Black are better at music—Or fuck you Diogenes the Cynic

I’ve done acid quite a few times and had no problems with it. My friends said it made me more normal. I guess whether it’s a “hard” drug depends on how you define it, but I meant it in the sense of dependency and potential fatality.

Were you on acid when you posted?

Well, of course, I found the pitting so absurd, I decided I might as well play along with some “cites.”

No. I haven’t done drugs since my first kid was born. I very rarely even drink any more.

A lot of people think The Eagles suck rhinoceros balls. I wouldn’t exactly put them on my list if I’m trying to convince people that there are a lot of great white musicians. Or Philip Glass who generally writes songs that consist of the same few arpeggios over and over again, or John Cage who’s widely considered to be one of the most pretentious composers in the history of music.

If I were going to take this tack of trying to prove that “white men can jump too” the first name I’d mention is Jaco Pastorius. Widely considered the greatest bass guitarist ever to live, he was a white man of Finnish and German ancestry.

Great, you’re sober. Would you please just say you were joshing with the whole black-are-better-at-music thing and stop this catastrophe? Really, just give us a wink and a smile and end it.

Well, I didn’t mean it all that seriously to begin with, or at least I didn’t mean to sound like some kind of prouncement of objective fact, but it really is my opinion and I really do think that some cultural influences could explain why Black American music has tended to be (IMO) so much more vibrant, inventive and expressionistic than white music. Once I got pitted, I found the pile on and the charge that I was a racist so hard to take seriously that I think I did have a bit of my tongue in my cheek while I was defending my position. I still can’t believe anyone really thinks I’m a racist.

I wonder if I’d get pitted if I said Mexican food is better than Minnesota hotdish.

You know, if we were farting around in MPSIMS, I might buy that. But if you’re going to take such a staunch stand over multiple posts in GD, without the use of single smiley, then I don’t think you should expect people to ever take you seriously.

Do you seriously consider somebody thinking blacks are better musicians so earth-shatteringly calamitous, or are you the one missing a wink and a smile and I got whooshed?

Multiple posts? I think it was like two.

Sounds like you have changed your tune from
Quote:
Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic
“It explains why black people are better at music, for instance.”

To “…my opinion and I really do think that some cultural influences could explain why Black American music has tended to be (IMO) so much more vibrant, inventive and expressionistic than white music.”

I don’t think it changes very much, and I said in the original thread that it was my opinion.

(Bolding mine)

Arguments about aesthetics opinion are stupid, which is why I haven’t gotten involved, but are you sure you mean expressionistic or are you going for expressive? I’ve heard many different musics described many different ways, but never heard Black American music described as expressionistic. I think Schoenberg and his friends might be startled by you usage.

Okay then:

John Davidson
Pat Boone
Mary Lou Metzger
David Cassidy
Bobby Sherman

Ok, you win, you proved DtC’s point. :smiley:

It’s not necessarily about being a member of the Offenderati. Sometimes, it’s simply that things would be a lot better for a great many people, if the fallacies of composition and division weren’t used as often as they are.

Well, it is. Judging people based on what race they belong to (fallacy of division) rather than who they are as individuals, is a racist thing to do. Even if you say good things about them. It’s not necessarily offensive in the case of ‘good racism’, (myself, I just roll my eyes and look at my bank account when people say that Jews are good with money), but the FoC and FoD do, indeed, contribute to ‘classicial’ racism still being viable.

If you (pl) have already decided that it’s okay to make positive generalizations about an entire racial group… why not negative ones? The genie is already out of the bottle once it’s acceptable social discourse to say “Blacks inherently have a better sense of rhythm, because black brains are just wired that way”. Once you say that, you really don’t have a leg to stand on if you want to call someone out for saying “Blacks are inherently of a criminal bent, because black brains are wired that way.”

The point is, once you’ve allowed for one claim, you lose your defense against the second. Especially since the same mechanics (cherrypicking individuals) can be used for either. Someone claiming that blacks are inherently ‘more musical’ and who goes and chooses some good black musicians to ‘prove’ that claim has no intellectually honest defense should someone else claim that blacks are inherently criminals, and chooses some really odious black criminals to ‘prove’ that claim.

The point, as I see it, isn’t about being a member of the Offenderati or, as Dio has oddly repeated, demanding that racist population-fallacies be negative before they’re correctly called out as racist.

No, not really.

In some cases, (eg. blacks are just not as logical as whites and can’t learn from books like white people do, due to their ‘differently wired’ ‘black brains’, that is, the original claim in GD that Dio was defending)… while people may mean no offense, calling a group irrational and unable to deal with object-centric learning is, indeed, calling them intellectually inferior. Even if that wasn’t the case, what I pointed out above is still true.

As long as children grow up thinking that “black people are better at music because of their brains” is not just an acceptable but an accurate claim, there’s nothing really to stop them from thinking “black people are inherently criminal because of their brains.”

There will, at some point, have to come an essential logical/semantic/perceptual shift where people who might even hold Dio’s strange beliefs, learn the difference between “blacks are better musicians” and “In America during the periods of 1800 to 2000, black musicians were overrepresented in what I would describe as the elite among musicians.”

It’s the difference between talking about some-but-not-all, and making broad brush generalizations that implicitly rely on the Fallacy of Composition. And come on, we’re all adults here. Anybody who is really too lazy to talk about “some blacks” instead of “blacks” as if they were a fungible group, really doesn’t have a leg to stand on when they complain that people didn’t know they were only talking about ‘some’ blacks instead of ‘blacks’.

I’m sure you meant that to sting. Perhaps if you explain why my statement is just as bad as the most racist bullshit you’ve seen for a while it actually would. You might start by explaining why his statement was such an extreme example of racist bullshit.

Typical Diogenes. Make a rather startling blanket statement. Then get poked, prodded, beaten, and ridiculed into fleshing it out into some kind of a defensible position, with a lot of “what I meant was” types of qualifiers thrown in. It would save us all a lot of trouble if he would just take the time to post his full thought in the first place! :slight_smile:

The only people who deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to being called racist are Michael Richards and Don Imus. Please get with the program.

Which is, of course, absurd. It’s no more racist than other positive statements, such as “whites are smarter, quieter, and better tippers than blacks,” or “Asians smell better than Arabs.”