From comments at Steve Sailer:
* A jazz musician being interviewed on NPR mentioned that he hated Bach. The interviewed affects shock and asks why, and the jazz man’s reasons are redolent of Wagner’s complaints about Mendelssohn: it’s like a tuning-up exercise that goes on for too long, technical specificity without blood. “Ditta ditta da, up here, and then it goes ditta ditta da down there. Why do I need to go up here and then down there?”
* I wonder if this is because of the heavy use of the harpsichord and organ in Baroque music. The harpsichord and organ are kind of unsettling and have an eerie quality to them. They tend to make you uncomfortable unlike the more mellifluous piano of later Classical and Romantic music. Much more solemn. Makes you think of church, funerals, vampires, etc.
* In Kansas City, it was considered scandalous that in certain Westport discos, when too many blacks were seen in the place, they’d play Aerosmith or REO Speedwagon , which was apparently negro repellent, and the blacks would leave as it was considered hokey and undanceable. This made the national news and it was a couple of months after that Aerosmith collaborated with Run-DMC.
* Now that Starbucks has chosen to rebrand itself as America’s public toilet, overtly, they will covertly turn to tactics such as this to remain a safe space for their paying customers.
* Sailer: Mathematicians famously love Bach. It would be interesting to see where on the Asperger’s scale is the optimum for loving Bach.
* Sailer: The NYT covers Mexico somewhat, but I suspect they lose money on it. NYT subscribers would likely rather read more about Israel than more about Mexico.
* On his pocast, Adam Carolla has mentioned, that when he supervised construction, mistakes plummeted when he switched from blaring rock music to classical at a site.
* Companies have all kinds of subtle tricks to scare away troublesome yuffs.
Starbucks: bathrooms locked and only accessible to paying customers + sell expensive products lower class proles consider “gay” and don’t want to be associated with
Chick-fil-a: locate restaurants in middle-class areas so they can recruit “the right people”; demand servers be extra cheery so as to scare away bad attitude “wrong people.”
Pizza joints: take-out, so they don’t have to bother with it
Chinese restaurants: goofy, low-volume Chinese music and televisions tuned to CNN
Wal Mart: “security, scan all aisles” …yeah, those cameras are on all the time, so it’s just a reminder to yuffs that they are being watched…they even have cameras that show you your image at eye-level at the automated register.
+ promote breast cancer awareness, women’s this and that, play classical music, and do all manner of other things that tuff guys consider sissy or gay and don’t want to be associated with (low-class progressives aren’t really that socially progressive, they’re just racists who vote democrat because they hate whitey).
* Sometimes I’m driving and listening to BBC Radio 4, and I hear something particularly objectionable to do with gender, diversity, inclusivity, or how awful white people are, in particular middle-aged English white people like me, and it all gets too much, and I change the station to Radio 3, the classical music channel. All at once I am in a different and much better world of beauty, intricate order and structure combined with ever-changing discovery, and (it seems to me) cheerful tolerance, good humour and magnanimity.
* Mexicans working in the USA like to play their Mexican music wherever they work—nice and loud, and the more the gringos get annoyed, the better they like it.
* If you record a bird-singing with a high fidelity recording and play it back the bird thinks his territory is being invaded and he swoops down to drive off the invader.
* I sometimes listen to classical music on CBC FM, which between 10 am and 2 pm has well-selected classical music with fairly minimal commentary that avoids politics. Unfortunately, every 60 minutes the music stops for a “news” broadcast that is the Two Minute Hate of Orwell’s 1984 come to life, with Donald Trump in the role of Emmanuel Goldstein. I’m not exaggerating — sometimes every one of the four or five news items denounces Trump.
A typical broadcast will go something like, “This is CBC News. Today Donald Trump threatens North American trade agreements. Next, Donald Trump attacks defenceless refugees, causing them to flee to Canada. Moving on, here’s an oppressed African-American talking about the emotional devastation Trump has wrought on her community. In environmental news, the survival clock of the planet is now at one minute to midnight because of Trump’s pandering to primitive coal interests. And lastly, Trump’s boorish behavior has offended sensitive people so badly they’re forming emotional support groups. And that’s the CBC News.” It’s nearly the same thing in French on Radio-Canada Ici Musique from 5 am to 7 am (although not on their really excellent classical program from 8 pm to 10 pm, which doesn’t have news).
* If it’s blacks you’re trying to keep away, and let’s face it, that’s who it is most of the time, heavy metal works quite well too.
