The Gantry Launchpad

Or is that country and blues?

As is not unusual {g}, Dean got me to thinking when he started a thread discussing the close similarity between country and blues music.

What surprises me is that this is news to people. I suppose it's one of those "everyone knows" things; everyone knows that country and blues are really, really different.

There's some good stuff over there; Alan of The Yellow Line points out one of the roots of country: Irish folk music.

Country music can trace a lot of its roots back to Irish folk music. Many if the 19th century Irish immigrants ended up in New Orleans and then worked their way up the Mississippi into Tennessee and the surrounding areas. These immigrants often worked alongside blacks.

Just what is the "moderate" political position in America today?

Dean Esmay asked the hard question: is there a moderate position today? He concludes -righly, I think- that "moderate" is an approach or a temperament, not a political position.

On the other hand Alan, of The Yellow Line argues that centrist is a more appropriate word. But "centrist" is just as bad as "moderate." The reason being that one is still defining a political position in terms of other people's political positions, especially when you consider that Alan says that centrist/moderates "are more interested in moving outside the dichotomy of left and right." In that case, they aren't centrist anymore, because they've changed the frame of reference.

I also have to severely disagree with the definition of moderate as "socially liberal/moderate and fiscially conservative." Is that "the" moderate posistion, or is it just one of them? And just who defines moderate? Is there a central (aha) comittee for the Centrist/Moderate Party no one's heard about? Or is this some sort of alleged statistical measurement of a mean or median? If so, who measured it, and how?