Hotter, Badder, and Unpopularer Takes

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

It's one thing if a show implies that people are having sex

Erm, are you against references to the existence of sex?

You realize that you are a reference to the existence of sex, right? (obviously as the product of sex, not a participant)

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

It's one thing if a show implies that people are having sex

Erm, are you against references to the existence of sex?

You realize that you are a reference to the existence of sex, right? (obviously as the product of sex, not a participant)

I didn't say that, but I said shows should not show the sex themselves.  I do wish that they would limit implications of sex to married couples, but I only won't watch a show for something truly excessive like GoT.

I really wish premarital sex would become a massive taboo that no one would openly discuss again.

So your objection is to references of pre-marital sex? Because you think it is morally wrong?

Do you not have objections to showing actual crimes, e.g., murder, robbery, fraud, in mass media?

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I find it hilarious and revealing that Sanchez tries to intimidate people he disagrees with by using their first names sometimes in his posts.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

People at large, including almost all users on Atlas, vastly underestimate how popular most of the progressive agenda is in suburbs.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Ken Burns's Country Music is better than his Civil War documentary, and will go down not just as one of the best documentaries of all time, but should be treated as one of the best pieces of American storytelling ever.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this (although it doesn't matter because nobody will read this post), but:

I recently heard an argument about how appeals to racism are common among certain groups of people because people in higher education are taught that labeling an argument racist is an automatic way to win an argument. However, these arguments are not incredibly compelling outside of higher ed, so there is a class of people who employ these arguments to fall mostly on deaf ears.

I'm trying to think more critically about this argument but I think not only is there something to it, but it's very generalizable. I think people are taught that there are certain ways to win arguments which essentially end the argument (e.g., why even debate an argument that is obviously racist?) and are conditioned to not critically evaluate arguments/debates any further (or, rather, are not conditioned to further evaluate the arguments). This trains people to substitute their critical reasoning skills with lazy debating tactics.

A great example of this is hypocrisy. It's pretty widely accepted that hypocrisy is bad, so people are taught to try to short-circuit arguments by finding hypocrisies in the debater (or in the ideology of the debater) rather than address the argument. But, if one is simultaneously presenting two contradictory arguments, perhaps one of them is right. Treating the hypocrisy as the endpoint of the debate stops one from critically evaluating which of the two sides, if any, is correct.

Another good example which is especially prominent in leftist and social justice circles is privilege/wealth shaming. It's so incredibly easy to short-circuit an opponent's argument by pointing out the privilege associated with the view that, at this point, many people are trained much more to do that than actually address the point.

I've been monitoring myself over the last week or so and I fall into these lazy patterns of debating/critical thinking, so I don't want to create the impression that I feel I'm above these things. But it's very interesting to see how common these behaviors are!

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

New age atheism like Dawkins, Harris, the late Hitchens, Bill Maher, etc.. seem to becoming an increasingly right wing reactionary group in this day and age as opposed to the liberals they were branded as in the 2000s

https://mobile.twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1228943686953664512
Sheesh I called that one

Dawkins has some weird and bad ideas but there's nothing really wrong with this tweet. Artificial selection HAS been been implemented for thousands of years to produce crops and genetic strains which are important for human agriculture since the agricultural evolution. Anyone who knows anything about genetics either recognizes that this is true or is too blinded by woke ideology to admit it.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Not posted in the right place for peak argumentation, but

if Bernie Sanders is interested in defeating Donald Trump, and has an army of internet mouthbreathers who worship him and are viscerally anti-Biden but won't take anything the Biden camp does as a good faith effort at reconciliation, then it is disproportionately Sanders's job to win these people over to Biden's camp.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

In all of the discussions of the failures of Sanders and Warren (but especially Sanders) Atlas hasn't spent nearly enough time discussing how the 2020 primaries have been an absolute vindication of IceSpear's/Mizzouian's (RIP FF)/TrendsAreReal's mockery of the " populist" narrative.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Listening to some classic Led Zeppelin today and after fifteen years of being an LZ fan I still don't understand why people think the guitar solo in "Heartbreaker" is any good. Not only is it extremely sloppy and disjointed but it completely breaks the momentum of the song. The only redeeming part is the riff at the end which leads back into the verse.

Ditto for the drum solo in "Moby Dick". That entire track is a waste of time.

edit: while I am here I will rank the songs on Led Zeppelin II which will probably be heresy to many Zeppelin fans

1. Bring It on Home
2. Ramble On
3. Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)
4. Thank You
T5. What is and What Should Never Be
T5. Whole Lotta Love
7. Heartbreaker
8. The Lemon Song
9. Moby Dick

Bring It on Home and Living Loving Maid are two of LZ's most criminally underrated songs (yes I'm aware of the plagiarism issues on Bring It on Home).

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Listening to some classic Led Zeppelin today and after fifteen years of being an LZ fan I still don't understand why people think the guitar solo in "Heartbreaker" is any good. Not only is it extremely sloppy and disjointed but it completely breaks the momentum of the song. The only redeeming part is the riff at the end which leads back into the verse.

Ditto for the drum solo in "Moby Dick". That entire track is a waste of time.

edit: while I am here I will rank the songs on Led Zeppelin II which will probably be heresy to many Zeppelin fans

1. Bring It on Home
2. Ramble On
3. Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)
4. Thank You
T5. What is and What Should Never Be
T5. Whole Lotta Love
7. Heartbreaker
8. The Lemon Song
9. Moby Dick

Bring It on Home and Living Loving Maid are two of LZ's most criminally underrated songs (yes I'm aware of the plagiarism issues on Bring It on Home).

This is a pretty fair list and I agree that Bring it on Home is one of the most underrated Zeppelin songs (though I am biased because it was one of the first songs I learned on guitar). However, I think Ramble On is pretty much unimpeachable as the best song on that album.

Ramble On is excellent and is the most cohesive song, but there's something which escapes words about the way the intro to Bring It on Home has this pent up energy from the intro and lets it out with that fade in with the distortion and the opening riff on the electric. I also just love the simple way the drums kick in there - such an incredibly simple fill but it can't be topped. Those twenty-or-so seconds from the distortion to the start of the verse are just sheer ecstasy to me. Being easy to play on guitar also helps.

Anyway I wanted to revisit this thread because I'm listening to IV today. Outstanding to listen to on a rainy spring day. It already has a solid claim to best rock album of all time but if you took out Four Sticks and replaced it with a song from Physical Graffiti like Night Flight it might be beyond dispute.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Ramble On is excellent and is the most cohesive song, but there's something which escapes words about the way the intro to Bring It on Home has this pent up energy from the intro and lets it out with that fade in with the distortion and the opening riff on the electric. I also just love the simple way the drums kick in there - such an incredibly simple fill but it can't be topped. Those twenty-or-so seconds from the distortion to the start of the verse are just sheer ecstasy to me. Being easy to play on guitar also helps.

Anyway I wanted to revisit this thread because I'm listening to IV today. Outstanding to listen to on a rainy spring day. It already has a solid claim to best rock album of all time but if you took out Four Sticks and replaced it with a song from Physical Graffiti like Night Flight it might be beyond dispute.

Ok, here's a really hot take: Four Sticks is actually one of the best Led Zeppelin songs. Its segues in time signature are seamless and its bassline is extremely catchy and creative.

Hmm... well that is a hot one. A steamer in fact. We'll agree to disagree. It's pretty rare that I notice a non-standard time signature, and even rarer that I really appreciate it. My main beef with Four Sticks is the driving riff is meh (and the time signature makes it feel jagged and uneven) while the vocals and lyrics are annoying and uninteresting, respectively. The sort of synthy/keyboardy stuff is cool though. I'll give them props for being creative but I haven't listened to this song all the way through since I was in high school.

My hot take (or preference/opinion) for today, inspired by the lengthy if one-sided discussion about whether Nazis were far left or far right is that I find the bulk of European history after the year 1800 to be very boring. With a handful of exceptions once you move past the colonization of the Americas I'm not interested. As a corollary I find contemporary European politics (in fact, all of politics outside of the Middle East and obviously the USA) to be uninteresting as well.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I am a student of and love classic country music but nothing uniquely musically defines  the South like Delta Blues of the likes of Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, etc.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Starting to come around to the opinion that the fingerwagging that happened over people breaking social distancing a month ago happened because people were scolding what they viewed of as poor and trashy white people, but lots of elites are more sympathetic to breaking social distancing with the Floyd protests because they are populated and supported by college-educated people.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

I sincerely hope that at some point in my lifetime we see the movement to tear down statues extended to include any statue of a person who consumed meat.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Del Tachi deserves to be in the Hall of Fame of Atlas Posters.