Not Dead Just Moved

As the title implies, I'm not dead! I'm just moving to a new blog at wordpress, which is what - like Ivan -I should have done to begin with. The pretentious title has been changed to another pretentious title, Kierkeguardians, and there's a short post up already on philosophy called Thinking the Limits.

"Every so often I ride past a primary school on my way to the city. (I say this so you don’t think I’m some kind of perverted child-watcher.) Every time, if there are any children out on the oval, at least one is always walking along the line of the fence. I remember people, including myself, do the same in high school: gravitate to the limit of where we were allowed to be. You often see caged animals – other caged animals, I mean – patrol the edges of where they can go. It doesn’t even have to be an artificial cage. Consider the attraction of cliff-top walks, for instance. Like probing at a loose tooth or scratching at a scab, this appears to be a basic animal instinct."

Read the rest of it over at my new home (how many links to my new blog can I fit in this post?). Expect more philosophy, less hip-hop, and more frothingly contrarian posts on politics.

History Being Made

Given the sheer number of photoshopped pictures on the internet, and the fact that we have situations like this where a giant mecha robot found its way into a painting of the Russian Revolution that was used in an actual high school senior exam, I predict that in five hundred years students will be taught the history of our current period from a curriculum that is at least fifty percent pop culture. At the very least it's going to confuse the hell out of the alien archaeologists that dig up our planet in five thousand years.

That was an actual thing that happened.

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This is awesome as well: it's the producer from Blue Scholars rapping about how much he loves pho. Somebody snorts Siracha sauce. Go watch it.

Crispin On Himself

This post by Crispy is interesting:

my view is that each of those things - specifically because of its status - is extremely likely to be false. and deep inside you know they're false, or you wouldn't need to exempt them from examination. indeed, i take, for example, the inquisition, as a demonstration that no one - least of all the inquisitors - actually did believe catholic theology. well have you ever looked squarely at catholic theology? honestly no one could believe it or even figure out what it could possibly mean to believe it, so simulation had to be enforced. that's why pol pot had to execute you: not because he was a fanatic, exactly, but because deep in his heart he knew marxism was bullshit, and he knew you knew it too.

 I have a great deal of sympathy with this position - that there are a host of unquestioned beliefs most people hold, unquestioned precisely because they are almost certainly bullshit - but I think Crispy is doing here what he accuses Democrats and Republicans of doing to each other in this post. It's obvious, Crispy says, that people who hold mainstream views (the importance of voting, christianity, etc) don't actually hold those views in a considered way! They get them wholesale from the dominant culture and treat them like holy writ, never to be questioned. There are shades here of the infuriating Christian critique of atheists: "atheists don't actually disbelieve in God; in their hearts they know He exists and they deny him out of spite".

Crispy, is this what you're saying? That people who disagree with you know you're correct, deep down? That is the kind of worldview that evokes a rich inner mythology; another way of putting it would be 'conspiracy'.

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I do want to agree that this stuff: "Everything which belongs to Christ - everything which makes Christ Christ ‑ is present in the Blessed Sacrament. This consequently means that Christ is present in His divinity as God and in His humanity as man. Christ is present in the Eucharist with His human body and human soul, with His bodily organs and limbs and with His human mind, will and feelings ‑ "the whole Christ." Latin reads Totus Christus," along with a ton of critical theory and philosophy, can only be believed by fiat since it is so obviously incomprehensible. Indeed the incomprehensibility seems more a feature than a bug - if it were stated in plain English in a way that avoided obvious contradictions (or was at least ashamed of them) it would be much harder to believe.

Red

Alright, enough already. I'll answer the question you all keep screaming: what do I think about Crispy's post on Taylor Swift's new album, Red, and by extension the album itself? In short, I think Crispy is too optimistic in his assessment of Taylor's new direction, and while I'd like to celebrate Red as a successful creative work, there are some problematic elements in the music that need to be unpicked.

Red marks the end (or at least the final stages) of Taylor Swift's metamorphosis from chintzy small-town country-pop girl-next-door to fully-fledged pop princess. The music is much more obviously produced, the synth lines are more prominent, and the familiar Taylor guitar is in the background when it's audible at all.

Let's deal with the obvious criticism: that Taylor's sold out, that she's gone corporate and abandoned her authentic roots, that she's now indistinguishable from any other successful pop robot. Crispy does a good job of dismissing this argument. All the major threads of Taylor's style are still present, if a little muted - from the occasional clever line in the bridge, put there to catch you off-guard, to the use of a "stepped-down version of the chorus as an intro", in Crispy's words - so long-time fans will find plenty to like here.

What about Crispy's claim that Taylor inverts the current pop paradigm? It's undeniable that instead of singing about partying and a commitment-free life, she generally sings about family and marriage. This is a clear continuation of her past work - even songs like Back to December, which feature a protagonist who casts aside commitment, demonstrate clear regret. But is this as interesting or as desirable an antithesis as Crispy says?

Taylor's good-girl attitude is an (authentic or manufactured) product of Small Town America. With her blonde hair and summery dresses, she projects the image of a girl-next-door. Think about the music video for You Belong With Me, where Taylor plays both the cute blonde love interest and the hot, black-haired cheerleader rival. Just as the girl-next door can't exist without the cheerleader, Taylor's focus on commitment in her music relies upon the current pop paradigm instead of subverting it. Rather than providing something truly new, she satisfies herself by occupying the other end of the current dichotomy. It's like the old madonna/whore dilemma in feminist theory - when the Catholic Church venerates the Blessed Virgin, that works to prop up its traditional misogyny instead of undermining it.

Enough with the themes, though. What about the music? It's, well, okay. Not bad. Starlight is good, as is The Lucky One, but songs like I Knew You Were Trouble fail to grab me. Taylor's country roots are still there, but they're in danger of being smothered. In his post, Crispy assumes that Taylor has arrived at her pop-princess pedestal - and if she has, that's fantastic - but I'm not so sure. What worries me as I listen to Red is the direction Taylor's taking: less guitars, more synth; less soul; more pop. Can she pick a path forward without drifting towards Britney Spears? I don't know. And I'm not sure I can bear to watch.

Harlem Roulette

The loneliest people in the whole wide world
are the one you’re never going to see again.

And four hours north of Portland, the radio flips on.
And some no one from the future remembers that you’re gone.
Armies massing in the dusky distance, ghosted in the ribbon microphone.
Leave a little mark on something negative, take the secret circuit home.
Nothing’s in the shadows but the shadow hands,
Reaching out to sad young frightened men.

The loneliest people in the whole wide world
are the one you’re never going to see again.

Essential Driving Safety Tips

Every year, hundreds of people are killed on our roads by drunk drivers. It's a sobering thought - that this carnage is happening all around us - and it shines a spotlight on the reckless and cavalier behavior of many drivers. Of course I'm talking about the victims: those who die, or are left with horrific injuries, or a lifetime of chronic pain. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that these people are at fault; I'm just saying that if they had made different, more responsible choices, they wouldn't have put themselves in their predicaments. It's a hard world, and we have to be sensible about the risks we take. There's no use taking up the mantle of victimhood and whining from the comfort of a hospital bed about how bad and evil drunk drivers are - it is, in the words of the philosopher, what it is. Instead, follow these driving safety tips and change yourself from a potential victim to a proactive and adult participant in the dangerous world of traffic.

1) Drive a Visible Car

You were crashed into from behind, were you? You were following all the road rules and the driver who hit you was off his mind on cocaine? Well, let's think about it rationally: if you had been more visible to the cocaine addict behind you, you wouldn't have been hit at all. Was your car black, or grey? Even bolder colours like red and yellow don't show up well at night. Really, unless your car is bright pink you've only got yourself to blame. To be safe - after all, safety is the goal here, and who could argue with that? - drape bright Christmas lights all over your car. It's expensive, sure, and ugly, but such is the price of responsibility.

2) Drive on Safe Roads

As responsible adults, we have to recognize that many roads and highways are very dangerous. To avoid an accident, only drive on roads with working streetlights. If a streetlight is broken or damaged, turn around and find another route. Especially in the country, highways will often have few streetlights. If you are forced to drive in these areas, park your car as soon as the sun sets and don't start driving until it rises again. Lack of light isn't the only issue - there are regions where the traffic is more unruly and less trustworthy in general, like cities or suburbs. If you see more than one other car on the road with you, pull over immediately! Otherwise you're accepting a serious risk (along with a degree of responsibility for the inevitable accident).

3) Drive at Safe Times

It's a statistical fact that most drunk driving accidents occur at times when people are likely to be drunk. Friday and Saturday nights are the most dangerous - really, if you're in a car on a weekend night, you've only got yourself to blame - but during the weekend, any driver you pass could be drunk as a sailor. Of course, if you're driving your children around, you'll want to be completely safe and never drive after midday, even on weekdays. Need to pick them up from school? Don't - instead, move house so you're living a short walk away.

Of course, following these helpful tips doesn't guarantee your safety. Risk is an inevitable and healthy part of life. However, if you get hit and injured by a drunk or drugged driver and you weren't following these tips, don't expect my sympathy. We live in a dangerous world, and it's hardly 'blaming the victim' to suggest that making yourself vulnerable to a risk that you could potentially avoid is foolish. In the aftermath of an accident, concentrating on driving visibly and safely is much more helpful than wallowing in self-pity. Let's work together to take responsibility for our actions and avoid the toxic mindset of victimhood.

Cry For Judas

Some things you do / just to see / how bad they make you feel

I love the song - and the new Mountain Goats album, oh my - but this music video doesn't really live up to my expectations for Mountain Goats music videos.

On the one hand, all the ingredients are there - from the obviously symbolic, like the rat poking its way around the dollhouse/maze (and at one point freaking out in the 'bathroom', I have no idea how they got that shot) to the completely impenetrable, like John Darnielle reciting lyrics to a silent child in a tiger mask. There's the child researching and performing his Satanic ritual, echoing The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton. There are even strains of the lapsed Catholicism that informs so much of Darnielle's efforts. But they don't fit together very well. What's the significance of the pregnancy test? Why does John Darnielle get killed by Peter Peter Hughes?

Thematically it's a jambalaya, a mix of all the elements in the music of the Mountain Goats, thrown together in the hope that it will work. It sort of does, like the music video for This Year. Still, it's got nothing on the best Mountain Goats music videos, which pick one visual theme - pictures in pictures, say, or dynamic text - and run with it.

Contra Ivan

I'm still catching up on From Wine to Water, but I thought this post was worth commenting on. Ivan argues that, in spite of the obvious fact that two contradictory statements cannot be true, our day-to-day thoughts contradict themselves all the time. As an example, he describes a person who eats meat because it tastes good but also believes that killing animals is morally wrong. I enjoyed reading the post, but I don't think Ivan is correct here for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the actual contradiction he teases out is not entirely accurate.

...to get an out-and-out contradiction, we need to do a bit more work, and probably to draw upon other things we believe to be true. For example, we might believe that 3) we will eat animals since they are delicious, and 4) we will not do things that are terrible. The explicit contradiction now emerges: We will not do things that are terrible, such as hurting animals. And we will hurt animals to eat them, since they are delicious. We both will and will not do something terrible. P and not-P.

What Ivan meant here with point (4) - and, Ivan, please correct me if I'm wrong - sounds more like 4b) we should not do things that are terrible. There's no contradiction between "we will eat meat because it is delicious" and "we shouldn't eat meat because of the cruelty involved".

Another possibility is that Ivan meant 4c) we do not do things that are terrible. This seems closer to the way most people think, since after all it's very hard for anybody to accept that they do terrible things. But there's no necessary contradiction between "we do not do things that are terrible" and "hurting animals to eat them is terrible"! We might imagine a point 5) if we do not eat this meat, somebody else will, or a point 6) eating this meat helps the farmers and abattoir workers feed their own families. Neither of these points are particularly good arguments, but that is not particularly relevant*. To the extent that meat-eaters usually think their meat-eating out, it's highly likely that hey avoid a contradiction by the use of some such rationalization.

Most importantly, though, I want to question Ivan's implicit assumption that most people do think out their practices in this way. Since there's no immediate and obvious contradiction in "hurting animals is wrong, but I still eat meat", the law of non-contradiction does not apply**. In the absence of a serious philosophical inquiry into your own justification for meat-eating, your justification is far too vague to contradict or be contradicted by anything!

Unlike Ivan, I think that people usually do obey the law of non-contradiction in their own thought. You can see this if you argue against, say, somebody who eats meat. If you point out an apparent contradiction, as Ivan did in his post, they will invariably argue against you or come up with an alternate rationalization for eating meat (assuming they don't change their mind). What they will not do is shrug their shoulders and calmly accept the contradiction. Ivan is wrong to argue that human cognition does not obey the law of non-contradiction, but he's not all wrong. Human action, of course, breaks the law of non-contradiction all the time - and that's why we need philosophy.

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* Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian who believes that eating meat is ethically wrong.

** If there is an "immediate and obvious" contradiction here, then there is also a similar contradiction in this example: "I wish to go to the post office, which lies due south from my apartment, but in order to get to the door of my apartment I first have to take five steps north."

The Ghost Of IOZ

As a rule, the most unseemly thing about any presidential candidate is his desire to be president. How is it that making zillions in private equity isn't enough? How was it that the ruling over an entire American state did not quench your thirst for power? What insatiable impulse drives your dark ambition to reign over the richest nation on earth? Surely the person put in charge of the sentient drone army should not display a naked desperation for dominance. Surely the answer to this yearning for power isn’t nomination but therapy.

So speaks Kerry Howley over at Slate (oddly enough, in the XXFactor section, misogynistically subtitled "what women really think"). If that first paragraph didn't raise the hairs on the nape of your neck, then perhaps the rest will: Howley writes an impassioned plea to vote for an unpopular third-party Marxist candidate who, even if she were to receive enough votes, would be too young to serve as President anyway. It is the best US election commentary I have read this year, and certainly the best article on Slate ever.

Gettier Cases: You Don't Know That

Can we imagine a case where you believe something, you're right, and you've got good reason to believe it - and yet you don't know that thing? We certainly can. Let's say you're a teacher at a high school, and the principal drives a very conspicuous car: a pink Ferrari. You show up to work one morning and see the pink Ferrari in the car park. In the staff room, another teacher asks you whether the principal's at work today.

"Yes," you say. "I saw his car."

As it happens, the principal is at work - but the pink Ferrari in the car park is, by pure chance, not his car but somebody else's. Did you know that the principal was at work?

By any reasonable standard, seeing an identical car to his in the car park would constitute good reason for your belief. And he is at work, after all! But intuitively, we don't want to say that you knew it.

Here's one reason why. If you had been informed that the pink Ferrari was not the principal's car - perhaps the other teacher replies "yes, I saw the car too, but it has a slightly different numberplate" - you would have changed your mind. In order to know something, it seems like there ought to be no true piece of information out there that, if you knew it, would make you decide you were wrong.

This kind of case is called a Gettier case after the first person to formulate one, Edmund Gettier. The general principle is to propose a situation where you have a true belief, but your justification for believing it happens by sheer chance to be wrong. Gettier cases pose serious problems for people who think knowledge is "justified true belief". Can a better definition of knowledge be found? Can the JTB definition of knowledge be altered to accommodate the Gettier cases? There's no consensus in philosophy right now, but I'll outline some competing theories next post.

An Ode To The Expendables 2

After a month-long hiatus, this is what I bring you: a paean to the sequel of an action film that well deserves the dubious title 'action film'. Indeed, all other elements of the film - plot, character development, the thematic heft - exist only to tie together a series of more and more ridiculous action scenes. Of course I am talking about The Expendables and its sequel, The Expendables 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Interesting Dan, over at Shittin' Diamonds, is convinced that the sequel has against all odds turned out to be good.

"The Expendables was an attempt at making an eighties action flick in 2010, and it sucked because it was a 2010 action flick with eighties action stars in it. The Expendables 2 doesn’t succeed because it puts more 80s action heroes on the screen, although its producers seem to think that’s the answer. (By the way, Arnie’s not fun any more, and Chuck Norris saying a Chuck Norris Fact isn’t actually that funny)."

Want to know why The Expendables 2 does succeed? Read the rest of the article here.

I'm Not Saying We Wouldn't Get Our Hair Mussed

At Balloon Juice, Bernard Finel writes on the increasingly likely prospect of war with Iran:

There has been some debate in strategic studies circles about whether this represented a warning against war or whether it was an effort to diminish expectations of catastrophic consequences in order to justify an attack on Iran. It sounds bad—war on “multiple fronts,” “hundreds of rockets and missiles”—but when you get right down to it, a month of conflict and 500 deaths could easily be seen as a small price to pay to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

 Finel quotes Israeli defense minister Matan Vilnai:

Vilnai said the government has prepared for the possibility of hundreds of rockets and missiles falling on Israeli population centers each day, with the expectation of 500 deaths.
“It could be that there will be fewer fatalities, but it could be there will be more. That is the scenario that we are preparing for according to the best experts,” he said. “The assessments are for a war that will last 30 days on a number of fronts.”

Five hundred deaths could easily - easily! - be seen as a small price to pay. Five hundred Israeli deaths, of course, using Matan Vilnai's estimate. There's no need to think about the Iranian casualties, or the victims of hundreds of Israeli rockets and missiles. No, the price of ending Iran's possible nuclear ambitions is five hundred deaths, more or less, depending on the breaks. What other deaths could matter?

Seth Sentry

Here's some great Australian hip-hop for a change - Seth Sentry's track Warm Winter. It's political:

So we came home, handshakes and ticket tape parades
Ace of spades swinging from a rope, 'hip hooray for the saviours'
We didn't even notice the changes, a disease born more contagious than AIDS is
Yeah, paranoia had changed us, the fear made us insane, afraid of our neighbours
The mere delay of a train was taken as strange
And every brown paper bag was an Al-Qaida attack
And every street corner had an armed Marine on it
Peacekeepers here to keep the peace that we wanted
They took the streets from us, our own leaders
Who the fuck would invade a country for no reason? Oh Jesus.

Not particularly subtle though.

Can't You Follow Instructions?

A few days ago I saw a dump truck full of rubble and twisted metal bars inching its way up a small street. Two men in construction gear were involved: one driving the truck, and the other walking in front making sure the way was clear. A few cyclists were heading up the street in the other direction, and as they approached, the man in front of the truck held up his hand and told them in an authoritative voice to go past on the footpath.

The cyclists gave him funny looks. There was plenty of space either side of the truck, after all, and due to the very heavy load it was moving too slowly to be dangerous. Ignoring the red-faced man, they rolled past the truck with a bike-width of clearance on either side.

"What's the matter with you?" cried the driver, incensed. "Can't you follow instructions?"

The cyclists were certainly capable of following instructions, but they were also capable of thinking and assessing risk for themselves. More importantly, they were capable of ignoring pointless and toothless instructions. If there wasn't enough room to pass safely next to the truck, they probably would have jumped onto the footpath.

This is what I mean when I say that anarchism is a thoroughly practical philosophy: quite apart from the question of whether obeying the driver's commands would have been sensible, there's the question of where the driver gets the right to issue any commands at all.

Nietzsche was right about this, at least - following orders does not come naturally, and anybody who finds it second nature to do so has probably been beaten or bullied into it. It's easy (and fun!) to scoff at adolescent rebellion, but beneath the tantrums and petty narcissism is the basic and praiseworthy human instinct to make our own decisions. Smothering this instinct is very difficult, but fortunately we have a similarly powerful drive to make decisions for other people. This is the primary purpose of almost every educational institution, workplace or prison - to mould its inmates into the kind of people who follow instructions.

We've gotten very, very good at it: a long time ago, you needed a constant threat of physical force, made real by reminders like public executions and torture. Now you can do it with a relatively small number of policemen and an array of cameras. The cameras don't even need to all work! The law is ever-present, omniscient, and possessed with a superhuman ability to collate and understand the information it gathers. Disobey legal-sounding orders, and you'll be found out and punished, so in general we obey.

It's good to know that we're capable of not following instructions, though - up to a point. If the man walking in front of the truck had been a policeman, after all, I doubt any of the cyclists would have stayed on the road.

Coffee & Snow 2

Just some chill Blue Scholars to ring out the last weeks of winter. It's not political or even particularly deep, but Sabzi's beat is magical and Geo hits all the right moments. Even if you folks in the northern hemisphere have totally different weather, this song should probably still work for a lazy afternoon.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Knowledge

So we accept that knowledge (or at least the possibility of knowledge) exists. Now what? Now we try to establish what we know about knowledge, starting with its conditions. What are we talking about, precisely? Let's unpack a particular claim of knowledge.

I know the Eiffel Tower is in Paris.

What do I mean when I say this? In other words, what would have to happen for me to be wrong? Well, at the most basic level I appear to be saying that I personally think that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris. If I believed that it was in Berlin, say, then I would be lying when I said I knew it was in Paris. So I am making a claim about what I believe. We can generalize this and say that knowledge requires belief.

I'm not just talking about my belief, though - otherwise I would have said 'believe' instead of 'know'. I'm making a claim about the outside world, in particular about the architecture of Paris. If I believe that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris, but I happen to be wrong, then I don't really know it, do it? The concept of 'wrong knowledge' is incoherent. So we can say that knowledge requires both belief and truth.

Now we are getting somewhere. If I know something, that must mean that I believe it and that it is true. But is this sufficient? Suppose that I have no acquaintance with any facts about Paris, or the Eiffel Tower in general. In fact, I only heard about the Eiffel Tower (which I dimly imagine to be a rifle-thin copy of Saruman's lair from the Lord of the Rings) a few minutes ago, when it came up in conversation. Feeling intellectually outgunned, I jump into the conversation with a wild guess: The Eiffel Tower is in Paris! Do I believe it? Let's say yes, since I'm the kind of person who very quickly develops certainty for no reason. Is it true? Yes, by sheer luck I've picked the right city. But do I actually know that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris?

Of course not. So there must be a third component of knowledge; some reason to think that your true belief is true. I must have some kind of justification for believing that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris. Photos, for instance, or multiple references in books and films. Knowledge, then, requires (at least) three things: that you believe a certain thing, that that belief is correct, and that you have good reason to hold that belief. This is what philosophers call "justified true belief", or JTB, and it was considered a full definition of knowledge for considerably more than a thousand years.

Is it, though? Can you think of a case where the three conditions - justification, truth and belief - are all met, but the belief still does not count as knowledge? If you can deduce it yourself (I certainly couldn't), then you'll find my next post on epistemology trivial.

Discussing Knowledge

To sceptical outsiders, the philosophical investigation of knowledge (epistemology, that is) might seem like an argument over nothing. Can't we simply answer the biggest question - "what is Knowledge" - with a link to an online dictionary or, failing that, a brief explanation of semantics and the nature of context? In other words, 'knowledge' means nothing on its own; its meaning is derived from the sentence in which it sits. You can draw out general senses from this and list them in a dictionary: "being aware of a fact", "familiarity with a concept", "practical skill in a certain area". Capital-k Knowledge has no existence unless it's defined, and the definition is essentially arbitrary; that is to say, almost every possible definition is equally valid.

This is wrong! To see why it's wrong, consider a field of discussion with obvious value, like car mechanics. It's obvious that there's meat there, that there's something of interest to be studied. However, try defining 'car' or 'engine' properly. The same problems that come up when you define 'knowledge' are here as well. Isn't 'car' used in different ways by different people? What counts as an engine? Can you construct an elegant definition that rules out trucks and buses without ruling out actual cars? Ought broken cars and engines count, and if so, where do you draw the line? And so on. Nevertheless, it's still possible to learn how to fix an engine without once touching the tricky philosophical problem of definition.

We drive our knowledge around every day: trivially, whenever we tell other people things. If you make a surprising claim about reality, you're likely to be asked 'how do you know that?' Whether you're a philosopher or not, you need to be able to answer that question - and, in order to do that, you need to have some vague idea of what it means to know anything in the first place.

Dear True Believer

I know you've been devastated in my absence. It was, of course, a week of crazed joy spent in contemplation of the Mountain Goats' new album, Transcendental Youth - of which a track, Cry for Judas, is now freely available! Check the horns! Check the bass line!

http://soundcloud.com/mergerecords/the-mountain-goats-cry-for

(Actual, scheduled content coming up soon. I promise.)

Hopsin

This guy, right here. He's got Eminem-like rhyme schemes and delivery, but with the sharp lyrics of Blue Scholars. Hopsin sounds like a guy who's spent years perfecting his craft only to find that mainstream rap is talentless and inauthentic, so he raps against the very genre he uses so well. Listen to this.

Reagan

The ballot or the bullet, some freedom or some bullshit
Will we ever do it big, or keep just settling for little shit
We brag on having bread, but none of us are bakers
We all talk having greens, but none of us own acres
If none of us on acres, and none of us grow wheat
Then who will feed our people when our people need to eat
So it seems our people starve from lack of understanding
Cos all we seem to give them is some balling and some dancing
And some talking about our car and imaginary mansions
We should be indicted for bullshit we inciting
Hand the children death and pretend that it's exciting

Listen to this. The flow is pretty simple, but it's produced by the absolutely incredible El-P and the lyrics are amazing.