Fascinating, isn’t it? Does he think the Democrats just “hate all things fossil” so much that there’s some kind of integer overflow and it flips negative, and oil businesses do just fine entirely by accident?
It’s truly astounding how well right wing propaganda gets folks to believe things that are so completely at odds with his own lived experience. None of us are immune to propaganda, I know, but that whole statement is just…fascinating
Oh that’s her, I was just trying to be insulting haha
Oh I’m totally agreed! It’s all capitalist, jingoist garbage, same as it ever was.
Yeah, I was just on a flight and saw a dude across the aisle that was mainlining all the worst people on twitter. Space laser lady, the racist cat, the nazi automaker…this dude was just liking everything and replying frantically. He was flipping through everything and replying so quickly that I felt pity as much a loathing. It was absolutely pathetic. Dude’s brain is melted.
That was the NFL being political though, this is them being patriotic…is what my troglodyte relatives will say.
To add to this, there’s a great section in Man Without a Country by Vonnegut where he talks about his approach to humor, and he mentions the time he was in Dresden during WW2 as a prisoner of war, while it was being bombed.
True enough, there are such things as laughless jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. There are real-life situations so hopeless that no relief is imaginable.
While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, “I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.” Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it.
A bigger part of the section here: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/kurt-vonnegut-1/excerpt-from-a-man-without-a-country
No, my entire point is that they are the ones that showed up: hence why we have a more authoritarian president than perhaps ever before. Between the 2020 election and the 2024 election, the raw numbers of votes dropped for the Democrats, not the Republicans. This whole discussion has been about bleeding support from (some) of the Left.
And yes, this is because Harris and the rest of the DNC shit the bed. That they went too hard toward the right is certainly a factor: and again, to be clear,I’m not saying it’s a good idea to move right. What I’m trying to get across is that abstaining is often indistinguishable from wanting a more right-leaning candidate, because then that’s the candidate that wins.
If it was up to me, see my volcano comment. If we want revolutionary change in the USA, I know which party I’d rather fight in the streets against.
I’m sorry that you’ve misunderstood my point so deeply. Let me more explicit. The Cheneys should have been thrown into a volcano. Harris did a shit job. We all need to organize to get milquetoast liberals/moderates and fascists alike out of office.
Unfortunately, over decades they’ve learned who are reliable voting blocks. Not participating communicates that one sees both options as functionally the same. So if anything, it encourages then to move to the right, which is a reliable voting block.
I’m not at all gleeful about voting for them, and desperately want other options. I’m doing what I can to build parallel structures, engage in mutual aid, and in my day job I’m fighting climate change as an environmental research scientist. Unfortunately, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, and the tracks of the trolley don’t change overnight.
Well yeah, that’s exactly the idea. Choose the best of bad options, and try to improve things so that the next time there’s better options.
Not choosing either usually leads to the worse option, which makes it harder to improve things.
There are no easy options.
Yeah, a lot of evangelical churches make it abundantly clear that as long as you love Jesus, you can be a giant piece of shit otherwise and still get into heaven.
As a kid I appreciated that line of thinking because I thought it allowed us to strive for better, accept that we’re all flawed, but still understand we’re all worthy of love.
Instead, as I was a teenager watching these same folks froth at the mouth and cheer for blood in Afghanistan and Iraq, I realized it was a way to reconcile any damn horrible thing they wanted to do. A cloak for depravity and hate.
Oni was so much fun: I would love to see how it feels now, but my nostalgia for it is off the charts. Martial art combos, plus sci fi guns: there’s just nothing else like it out there, which is a bummer.
Thanks for a thorough reply, there’s a lot to tackle, so apologies that I’m not responding to everything in it. You make good points, but it’s clear we have fundamentally different perspectives on this.
I’m not that sure about permission being important in art would led to coherent definition. How could art know if it had permission to be made or not?
I tried to be explicit that permission is not required to make art - because I want to disentangle the two arguments. One of the biggest contentions I have with AI gen stuff is the ethics involved. No ethical consumption under capitalism, so I get arguments that the paint brushes I have were produced unethically to some degree, so pot meet kettle, but I think there’s degrees we can find some nuance in. But I don’t think it’s useful, either, to just shrug and toss the ethics aside. It must be acknowledged, and grappled with.
As for the rest of your comment about the artist copying preexisting emotions, tapping into things that are already there - or the infinite monkeys thing - I do think some amount of intentionality is required to call something art. That said, we all create derivative works to a degree: that’s just impossible to avoid. We’re only human, and we filter our environments through our brains and experiences, and that allows some unique (but again, derivative to a degree) works. If you ask ten people to paint a scary lion, we’re all drawing on some shared fear, and maybe a single photograph of a lion, but you’ll get different works as a result. The art, for me, is the product of the creative process. Art requires intentional action, IMHO. It’s a more narrow definition than yours, but I think being overbroad makes the word meaningless, and indistinguishable from…beauty, or (to include grotesque images, or other emotions), simply aesthetics. AI tools can make beautiful images, but this all circles back to my initial point (with some modified wording): aesthetics are not inherently art, art is not just aesthetic. If we get to AGI, I’ll buy the things it creates as being art. For now, it’s really impressive math. Doesn’t undermine the beauty in it, but it’s something different.
Again, this is my personal opinion. In my science career I’m more of a lumper than a splitter - when talking about evolution, you can “lump” together groups into species, or “split” them into subspecies (really for any clade). So I get your impulse to be open and not gatekeep. I’m not trying to gatekeep, but I do think there is utility in defining things. I don’t like splitting species, but there are differences in crocodiles and alligators. We can’t just lump them into one species - but they are related by broader terms. In this case, I think you’re talking about aesthetics, and not art. Just my personal opinion, and not making a value judgement any more than calling an alligator an alligator, and not a crocodile. They’re different things, and yes: species that look nearly identical but are genetically distinct qualify as different species. The way something beautiful is made matters. IMHO
You’re arguing with a version of me that you’ve created in your head, because nowhere did I say anything about AI art. You’re also again misunderstanding my point - and misunderstanding what creativity is. “Representative art” requires creativity, because a mountain is not two dimensional. Taking a photograph requires decision-making. Even once you’ve taken a pretty picture, though, loop back to my first point - beauty alone is not art.
Again, you’re arguing with a version of me that you’ve created in your head: yes, we use tools to make art. People use spellcheck when writing a play, people use knives when making woodcuts, we use ovens to blow glass. However, if I - without permission - take a photo of my neighbor’s watercolor and print it on T-shirts, do you think I created a work of art? That much is at least arguable. There’s expression, there’s creativity, and it could be aesthetically pleasing in the end. However, one of the main contentions people have with AI gen…do you find it ethical?
Pay close attention to what I’m saying here, please. You’ve been trampling on nuance, so don’t put words in my mouth. I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’m a scientist that kind of works in tech, and I have a lot of creative pursuits outside of my day job. I think there’s a lot of potential to LLMs and other tools out there, but I think we need to pay careful attention to ethics, and I do think words have meaning, even if definitions drift, and even when we’re talking about challenging subjects.
Keep trying really. It’s interesting seeing some people realize how in all human history we have been unable to came up with a united and universal definition of art. It is probably one of the most vague concepts we have as humans.
I’m glad we agree on something! Yes, the definition of art hard to pin down. Subjectivity is the name of the game. I loathe a lot of modern art, because I think it’s disappeared up it’s own asshole, as Vonnegut would say. It’s strange though, because you seem to be certain that your definition of art is universally correct. Again, my initial point - you’re conflating beauty with art, because you claim a mountain itself is art. I think a mountain is beauty, and there’s beauty in our scientific understanding of why it looks like it does. But I don’t think that qualifies as art.
And of course pushing politics in the definition (we all know this is truly about politics, there is not facade here) is the oldest trick in the book.
What politics do you think I’m pushing? How do you think whatever politics you are pushing have impacted your view of what defines art?
None of what you just said has anything to do with the point I was making.
It sounds like you’re conflating art and beauty.
Art is about human creativity and expression. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, and beauty doesn’t have to be art.
Something that’s stuck with me for a long time is this quote within a quote about Susan Sontag:
“She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
https://inthesetimes.com/article/susan-sontag-and-arthur-miller
“This deal is getting worse all the time!” is the hallway one, but I thought the same as you!
For more than a decade I only rode a motorcycle in Florida. I even made trips - with a passenger - to Costco. It required plenty of straps and saddlebags and a big backpack, but it was doable to get groceries in it for two people.
This was on a Triumph Scrambler, and I had added a luggage rack etc, so not something you could do easily on a stock sport bike, but you don’t need a big touring bike for this kind of living, either.
The times I needed to haul something big, I rented a truck from a big box hardware store. Saved a ton of money over the years, and only now have a Prius (with a roof rack to haul stuff) because I live in a place with harsh winters. No sidecar yet, but thinking hard about it…
I assumed the meme is related to high prices decades ago: for example, I remember saving up allowances to buy Star Fox 64, which cost about 70 bucks in the late nineties.