[Automatic Nate]

PR: That's a pretty good sociological/economic analysis, and one that I'm often weak on in the face of actual cases. I admit that I often neglect the theoretical big picture when faced with actual cases. While I still hold that assisting the poor is a valid common good, I do agree on the larger scale that our current system is a rather lousy way of doing so. I also agree that something significant has changed, but that brings me to...

Imp: Very cute. I would ask you to narrate your favorite gangsta rap in Sophoclean terms, but I don't think I'd find your answers any more satisfactory. I'll simply say that your analogies seem to stretch the categories beyond their capacity to bear meaning. Simply renaming a female character "bitch" doesn't take into account the categorical shifts that have taken place with regards to women as entities and as (non)-persons in popular culture. And DMX at least doesn't seem to think he's dodging a prophecy by abandoning a child... if you could point to something like that in 50 Cent, I might have to recant.

On a larger picture, we do have a serious disagreement with regards to history. While recognizable patterns do show up if we look at history on the long view, I hold that particular events, particular actions of particular people, and particulars of other kinds give history its shape--there is no inevitable, general cycle. Humans have agency, and each time is different enough from other times that we ought to give serious thought to any time span's particulars. So the flip "Plato said it too" is a bit too lightweight, on my view, to give a convincing account of the age of the Caesars or the Borgias or the gangsta rappers.

Finally, the idea that abstractions like "sexism" and "violence" have simply existed, as they exist now, through the ages, implies a teleology that I cannot embrace, namely that everything that's happened up to this point can best be named in our easy categories rather than engaging the vocabularies and categories of other ages. Something different was happening when waltzing became the dance of the upper class than is happening as Britney Spears goes from teen queen to sorority girl party music. I know all this drifts from our original topic, but I thought my assumptions on the matter might be helpful as we continue to ponder the particular case at hand.