I wanna do this now. One like, one hot take! https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1274594137052975104

okay I tweeted this last night and then immediately fell asleep lmao. So here goes. Trying to think of something that will be actually surprising. I think I am going to just use this thread as an excuse to reveal all my baseline ethical and psychological assumptions.

1) Christianity is Good, Actually not only insofar as its historical claims are true, but insofar as it would behoove us all to sell all we own, give it to the poor, forsake our own comfort, and just wander around trying to be kind to people however we can.

2) Furthermore, the spiritual discipline of being a good person, really truly being a good person beyond the confines of the morality your society hands you for free, actually is more important than working for the better political organization of society.

3) The only political or intellectual virtue is timeliness: how well are you helping yourself and the society you live in adapt to present material conditions?

4) As such, there is no universally applicable, morally correct political or intellectual take. Leave that to the religionists. Political and intellectual morality is entirely relative to material circumstances.

5) I believe in a super loosey-goosey moral relativism surrounding an iron core of "as many people should have basic human needs as possible" and "at the end of the day, we really should all sell all we own, give it to the poor, and wander around being kind to people."

6) All "hard rock" or "heavy metal" and progressing out to all the forms of "death metal" or "screamo" or whatever rely on the flattening of rock music's grooves (inherited from Black artists) into very straight, even rhythms as a metaphor for (~white) masculinity.

7) The brain is a machine the first task of which is to turn the jumble of information it receives from the sensory nerves into experience, and the second task of which is to turn experience into a set of predictions for how to act to best advantage in the future.

8) Accordingly, "culture" is the exchange of information wrt those conscious and unconscious predictions for how to act in the future.

9) People get way too hung up on whether or not an ideology justifies all the things they want to justify, when really the point of an ideology is to de-emphasize stuff you already understand due to prior ideologies, and emphasize stuff the old ideologies missed.

10) We all know "necessity is the mother of invention" but we seriously underrate that when it comes to art. The most innovative art is the art that exists to do something specific in the world. This is why religion and dance parties are the main drivers of musical innovation.

11) Fat butt > muscle butt

12) Confidence and faith are essential to art and religion, but certainty is poisonous to both. Never sully anything wet and alive by associating it with something a dry and dusty as a fact.

13) The number one thing wrong with musical theater since ~1965 is a lack of Black people. MT didn't miss rock, it missed Black music.

14) Iyanla: Fix My Life is a great work of art and honestly deals with issues you hardly see anywhere else on television. And her little August Wilson Aunt Ester exercises are silly but idk maybe some of them work! (not "pop my butt" tho)

15) Funk music = music that (finally) explicitly subjugates harmony to rhythm.

16) Some of us really should be patient with white ppl and handhold them through anti-racism, particularly those of us who have the privilege to easily assimilate/integrate into white institutions.

17) Here's an anti-woke take: while most of the integrationist end of wokeness is extremely valuable, necessary, and timely, some of it is integrated minorities trying to work out their tragic mullatto complex.

18) Aretha Franklin > Whitney Houston > every other non-gospel singer of the so-called "rock era" (i.e., since jazz stopped being the dominant form of popular music.)

19) William Blake had all of reality more or less totally correct. Emily Dickinson too.

By contrast, Walt Whitman is wrong about 90+% of what he says, but that ~10% he really nails.

20) Language is a very poor vehicle for truth, so almost everything is a half-truth that emphasizes a particular part of the truth. That's why it's silly to be so rigid about evaluating statements.

21) Kant was a poet. Basically all philosophy is a kind of poetry insofar as it attempts to control the possible interpretations of language by creating a system that only coheres given a specific meaning for each part of the system.

22) Critics of wokeness are providing an essential social service, but like most conservatives they would be way more effective if they would adhere to the ideology and critique and shape and redact from within, rather than trying to stop the whole thing from outside.

23) Some great artists are pernicious influences. Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Stephen Sondheim come to mind. People who try to imitate them almost always end up making something pretty dreadful.

24) As you may have noticed in this thread, I am still really into Harold Bloom, who had a lot of really great ideas about how art interacts, both in the mind of the artist and in the mind of the audience (he deliberately conflated these two). He was also a bad person.

25) Stevie Wonder is the best songwriter of the rock era so far. Better than Lennon and McCartney, better than Bob Dylan, better than Ashford and Simpson, better than Marvin Gaye, better than whoever.

26a) A real hot take: in my ideal America, all religious and ethnic groups, including white evangelical religious conservatives, should be allowed to have geographic enclaves and communities wherein their particular cultural and moral commitments are respected and enforced.

26b) Economic policy needs to be completely nationalized (no race to the bottom on taxes), but cultural policy should be radically localized. If 90+% of the people in a community want something to be punishable by expulsion from that community, that should be allowed.

26c) Ofc it doesn't work if a couple cultural groups that lack a welcoming or liberal or multicultural ethos hold all the wealth and power. So we gotta fix that end of it first.