kid out of public schools where hip hop infestation is writ large. students are fighting back by reading books, doing their homework, taking the advice of teachers and parents, and working after school. they're "showing up" and have formulated goals. you want to sit there and suggest the term ,"ghetto," comprises an entire city of degenerates that's somehow captured by the gangsta rap and hip hop. hip hop is not nor will it ever be the mouthpiece for ghettos (it's more concerned with bling bling anyway) so i strongly disagree. there are many pockets of good works going on that's not reported in the smut music. in fact, the music distorts the reality. but how would i know anything about ghetto life? i'm a white guy from the suburbs.
to be honest with you - and i'm not saying this facetiously, i still don't quite grasp your argument - you're all over the map and that's at least partly because your thinking is intoxicated by relativism, which i've discussed in great detail above. so there's a tendency in you to lack a center, a core. you say you're deconstructing this argument? how? you take a position and in the next statement recoil. in between you invoke, "know thyself." but socrates didn't mean that we shouldn't have an opinion about things - he believed we should make informed judgments. my judgments are informed, yours are wishy washy, but wishy-washy doesn't come closer to the Socratic ideal. keep in mind that it was Socrates student Plato who wrote The Republic that called for censorship (and to think if plato could see hip hop!). you bring up socrates, have does that adage pertain to this discussion exactly? and do you even know about deconstruction? you have a tendency to sprinkle your posts with terms and big names, so i'm just checking again, because you still havn't clarified your statements on emerson and thoreau. i assume you're talking about Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, yes? how do you "deconstruct" this hip hop issue?
i assure you that any lyrics i made up in this thread are far less distasteful than the hip hop smut out there. a'ight?
gideon says
"Is there anything that anybody could ever say and I mean this. Is there any author or govt official or priest or spiritual leader or artist or classical musician or poet who could help you finally wise up?"
that's quite gratuitous, don't you think? to suggest that i'm pig-headed just because i disagree with your intellectualization call to more closely examine the causalities of hip hop is wrong. it doesn't mean i already haven't considered such.
Last edited by jon1jt; 12-31-2006 at 12:57 AM.
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
My friend, you may wonder what I would do, but, you would be sorely wrong. I would never espouse the censoring of anything not directly harmful to a person. I believe in freedom of speech. Anyone can say anything they want to or about anything.
In fact, I find it personally offensive you would suggest that I would do such a thing. In the future, please do not presume to assume to know what I would do, and I won't presume to know what you would do, which I have not in a single one of my posts done. I have only responded to the words you put on the proverbial paper.
I will say here that I think perhaps things have gotten a little heated and a little personal, but this censorship idea seems to be the unspoken center of this thread, at least to me. I, for one, have no problem admitting that the misogyny and violence espoused by rap music is no way to live. I do not listen to rap music myself, but I also do not believe that something such as 'art' can be accurately defined; meaning defined in a way that brings common consensus, thus art, I think, is much like treasure, meaning it can be another man's trash.keep in mind that it was Socrates student Plato who wrote The Republic that called for censorship (and to think if plato could see hip hop!
In any case, I think we have hit the main issue of importance here. Hip-hop censorship, which is the part of your posts, Jon, that I find the most disturbing, and quite frankly I would call them at the very least tyrannical. Hopefully you are not.
Howver, the one thing I would ask you, beyond everything that has been mentioned here, what gives you the right to censor something that is so obviously freedom of speech, and so obviously defended by over two hundred years of legal jurisprudence, defended by a legal tradition that is upheld by not only the world's oldest existing Republic (and not Plato's Republic, but the real one) but also the world's second oldest government (not country, obviously, but only England's government has a longer continuous existence in its modern form than that of the United States)?
You have discussed at long length the evil of relativism, and pure relativism is indeed evil, but have you ever considered the evil of pure objectivism? This is the evil that drives empires, crushes men, lays low great societies, tortures men, punishes intellectuals and turns scientists into slaves dedicated not to improvement, but to the creation of war machines. I have asked you before and I ask you again, what gives you the right to make your absolutist statements? Plato? His Republic wouldn't last a second in the real world, and consequently his Republic is not ours. What makes your arbitration of taste the ultimate one? Or maybe I should say the penultimate, since you concede greatness to the Ancients, and in that case I would ask what makes them, those who had died nearly two thousand years before the founding of our Republic, greater authorities on our laws and our Constitution than we ourselves, than the Supreme Court Justices, one of whom you have quoted?
I hope this doesn't come as a personal attack because it is not intended to be, but you have recomended to total censorship of whole volumes of human thought and history, ugly as they may be, and have said that the world would be better off without remembering some of the ugly scars that have taught us the pain of our mutual struggle to come to where we exist today. What gives you the right to say that something is so harmful that we must pretend that it never occurred, for surely erasing documents that shed light on the history of something that actually happened in a non-relativist, very absolute way would be nothing more than pretending? What gives you the similar right to pretend that what people say and consume today isn't important to understanding the people who identify themselves with it?
I can understand that we all have our own definitions of art, and I will defend mine as everyone here has defended theirs. In fact, it is the very thesis of my argument that everyone creates their own definition of art. 'Art' is not a tree. It has no leaves to whisper in the breeze. It is not green, or brown, or even any color. It is an abstract concept created in the mind of man. Indeed, the very word comes from 'artifice' meaning something created. I feel to regard art in any other way is to sell it short of something. There may be art we dislike, art we consider better than others, art we consider trash. I have hated many pieces of art in my time, and even said I don't consider 'x' to be art, but the truth is that someone else inevitably will. As a result I have given up attempting a definition of art, because whenever I do I find it irreconcilable to the other myriad of personal definitions people hold, and why is that? It is because art is like the image of God. We all have one, be He a kindly man with a white beard, a nebulous ball of light or simply a black void of non-existence. Who knows which is better or worse (of course, each will inevitably have its partisans whose rights to free disagreement are protected under the same Amendment which prohibits your cesnorship). At least we've stopped killing one another over it, for the most part.
Art is not a mathematical equation, and y never equals x because none of us play the game with the same variables, and the moment we try to fix those variables, the moment we attempt to FORCE our ideas upon another we have lost that essentialy individual thing that powers great artists to transcend the normal and the banal. By denying the freedom of hip-hop to be coarse you deny the freedom of the impressionist to paint a shadow green, the jazz musician to improvise and the author to write a stream of conscious narrative that breaks the rules of literary narration.
Hip-hop as it lives today may be untenably rude and vulgar, but its rudeness and vulgarity is an expression of a segment of our culture. It may not be a pretty segment, it may not even be an acceptable one, but it is one that exists and closing one's eyes to it does not make it go away. You can not fight it with a blindfold or fingers in your ear. Outlawing it legitimizes its form, it gives it a forum (again I refer you to the great Salon des Refuses in both its year of inception and the later years of its tradition) from which to proclaim that society is afraid of its raw 'truth' when its raw 'truth' is nothing more than the self-indulgence of a few angry men trying to posture themselves into what they perceive as greatness. This is one of those things that if killed will live on to choke its enemies when they are finally forced to eat it. You can never understand something you kill out of fear and disgust, and you can never end something that you refuse to look at. Our problems will live on if not in rap music than in something else. All things must be created, and they are created not because someone decided they should, but because they complete an idea someone felt needed to be completed. It is the idea that may be bad, but not the medium it is expressed in. An idea can only be negated once it is understood and once its adherents are shown a better way, which they never will come to see if led to it by a nose ring like a recalcitrint ox on a yoke.
And by the way, Jon, I like music you would describe as having 'class' too. As I have said before, I don't listen to hip-hop for the very reasons Kilted Exile said he does not. I don't like it. I don't like its message, and I don't like the content. I prefer jazz, the blues, a little bit of bluegrass, some oldies and even on occasion a bit of doo-wop, which I think is as far from rap as you can get. Just listening to music with 'class' does not confer a right to sit in judgement over the music of someone else. Elitism is not necesarily a bad thing, but much like absolutism and relativism it is something best taken in strides.
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
I Feel Honored And Am Delightfully Humble
Wow.
There is nothing that I can add to the above. I once was told that a writer is someone "who has something to say and a way to say it." There is nothing more I can add in terms of insight regarding the advocacy of censorship. Nor is there anything I can add that would make the above statement more eloquent. It has all been said and said well. I offer my deep thanks to the individual who posted the above Sheyk Abdullah. I now have an example of an argument that is both sound, persuasive and written with heart. Quite good.
I have gone from feeling
in this forum.
toand that is quite a nice way to feel on a rather chilly Oakland night.
"Nor what the potent Victor in his rage
Can else inflict, do I repent or change"
Milton, Paradise Lost
Book 1 Line 95-96
"There is only one plot-things are not as they seem."
Jim Thompson
i already discussed in great detail that absolute freedom of speech is a chimera. i'm not going to repeat that one again. you have a duty to read people's posts before making such remarks. wonderful rhetorical flare though. and the hip hoppers will pay homage to your fanatical spirit of freedom, however illusory it is.
abdullah
In fact, I find it personally offensive you would suggest that I would do such a thing. In the future, please do not presume to assume to know what I would do, and I won't presume to know what you would do, which I have not in a single one of my posts done. I have only responded to the words you put on the proverbial paper.[/B]
i presume what you would do based on the comments you left here. it's called an educated guess. isn't that part of my right to say "anything i want to or about anything"? or do you deny me that freedom that i cannot deny gangsta rappers who demonize cops and hip hoppers who make women out to be objectified meat? c'mon.
abdullah
I will say here that I think perhaps things have gotten a little heated and a little personal, but this censorship idea seems to be the unspoken center of this thread, at least to me. I, for one, have no problem admitting that the misogyny and violence espoused by rap music is no way to live. I do not listen to rap music myself, but I also do not believe that something such as 'art' can be accurately defined; meaning defined in a way that brings common consensus, thus art, I think, is much like treasure, meaning it can be another man's trash.
i've already made my case that hip hop is not "art." well, like i said earlier, if art can't be defined then "exploitation" can't be defined when it comes to foreign workers and child labor in a way that can bring common consensus. but the fact is legal interpretations define terms everyday.
abdullah
In any case, I think we have hit the main issue of importance here. Hip-hop censorship, which is the part of your posts, Jon, that I find the most disturbing, and quite frankly I would call them at the very least tyrannical. Hopefully you are not.
jon1jt
that's a wee bit hyperbolic, no? to use the word "tyrannical" to apply to me? i haven't heard that word used in a while. i came across it in the Federalist Papers once as it was used to connote an infrequency of the majority, "Tyranny of the majority." i think it was madison who said such a majority couldn't hijack government because power was divided and dispersed. it reminds me that there's a tyranny of the majority today which sustains hip hop and other egregious modes of expression (e.g. porn) used to disgrace women. and such is relativistic liberalism at work the last half-century, some of which is rehashed here (by you and not me) for edification.
abdullah
Howver, the one thing I would ask you, beyond everything that has been mentioned here, what gives you the right to censor something that is so obviously freedom of speech, and so obviously defended by over two hundred years of legal jurisprudence, defended by a legal tradition that is upheld by not only the world's oldest existing Republic (and not Plato's Republic, but the real one) but also the world's second oldest government (not country, obviously, but only England's government has a longer continuous existence in its modern form than that of the United States)?
what a burst of rhetorical exaltation! but don't you know, speech, both written and spoken, can be subject to government scrutiny? such is known as defamation, seditious libel, slander, etc. there are court-imposed "gag rules" --- also, read Miller v. California for the strict scrutiny test that limits speech.
cont. below
Last edited by jon1jt; 12-31-2006 at 06:43 AM. Reason: parag.
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
abdullah
You have discussed at long length the evil of relativism, and pure relativism is indeed evil, but have you ever considered the evil of pure objectivism? This is the evil that drives empires, crushes men, lays low great societies, tortures men, punishes intellectuals and turns scientists into slaves dedicated not to improvement, but to the creation of war machines. I have asked you before and I ask you again, what gives you the right to make your absolutist statements? Plato? His Republic wouldn't last a second in the real world, and consequently his Republic is not ours. What makes your arbitration of taste the ultimate one? Or maybe I should say the penultimate, since you concede greatness to the Ancients, and in that case I would ask what makes them, those who had died nearly two thousand years before the founding of our Republic, greater authorities on our laws and our Constitution than we ourselves, than the Supreme Court Justices, one of whom you have quoted?
to answer your question, no, i have never seen a world in which objectivism was tried. neither have you. but i've read enough about it to know that it's no less brutal than the brand that permits the smut we see emulated in schools, on tv, radio, etc. what you present here is nothing more than theoretical speculation. and i have more to go on given the history of relativistic liberalism that reveals numerous examples of an erosion of democratic institutions and culture.
abdullah
but let me get to the part that really raised my eyebrows is your question:
I should say the penultimate, since you concede greatness to the Ancients, and in that case I would ask what makes them, those who had died nearly two thousand years before the founding of our Republic, greater authorities on our laws and our Constitution than we ourselves, than the Supreme Court Justices, one of whom you have quoted?
jon1jt
actually - what raises my eyebrows is your lack of knowledge regarding the literature, particularly the realm of philosphical literature as it pertains to the framers drafting of the declaration of independence and US Constitution. the framers -- particularly Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- the producers of those great documents, were quite clear that without the guidance of the nearly two thousand years of history that came before them they could never have fashioned the system's ideological underpinnings in the relatively short time it took in the glorious summer of 1787. ah! just feast your eyes on the correspondence between jefferson-madison-washington and especially madison's notes to the constitutional convention, which are replete with references to solon, pericles, plato, aristotle, alexander, later - theres the age of enlightenment thinkers they borrowed from: montesquieu (spirit of laws); jean jacques rousseau; voltaire; david hume; kant; etc. i can go on and on but you get the point. to suggest that the past didn't inform their judgments or doesn't inform our judgments now is just wrong. i recommend that you read the federalist 10, 56, 78, 84.even jefferson himself acknowledged that the constitution was "perpetual" in it's need to be reconsidered continuously through history and even in one writing suggested that every 20 years it should be replaced! the constitution was seen then as "evolutionary" in that it adapted to changing circumstances, but that the past would inform the present, always. see USSC decisions, esp. justice reinquist and scalia, which are a major part of the historical record on this subject matter.
abdullah
I hope this doesn't come as a personal attack because it is not intended to be, but you have recomended to total censorship of whole volumes of human thought and history, ugly as they may be, and have said that the world would be better off without remembering some of the ugly scars that have taught us the pain of our mutual struggle to come to where we exist today. What gives you the right to say that something is so harmful that we must pretend that it never occurred, for surely erasing documents that shed light on the history of something that actually happened in a non-relativist, very absolute way would be nothing more than pretending? What gives you the similar right to pretend that what people say and consume today isn't important to understanding the people who identify themselves with it?
look, you want to retain Mein Kampf, then so be it.
abdullah
art we consider trash. I have hated many pieces of art in my time, and even said I don't consider 'x' to be art, but the truth is that someone else inevitably will. As a result I have given up attempting a definition of art, because whenever I do I find it irreconcilable to the other myriad of personal definitions people hold, and why is that? It is because art is like the image of God. We all have one, be He a kindly man with a white beard, a nebulous ball of light or simply a black void of non-existence. Who knows which is better or worse (of course, each will inevitably have its partisans whose rights to free disagreement are protected under the same Amendment which prohibits your cesnorship). At least we've stopped killing one another over it, for the most part. Art is not a mathematical equation, and y never equals x because none of us play the game with the same variables, and the moment we try to fix those variables, the moment we attempt to FORCE our ideas upon another we have lost that essentialy individual thing that powers great artists to transcend the normal and the banal. By denying the freedom of hip-hop to be coarse you deny the freedom of the impressionist to paint a shadow green,the jazz musician to improvise and the author to write a stream of conscious narrative that breaks the rules of literary narration.
jon1jt
the only thing i want to address here is your variant of the slippery slope argument that goes that banning x (hip hop) will necessarily result in banning (y) an impressionist's right to paint a shadow green, etc. here's my formula: apples (x) and oranges (y).
abdullah
]Outlawing it legitimizes its formit gives it a forum (again I refer you to the great Salon des Refuses in both its year of inception and the later years of its tradition) from which to proclaim that society is afraid of its raw 'truth' when its raw 'truth' is nothing more than the self-indulgence of a few angry men trying to posture themselves into what they perceive as greatness. This is one of those things that if killed will live on to choke its enemies when they are finally forced to eat it. You can never understand something you kill out of fear and disgust, and you can never end something that you refuse to look at. Our problems will live on if not in rap music than in something else. All things must be created, and they are created not because someone decided they should, but because they complete an idea someone felt needed to be completed. B]
jon1jt
the last i checked outlawing slavery didn't legitimize owning slaves. tossing hip hop to the gutter from which if came and whence it return won't legitimize anything other than seer into the collective conscious the notion of an irredeemable America which decisively rails against the glory of drug dealers, big money, and objectification of women and that such thinking will not be tolerated in this great country.
you've also spun quite a number of metaphors in your last paragraph, which is wonderful if it was a poem. you do not once CONSIDER the potential or actual public harm (to women, etc), not one sentence devoted to it. you acknowledge the problem but are steadfast against the possibility that hip hop is harmful and whether the government has a compelling state interest in it, to the extent that it's polluting the youth (and sadly, some adults) who listen to it. yes, it's true as you say that problems will always exist. but is that all you can say??? (sigh) we call upon the mechanisms of law and justice to remedy such problems. but your not interested in minimization, only furtherance. that thinking does not help people, that's giving up.
abdullah
[/b]And by the way, Jon, I like music you would describe as having 'class' too. As I have said before, I don't listen to hip-hop for the very reasons Kilted Exile said he does not. I don't like it. I don't like its message, and I don't like the content. I prefer jazz, the blues, a little bit of bluegrass, some oldies and even on occasion a bit of doo-wop, which I think is as far from rap as you can get. Just listening to music with 'class' does not confer a right to sit in judgement over the music of someone else. Elitism is not necesarily a bad thing, but much like absolutism and relativism it is something best taken in strides.[/b]
jon1jt
i think our musical interests suggest that we'd get along just great.
i apologize for the page not being bracketed -
Last edited by jon1jt; 12-31-2006 at 06:46 AM. Reason: paragraphs out of whack, sorry.
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
if you don't mind me asking ghideon, this sideline display wouldn't in any way suggest that you can't handle being in the arena anymore, now is it? should i just hand the scalps to you then?Wow.
There is nothing that I can add to the above. I once was told that a writer is someone "who has something to say and a way to say it." There is nothing more I can add in terms of insight regarding the advocacy of censorship. Nor is there anything I can add that would make the above statement more eloquent. It has all been said and said well. I offer my deep thanks to the individual who posted the above Sheyk Abdullah. I now have an example of an argument that is both sound, persuasive and written with heart. Quite good.
I have gone from feeling
to
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
Thanks for the reply. Just so there's no misunderstanding, I didn't mean to suggest that you personally did approve of the misogynistic nature of this music. Because your remarks about being reluctant to criticize the violence of young black men came after your remarks about violence toward women though, I thought they were connected points. I can see from your subsequent post that what you were suggesting was that we ought not to unreflectingly dismiss angry young men because they are angry, but should try to look at and understand the roots of their anger. I do agree that race, and poverty and violence are complex issues, and so I agree with you about trying to understand the point of view of people whose experience may be very different from our own (or at least, very different from my own). I can only follow this philosophy of understanding to a point though, especially where violence toward others is concerned.
This I agree with entirely. Ideally, no violence should be tolerated, though as you sadly and rightly said, this often remains an ideal, since there is no easy end to violence.That is, that we make it clear we do not simply have a problem with the violence they are singing about. No. We stand against all acts of violence and that must include the violence that is going on in their communities as well.
I said that I follow your philosophy of understanding this "hip hop" point of view only up to a point, because it does become problematic if taken too far. Instead of only understanding it becomes justification (which I'm not saying you're doing), and there isn't a good justification for gratuitously violent acts against other human beings (as I'm sure you agree).
The other huge problem I have with this line of thinking when carried too far is that it makes this a black and white issue, when in actuality there are many black people who aren't a part of a culture of violence and/or don't want to be (and obviously there are white people who are and do). By getting too caught up in the idea that past wrongs done to black people are the reason for present black youth being fascinated by violence, we run the risk of not only turning this into a justification for violence, but of perpetuating stereotypes by making it sound like the violence of hip hop and rap is somehow a black thing, and representative of black culture. As we've both already suggested, the more violent and objectionable kind of hip hop really doesn't represent black women. If anything it demeans them further. It also doesn't genuinely describe the lifestyle of a lot of black men. I think this is what the Juan Williams article that Virgil posted on the other thread was trying to get at. This kind of music shouldn't be regarded as the cultural statement that represents a whole group of people. On a personal level, I have had black friends from different economic backgrounds (upper middle class suburbs, and poor area of Chicago's south side) tell me that they resent the assumption by people, both black and white, that because of their skin color they in some way identify with thug life as described by rappers or would think it's okay for someone to go around calling them "nigga" or "b****" or "ho." This is not to say that there are not black people for whom this kind of music is a part of their culture, or that there aren't some hip hop songs that honestly represent peoples' experience in less blatently offensive ways, but it seems to me that if you generalize too much that it's only to be expected that black people will sing about violence and even be violent because of their race, that this might become all that people expect from that race (and worse, all that young black men expect of themselves), and that surely is not fair to the many people of color who also come from a background of opression and do their best to live kind and peaceful lives.
Last edited by Petrarch's Love; 12-31-2006 at 05:00 AM.
"In rime sparse il suono/ di quei sospiri ond' io nudriva 'l core/ in sul mio primo giovenile errore"~ Francesco Petrarca
"Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can."~ Jane Austen
You have mentioned a lot of names, gone through a lot of Classical philosophy and even quoted a Supreme Court justice, but you don't seem to be actually proving your point, you just say 'look at this, look at this. I'm right, your rights are an illusion!'
Admittedly, you do get mention the case Miller v California lower, and I will address it in its turn.
Say anything you want to. That's fine, but this forum has a policy of not personally offending the posters, and I was just letting you know that you had done just that by assuming to know myself better than I, and I would hope that since I have not offended you, or at least not consciously or intentionally, in the spirit of civilized discourse you would not do the same to me. In any case, I fail to see what part of my comments on this thread have suggested I prefer the freedom of speech of one group over another. If you can point out where, exactly, you think I said that perhaps we could clear up the confusion on why you would think I feel that way.
I don't see the connection, and I don't think you've made a cohesive argument. Could you explain the realtion between art and labor exploitation? Sometimes I may be a bit slow to grasp something.
I'm sorry I misused my pronouns. I call the idea of censoring hip-hop tyrannical, and not it is not hyperbolic. Any censorship is tyrannical, a usurpation of our freedoms, some of it is necesary, but if it goes too far there is no limit to its rampage.
Our checks and balances have worked, they have saved us from the censorship you suggest. The fear you have regarding hip-hop is not unlike the fear the Nazis instilled in Germans regarding Communism and the Jews. Of course, your suggestions have a long way to go before that, and will probably not degenerate into genocide, obviously, but any step backward from what we have achieved is a defeat. You would fear-monger about rap until it were thrown into a legal as opposed to a merely social ghetto, and from a social ghetto there is a chance for enlightenment, from a legal one there is only damnation.
The fear of the 'tyranny of the majority' refers to exactly what you are espousing we do, it is designed to be set in place in the event a mob mentality sweeps the nation and that majority shoud USURP the rights of a minority. The framers of our constitution, being the classical liberals that they were, would never have created a document that restricted the free exercise of a citizen's rights. For proof of this one need merely look at the Amendments to our Constitution, and with the exception of the Eighteenth, which was passed on the mob-mentality created by the Temperance unions that alcohol would destroy society if it went unchecked, none of them RESTRICT THE FRANCHISE OF RIGHTS (I put the emphasis because I feel it is important, indeed, central to a Republic and our ideology).
And let me ask another question, how well did that cesnorship of prohibition work? If I remember correctly it created the mob.
Of course I know that, but in order for something to be considered libel or slander it has to be demonstrably false with an intention to harm. Something that is true is NOT slander or libel, and if slander and libel were so easy to prosecute how many tabloids would you expect to be in existence?
However, such cases are NOT scrutinized by the gov't. They are civil lawsuits brought against an individual by ANOTHER individual, namely the party who has been slandered. Thus the legal system does not act as a gag over the speech, but as artbitration between a wronged party and its accuser, between two PRIAVTE parties, it does not exercise a censorship function on its OWN BEHALF, and thus does not restrict freedom of speech. We could go back to duels over slander and libel. I don't know I would object.
I have looked the case referred up on wikipedia (I'm sorry, but I lost the website I normally used as a reference for Supreme Court decisions which was a little official. If anyone has it, it is a web-list of all their decisions, I would greatly appreciate it), and it seems to say that a work of art could only be banned under SLAPS; if it has no redeeming scientific, political, literary or artistic value; the thing in question was jusdged to be purient by THE COMMUNITY'S STANDARDS (not national standards, meaning the Fed gov't cannot ban it, and meaning in the Ghetto it can be legal) and the work describes explixitly sexual or excretory functions, which admittedly some rap does.. I would say rap has both social and artistic value, but the last may just be because I am in this matter, as you have accused me of being, a relativist. In any case, I certainly can't see how it doesn't have social value.
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
Oh, we both have seen a world where objectivism was tried. It was called the USSR. There was no relativism, either you agreed with the objectivist view of the State or you went to a Gulag. Another example was early Communist China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, need I go on?
Perhaps I am ignorant regarding the literature, but maybe it's just because agroikos eimi, ten skafen skafen lego. I assume you don't need a translation of this Classical Greek since you are so familiar with the classics.actually - what raises my eyebrows is your lack of knowledge regarding the literature, particularly the realm of philosphical literature as it pertains to the framers drafting of the declaration of independence and US Constitution. the framers -- particularly Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- the producers of those great documents, were quite clear that without the guidance of the nearly two thousand years of history that came before them they could never have fashioned the system's ideological underpinnings in the relatively short time it took in the glorious summer of 1787. ah! just feast your eyes on the correspondence between jefferson-madison-washington and especially madison's notes to the constitutional convention, which are replete with references to solon, pericles, plato, aristotle, alexander, later - theres the age of enlightenment thinkers they borrowed from: montesquieu (spirit of laws); jean jacques rousseau; voltaire; david hume; kant; etc. i can go on and on but you get the point. to suggest that the past didn't inform their judgments or doesn't inform our judgments now is just wrong. i recommend that you read the federalist 10, 56, 78, 84.
I don't see anything here that has demonstrated I have a lack of understanding of philisophical documents. I have said that many of their suggestiosn are impractical and antithetical to an American perspective, but they were written over 1500 years ago. To assume they have some supremacy over our Constiution is, to say the least, unprecedented, and not just in a legal sense.
You would not consider a 'reconisderation' of our founding document, you would throw the baby out with the bath water! What freedom is there in censorship? You would have us turn our backs on our entire tradition as a nation, as a country. You have quoted some SC cases so I will cite some, Brandenburg v Ohio which says that inciting another to commit a crime verbally is protected by the First Amendment (exactly why you would censor rap, I believe) . The only speech not protected by the decision is that which supports criminal activity in speech that is likely to incite imminent action, likely to directly cause such action and whether the direct intent is to incite criminal action, and rap's purpose is not to INCITE such action. It may glorify, but it never says 'Go out and rob a bank,' which is required to be banned. In other words, the test fails to ban rap on all three counts. The violent impact of rap is not guaranteed and it will not drive people to crime by just listening to it.
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
PLease do not insult me. I have read the posts, and such a mentality toward Mein Kampf would be tantamount to what I described. After all, the very knowledge that there was a National Socialist Party could drive people to Naziism, and that's what you want to avoid, right? I think it was a quite logical extension of your argument. You want to avoid negative ideas by destroying the source of those negative ideas. How many negative ideas could we get rid of if we just destroyed history. My reasoning is perfect, flawless. I am taking exactly what you have said your purpose in banning Mein Kampf would be and expounded it.look, you want to retain Mein Kampf, then so be it.
I assume you do not study history, or have not at a serious level. The one thing that is most important for a Historian to have is as little prejudice as possible. Even when studying the Nazis the historian must not look at them as an evil group, or even as a bad group. Such objectivism does not mean the historian condones the ideas that the group espoused, but it does mean he will be able to understand the events that ocurred as a result of the ideology, and believe it or not, the absence of Mein Kampf, an incredibly important document for the era, would seriously undermine historical attempts to understand the period.
And what you actually raised was not the issue of whether banning Mein Kampf would effect teaching, what you said was;
pg 4, first post, Jon1jt
Those were the words I responded to. You didn't say anything about teaching, you said the world in general would be a better off place if they were banned because they give rise to hate crime.
It is people that give rise to hate crime, not ideologies. People merely use the ideology as a tool, just like all culture is a tool, that justifies and enables their actions.
[QUOTE=jon1jt;307880]the only thing i want to address here is your variant of the slippery slope argument that goes that banning x (hip hop) will necessarily result in banning (y) an impressionist's right to paint a shadow green, etc. here's my formula: apples (x) and oranges (y).[QUOTE]
There is a relation whether you see it or not. Those art movements in their conception were seen just as degrading as you see rap. They did not spring fully formed into genius out of the artist's head.
Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe was labeled as pronographic smut because he depicted a nude outside the social conventions, his Olympia was threatened with destruction because it protrayed a prostitute in full frontal nudity, unashamed by her profession. Modigliani came uder constant attack for the same vulgarity for his paintings of the female form which were very correct. That is how banning hip-hop strips the art from an artist. Banning one thing considered 'vulgar' inevitably leads to the banning of something else considered 'vulgar' and then you are left with nothing. The things you are saying now about rap are nothing different than what was said of the Impressionists, the Beats (as has been brought up before) and many others.
Of course, the difference now is people call one art and the other crap, but would these same people call the beats art if they had been born seventy-five years ago? Or would they have been campaigning for the censorship of smut? Would they have liked jazz if they were around when it was played in the brothels of New Orleans, or would they ask it be banned for the sake of society, as it was?
Outlawing slave-holding did not legitimize slavery because slavery didn't derive its cachet from illegitimacy. Rap does. Because of that outlawing it would be giving it an endorsement and would say to all of its adherents, 'your country doesn't care about you. It's afraid of you, so feel empowered!' I would rather those people feel empowered because they are taken seriously enough to be understood well enough that their problems, the things enciting them to violence, are solved.
I have been saying all along THE GOVERNMENT HAS NO INTEREST, COMPELLING OR OTHERWISE, IN CENSORSHIP. I did address rap's harmful effects, and I said they are NOT alleviated by censorship, but only by understanding. We do not need a Criminal Code of 1926 such as they in the USSR to eliminate our problems.
As has been said before, saying "I listen to music that has class" is an elite statement as it implies what you don't listen to is worthless.i think our musical interests suggest that we'd get along just great.
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
abdullah you ought to read ayn rand's objectivist philosophy who wrote quite extensively and borrowed from aristotle before giving me examples like the USSR and China.
ABDULLAH SAYS,
Outlawing slave-holding did not legitimize slavery because slavery didn't derive its cachet from illegitimacy. Rap does. Because of that outlawing it would be giving it an endorsement and would say to all of its adherents, 'your country doesn't care about you. It's afraid of you, so feel empowered!' I would rather those people feel empowered because they are taken seriously enough to be understood well enough that their problems, the things enciting them to violence, are solved.
jon1jt
i want to respond to this right now briefly, asking whether you are unaware that the United States fought a bloody civil war and it was such a sensitive issue that lincoln himself acknowledged the slave owner ideology and made compromises regarding the institution leading up to it. the slave owner, however, felt as much the "right" to own as the rapper to make his smut. if you don't buy this argument, i recommend glancing John Calhoun's Union and Liberty. scholars today are baffled by it's logical precision in its establishment of a natural, absolute, and inviolable right to own slaves. he was from the south and was removed from Jackson's administration as Vice President - quite interesting. again, you need to learn the history and philosophy before making false analogies.
and your point that i have a superficial understanding of history because i'm not objective in my reading of it is just not true. how do you know my disposition when i read history?? look, everything is perspectival -- even great historians like gordon wood and john keegan (and jacques barzun) acknowledge that. this idea that we can somehow be transcendant eyes perusing the annals is gibberish. i've removed myself in the same spirit as you and the rest, but you deny me the right to have an informed opinion on history, and that's where you're wrong.
and for your info i studied greek for only two semesters and i'll admit not having as much of an interest at the time as latin. i felt latin had more to offer me for where my interests were heading and so took three years of that. so there you have it.
you have made many interesting points that i would like to respond to later when i have the time.
Last edited by jon1jt; 12-31-2006 at 03:01 PM. Reason: add points
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
ghideon here
I had to re-register so my name is different. But the man behind it? Still good ol Ghideon.
Jon1: OK. Somebody asked you what you listened to? That is a simple question and could have been answered simply. My feeling is that the list of artists you listen to speaks for itself in terms of what your personal likes and dislikes are. Why did you feel the need to say that your music has "class?" And then, after having written that statement, you now say that you were not implying that your taste was of some higher type then others. Then what were you trying to actually get across to readers when you used that phrase? Certainly you are aware that many people, upon reading a statement "my music has class" is a loaded phrase. Either you were not aware of the likelihood that most readers would make the same inference that I and others have made or you were aware of that likelihood and did not care about it. In the first case you lacked a particular understanding of language and its use in this society. In the second case you did not care if your writing was misunderstood.i wasn't implying that i'm above the rest, please - get real. somebody in here asked me what i listen to because he was baffled by my hip hop criticism, so that comment addressed him.
Additionally, since I have read many of your posts in which you have stated that hip-hop is smut and that quite a few other genres are not then I think that most readers would also assume that you believe hip-hop lacks class and other forms, such as the ones you listen to, do have "class". Am I wrong?
I am not responding to any one individual, but reading through this entire thread all I've noticed is the lack of any one persons experiences while they give quote after quote.
I, me, I have lived in violence. When I was 5 my Dad kicked me with steel toed boots b/c I changed the channel on the TV which I wasn't even aware he was watching. (Which led me to believe for a long time afterward that I was deserving of punishment no matter how extreme and it didn't matter if I knew what it was for.) He moved out when I was 8, but up until that point there were many nights of screaming and fighting and all manner of abuse. When I was about 9 or 10, visiting him, he smashed my head and my brother's head against a wall because we were laughing and he couldn't hear the TV over it. My house has been broken into 5 times. 2 of those times we were home. I have been attacked more than once walking home from school. Two of my brothers were mugged. My sister was attacked by a prostitute who thought she was taking her picture. I have had someone banging at our door for over 15 minutes, screaming unitelligibly, and found out later it was b/c they were beaten with a hammer one street over. I have myself, cleaned up after a man and his girlfriend got into a fight with a broken beer bottle. I've helped pack up the belongings of someone who commit suicide after a lifetime of crime and jail. A car drove into a house and hit the gas line, no explosion, and me and my mom going out to see what was going on find a man who had been stabbed over 20 times collapsed in our yard, which was as far as he could make it from the car.
So I say without reservation, ANYTHING that GLORIFIES violence, is NOT ART!!! Any lyrics, in any song, in any genre, or any book, or show or ANYTHING which GLORIFIES THAT(!), is NOT ART!!!!!!!!!!
Do I think it should be censored? Perhaps to your surprise, no, I don't. Darkness cannot exist where there is light. My late pastor taught me that. Our church and it's community groups have fought against drugs, abuse, massage parlours, prostitution, pawn shops, private clubs and fought for better housing, better funding, and more involvement from the actual community. My pastor was very vocal in that people make their own decisions, and should be personally accountable, and believe in God or not, how else could a New York kid who almost died of an overdose, have grown up to be hailed a hero and crusader for those in need in the inner city of Winnipeg? It is by compassion and understanding that a difference will be made. When he found out that a house was dealing drugs in our neighbourhood, he got up early one morning and while trying to think of what to do he opened the Bible randomly hoping for a passage that would say, “go do this . . . or go do that”. What he found was a passage about darkness not existing where there is light. So if the drug dealers are the darkness what is the light? Then it hit him and while it was still early he went and put flyers up all over the neighbourhood 'advertising' for these crack dealers. Boy did it come as a surprise to the dealers when a news crew showed up at their door that morning. That crack house closed down so fast b/c no one would be caught dead going to a house with so much heat. As for music that 'speaks out against' this, it is no doubt going to have controversial content, but to ban it would be to sweep it under the rug. It would be to take everyone living in the midst of terror and abuse and tell them, we don't want to hear about it because it is 'unpleasant'. It would be to take a drug dealer, a hooker, an addict, like one of my brothers, or anyone and tell them you aren't a person to me, in need of love, and consideration and understanding. And who are we to decide who is worth 'saving' and who isn't. Let us not be so quick to judge, ANY music, rap and hip hop included, that denounces such things, is both necessary and ART! Deeply moving and beyond placing a value upon.
One quote I leave you with, not because you will even recognize the person that said it, but because I believe it to be inherently true
"Those who are too timid to embark in some venture of love are finally left on the desert shore of a life without interest or hope. We never live so intensely as when we love strongly. We never realize ourselves so vividly as when we are in the full glow of love for others. Love establishes the fullest intellectual contact with the world about us. It has a passionate desire for full comprehension, whereas selfishness loses interest as soon as it has made the other serve its ends. To understand things and people we must love them.”
-Walter Raushenbusch
Having stated my opinion, I will not be posting on this thread again merely to repeat myself. Thank you for reading.
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