Eccentric Flower:199903/one friend thrice and virtues of opinion
From Eccentric Flower
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seventeen march one friend thrice, and virtues of opinion Well, the two largest banks in our area have merged, making an even larger bank, and making me doubly glad I don't do business with either of them ... the problem is that if this keeps up there will no longer be any small banks for me to turn to ... my tiny bank I had for four years was consumed last year; fortunately I am happy with the bank that swallowed them, but if one of the two giants above had done so, I'd have had to do a lot of messy shopping. I told a friend the other night that I finally lost faith in Adam Smith and the invisible hand when I realized that companies would rather merge than compete. Competition is usually good for the consumer. Mergers are usually bad. That's your economics lesson for today. I thought of the same friend again this morning when I read that the Dow-Jones Industrial Average broke 10,000 briefly yesterday. He's the only person I know, online or off, who has any sort of real money invested in stocks ... I fear and loathe the stock market, and we've had all sorts of interesting discussions about my prejudices. And speaking of prejudices, the same friend left me an email this morning with a quote from music reviewer Robert Christgau: Ultimately, each grade represents a synthesis of aesthetic judgment, which is relatively objective, and function analysis, which isn't .... This is obviously a very personal approach, and you'd probably be well-advised to adjust my grades [on reviews] according to our differences in taste .... But on the other hand, it's impossible to make a life out of rationalizing/explaining your own opinions without believing in some part of you that those opinions jibe with the zeitgeist. So if you find yourself valuing many of my C plusses and rejecting a lot of my As, maybe we'd better not have lunch. A great quote ... except .... 1. I am more or less making a life out of explaining my own opinions, and yet I seldom feel they jibe with the zeitgeist - if anything, I am acutely aware how far out on a limb I am; I often feel I am a minority of one. And this makes me no less reluctant to state/explain my opinions. So perhaps I'm fearless, crazy, egotistical, or any or all of the above. 2. The quality of the writing is more important than the nature of the opinions. I imagine some people read this because of the way I say things, not because of which way I lean in a given matter. Christgau is an excellent writer. If he were just sitting around saying "Here are some albums I like," then no one would have given him a job reviewing records, yes? (For another take on this, see my comments on film critics.) 3. It's disagreement I favor. If I favored most of Christgau's C+ grades and disliked his As, it would make me want to have lunch with him even more, so we could try to convince each other what the other person was missing. Example: I have gotten a fair amount of agreement and disagreement from my Three Nazi Films comments. I've stated opinions in recent days about The Producers (which I like up to the point where they actually start showing us parts of the musical, and then turn off), Life is Beautiful (verdict still out on whether Begnini makes his trick work or not, but I probably won't see it for unrelated reasons of tone and style - not my usual thing), and Ian McKellen's take on Richard III (which I think I had better see ASAP). Actually, McKellen's fascists are not explicitly named as Nazis, I don't believe, but you get the point. I like knowing when people agree with my opinions on these films (two of which, let it be said again, I have not seen - oh, folly!) But it is probably more useful to know when people disagree - it tells me that there may be something I am missing, that there is content I am not interpreting the same way as someone else (or, more likely, am not interpreting at all). I may not change my opinions - after all, I have to make a stand somewhere - but I like knowing where all the other opinions live. And ... if it weren't for disagreement, I wouldn't get comments like this one from my Estonian correspondent ... which would be a true shame: Should anyone laugh over and at Nazis and Communists? And if one should laugh, then when? I feel differently from you in this. If I am sure the horrors will never recur, there is nothing funny in them. If there is just a slight chance of the Holocaust returning, then a bigger part of it has to be active in my mind, and grinning now and then would be appropriate. If Stalinism will be back tomorrow, then laughing may well be the only way to keep sanity.
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