Recent Recalibrations
[Epistemic Status: Ramble]
As I’m wrapping up the historical part of my folk music obsession – here are random thoughts relevant to group interest
- The red scare is misnamed and started much earlier and went much longer than I previously thought.
- The blacklist and all that went with it was much better organized and not designed to be effective
- Being on an FBI watchlist is a great gift to a future biographer
- In many ways the range of acceptable behavior was much broader in times past and some degree of social repression is desirable and represents progress
- The use of the term communist and socialist carries over throughout time, and their theoretical meanings have stayed relatively stable over time, but their practical usage has changed dramatically enought as to make historical comparisons largely meaningless
- Midwestern Left populism is curious by its absence in cultural prominence, as are the Wobblies
- The zeitgeist is difficult to summarize in modern forms of media consumption, i.e. 10-minute youtube videos and 5-minute wikipedia reads, there really is no substitute for books for conveying zeitgeist
- Types of information and metis have different bandwidth and transmission methods – that is probably an area where rationalism can contribute greatly