The Washington Post has a review up of Brad Paisley’s newest album. The review itself is pretty positive, but it starts out by bashing country music as a whole:

Country music has always had something of an image problem, particularly among people who fancy themselves as progressives. Immigrant-trashing, gay-bashing, race-baiting, women-hating songs aren’t hard to find in the country catalogue. Heck, sometimes you can find them all on a single album.

Many of my friends don’t like country music much. My wife doesn’t like it, for that matter. I grew up listening to it, but I (mostly) quit several years ago when it seemed that new artists whose styles I didn’t like (e.g., Big & Rich, Gretchen Wilson) were being played nonstop on the radio. My faith was becoming more and more important to me, just as (it seemed to me, at least) the music I was listening to was becoming less and less edifying (and it wasn’t all that edifying to begin with). Still, the accusation here seems false to me.

It’s true that you can go through the catalogue of country music and probably find all of the things that Mr. Heim mentions at the beginning of this piece, but I’d wager that’s true of any musical genre. Is it truer of country than other music? I suspect that it isn’t. When talking it over, I really couldn’t come up with any songs off the top of my head that fit any of these groups, with the possible exception of a line in A Good Way To Get on My Bad Side that says, “A little sissy in a cowboy hat ain’t country,” but my wife and I both believe that assigning that to “gay bashing” is a bit of a stretch (her take was that it had more to do with country performers who didn’t have enough “Cowboy Cred”).

After thinking about this for a while, I decided to do a decidedly unscientific experiment. My original thought was to sample the music on the radio on our way to and from church^[a], but after discussing it with my wife, she suggested that I just look at the top songs for the last few weeks or months instead (that way, I could check the lyrics online, and she didn’t have to listen to country music). Here’s what I found at the top of the Country charts:

1. Out Last Night, Kenny Chesney
2. Whatever It Is, Zac Brown Band
3. Sideways, Dierks Bentley
4. Then, Brad Paisley
5. Kiss a Girl, Keith Urban
6. I Run to You, Lady Antebellum
7. People are Crazy, Billy Currington
8. You Belong With Me, Taylor Swift
9. Alright, Darius Rucker
10. Lost You Anyway, Toby Keith

I tried to be as harsh as I could on these songs, but the only ones I could really put in any of the categories that Mr. Heim mentions are the ones that talk about being out drinking and admiring the women who’re there, such as Out Last Night or Sideways (or talking about women while out drinking, as in People Are Crazy), and that’s a huge stretch.

Next, I checked out the Mainstream Top Ten

1. Boom Boom Pow, The Black Eyed Peas
2. Halo, Beyonce
3. Don’t Trust Me, 3Oh!3
4. Second Chance, Shinedown
5. I Know You Want Me, Pitbull
6. The Climb, Miley Cyrus
7. LoveGame, Lady Gaga
8. I Do Not Hook Up, Kelly Clarkson
9. Waking Up In Vegas, Katy Perry
10. Please Don’t Leave Me, Pink

Again, picking any of these songs as fitting any of the criteria that are listed above is a bit of a stretch, but not as much as one as for the country music. The 3Oh!3 song, Don’t Trust Me, repeats lines that are pretty insulting to women, much more so than the admiring language used in the country songs listed above. The same is true for I Know You Want Me by Pitbull. The Lady Gaga song, LoveGame, isn’t so much misogynistic but it is crude and trivializes sex.

The only conclusion I can reach from this (admittedly small) sample is that country music is no more susceptible to “Immigrant-trashing, gay-bashing, race-baiting, [or] women-hating” than any other genre of music. The image problem that it has among “people who fancy themselves as progressives” is not because of any fault of the music itself, but that those “progressives” have a tendency to believe that it’s wrong for us to judge any culture… unless it’s that of rural (particularly southern), conservative America (which they stereotype in ways that are generally unfair). Since they associate country music with this culture, they hate it, even while they’re unable to bring themselves to say that it’s their own inherent culturism that causes them to do so.

1. I thought about just picking one of my old albums at random, but realized that, since I would have avoided any of the items he mentions above, that would’ve self-selected away from his stereotypes, even if they had been true [↩]

One of the charges often levelled against pro-life activists is that they’re inconsistent. The basic argument is that if a pro-life activist (who tend, generally, to be conservative) also supports policies that would end a life (e.g., pre-emptive war, the death penalty, etc.), then the pro-life activist is being inconsistent, and, therefore, their stance is wrong (or, alternately, their stance is based solely in a patriarchal desire to keep women from having the freedom to murder an innocent life to decide what happens to their own bodies).

This argument is mostly ineffective, and, in fact, fundamentally flawed. The truth is, it’s absolutely possible to oppose the ending of innocent life while still believing that there are times when risking the lives of brave men for a cause or ending the life of an irredeemable criminal is acceptable. These situations aren’t analogous, really, and don’t pose a cognitive dissonance.

The people making these arguments (for lack of a better term, I’m going to call them the Consistents) are perfectly aware that their argument is a pretty weak straw man. They simply don’t care. With that in mind, I think it’s fair to turn that back on them. Please note that the rest of this post is (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek.

I have to wonder if the Consistents don’t have a bit of dissonance in their own minds. I’m going to take some liberties here. The Consistents assume that because being pro-life is a conservative opinion and because conservatives tend to be hawkish and support the death penalty, that all conservatives have all of these positions at the same time. To be fair, I’m going to do the same thing. Being pro-choice is usually a liberal stance, as is environmentalism. I’m going to assume the Consistents hold both of those positions, as well as other liberal standards.

Thanks to the efforts of environmentalists, DDT was outlawed back in the early 1970s. The primary reason given was that DDT allegedly caused egg shells to weaken, which led to a lot of baby birds (especially bald eagles) never making it past the egg stage. One of the main benefits of DDT was that it killed a lot of mosquitoes, which largely made malaria a thing of the past in most of the Western world. One of the side effects of outlawing DDT, therefore, is that a huge number of people have died from malaria, specifically in Africa.

Therefore, our Consistents believe that unborn birds are so important that a lot of people should die to protect them.

On the other hand, the Consistents believe that unborn humans are so unimportant that murdering them should be perfectly acceptable if their mothers would prefer not to be inconvenienced by them.

Seems rather… inconsistent^[a], doesn’t it?

[Update: Ed points out in the comments that my history of DDT with respect to environmentalism and malaria in Africa is off. I think the point still stands (the "inconsistency" pointed out by the Consistents really isn't one), but my analogy is wrong.]

1. Of course, there is a way to reconcile these two beliefs, and it dovetails nicely with the Consistents’ support of affirmative action policies (again, we’re assuming they cling to all leftist policies). Outlawing DDT internationally disproportionately affected Africans. Abortion disproportionately affects African-American babies. Affirmative action policies attempt to tell us that certain classes of people are unfit to compete in the work force without assistance from the government. Which people? Minorities in general, but the intent was to “help”, specifically, African-Americans. Are you detecting a pattern? Makes you wonder why they’re so quick to call conservatives racists, doesn’t it?

   Of course, the preceding footnote is (mostly) a matter of me taking issues out of context and twisting their intent (slightly), but the Consistents (and many of their fellow leftists) seem to feel that’s fair when taking on conservatives…

   [↩]

I wrote a couple of posts last week that didn’t quite make it here to be published. I’ve published them and put the original dates on them because they had relative references to dates (today, yesterday, etc.).

Sorry for any confusion - I just didn’t want anyone to think I was being dishonest and trying to make it look like I was doing more blogging than I had actually been doing.

A questionable election in Iran leads to protests which are mostly peaceful on the part of the protesters and which are responded to with brutal oppressive violence by the government. President Obama’s response is… lukewarm, to say the least. He straddled the fence for days, saying that he supported the “debate” that was going on, before finally protesting the regime’s actions in the weakest terms possible (and even that was apparently only due to the amount of pressure he was getting).

Then, this weekend, the elected President of Honduras wanted that country’s Constitution rewritten so he could serve another term. The Honduran Congress declined to do so, so the President took matters into his own hands, despite multiple Supreme Court rulings that what he was doing was illegal. When the military removed him from office and instated the man who was Constitutionally his successor, President Obama, joined by famed human rights stawarts such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, denounced the “military coup.”

On second thought, I guess President Obama’s positions are consistent. He consistently sides with oppressive governments and dictators and, more importantly, against the will of The People. I don’t like it, but it’s not confusing.

I feel kind of silly writing about this, considering the kind of bravery we’ve seen from the Iranian people, who have been standing up to their government against much harsher threats than anything I’d ever face. Still, I think it’s important enough to mention this story.

What some fail to realize, though, is that such reviews can be tainted: Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all.

The practice has grown to the degree that the Federal Trade Commission is paying attention. New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers — as well as the companies that compensate them — for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest.

It would be the first time the FTC tries to patrol systematically what bloggers say and do online. The common practice of posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer — and getting commissions for any sales from it — would be enough to trigger oversight.

I found that story because of this one, on Outside the Beltway. The author, James Joyner, closes the post (well, technically, he closes the update to the post) with the following statement: “If a blogger engages in payola, though, the penalty should be exposure and loss of journalistic credibility, not fines from the FTC.” I agree completely.

I’m fine with that. I believe that it’s horribly unethical to accept money from a company and then push its products without revealing that you have a financial incentive to do so. On the other hand, I don’t see much of a problem at all with talking about a book or movie and then using an affiliate link to Amazon in order to sell it (since you’re not getting paid by Amazon to promote a specific product, just to point sales their way, there’s less of an ethical issue in my mind). I have little interest in becoming an Amazon affiliate, but if this idiotic rule goes into place, I will do so and I will put a link to an Amazon product in every post I write, even if I have to stretch to do so.

The best part of this idiocy is that the rules would be selectively enforced on those of us who share our opinions online. There’s nothing to indicate that I would be subject to any penalties whatsoever if I mentioned to a friend that I really liked my dentist (even if I didn’t tell this hypothetical friend that the aforementioned dentist once sent me a gift basket for a previous referral). Nor is there any talk, as far as I can tell, of looking at government intervention in the “mainstream” media:

As blogging rises in importance and sophistication, it has taken on characteristics of community journalism — but without consensus on the types of ethical practices typically found in traditional media. Journalists who work for newspapers and broadcasters are held accountable by their employers, and they generally cannot receive payments from marketers and must return free products after they finish reviewing them. The blogosphere is quite different. “Rules are set by the individuals who create the blog,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “Some people will accept payments and free gifts, and some people won’t. There’s no established norm yet.”

Call me paranoid and cynical, but I just see this as a tool that government officials would use to attack bloggers whose opinions bothered them. I don’t really foresee this blog being attacked (see: my near- total lack of readers), but if a blogger spoke out against the administration (either a conservative blogger speaking out against the current administration, or a liberal blogger speaking out against some future administration), is it really unreasonable to think that blog might be more closely scrutinized for potential “payola” offenses? It wouldn’t even matter if they were true. Bloggers aren’t mainstream media, and for the most part, any of us who hit legal expenses from our blog would be on our own to pay them (well, we might find ourselves depending on the kindness of strangers, at least).

Go back and look at the brief quote I borrowed from James Joyner. Supporting a product in exchange for getting paid is generally unethical, and I fully support the idea that the community can expose and punish someone engaging in unethical behavior. I do not support the idea that the government can punish someone for this, and I definitely don’t support the idea of singling out bloggers.