Comments on: We keep everything we used to have and add some more

By: Jim

Jim — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 18:52:18 +0000

Gaikokumaniakku: “I have half-a-dozen friends who would make time for this even though their schedules are packed.”

I’m with you, six million percent.

By: Jim

Jim — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 18:51:23 +0000

McChuck: “And he never even imagined the folly of overly educating women.”

You cut to the quick like a dagger to the heart.

https://i.ibb.co/Cwy07jx/goodevening.jpg

By: Gaikokumaniakku

Gaikokumaniakku — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 03:08:42 +0000

“There is no living composer as great as Bach. Nevertheless, the present looks much better than the past if you compare the fifth-best to the fifth-best.”

I doubt this.

“Who even wants to listen to the fifth-best Baroque composer?”

I have half-a-dozen friends who would make time for this even though their schedules are packed.

“But the fifth-best punk rock band (say, the Dead Kennedys) is excellent.”

I don’t think the Dead Kennedys were really a punk rock band so much as a satirical joke. I think they are musically horrible even though I used to have them on CD.

I actually think Japanese cultural appropriation was the best thing to happen to both jazz and punk music.

Judy and Mary might be the tenth-best Japanese punk rock, but they are IMNSHO better than the Dead Kennedys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbBq38D0qPo

By: McChuck

McChuck — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 18:33:33 +0000

Phileas Frogg, the past few decades have proven that Richelieu was right on this point. And he never even imagined the folly of overly educating women.

By: Phileas Frogg

Phileas Frogg — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 13:18:58 +0000

Because a knowledge of letters is entirely indispensable to a country, it is certain that they should not be indiscriminately taught to everyone. A body which had eyes all over it would be monstrous, and in like fashion so would a state if all its subjects were learned; one would find little obedience and an excess of pride and presumption.

The commerce of letters would drive out that of goods, from which the wealth of the state is derived. It would ruin agriculture, the true nourishment of the people, and in time would dry up the source of soldiery, whose ranks flow more from the crudities of ignorance than from refinements of knowledge.

It would, indeed, fill France with quibblers more suited to the ruination of good families and the upsetting of public order than to doing any good for the country.

If learning were profaned by extending it to all kinds of people one would see far more men capable of raising doubts than of resolving them, and many would be better able to oppose truth than to defend it.

It is for this reason that statesmen in a well-run country would wish to have as teachers more masters of mechanic arts than of liberal arts.

— Cardinal Richelieu, “The Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu”

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 05:24:04 +0000

As the highest art form, classical music (broadly defined) is the most sensitive and susceptible to spiritual and ethnic corruption. To truly revive classical music, we must purge the corruption.

By: Lucklucky

Lucklucky — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 03:28:26 +0000

“There is no living composer as great as Bach.”

No, but there was Vivaldi.