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I've got to admit that I flinched at his take on #metoo. Not really what I would've expected.

What are your thoughts on the current state of modern rock music?

(But I can appreciate an interesting and fresh perspective even as I disagree with it, or at least cling to his blanket caveat about "pure malevolence".)

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~zampano wrote (thread):

The thing is, I think he's right, both on this and #66:

https://www.theredhandfiles.com/why-do-you-write/

It's easy for us to forget that, say, 1960s protest music, which seems surprisingly quaint now, was every bit as transgressive then as something like a singer having said something transphobic is now. Or what Martin Luther did in the 1600s. You can argue that the underlying morality is different (and I wouldn't disagree), but this brings us to a difficult place. It's difficult to allow only some kinds of unpopular ideas and not others.

That being said, I do think society has a right as a general thing to allow for certain bright-line rules. But I also question whether deplatforming, cancelling, whatever you want to call it, does more than drive those ideas underground. At the very least, it's going to make someone be less exposed to contrary opinion, and thus less likely to change. Pushing back directly just leads to the person digging in their heels.

Or as Nick Cave wrote in #66:

Antifa and the Far Right, for example, with their routine street fights, role-playing and dress-ups are participants in a weirdly erotic, violent and mutually self-sustaining marriage, propped up entirely by the blind, inflexible convictions of each other’s belief systems. It is good for nothing, except inflaming their own self-righteousness. The New Atheists and their devout opponents are engaged in the same dynamic. Wokeness, for all its virtues, is an ideology immune to the slightest suggestion that in a generation’s time their implacable beliefs will appear as outmoded and fallacious as those of their own former generation. This may well be the engine of progress, but history has a habit of embarrassing our treasured beliefs. Some of us, for example, are of the generation that believed that free speech was a clear-cut and uncontested virtue, yet within a generation this concept is seen by many as a dog-whistle to the Far Right, and is rapidly being consigned to the Left’s ever-expanding ideological junk pile.

Really the only thing I disagree with here is the suggestion that Antifa is somehow as organized as the Far Right movements we're seeing, but that's a quibble in this context.