Songs with dance as metaphor

The New Neo Posted on by

There are tons of songs about dancing, for obvious reasons. But that’s not the subject matter of this post – songs about dance for the sake of dance. This is about songs that use dance as a larger metaphor for life or love.

Here are just a few:

Could I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life
For a Dancer
Dance Me to the End of Love
Don’t Forget to Dance
I Hope You Dance
Dance With Me
Oh Very Young

One of the very very best dance-as-metaphor song is “The Dance” by Garth Brooks. Here he is at the beginning of his career. It’s very intense, especially the expression in his eyes:

The song’s lyrics have different meanings to the listeners. Some relate it to the pain of illness and death ending a happy relationship. Others (and I’m in this latter group) see it as describing a once-promising love gone sadly wrong, with all the pain and heartache that entails.

Brooks says it’s his favorite of all his songs, but you may be surprised that he didn’t write it. Here’s songwriter Tony Arata, who tells the story of writing the song here:

The theme – of deep appreciation for even a relationship that has an unhappy ending – is not uncommon in poetry and song. For an example of the latter, we have Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” which celebrates what Cohen called the broken Hallelujah:

There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah …

… And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.

Europeans aren’t happy about the “migrants” – plus they have other troubles

The New Neo Posted on by

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Mass protests are now common in Britain against the Labour Party’s open borders policies and generous welfare entitlements for immigrants who arrive illegally and without authentic “political refugee” status.

Greek officials, also swamped by illegal immigration, now cite President Donald Trump’s secure border policies as new models for their own.

The majority of European immigrants now come from majority-Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet many arrivals seem angrier at their newfound liberal hosts than at the dictatorships they fled back home.

Europe’s immigration policies will not work in a multi-ethnic democracy.

Hanson points out that Europe’s welfare states can no longer sustain benefits, their energy policies are damaging, they need to pay more for defense, and their “migrants” are not being forced to assimilate. A really toxic brew.

And yet – what will happen? Are many European countries reaching the point of active rebellion and revolt by what we might call the natives, plus those who emigrated there in order to be free of the constraints of their native third-world countries rather than to export them to Europe? Who will win, the elite internationalists or the proles?

On Candace Owens, Israel, and the Jews

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Although these days the majority of Jew-haters and Israel-haters are on the left, the left has no monopoly on it and there are some very vocal people on the right (or supposedly on the right) who share the sentiments and seem obsessed with expressing them. Anti-Semitism is an old hatred that springs from many sources and is a shape-shifter extraordinaire.

For example, there are the “influencers”:

Simon Plosker, editorial director at the HonestReporting media watchdog group, said that “when you look at the anti-Israel social media content of supposedly right-wing influencers like Jackson Hinkle or Candace Owens, there is barely any difference between them and the far left. And their antisemitism has become legitimized under the cover of hatred towards Israel.”

Candace Owens is one of the most flagrant of these, and I believe that she really does influence many people. Certainly on social media she has a large following. Owens is a convert to Catholicism, but it seems to be some strange sort variant that isn’t typical of the faith. European Christianity – Catholicism and some Protestant denominations such as Lutherans – has a lengthy and terrible history of Jew-hating and even violence against Jews, with the blood libel (Jews killing Christian children for ritual purposes) prominent in the propaganda. For many years, however, things have changed and Christians have become, for the most part, very supportive of Jews and Israel. Owens (and to a lesser extent, Tucker Carlson) goes against that trend and is one of the most virulent of online Jew-haters. She is also a conspiracy theorist extraordinaire.

It’s easy to find examples if you go to Owens’ X account, and although her statements have their own flavor some of them are indeed indistinguishable from those of the haters on the left. For example:

Gaza is a concentration camp where an open genocide is taking place. It has taken Goebbels levels of propaganda to try to convince the world it isn’t happening but it is. Just like Adolf Hitler, Bibi Netanyahu is an ethnocentric imperialist monster and we will make sure the world remembers what all of you supported when God has his vengeance.

Note the prediction of coming retribution by the deity towards Israel, combined with aspects of leftism (“imperialist monster”). Owens is – or was – a changer who started out on the left, but at the moment she seems to be in a world of her own, although she shares some of the “woke right’s” positions such as being anti-Ukraine.

In the same tweet I just quoted above, Owens goes on to add:

With enough time, I’m sure Hitler would have been very open to similarly running a sophisticated global blackmail ring with Jeffrey Epstein and perhaps would have even orchestrated the assasination [sic] of a sitting U.S. President or conducted a false flag or 2 to demand our allegiance.

Let me know how horrified you are by this comparison, and I’ll let you know how little we care. I will never stand with genocidal maniacs, who are committing an open holocaust and trying to usher in WW3, all while purporting to be eternal victims.

This is especially interesting in that it echoes Hitler’s political will, written shortly before his suicide. I’m referring in particular to this Jew-blaming from Hitler:

It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was wanted and provoked solely by international statesmen either of Jewish origin or working for Jewish interests. …

Centuries will go by but from the ruins of our towns and monuments, the hatred of those ultimately responsible will always grow anew against the people whom we have to thank for all this: international Jewry and its henchmen. …

I have left no one in doubt that if the people of Europe are once more treated as mere blocks of shares in the hands of these international money and finance conspirators, then the sole responsibility for the massacre must be borne by the true culprits: the Jews.

We also have this sort of thing from Owens:

What’s going on? Aside from the age-old attraction of anti-Semitism? Well, Owens has her finger on something when in another tweet she says “victim fatigue” about Jews. Never mind that they have been victims for longer and worse than any other group on earth; the Candace Owens of the world are tired of hearing it. It’s “blame the victim” on steroids. In addition, there’s abysmal ignorance of history, which is rampant, plus a good dose of Holocaust denial.

But most of all it’s the thrill of belonging to a group that thinks it has the real scoop. Everyone else is lying, it is they who have sussed out the truth. The media lies. Teachers lie. Politicians lie. For Owens it also has a large dose of ancient Christian Jew-hatred which fortunately has gone out of style for most Christians, as well as her tendency to try to shock by espousing non-mainstream ideas.

I think this comment is insightful:

… [S]he takes contrarianism to its radical extreme. She takes it to its radical extreme because she was unnecessarily attacked when she had sensible positions. She’s rebelling. Keep in mind she was an Occupy Wall Street Socialist at one point.

And this one, which is why I pay attention to her:

As the article demonstrates, she’s been consumed by a whole variety of conspiracy theories, especially the anti-Semitic ones, but she hasn’t lost the charisma that made her eminently watchable. She has five million followers and over two million subscribers, who are, as one can see from the comments they leave, are completely on board with her beliefs.

Here’s her reaction to the church shooting in Minneapolis, which demonstrates some of her conspiracy theories:

Lots of commenters there call her insane. I doubt it bothers her in the least. She’s found a niche, and for the moment she’s staying there and unfortunately has many followers. You may think I’m paying too much attention to her, but social media amplifies this sort of message immeasurably, and it is poisonous.

Robert Frost on justice and mercy

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently commenter “Selfy” linked to this article and offered the following quote from it:

Mr. Rigney echoes this critique of systemic racism but reserves most of his ire for feminism, which he blames for many of empathy’s ills. Because women are the more empathetic sex, he argues, they often take empathy too far.

He found an encapsulation of this theory at Mr. Trump’s inaugural prayer service, where a woman preached from the pulpit. During a sermon that went viral, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde pleaded with the Republican president to “have mercy” on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, prompting a conservative backlash.

“Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation,” Mr. Rigney wrote for the evangelical World magazine.

Which immediately reminded me of a post I wrote back in 2019. The following is a repeat of that post.

Anyone who’s read this blog for a while is well aware of how much I admire both the poetry and the thought of Robert Frost.

For example, there’s this [in the excerpt that follows, Frost uses “justice” in the traditional sense rather than in the leftist “social justice” sense]:

Frost was convinced that the conflict between justice and mercy in human affairs is an eternal and universal moral problem of humanity, and not merely a contemporary political partisan concern…

With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics. In 1936, in the midst of attacks on [his collection of poetry] A Further Range by the political Left, Frost wrote to Ferner Nuhn, a young New Deal acquaintance and friend of Henry Wallace, that “strict justice is basic” for a free society, and freedom implied that some people succeeded and others failed. The winners reaped the rewards of their talents and efforts, but what about the losers? Frost acknowledged that government “must do something for the losers. It must show them mercy. Justice first and mercy second. The trouble with some of your crowd is that it would have mercy first. The struggle to win is still the best tonic. . . . Mercy . . . is another word for socialism.” Frost believed that what was commonly called “distributive justice,” the attempt to spread the wealth of society to the masses, through graduated in-come taxes and other such devices, was really distributive mercy misnamed. Frost drew out for Ferner Nuhn the logical consequences of a system of socialistic mercy:

“The question of the moment in politics will always be one of proportion between mercy and justice. You have to remember the people who accept mercy have to pay for it. Mercy means protection. And there is no protection without direction. A person completely protected would have to be completely directed. And he would be a slave. That’s where socialism pure brings you out.”

The Ruthless podcast: Mamdani on how to deal with escalating altercations

The New Neo Posted on by

This is astounding (the clip I’ve selected is about three minutes long):

Those instructions read something like the advice a therapist might give to deal with a verbal spat between friends or acquaintances. They would be absurd to use in a violent situation. Anyone recommending such a thing is either divorced from reality or malevolent, or both.

Were these recommendations really meant to deal with criminals or others threatening violence? Finding a legible copy of the instructions wasn’t easy, but I found this. The recommendations discussed in the video are under a heading that reads, “Are you encountering a conflict that appears to be escalating?” And “call the police” is certainly not one of the choices for a response. The document is put out by Mamdani’s Public Safety Team, and is addressed to small businesses.

Celebrating child murder; knocking prayer

The New Neo Posted on by

First there was rejoicing when a United Healthcare CEO was murdered in cold blood.

Then there was celebration at the murder of a young Jewish couple.

Now some leftists are applauding the act of killing little children in a Catholic church. After all, some Christians aren’t pro-trans.

See this:

I don’t know how big a group this is. I don’t know whether these are real people or bots. I don’t know whether they’re teenagers or adult psychopaths. On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog:

But it does appear that there is a vicious “blame the victim” online community. Social media acts as a way to foster, spread, and above all norm such pernicious sentiments.

Speaking of which, this latest shooting has sparked a really ignorant set of remarks about prayer, such as this one by Gavin Newsom:

Is the point to mock the power of prayer, as though the idea of prayer is to give one immunity from the bad things in life? Has Newsom ever heard of the phrase “when bad things happen to good people”? If there are no atheists in the foxholes, why do soldiers get killed? No, prayer does not stop a bullet, although I suppose some people believe in miracles. But I think the vast majority of religious people – and even people without religion – are aware that prayer is not a magic talisman.

I might also ask whether Newsom has ever heard of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755? Perhaps Newsom’s answer would be “no,” because although it was a huge event in Western history it’s not necessarily something most people know anything about. I wrote a previous post on the topic; here’s an excerpt [emphasis added]:

Like WWI and the 1918 flu epidemic, it was a cataclysmic event — not just because it killed a lot of people, but because of what it meant to those who survived. It was a case of that overused word: the narrative. If WWI precipitated a loss of faith in human progress, the Lisbon earthquake had precipitated a loss of faith in faith itself. As I wrote here:

“How many remember anything about the great Lisbon Earthquake, fire, and tsunami of 1755, which struck at 9 AM on All Saints’ Day and virtually destroyed a city that was one of the major capitals of the world at the time, collapsing churches filled with worshipers and filling Europe with horror? The earthquake struck not only at the city and its inhabitants, but at the attitude of optimism that had characterized the first half of that century, and caused many to question their previously unshakable faith in divine providence, advancing the Enlightenment and the science of seismology.”

People of faith have long been aware that prayer is not necessarily protective. What was Newsom trying to say? Whatever his intent, one can be pretty sure it was political rather than reflective, and that the goal was one of the left’s favorites: to use the murders to advance gun control. This connection is made explicit by others, in posts such as this one from a Florida Democrat in the House:

A class act.

Even the MSM is starting to admit that Bolton may really be guilty

The New Neo Posted on by

The evidence is starting to be harder to deny. At least, it’s become more clear that the re-opening of the investigation of Bolton is justified:

The New York Times wisely expanded its narrative from it not being clear “what culpability Mr. Bolton might have,” to a fairly definitive statement that a hostile intelligence service intercepted Bolton’s emails, and those emails contained classified information. For good measure, The New York Times credited Joe Biden for investigating malfeasance that occurred during Trump’s first term.

And:

Another political changer shunned by friends

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s an old old story, but one that continues to interest me. Evan Barker writes that at the beginning:

I’d worked in politics nearly half my life, starting out as an intern on Barack Obama’s campaign when I was only seventeen years old, then as a field organizer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Before Obama won the primary in 2008, I was an alternate delegate for Hillary in Kansas’ third congressional district, one of the youngest ever in the state of Kansas.

After a series of disappointments with the establishment, I eventually found my way to the Bernie side of the party …

So she’s established her Democrat bona fides and even her leftist bona fides. However, something happened to her on the way to the 2024 election, and that something can be summarized as Kamala Harris (although certainly not just Kamala Harris):

A lot of people have asked me what the exact moment was at the DNC that made me realize I wasn’t on board with the party I’d worked for nearly half of my life. The truth is, it was everything. The crowd that mindlessly chanted “joy”, the vasectomy van offering free tacos, the coronation of a candidate with zero policies or platform available, and the final straw: Oprah Winfrey. Her tone deaf lecturing turned me off so much, I left the building, getting an uber straight to my hotel, where I booked a flight home a day early, not even staying for Kamala’s acceptance speech.

I wouldn’t agree that Kamala had zero policies or platform, but although she certainly seemed unable to discuss her platform coherently, the platform she did have was IMHO pernicious. That doesn’t appear to have been Barker’s problem with Harris, because even though Barker technically qualifies as a changer she’s certainly not on the political right even now.

Nevertheless, she’s been shunned for having been unwilling to vote for the empty Kamala:

In the past year, nearly all of my old political friends have stopped speaking to me. One of them said: “fascism doesn’t look good on you”, another said “why couldn’t you have waited until after the election?” The social ostracism has trickled out into my non political life, too. I’ve lost friends I’ve known for fifteen years. My toddler stopped getting invited to birthday parties. He was rejected from preschool. We even had to move to a new town.

Now that we are more than half a year into a second Trump presidency, I’ve been asked numerous times if I regret my decision to ditch the Dems, or if I’d publicly say sorry for what I did.

The answer is NEVER.

In fact, more Democrats should’ve had the courage to speak out about Kamala’s candidacy, and the direction of the party in general. …

If the Democrats want to become a winning party again, they need to recognize that policy, and not messaging has led them to defeat. This means they need to stop only defining themselves against Trump, and decide what they are going to stand for. The days of mealy mouthed corporate speak are over. What the public craves more than anything is authenticity.

Besides this, Democrats need to come to terms with accepting more heterodoxy within their own party. Throw the purity tests in the trash can. It isn’t a moral failing to have a different opinion when it comes to immigration, gender ideology, or identity politics. If the Dems want to truly be the party of diversity, then diversity of thought must be included.

Good luck with that, Evan. Those days are gone. Will they ever come back? Can they ever come back? I doubt it, although of course I could be wrong. I certainly don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. I don’t even think it will happen in Evan’s lifetime, and she’s pretty young.

Nevertheless, Democrats might win the presidency and/or Congress (and certainly the House) again, and rather soon. Someone such as Evan is still in the minority in her party, and many Democrats are still very energized to vote against the GOP.

Depression and rage: the Nashville school shooter and the Minneapolis school shooter, plus Columbine

The New Neo Posted on by

One can’t help but notice the similarities between Robert (“Robin”) Westman of the recent Minneapolis school killings and Audrey (“Aidan” ) Hale of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville. There are differences, of course, starting with the fact that Westman was a biological male and Hale was a biological female, and ending with the fact that Westman killed himself and Hale was killed by police.

But the resemblances are striking. Both had not only identified as trans and had given themselves new unisex names, but they also wrote copiously prior to their crimes, were fascinated and inspired by other school shootings and shooters, and both targeted students at religious schools that the perps had themselves attended. Perhaps this latter was more from familiarity and opportunity than anything else. But it’s hard to believe it didn’t involve special animosity at some level, although according to the final police report on Hale:

… [T]he 28-year-old [Hale] relished fond memories of The Covenant School and wanted “to die somewhere that made her happy,” Nashville police said.

“Hale bore no grudge against the school or staff” and considered them to be “‘innocents’ and victims on par with herself,” the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said.

If you want to read the elements of Hale’s manifesto the FBI ultimately released, see this. I’ve only looked at about the first third, but the overwhelming impression I receive is one of profound depression. One would think that would drive a person to suicide rather than murder-suicide, and yet – apparently due to a desire to go out in a blaze of notoriety and gain a fame in death that has eluded the person in life – the person chooses not just suicide but to cold-bloodedly kill the most innocent and heartbreaking victims of all.

Westman wrote this about his depression:

Further along in the manifesto, Westman wrote: “I have wanted this for so long. I am not well. I am not right. I am a sad person, haunted by these thoughts that do not go away. I know this is wrong, but I can’t seem to stop myself. I am severely depressed and have been suicidal for years. Only recently have I lost all hope and decided to perform my final action against this world.”

This overwhelming depression was also a motive, and perhaps the primary one, for at least one of the Columbine killers – Dylan Klebold – and possibly a motive for them both, although rage, nihilism, and psychopathy seems to have been more prominent for Eric Harris. I’ve written many posts on Columbine (see this), so I won’t go into too many details about them in this post, except to add the following [emphasis mine]:

The two teens’ attack on the Jefferson County High School was meant to “kickstart a revolution” – a rebellion they could ride to infamy, according to one of five home videos the seniors made in the weeks leading up to the April 20 bloodbath. …

Those videotapes show two teens filled with rage, sick of life and mocking their family and authority. The only remorse the two Columbine High School students showed on the tapes was to their parents …

Sitting next to Klebold, 17, Harris out lined their scheme to kill “niggers, spics, Jews, gays, f—ing whites” to “kickstart a revolution.”

“It’s going to be like f—ing Doom,” Har ris said. “Tick, tick, tick, tick .Haa! That f—ing shotgun is straight out of Doom!” Klebold: “I hope we kill 250 of you.” The seniors then debated if Steven Spiel berg or Quentin Tarantino would better direct the film of their lives and the massacre just weeks away.

Harris and Klebold are so famous they are still being discussed today, which was one of their goals.

But back to Westman and Hale. Why do some melancholy young people decide to take their depression out on others? The desire for notoriety seems to be a huge factor, but I don’t think it really explains it. Way back when I was in college taking courses in what was then called Abnormal Psychology, I remember being taught that suicide is rage turned against the self and homicide is rage turned towards others, but depression is often behind the rage. In murder-suicides, the rage seems to be towards both self and others, combined with depression – but again, that doesn’t really explain the mystery, does it? There seems to be a toxic brew of rage, depression so bad it leads to despair, social media, desire for fame, and often a hatred for life itself.

Were Westman and Hale receiving hormones, which can also mess people up? I don’t know and haven’t found anything about that. Most school shooters come from intact homes (I wrote about that in these posts and also dealt with the common idea that SSRIs are at fault; the evidence for that is unclear). Westman’s parents were divorced, but I don’t know whether his father was in his life much; both Columbine killers had intact homes, and Audrey Hale’s parents were together as well.

Eric Harris – of all people – quoted Shakespeare’s The Tempest thusly on the question of parental responsibility:

Good wombs hath borne bad sons …

I’ll leave the mystery there for now.

NOTE: The left is of course pushing its preferred political angle, which is gun banning and don’t demonize trans people, you vicious hateful Republicans!