Politics, Creativity, Loudness A Blast From the Past from September 2017

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

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*We have a tendency to forget, but truly, this is a blast from the past.  None of this is new. It is just completely open now.  This is a new phase in a very old war — I’m so, so very tired — but hey, dropping the masks was not a smart move for the other side. Their deeds thrive in darkness. Be not afraid. Dropping their masks gives them no advantage -SAH*

Politics, Creativity, Loudness A Blast From the Past from September 2017

Lately I find myself wondering just how minority the vocal minority is, recently and more or less assuming “very minority.”

The vocal minority I’m talking about here are my colleagues who, uniformly and en masse, give the impression that every creative person exists in a spectrum between Lenin and Stalin.

Anyone, including myself back when I was just a reader or a beginning writer with not many contacts, would be excused for thinking that somehow being lefter than left and thinking that communism was a cute and unexplored idea correlated highly with wanting to write fiction, particularly science fiction and [even more so] mystery.  Part of my decision to stay quiet early on was because I was sure this was so and that I was a very odd duck who had somehow made it through with the contradictory characteristics of not being a lefty and wanting to write.

More or less daily I heard people, some of them the few non-left who’d slipped in talk about how the left was related to creativity, mostly because the left required original, contercultural thought, which in turn of course was creative and related to creativity.

I’ll be honest, since I am by nature a trouble maker and — as my mom said, only half complaining — prone to scratching up every newly painted wall to see what’s underneath, that’s when alarm bells started ringing in my head.

Yeah, I know, it is part of the mythos of the left that they’re countercultural, boldly opposing centuries or millennia of oppressive politics, etc.  It’s a cute self concept, and it allows largely conventional, privileged, often rich people to think of themselves as the oppressed hordes or at least the defenders of those. [You don’t have to buy their narrative.]

But let’s be blunt, because honestly, I’m in no mood to cater to their delusions: this hasn’t been a fact since I was born, and probably long before.

If you’re a reader of early twentieth century fiction, say Agatha Christie, you’ll find that even back then the communists were treated as rather cute pets, or something like “those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.”  Further, they were often from the rich and privileged classes.

In fact, growing up in Europe, I can tell you that contrary to just about every movie and tv series and book NOW published, communists were not the struggling under class (they were sometimes their over-educated young, though) but more often were the sons and daughters of the nobility or the upper class.

Dave Freer might have a point when he says the “aristos” instinctively sensed a system (top down planning) that, in the name of the downtrodden, would undo the revolutions that stripped their kind of power over the last centuries.  He might be right, particularly because that top-down alliance, i.e. the king or upper nobility doing things in the name of the poorest people to keep down the bourgeoisie was routinely played in Europe from about the 12th century onward.  Heck, you could say the French revolution was the result of Louis XVI trying to play the game, being singularly inept at it and getting burned.  (Beheaded.  Same difference.)

Anyway, for as long as I’ve been alive, in all Western countries, the way to be respected or promoted or advanced in any artistic, news or otherwise intellectual field was to convincingly mouth the platitudes of leftism in its Marxist incarnation.  If you could add a genuine touch of Stalinist psychopathy, then you’d be considered genuinely righteous and advanced faster.

So that was my first alarm bell ringing on the idea of “but leftists are more naturally creative because they have to challenge the existing system.”  How did that work, when they were the existing system?

Then came experiences, like speaking out, getting publicly told I was crazy (at the time speaking out more or less in private, in private lists and about minor issues, like telling one of the luminaries of the field that no, George W. Bush (!) didn’t raise the postage rate to bankrupt her PERSONALLY as it made her efforts to sell her used books harder.)  The thing was that everyone would pile on in public, and then the avalanche of “I don’t dare speak because I want to work/have children/etc” “but I agree with you” started, a lot of it from people my age or younger than I, i.e. in my sclerotic field, what passes for “youth.”

And I started wondering “How small is the vocal minority?”

I’ve since come to the conclusion they are very small and very scared.  To put things bluntly, again: a triumphant, confident cultural movement feels no need to shut down those who dissent.  They might argue with them, but they don’t shut them down.  They know they are most in accord with reality, most people agree with them, and eventually will come to their side.

Confident cultural movements don’t try to shut down dissenters and don’t deploy antifa to tar [or in 2020 physically attack] anyone who doesn’t agree with them with the brush of extreme right wing.

It’s only movements who are afraid the opposition has a point and has more adherents than they do that feel the need to be that violent.

Meanwhile in the creative fields of today (and even in the news fields and intellectual professions), the order of the day is the screaming down, shutting down, soft banning of all dissent.  We are treated to people acting as though soft-right speakers were an armed invasion of our universities.  Friends who aren’t even right wing enough to be considered non-left are enduring soft black listing from their publishers.

The result?

Well, you see, the left isn’t the creative side of this equation.  This is not because leftists are inherently less creative.  Saying that would be stupid, as only stupid people would maintain that creativity somehow relates to a political side.

It’s more because leftism is the establishment right now.  Which means they attract a whole lot of good boys and girls who want to be in the artistic/intellectual professions but who have never had an original thought in their lives.  If they’d lived in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, they’d spout blood-and-soil and genetic superiority nonsense because that was what would get them advanced.

There are still creative leftists (for the definition of left being socialism and communism) but they are usually pariahs along with me and everyone else to the right of Lenin.  That’s because then tend to defend their beliefs in non-standard ways and to find the good boys and girls of the establishment as awful as I find them.

Now, I think these people are wrong, and I often think they are morally bankrupt, but a lot of them are also extraordinary artists.

The good boys and girls of the establishment… aren’t.  They really can’t be.

Those of us who arrived at our political beliefs in defiance and iconoclasm, and who had to — back then — filter every item of news to find the truth beyond the narrative are creative by default.  You see, we had to reject so much of the entertainment fed to us, that we had to grind out own out of what was available.

So, as the establishment — LEFT establishment — clamps down ever harder on any dissenting thought, what they’re actually doing is destroying those few elements among them still capable of original creation.

This more than anything explains the slump in Hollywood earnings this year.  For how many years have they been milking the re-runs and remakes.

The publishing houses who demand a unified political narrative, put limits on imagination with cries of “cultural appropriation” and hire not by ability but by DNA are experiencing the same issues.  They might think it’s indie eating their lunch, and it is, but it’s only because they no longer have teeth to chew that lunch.  They abandoned their reading public DECADES before indie found it.  And they’re willing to go down with the ship rather than relinquish their political death grip on the product (again, not the sign of a confident cultural movement.)

As for academia… Good Lord.  Why do you think that liberal arts requirements keep getting added to STEM degrees?  What parent or even student would willingly pay for a field where Western history is banned because it’s “oppressive.”

The left, left to their own devices, would entirely dismantle Western civilization.  It’s always been their intent, partly because the USSR always considered itself “Eastern” and in communist propaganda, the perfect state was always an appendage of Russia.

But there are very few of them, and they’re stunningly non-creative.

The problem is that they have a grip on every accrediting authority, almost every publishing house, every museum, every cultural institution.  They acquired this by the long march and then refusing to hire/contract anyone not their comrades.

You must have a heart of stone not laugh like an hyena at the thought of a hundred years of long and slow march, and then indie, and blogs, and…

Are we at the tipping point, yet?  Not quite.  And make no mistake, we need as many hands as possible to the cultural war.  If you can you must write, or create art, or whatever.  It won’t bring you the same rewards, even now, as if you were a darling of the establishment, but the thing is…

The worm is turning.  The times they are achanging. We’ll have some losses (how not) but in the end, the cultural tide is with us.  The more the establishment clamps down, the more scared it looks, the more adherents it loses.

And their product is just bad.  In books, it’s becoming well nigh unreadable.  There’s only so long you can wear the skin of a gutted institution while demanding respect, before the putrefaction is clear and people turn away in disgust.

In the end we win, they lose.  Be not afraid.

 

 

303 thoughts on “Politics, Creativity, Loudness A Blast From the Past from September 2017”

    1. One of the very first things every Communist Revolution did was to liquidate the Intellectual Class, a lesson the Intellectuals of the rest of the world steadfastly refused to absorb. Oh, some intellectuals would remain. A few, like Stanislaw Lem, would even do wonderfully creative work (Steelypips Forever!). But in each Peoples’ Republic, the Intellectuals who had helped bring about the Glorious Revolution were (rightly) viewed as troublemakers, and tended to disappear between two days.

      1. If they do somehow win, one of my great solaces will be listening in my cell as the people who called me Nazi over and over are taken from their cells and executed while they scream, “But I support the Revolution”.

        They are much more a danger to the post revolution state than I ever will and don’t realize it.

        1. I had a conversation like this with one of my younger cousins. She went to progressive schools in NYC, think about that for a second, and was busy calling me a capitalist pig and such. I reminded her that she could go to the very expensive college she was at because her grandfather was a capitalist pig and then pointed out that come the revolution, things wouldn’t be run by people like her. Nope. Very soon after the revolution, things would be run by people like me.

          I keep waiting to see her on the news with antifa. She fits the profile. White, Wealthy, Weird, but not Wise.

    2. But their statues are much better than our modern art statues. And sorry they are usually better than any Modern Art. At least trash in a corner isn’t ART with them.

      1. The thing is that statuary and painting do not need conflict and it’s much easier to do a heroic statue than a heroic story in Socialist Realism.

        1. Socialist Realism – now there’s an oxymoron.

          The latter is to the former as kryptonite is to Kal-El.
          –

      3. Stalin and the Austrian guy had almost exactly the same taste in art and, particularly, architecture. It was just one of many, many similarities.

      4. Their art and modern art serve different ideological intentions. Socialist (and let’s not quibble: Nazis were socialist) art was intended to glorify their society and exalt their subjects’ feelings for their society. Modern art’s goal is depressing people and convincing them their society is trash.
        –

  3. A couple of days ago, I made a comment on another forum that the recent Doctor Who virtue-signalling retcon shat all over everything that had gone before.

    It’s not a particularly conservative forum.

    The comment already has over a hundred likes, and literally no one is disputing it, trying to claim that the retcon was a good thing, or anything like that. Closest anyone gets is to complain that the actress playing the current Doctor has been dragged down by awful writing. (Same problem with the prior Doctor, go figure.)

    -Albert

    1. Haven’t watched Who in quite a while (since Comcast f*d us and cut our channel selection while upping our rate, so we lost BBC America)…. dare I ask what they retconed?

      1. It ‘turns out’ that the Doctor was a little girl of color when the Gallifreyans found her, they used her to develop their regeneration biotech, and she’s always had unlimited regenerations.

        So much of canon is overturned, both classic and nu-Who, that the simplest explanation is that the Wise Wahman pre-Doctor who told #13 all this is lying her ass off.

        -Albert

        1. Oh. Holy. ****.

          That “THUNKTHUNKTHUNK!” sound you may have heard was the sound of my head rapidly and repeatedly impacting my desk.

          1. Yeah. Pretty much that. When I heard they were going to 1) have a woman play the Doctor and 2) gut and re-wrote the cannon, I wrote the series off. Because no matter how good the actress was, the choice was so obvious and heavy-handed that it would poison the series for lots of fans. [Note: this was at the same time that the Beeb was loudly and angrily announcing that Sherlock was not gay and would not enter into a homosexual relationship with Watson. Instead they sacrificed Doctor Who to appease the Wokesters.]

            1. What’s really sad is they could have pulled off a female doctor with a simple bit. Exceeding the regeneration limits needed an explanation and the sex change could have been argued was one of the things that needed to happen. It has both story and virtue signalling potenal.

              The later:
              1. It means the next 12 doctors have to be women. No one and done tokenism here.
              2. It gives you a huge pile of stinking sexism to rage against: all those male Gallifreyans who’d rather die than regenerate into 12 more lives as a woman.

              In terms of story, who are the hidden Gallifreyans who, as part of hiding, did the sex change regeneration. The regeneration of Romana included her trying different forms including at least one male one.

              That’s me, off the top of my head, seeing how you get to have your cake and eat it too with a female doctor if you bother to actually write it instead of just virtue signal. It was the one woke announcement I didn’t view with dread because I figured they’d use the 13th regeneration dodge.

              Turns out I’m more creative and respectful of the franchise than the creative team.

              1. See also, the Ghostbuster’s movie.

                They don’t want what they say they want– they want to be shown to be willing to sacrifice what someone else likes to show everyone how much they want what they say they want. :/

                1. Someone here did an outline for an all female Ghostbusters that would have been an excellent movie. It would not have worked with the actresses in question.

                  That leads me to a big issue I had with Lady Ghostbusters. How was it a feminist triumph. Supposedly the four stars were among the great comic actresses of our time. Accepting that, why is it a triumph to have them just remake the grand work of four male comic actors of a generation ago? Wouldn’t the real triumph be letting them run wild with their imaginations?

                  2. “Supposedly the four stars were among the great comic actresses of our time. …”

                    If you sit through the movie (it isn’t painful, merely meh) the real question is “How did Chris Hemsworth, an actor not then known for comic chops, steal every scene he was in?”
                    –

                    2. Richilda, a Snow White variant predating the Brothers Grimm even, has the villainess consulting the mirror for her husband. She neglects to specify that he be free to marry her, but he’s willing to fix that.

              2. Don’t forget that Joanna Lumley was (very briefly) The Doctor in “The Curse of the Fatal Death” in 1999. An official BBC production, even if the Whofans debate its canonicity.

              3. One other dodge option: Who was the (apparently) only Time Lord to survive the Dalek/Gallifreyan Destruction of the Universe? It would not be difficult to write that into re-starting his regeneration clock. “Gee, Doctor, revising the Space/Time Continuum seems to have started your regeneration cycle over again, with your current incarnation being number [2] of 12!”

                Or even, “Having survived that you can regenerate forever, assuming something does’t kill you first.”
                –

                1. Or even:
                  “This is unheard of….how are you alive? None of the readings make sense. Maybe it’s ____(insert half dozen options that you can mine for future plots)_________.”

          1. This is the BBC, remember. Essentially an arm of the political establishment. In a way, it’s amazing their content isn’t worse than it is. Of course in the United States they benefit from the ‘Imported Beer’ effect; before the beer culture really took off in the US, we’d hear about how superior British beer was to Budweiser, when the British equivalent of Bud was never imported and actually worse.

            1. Carling is indeed vile. They seem to have moved to Bud there though, or Stella because you get fall down drunk faster

            2. Just think of the last two seasons as being bad who fanfic. And I like Whitiaker and the actors and actresses playing the companions. The writing and story arc however, absolutely awful and clearly more concerned with rewriting the entire Whoverse to be “woke”

        3. If they have the sense God gave a Turnip (but this is the BBC, so I ain’t holding my breath), this will turn out to be some deep laid plot by a Big Baddie.

          *sigh*

          This is the problem with serial storytelling; if your run goes on long enough, your writers will necessarily start to inject ‘new’ ideas that trash the old ones. As a comic collector (in remission now) I watched this go on as the episodic comics of the Golden Age and the Interregnum segued into the story arcs of the Silver Age…and as tighter and tighter continuity started the retcon storms.

          Some Manga escape this by bringing their stories to a definite close; Evil Defeated and everybody settles down and has kids…or (the Japanese being who they are) everybody dies heroically. It helps that the Japanese seem to like being told the same stories again with variations (or I’m misunderstanding what looks to me like repetition).

          I suppose with Dr. Who, what with time travel and time wars, it would make ‘sense’ of a sort for there to be multiple time-lines and multiple origins.

          *shrug*

          1. Wrap it up, shut it down, give it a few years and then reboot Dr. Who entirely. Give Eccleston the title role first.

            1. No, it is obvious the audience has grown bored of the concept and character; they’re accustomed to bigger, better things!

              It couldn’t possibly be the writing and lead performer – they’re the absolute best at what they do!!!
              –

        4. That is so unbelievably stupid. The few times the Doctor has talked about his pre-travels childhood, he’s talked about being a young boy. And to make things worse, one episode actually had him briefly visiting his own childhood where we met the young Doctor . . . who was male and Caucasian. And this isn’t some obscure story from decades ago, this aired within the past five years.

        5. Drive a stake in it, it’s done…

          As far as I’m concerned, the series stopped halfway through the Tennant run.

          “The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views – which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”
          — The Doctor; Doctor Who: The Face of Evil Pt 4 1977

        6. I am SO glad now that I gave on Dr. Who some years ago for what I felt was excessive ‘woo’. I expect some, that being the nature of progress itself, and Clarke’s Law… but there is only so much before “C’mon, now!”

          1. I used to be a Whovian, and watched (eventually) every episode that could still found at the time, from the october 1963 original to when the series was ended/suspended. And the movies. And the thing after the original series(es?). And $SISTAUR gave or lent me DVDs of the first few season of the resumption…. and, then, well, it seemed to me me – even from a distance – to have gone off the rails. Unless the retcon is retconned (as speculated) I do not see going back save in a “trainwreck fascination” sort of way.

            If THAT’s the Gallifreyan timeline? Give me Goldport.

                  3. Not to mention Ollivander in Harry Potter.

                    Ollivander was the first hint of just how weird Potterworld was.

                    “Terrible… but GREAT!”

              3. I hated the doctors after Tom Baker, because they weren’t Tom Baker… but later I learned to appreciate Peter Davison, and eventually Colin Baker. And then we got Sylvester McCoy. Most of McCoy’s episodes were crap, but he gave it his best anyway, and he shone even brighter compared to the listless efforts the Beeb put forth to film them.

    2. I can fix that for you.

      It isn’t a betrayal of everything that has gone before if the show has been pettily misused for a very long time.

  4. On a related note, the Usual Suspects are calling for the Retro Hugos to be ended forever because Lovecraft and Campbell won this year.

    What they cannot dominate, they destroy.

    1. Everyone knows that Hitler deserved it, for the thousand year reich.

      Seriously, there’s enough horrible stuff going on that has some actual need for study. Why are you heaping more pain onto your self by remaining aware of the usual suspects?

      2. Know thy enemy. The same reason I pay attention to what [college name, university name, other academic association/accreditation thing] are up to, so I can be ready to find ways around the tsunami of booshwah that comes down the pike.

          1. Just to make it clear — they want to punish REAL PEOPLE to ‘protect’ DRAWINGS of FICTIONAL CHARACTERS that DO NOT EXIST. I’m sure it’s ‘for the children’ somehow.

            While harboring ACTUAL RAPISTS AND CHILD MOLESTERS in their midst.

            They don’t have ANY principles, as we understand the concept. There is nothing they won’t say, or do, to gain power over people.
            ———————————
            The world is full of self-important, self-righteous, obsessed assholes, tormented by the conviction that Somebody, Somewhere is Doing Something they don’t approve of, and driven by a compulsion to Do Something About It at any cost.

      1. Some people think it’s the Puppies, of course.*

        *NOTE: To the trolls who scour our comment sections looking for blog material, the Puppies have NOTHING to do with your current Hugo woes, so move along.

        1. That anyone would say that anything today is a “Sad Puppies” issue is so amusing. The Puppies have moved on (*ox* can see that! And, ox s-l-o-w )… and found better… and left the Puppy Kicker’s debris to the Puppy Kickers.

          1. They are the same kind of people who genuinely believe the rioting at BLM “protests” is clandestine Klansmen. Of course they see Puppies everywhere.

    3. Wasting away again in Worldcon virtueville,
      Searching for their last remnant of pride
      Some people claim that there’s the puppies to blame
      But they know, it’s their own damn fault.
      Yeah, Some people claim that there’s the puppies to blame
      But they know, it’s their own damn fault.
      –

  5. I will say that the Left does seem more inclined to produce artistes although I would say that the reason for that is highly debatable. It could be because the Left so hates the middle class lifestyle and being an artist seems a good alternative to that. It could be because the Right generally considers it a moral obligation to provide for yourself if you’re able to, and thus doesn’t go into creative fields full-time without being good enough to make a living. Or it could be that the same people who want the social position of being An Artist also take up Leftism as a positional good.

    Of course, there’s a big difference between the artistes and actual creators. I’d guess very few of the former are capable of working 9-5 to produce actual novels or paintings or songs (gee, sounds almost like a job, doesn’t it).

    3. The artistes are like college professors who want a 1/1 teaching load, lots and lots of paid research time, no administrative duties, and a six figure salary after taxes, plus full benefits, forever. They are brilliant [in their own minds at least] and deserve to be supported by society/the government because of their important [see above] contributions to civilization, justice, and Culture.

    4. They produce artistes because an artistes doesn’t have to know or produce anything reasonable. He can throw paint at a canvas and that is ART. Requires NO craftsmanship, it requires nothing but the ability to call it art with a straight face. A real ARTIST is able to recreate a work if he wishes. Modern Artistes cannot.

      1. That isn’ – entirely – fair. Yes, ‘action painting’ is largely un-reproducible, but it’s not the whole of Modern Art. Warhol could probably reproduce his paintings endlessly. What drags down Modern Art is the conviction that anything the Common Folk like has to be crap. So Modern Art has devolved into a series of hip in-jokes on The Unwashed, some of them more obvious than others.

        In the meanwhile Artists who don’t subscribe to the idiocy often do rather well. Frederick Hart became quite wealthy, and so did LeRoy Neiman. And as the Art World continues to cram its collective head up its arse, the work of Artists like Hart, and Neiman, and (a personal favorite) Viktor Schrekenghost are quietly coming into their own.

        1. But popular art is common and vulgar! Their Art is so refined, very few people appreciate it!

          I suppose their ultimate goal is to create Great Art that NOBODY likes. That would explain much.
          ———————————
          She: “It’s performance art.”
          He: “He’s shooting paint up his bum and squirting it on the canvas!”

          1. Seems like ‘Great Art’ went the same path as post.. oh about 1950? Jazz. There’s the ‘lowbrow’ stuff before that people liked… and there’s the High Art.. of unlistenable dreck, with a few rare wonderful exception here and there.

            1. I like your term better. ‘High Art’ — does that mean that one must BE high to appreciate it?

              Not suggesting that Ox would know.
              ———————————
              Sanity is like most things — best practiced in moderation.

              1. Any ‘highs’ ox had were from legal stuff.
                And have been times ox drank like a centaur (and yes, ox head HURT after).
                Ox still never so snockered to claim beauty in utter trash.

                Sometimes someone can do wonders with *junk* (there are some impressive welded sculptures), but that’s different.

            2. Spyrogyra, the Rippingtons, Third Force…Spyrogyra’s last album I know of went a little off, bit most of it’s quite listenable.
              Modern “classical,” however……
              Which is why movie scores are far better than most modern “classical” music.

              1. Morten Lauridsen’s modern classical is beautiful, as is some of Ola Gjelo’s (both choral composers and pianists.) A little Eric Whitaker goes a long way, but his “October [instrumental]/ Alleluia {vocal}” is wonderful – hard as heck to sing, like all of his works, but wonderful.

                It does take a fair amount of sifting to get to the precious pearl in the pile of pig litter, however.

              2. Does this qualify as modern classical?

                It’s Tuomas’ latest orchestration from Human:||:Nature
                This is a very well done fan video.
                I’ll forgive him his Dawkins love, Sagan love, etc when it brings out this.
                He is, though, very influenced by movie scores (he has one for a movie the needs to be made, Scrooge McDuck based, and Imaginaerum had a movie made with it)

                1. <quote-ish>Isn’t it amazing that we wake from a sleep of 100 millennia for seventy years</quote-ish>

                  I love the lyrics in that.

            3. 1950? I’d run that to at least 1985. Plenty of 60s top level jazz is very accessible and still listened to. Yes, some 70s fusion is weird, but most of those people made more accessible stuff later (early vs. middle Weather Report for example), but I consider that more “practicing out loud with new ideas” than being snooty artistes.

              One problem post 60s is the avant guard was not required to circle back with the new things they found to fold them into the main current, but just celebrated as “stunning and brave” and encouraged to be weirder and weirder. Synthesis is a key requirement of creation.

          2. Must. Resist. Responding.

            (The clean ones are carp-worthy, and we won’t speak of the others.)

          3. The only argument along those lines I found even worth engaging, although I still didn’t buy it 100%, was by Susan Sontag. She argued at some part some forms of art would become complex in the ways the sciences had and require an intermediary who was both able to understand it and explain it in a more common language than the artist. She compared critics, in that sense, to engineers and popularizers of science.

            Like I said, I didn’t 100% buy the argument, mainly because the drives behind the search for truth in the arts versus STEM are different. That said, at least it wasn’t a “we’re smarter than the rubes”, but a “this is a technical field that anyone can study, but without study you will not understand it” argument.

            1. Would “there are techniques that greatly enrich your art and can be learned a lot faster than they can be figured out”– like perspective?

              Note, I don’t think the techniques of art require a college, but the technology and identification and stuff would, ditto being able to do a decent job of any various sort which would be crazy useful for making art on demand.

            2. which is ridiculous. Art that requires an ‘expert’ to ‘understand’ us useless art.

              1. Which is my fundamental disagreement. The engineer, in applying advanced science beyond lay understanding is performing a practical service. I don’t see the value of art interpretation as practical.

                I just think she deserves credit for something deeper than “you rubes are too stupid to understand”.

            3. > art

              The B-70 Valkyrie, Crazy Horse, the Gateway Arch, Trinity, Starman…

              Art and engineering go hand-in-hand.

        2. Same in art music. They never wanted to recognize the most successful American composers of our age, Williams and Glass, because they weren’t obscure enough (and given some Glass that’s saying something). It is interesting both had great successes in theatrical music. In fact Glass rejects the label minimalist. He describes himself as a writer of theater music.

          I heartily recommend his memoirs. I was not surprised to find he worked in a steel factory and loading trucks to finance his time at Julliard (the cab driving came later). That kind of honest work to get the time to create always shines through.

        1. Reminds me of the camping-meals sections of FF15. Warning: try not to watch the video when you’re hungry.

          For those who haven’t played Final Fantasy 15, whenever you make camp, the party member who’s a chef will make a meal for the party, that gives them stat boosts the next day. And the CGI renders of the food are… beautiful. And mouth-watering.

          1. That reminds me, I need to make rice balls for dinner tonight– going to try the canned salmon to see if I can sort-of get the right flavor/texture for the salted salmon ones I remember.

            *tries not to drool*

            1. The game itself was disappointing (I watched a Let’s Play video series of the game). The first half of the game was great, but the second half fell prey to terrible writing. The problems started when a major character was killed by Gameplay And Story Segregation, and it went downhill from there. (Seriously, the guy who can literally pull healing potions out of thin air was right there, but he never tried to pull out a potion? It was a simple stab wound to the chest! Maybe a potion can’t cure cancer, or a wound that’s too old or something… but recently-inflicted wounds are exactly what potions are designed to deal with!). It was bad enough that I’ve seriously considered writing a fix fic, because there’s other parts of the worldbuilding that would make it totally plausible that the character doing the stabbing would actually not be able to touch the character who was stabbed.

              Seriously, bad writing. The second half felt like it was forcing a bunch of tragic events just for the sake of having drama, and not because they made sense with the storyline thus far. What I thought I was going to get was a tale of revenge and/or forgoing revenge, like FF12. What I actually got in the second half was “Rocks fall, everyone dies.” Which was a darn shame, because the first half of the game showed such promise.

            1. if it was without the NSFW stuff it still looks like a massive time sink. (he says some time later)
              Oh, and I’ve seen a few that are great at the ultrarealistic “painting” (some digital, some in acrylics)

    5. People underestimate how many “artistes” come from far-left activist families. A lot do. I think they actively encourage their kids to get into the arts while conservatives–worried their sons or daughters will end up on the streets–actively discourage their own kids.

      1. When I was young I dated a girl who went to art school at Cooper Union. She went in as a pretty, very talented girl and within a year or so was wearing nothing but black, was white as a ghost, and seemed to have lost all her skill. Later she moved on, got off the heroin, got her skill back and became a commercial artist. she’s actually quite normal now. Art school in this day and age takes talented, enthusiastic artists and ruins them. it’s a racket.

        The thing is to be an artist, not to make art. Warhol was actually trained properly and he didn’t collect modern art but rather old masters. No fool he.

        I’m encouraged by the number of people who are returning to atelier training. The inter webs are loaded with them and they seem to be trying to restore skill of hand to art. You won’t get it at art school.

        1. The fantasy artist Theresa Mather points out on her web bio that she doesn’t have lots of formal training, and suggests that people find other ways besides art school to learn to do what they want to do.

          1. The problem is that art really does have a lot of craft and procedure in it, and artists really do benefit from formal training. You can’t reinvent the wheel in a single lifetime, and there are just too many specialized bits of knowledge that really are needed.

            But yeah, atelier training seems to be a lot more practical than most art schools.

        3. I read a fascinating article a while ago about art schools. The claim was that it used to be that art schools taught you skills — your artistic vision was up to you. If your vision required knowing how to make photorealistic paintings, the school would teach you to do that. If your vision required carving stone so that it looked like lace, the school would teach you that. But then the sixties came, and the artists of that period were great at publicity. “Come watch me crush a mouse between two stones!” Skill at painting, or stone carving, etc, was not required.

          The problem was that eventually the old professors retired and were replaced by the sixties artists, who couldn’t teach any skills because they themselves had none. All they could do was teach publicity.

          For his article the reporter tried to interview art students. None of them would allow their names or photos to be published, because “it would damage my artistic reputation to be known as a student.”

          It was a very depressing article.

      2. Part that, part gatekeeping. Plus the “I ought to be more famous” chip on shoulder that drives many of the artist to hard left

    6. It’s instructive, I feel, that Shakespeare wrote intelligent fiction, but it was still low-brow and mass market.

      That combination is why it’s remembered to this day.

      -Albert

    7. The left produces more “artist” because they think art is easy and they are lazy. What they call art proves they are lazy when they make it. Sometimes, they even admit it, such as Art School Confidential.

      My ex is a sculptor, with her favorite medium being stone. She has a talent for it, both in general and especially in stone. I don’t know if it is still true, but you used to be able to get her to 3600 RPM and ready for electrical loads by showing her the most recent award winning gallery works.

  6. What the big lie has been is the conflation of liberalism with leftism. Liberals, those who think individually and believe in personal freedom, are not Leftists. Leftists think collectively and pigeonhole everything into collective boxes. Anybody who is that rigid in their thinking cannot be creative.

        1. they klept new names once the ones they are using becomes synonymous with what they ACTUALLY stand for, though being of limited thought, they often vacillate between those they’ve already used in the past. Though you also get the word salad versions too.

      2. There are no good terms for the sides here. Heck, it’s not even generally acknowledged that there are more than two sides, but there must be.

      3. As a Classic Liberal, I have indeed had to accept that that battle has been truly and completely lost. But then, in my experience a LOT of (most?) Americans are completely ignorant when it comes to these things. Saying that I’m a “Classic Liberal” has both gained me praise from people I have no political commonality with (until they found out my actual ideals), and unwarranted derision from people whom I share MOST political ideals with (Small Federal government, low taxes, pro-liberty etc.) They hear the word “Liberal” and assume I’m a damn commie bastard. Funnily enough, the Damned part is actually, officially, true (I had a couple run-ins with Catholic Priests).

        1. “Classically liberal” has been done like “libertarian.” Usually means “liberal that wants to feel special.”

          Yes, it is very annoying.

          ****
          Priests can’t damn you; only you can.

  9. it could be that the leftoids are getting less creative, as they seem unable to come up with anything new, and seem to glorify non-artistic stupidity as high art
    They are killing off their creativity.

    1. >> “They are killing off their creativity.”

      It’s kind of hard NOT to when you demand total ideological conformity.

  10. I guess we know what the MSM will be talking about for the next cycle.

    And the cycles after that when some “mysterious” revelations happen.

    1. Doesn’t help the leftoids when even those on their side are showing mail-ins are fraught with issues. I think this means they think it hurts them enough it might cost them even cheating, is all I can figure . . . or someone feels, if it is enough of a debacle, the populace will revolt (and not their pet groups), investigations will show more fraud than they can sweep under the rug, AND how incompetent the system is, ensuring it goes back to “Vote On The Day unless you got a strict valid reason to absentee” and ups the scrutiny.
      So far, I’ve gotten 3 “Register to vote” and 1 “Order you absentee Ballot!” letters in my mail for the previous owner of my house (only the wife, and I’ve gotten medical bills for her as well). None for my dead cat though.

      1. Apparently the counterattack is to insist that the Republican Party has been trying to destroy the USPS for ages for… some reason?

      2. I’ve mentioned the mess with Washington sending my husband ballots… in Texas… repeatedly….right?

        Well, we’re now at two, each, “gosh, we noticed you’re registered in two states! Which do you want?” letters.

        First one, I was thinking “yay! They’ll finally take us off the registration!”

        Second one: “….oh. They’re trying to hint that I can vote both places, and they’ll send the Washington ballot here. Niiiiice.”

        1. Oh dear. And I thought it was bad that I’d gotten absentee ballot applications to the current address with preprinted directions to the previous county. From which I actually am deregistered, or at least I was when I last checked.

    2. Social media is already in full meltdown mode. NO EXCUSE TO DELAY ELECTIONS EVAR!!!!
      EVILORANGEMANBAD IS A FASCIST RACIST DICTATOR RRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

      The fact that these same reeeeeeee-ers were reeeeeeeeee-ing that the primaries NEEDED to be delayed or cancelled due to COVID seems to have been rather conveniently forgotten.

      1. Instapundit noted this today and I think the comment about Trump forcing the “we can’t start school” and “we can’t go back to work” and crowds to confront their hypocrisy is spot on. Trump knew he would get this reaction and wanted it so he could fling it back at the CCP Virus hysterics:

        WE DIDN’T DELAY ELECTIONS FOR THE CIVIL WAR, WE DON’T NEED TO DELAY THEM FOR THIS: Donald Trump suggests delay to 2020 US presidential election. And I just voted safely last week. But this will have the effect — which is probably the real goal — of goading the catastrophists into supporting a return to normality.

        UPDATE: A friend on Facebook comments: “The left is going bonkers over this. They’re too dumb to realize this is a play off the left’s ‘we can’t start school until we have a vaccine’ and ‘we can’t go back to work until Covid runs its course’ positions. The left now has to choose one course or the other.”
        Posted at 1:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds

        1. Trump understands this. He really does play them like a fiddle. best thing is that some of them know this but can’t help themselves or they point it out and get smashed. It’s hysterical to watch.

          1. Salena Zito. A real reporter. Seriously, read her stuff. She drives back country roads to salt of the earth towns, and talks to people in diners.

        3. Rush Limbaugh had that take in his show this morning. “If it’s so bad you can’t send your kids to school or go to work, why is is safe to vote?”

          I’m stuck with Vote-fraud by mail because Oregon, but it’s fun seeing the heads explode.

          When I saw it, I knew POTUS had an angle, but wasn’t sure what he was driving at. Seems to make sense now.

          1. Oh, there’s an organized push online to just have everyone request an absentee ballot or two so they can vote by mail anyway.

            1. Here in Illinois, there was a law passed that required the Election Commission to mail out a form for “vote by mail” wither “you” are thinking about it or not.

              Oh, I’m still planning to vote in person.

              1. You’re still planning to vote in person? Good luck with that, but don’t be shocked if you show up election day to find your vote has already been cast. No, you won’t be allowed to know who “you” cast it for — that would be wronnnnggggg.
                –

            1. But if vote-by-fraud mail gets Democrats elected, that will prove that it works perfectly.

              1. And even if you prove fraud, Democrats will stay in those offices unless removed by force.

                1. In Oregon, the last R Secretary of State (Despicable Kate Brown’s position until she forced the Dem governor out over some corruption–no Lt. Gov) died in office, and Kate selected a RINO to carry on the Democrat agenda.

                  There were problems with primary ballots; R voters had been mysteriously changed to Ds (bloody few had D to R switches), and the SoS blamed the voters. Some pretty crass blaming too; might have said some were drunk…

                  The state Republican party has had a spineless reputation, though there have been bright spots, like the late Sec of State. OTOH, with the massive Dem overreach, there’s a certain vertebrateal growth happening.

                  I’m not a native Oregonian (born and raised in the midwest, survived Cali for a quarter century), but my understanding was that vote-fraud by mail was approved by the voters in the 1990s. It would take a bit of a miracle to get it undone.

      2. They’re good at conveniently forgetting what they said last week, or yesterday, or three minutes ago.

        And then wonder why they are losing trust.

      3. Looks like DJT gave the fish tank another tap…

        Next he’ll say something about the Fed can’t provide security at the polls, and then they’ll be demanding that he send the Army in for their protection.

        The comment about “if Trump praised oxygen, the Woke would be taping plastic bags over their heads to keep it out” seems to have a lot of truth in it.

      4. But we’re perfectly suited to mail your ballots using the same system that routinely gives you other people’s mail, using information systems that are typically inaccurate (I was in books twice in same county) and outdated, and send “representatives” out to safely collect your ballots so you needn’t risk your life walking to the mailbox. Don’t worry about the Billy clubs and guns. They are for your protection.

    3. Trump is a master of getting opponents to commit errors.

      He just trolled the Left and AntiTrump to comitting to an on-time election, delays not permitted or acceptable.

      That actually works -for- Trump. Which is why he did it.

      Someone play the theme from “Shaft”. That is one Baaaaad Orange Man.

      1. Criminy. I actually have that in my playlist… And the themes from “Greatest American Hero” and “The Rockford Files.” And the soundtracks to “Phantasm” and “Escape from New York.” And bits from the soundtrack to “Lexx.” And the Coven cover of “One Tin Soldier” from the “Billy Jack” movie.

        “Go ahead and hate your neighbor
        go ahead and cheat a friend.
        Do it in the name of Heaven
        you’ll be justified in the end.
        Won’t be any trumpets blowin’
        come the Judgement Day.
        On the bloody morning after…
        one tin soldier rides away.”

        Stepan Hauser said that much of what we think of as “classical” now was written as commercial music. A couple hundred years from now, it will be interesting to see what future generations consider to be classical music…

        1. Well, he _was_. Melania seems to have kept him happy to remain groupie-free these last 15-ish years, so she’s doing something right in terms of belly full and balls empty.

          -Albert

  11. Yeah, I think they’ve killed their creativity. The only way to be creative these days is to do something obscene, however one defines that (the more outre the better). The alternative to creativity is to display fawning love of the preferred politician or political idea (I’m thinking about Shepherd Fairy and his Obama prints…haven’t seen much of him lately…).

    It is fun to remind those “speaking truth to power” that they have become self-hating…

  12. “…a triumphant, confident cultural movement feels no need to shut down those who dissent.”

    Islam begs to disagree.

    1. And if you think they’re triumphant and confident, you haven’t actually looked at their plunging birthrates and other issues.
      Same thing, actually. THey’re just yelling loudly.

      1. See? That’s what happens when you let women learn to read and listen to dar al-harb media. They get weird foreign ideas like they don’t want to be kept in harems and used as baby factories.

        You let that sort of thing go on without slapping the bitches back down, eventually they’ll be standing there with a badge and a gun on their hip, giving you the stink-eye because they don’t like the way you’ve been driving. Just like they were real people or something.

    2. They use our technology; we don’t use theirs. They steal our ideas, even while denouncing them as evil. Their fanatics are trying to drag the whole world back to the 7th century.
      ———————————
      Today’s problems are the solutions to yesterday’s problems.

      1. We use some Arabic or Middle Eastern ideas. But it seems that a few centuries ago the Middle East’s Idea Machine… stopped. Hrmm, what happened right about then… I wonder… (even ox not wonder).

          1. Well, the ones they didn’t steal, they imported via trade.

            Arabic Numbers came (via trade) from India.

            1. Ended up down quiet a rabbit hole….
              1) as we’d all figure out given a few minutes thought, “trade” then was rather more Ferangi ideal than a convoy of 18 wheelers
              2) They don’t call them Arabic Numerals anymore, because of the confusion between the numbers actually used in Arabic vs the numbers we’re talking about. Kludge is either English Numerals or “Hindu-Arabic,” with Encyclopedia Brit. going with the latter.

        2. Egypt, North Africa, Persia and India had been civilized for a long time. Arabia, not so much.

          1. Yeah, this. When I was working in Saudi, one of my co-workers drew up a comic book depicting some of our experiences/lampooning some of our compatriots (and me). I helped with some of the artwork (erasing pencil lines after inking & such). Dealing with the fellows who ran the printing shop he was working with was – interesting. They were Egyptian, and had some – less than flattering – views of their co-religionists.

        3. In the book Myth of the Andalusian Paradise by Dario Fernandez-Morera, he quotes Muslim writers from the Middle Ages who bluntly stated that the Arabs were the most ignorant and uncultured people on Earth, that war and religion were the only two things they understood, and all their culture came from the people they conquered.

          The book is highly recommended; it’s a bit of an eye-opener when you see what actual Muslims of the time (and Christian and Jews) thought and said. It can also get really creepy when you read what they thought of women and blacks.

          1. ‘Thought’? Still think, as far as I can tell from long-distance observation. Isn’t the slave-trade still going strong in Sharialand?

            -Albert

          2. I read it. Excellent. It was hard to get a copy

            What I love about this forum is that people actually read stuff.

            I do recommend Tom Holland’s Dominion. It directs so many of the false narratives that deny that the west is best. He show just how awful the Romans and pagans generally were when you compare them to the morality brought by the Christians And refutes the argument that Christianity had nothing to do with it.

            1. I’ll look for that book. Someone else here mentioned Rodney Stark. He’s another good one on the history of how and why religions and societies develop the way they do, and is very accessible. Especially his ‘Discovery of God’, which shows how the major religions developed the way they did — it had some surprising information, like the three other people preaching new monotheistic faiths in Arabia in Muhammad’s lifetime, one of them a woman; and how and why Buddhism failed to utterly in India.

              He also did ‘Cities of God’ which covers the first few centuries of Christianity. The chapter on what life was like in Roman cities of the time was worth it all by itself. I never knew that papers of identification back then went into so much detail about just which scars and missing fingers or limbs someone had. Or just how crowded and violent and dirty Roman cities were.

          3. “… quotes Muslim writers from the Middle Ages who bluntly stated that the Arabs were the most ignorant and uncultured people on Earth …”

            A pinch of salt to accompany that: these days you can find plenty of American writers saying as much and worse about our own nation.
            –

            1. I’d put five bucks on the Muslims doing the writing being Persian, or at least fancying themselves such.

              A lot of the mess in Islam breaks out really, really well if you look at “Arab or Persian” as an important feature.

      2. But hey! The classical Arab world gave us zero. And al-jabr, sort of! And they were quite the astronomical observers.

        Of course, they haven’t done much in the last millenniom or so, but we must always tout their achievements!

        1. No, the Hindu did. The Arab world mostly served to cut Western Europe off from the Greek and Roman texts preserved in Constantinople by enthusiastically pirating any attempted maritime traffic.

          -Albert

      1. Apparently the Muslim world is taking the Petra thing very hard, but the multiple approved Koran versions still in print are being taken even worse. Because apparently “the Koran is eternal and changeless” only dates back to 1983 or such, but the madrassa kids really believed it.

          1. Evidently there’s a theory that Petra is the Mecca in the Koran and that the Kaaba was moved. Tom Holland, a historian whom I greatly admire, has been on it. He’s no looney. I recommend his Recent book Dominion about how Christianity is responsible for all that is distinctive about the west, justice, mercy, etc., He’s an atheist himself, I think.

            You can imagine how a literalist Would have to react to such a fundament thing being wrong.

            2. You can imagine how a literalist Would have to react to such a fundament thing being wrong.

              –
              I can imagine it just fine. “Off with his head!”

            1. Oh, like Spencer discussed in Did Mohammed Exist. That book’s laying out of the lack of information about a place in Mecca’s location was darn convincing.

            2. The theory they were actually unpaid Roman mercenaries makes perfect sense.
              BUT it also shows you how the past is still with us.
              oh, also bad fiscal policy kills, okay?

                1. So the academic refutation of the Petra alignments of the oldest mosques was “Yeah, well, the ancient world didn’t know nothing about no navigation.”

                  So now Dan Gibson’s YouTube channel is doing a nice little series on ancient desert navigation and other ancient tricks for desert trading caravans and nomads, and how it was actually a little more sophisticated than most ancient naval navigation. (But the bit I really like is the engineering explanation of how you make sure that your trading route has enough water along the way.)

                  That said, it’s quite possible that the sailors did know a lot of the ancient navigation tricks, much like the ancient Polynesians did. It’s the ship technology that might not have been up to sailing out of sight of land.

                  1. So the academic refutation of the Petra alignments of the oldest mosques was “Yeah, well, the ancient world didn’t know nothing about no navigation.”

                    …. the only sensible response to that is to laugh hysterically.

                    Seriously, not only did the Romans do their thing with roads, but half the stuff we learned in the basic Navy navigation familiarizing thing was ancient.

                    If my motor-power came from the wind, I wouldn’t want to leave sight of land, either!

                  4. I turned on the documentary.

                    Husband is now sitting there, yelling at the screen things like “What?!? Like DESERT TRADERS couldn’t find their way across a DESERT? Seriously?”

                    About ready to get him a bowl of popcorn. 😀

                    1. Nah, get him a couple of wisecracking robots and let him go full MST3K. It’ll be even funnier. 😉

                    4. Ugh. I’ve done that before. Fortunately, I think it’s funny too, even when it’s myself I’m laughing at.

                    6. Nope! Nerds are solitary; geeks are pack animals.

                      Kind of like a pack of cats, most of the time, but they DO socialize. 😀

                    8. Cats do not congregate in packs, any more than lions. The lions get prides, and the cats get clutters.

                    9. Actually, “pack” is a valid description for any group of animals, even if there are more specific descriptors– same way that an ewe is still a sheep.
                      Probably via the “collection” meaning– ‘a group of like persons or things,’ as one of the simple definitions puts it.

                      5a(1): a group of domesticated animals trained to hunt or run together
                      (2): a group of often predatory animals of the same kind
                      a wolf pack
                      (3): a large group of individuals massed together (as in a race)
                      b: WOLF PACK
                      https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pack

                      Why they list that separately from sense 1b, a group or pile of related objects, I do not know.

                    10. So what do you call a bunch of flippant blog commenters like us, then? A snark? An irreverence? An annoyance?

                    13. A Clutch — as in: A Clutch of Pearls.

                      As we’re constantly tossing pearls before swine the logic is inarguable.
                      –

                  5. “ancient tricks for desert trading caravans and nomads”

                    Apparently not only did the ancients not have much star-obscuring light pollution, they didn’t stay up at night watching TV. Somehow they were even able to figure that the stars moved in regular, predictable patterns? Absurd! Those ignormagi did not even have telescopes!
                    –

                2. Yes, the idea is that the “tribe” Mohammed is supposed to have come from was not really a tribe. It was a conglomerate of unpaid roman mercenaries as the empire fell apart.
                  They were vulnerable, and had trouble holding together and someone cobbled together this myth from Christianity, half a dozen heresies circulating at the time, Judaism and desert lore, both to hold them together/get them to defend themselves, and allow them to conquer.

                  1. I recently read “Discovering God” by Rodney Stark.

                    It was an interesting read and was especially interesting when he discussed the founding of Islam and the life of Mohammed From Muslim Sources.

                    It was also interesting when he showed the attempted “white-washing” of Mohammed by modern “scholars”.

                    Basically, even the Muslim Sources show Mohammed as a nasty person and not somebody who would be called “tolerant”. 😈

    4. Achmed the Dead Terrorist’s catch-phrase is something like “Shut up! I keeel you!”

      It’s funny because it strips all the posturing away, and lays bare the terrorist situation.

      They’re not confident, they’re that a-hole who thinks they can get their way by threatening physical violence every time someone doesn’t give them a lollypop.

      And they don’t learn, because when they do learn, adn are stopped, it tends to be rather permanent. x.x

  14. Herman Cain has passed on. I gather the usual Twitter suspects are being their usual ugly selves. Because a successful black conservative is just too, too awful.

    2. Yes just saw the news about Herman Cain.I was deeply saddened, I thought he was a man with some good ideas and hated that the Democrat party destroyed him. I’m sure Twitter is all aglow with their two minutes hate now. I couldn’t say though because i never been on it and never will. Most things that you can say in 140 characters (Or whatever it is) is probably not worth reading.

      1. Be interesting to juxtipose with Rep. Lewis’ funeral.

        Was at the doctor’s office and the receptionist lady commented it had been a very, very long funeral.

        1. Like the funeral in ‘My Fellow Americans’?

          “That dead general’s the lucky one. He doesn’t have to listen to that speech again!”

        2. >> “Be interesting to juxtipose with Rep. Lewis’ funeral.”

          Better yet, George Floyd’s.

  15. Question becomes whether it is first a case of cornered animal or just shooting the wounded. When they get power, whether it is in november or later, it will be another step down road to collapse solely because it can’t go on. I expect could probably coast for decades but eventually you become prey for a more cohesive society or societies in event of break ups.

    But I’m not sure it is purely or even mostly a cornered animal response as a method of shooting the wounded. Since march we’ve been reminded that our clerisy can make lives miserable with something relatively innocuous and that we will be forced to bend to their will. And since may we’ve seen that facts and law are more malleable than in Oceania, with history, medicine, law, and everything else.

    And shutting down others is nothing more than the use of power which is a pleasure in itself. Could be fear of the idea, despising those saying it, or simply capriciousness

  16. The thing I hope is that people are seeing what Google, YouTube, and the rest are doing with shutting down anyone that speaks up or has a different idea. The shutting down or the Doctors about HCQ or whatever. The banning of conservatives. I hope people realize what is going on. Just hoping, I don’t expect it.

    1. If it’s factually wrong, debunk it.
      If it’s idiotic, ridicule it.

      Instead they’ve given it legitimacy by attempting to hide it while no longer even given the pretense of not being solidly biased against everyone to the right of Stalin.

      1. To quote George RR Martin before he went full woke:

        “A folly. When you cut out a man’s tongue, you aren’t proving him a liar. You’re merely proving that you fear what he has to say.”

    2. My question is how much do the people running Google, Twitter, etc., have invested in Gilead, which makes Remisdivir, which costs in the thousands for each treatment. Dr. Fauci is on the board of Gilead, and thus personally financially benefits from the far cheeper HCQ alternative being usable to treat the CCP Virus. How many others are trying to “ban” HCQ, a medicine that has been safely used for many decades, simply because they have a similar financial interest.

      It has been noted that the studies where cardiac issues were caused by HCQ used far higher doses than the 200mg dosed used for malaria treatment and which is the recommended dosage for treating CCP Virus patients based on the actual use by treating doctors.

      1. I wonder how the investigation to the hit-job on HCQ is going?

        Last I heard– I was about to say “it was a while ago” and then I realized I have no landmarks left since sometime just after Valentine’s Day, not even Easter or the 4th of July– there was the liiiiiiiittle matter of the “look, people died so much we had to stop the study” having given the sick people like two or three times the known lethal dose, when they were supposed to be studying therapeutic doses.

        This stuff is seriously looking like COVID is cover for a crud-ton of murders, or folks are just f’in insane and have dehumanized those they harm to the point they aren’t even considered.

        1. The data that caused WHO to declare study of HCQ as a SARS2 treatment off limits was provided by an outfit called Surgisphere. Shortly after people started to publish studies of the data that Surgisphere had released, Australia noted that the deaths reported for that country were wrong. People started to take a closer look at the data, and Surgisphere as well, which apparently pretty much turned up out of nowhere, and had some unusual choices of individuals in leadership positions. When pushed, Surgisphere refused to divulge where the data had come from, and publications started to walk away from it. Most importantly, WHO reversed its policy against studying HCQ.

      2. My doctor said they knew HCQ was effective against “the flu” back when he was a medic in Vietnam.

        1. HCQ was used successfully against the original SARS virus, which is presumably why doctors tried it out against the current SARS2.

      3. The push against HCQ doesn’t feel to me like something based on financial motives. It feels more like a holy hunt against those devil (or Trump) worshiping heathens. Admitting that HCQ might be effective means showing respect to those nasty bitter deplorables, and contradicts the sacred teachings of Government Almighty to lock down all the things and wear masks in all the places as the only effective measures against the virus.

        1. That covers lots of the demedia insanity. But admitting that a non government doctors treatment regimen is all that is needed (based off studies the last time we fought this form) would mean that medical exhibitionists wouldn’t get to bask in the adoration of populace for managing the crisis. Plus people might ask why when we opened the “in case of emergency” door we found an iou.

        3. Thing is, noting the financial incentives that some might have to bury HCQ will work in persuading people who might roll their eyes and call you a conspiracy theorist when you note that much of the anti-HCQ push is likely due to TDS.

        4. And now the lawyers are circling. The two big regional hospitals have come out and said that they will not use HCQ because that’s not what the WHO and CDC (and EIEIO) guidelines and best practices say . . . so they are covering their rumps. The dig about “despite what internet rumors claim” was not really professional, however, IMHO.

        5. It is (another) case of over-reaction. They could not give Trump a “win” even if all they needed to do was say Trump had gotten out ahead of the science and, as even a blind pig will occasionally find an acorn, gotten lucky this time.

          But Nooooooo – they had to make it “Trump is killing people!” and they had to keep it that way. Thus people are dying because hospitals denied them treatment because the medicine was politically incorrect, not because its effectiveness was unproven.

          Meanwhile, that woman in Arizona who gave her husband fish tank cleaner because OrangeManBad has disappeared from the news …
          –

  17. I’m sorry, but no matter how creative the perversions and however thorough the exploration of the dark side of humanity, I’m not going to call it *good* art.

  18. But let’s be blunt, because honestly, I’m in no mood to cater to their delusions: this hasn’t been a fact since I was born, and probably long before.

    I shared a couple of articles on my blog– that’s all I do, post memes and reblog!– and a fellow that linked to one of them managed to boil it down to a single word:

    Indulging.

    We keep indulging them. It’s probably a bad idea. I know I’m tired of it.

    1. Indeed. The thing is, the responsible people in any group are generally far, far outnumbered by those who “don’t want to rock the boat”. I.e., everyone else wants you to indulge the screamers so their lives go on the way they like. And will go out of their way to force you to do it – “you’re the responsible one, we’re too busy, we have our own problems, Someone Has To.”

      No. No, someone does not.

      But putting your foot down about that generally ends up with a horrendous mess, because the against-boat-rockers decide YOU are the problem, not the screamers. And then it’s a fight not to get pitched overboard yourself.

      1. When the boat-rockers have had time to get into authority, yes.

        The longer it goes, the bigger the problem– because they’ve been trained that all they have to do is yell louder, and they’ll get their way.

        For GENERATIONS, now.

        My mom’s family has a culture where everybody indulged the jerks…but also indulged folks who were jerks back, although they’d advise against it, because Someone May Get Upset.

        Thus far, the Someone Who Gets Upset consists entirely of the folks who are being jerks, and two people who agree with them/”don’t want trouble.” (Nevermind that the trouble is THERE every time, and they’ll even complain aobut it– doing something is Making Trouble. Oh, buzz off, drama queen….)

    2. >> “that’s all I do, post memes and reblog!”

      There’s a reason I once referred to you as Our Patroness Saint of Obsessive Meme-Sharing. 😛

      >> “We keep indulging them. It’s probably a bad idea. I know I’m tired of it.”

      We’ve been getting less and less willing to indulge, I think. We’re seeing more push-back lately.

      1. Indulgent? It’s complicated. There are some missing from this story, such as the existence of a father in this boy’s life and just what, exactly, was going on at that reform school “Youth Correctional Facility” to which he was sentenced:

        Trump-loving grandma outs Portland ‘bomber’ to feds — and it’s her own grandson
        Shortly after midnight on Tuesday morning, videos captured the moment a makeshift bomb was thrown at the Portland federal courthouse during another night of violent protest. A Trump-loving, 69-year-old woman soon stepped forward to out the suspect publicly — as her own grandson.

        Karla Fox says she recognized the alleged bomber as her daughter’s son, 18-year-old Gabriel “Rico” Agard-Berryhill.

        In the hours after the IED attack, social-media users analyzed videos showing a slim male, wearing a distinctive olive vest with the word “ICONS” printed on it, throwing something over the fence at the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse. Seconds later, a large explosion erupts, covering the front door in flames. The man picks up something off the ground and sprints off-camera. Police said the concussion could be “heard and felt more than a block away.”

        Fox instantly identified her grandson because she gave him the vest. …
        –

  19. Weirdly, I’m less stressed than I’ve been in the past. Certainly less than I was in 2017. Maybe because everything is so out in the open, no one’s pretending, at least not more than a half-hearted application to form. When it comes to writing I’m just busy (and undisciplined) but I’m not *blocked*.

    There’s still people insisting that the female remakes are completely brilliant and the only person who wouldn’t agree are misogynists. But they just sound so silly. The white knights jumping in to screech “misogyny! misogyny!” are sort of hysterical (pun intended) rather than frustrating. More people seem entirely willing to entertain the idea that the writing is bad, or at least narrow.

    Hmm. Yes. I think that “narrow” needs to be a writing concept that people begin to explore. Is your writing narrow? Does it lack breadth? Does it have no peripheral vision?

    We say “shallow” but quite frankly, I like some shallow entertainment. Complaining that something doesn’t have depth doesn’t quite do it.

    I’ll suggest that the commie-pinko creatives that Sarah mentions who are creative in spite of it all don’t write narrow, no matter the seriousness or levity of what is created, which would explain why they’d gain the ire of those demanding no one color outside of those very constrictive lines.

    I saw the beginning of a you-tube video about tropes about women that this person didn’t like. (Beginning, yes, there’s no possibly way I had time to do more than dip-in for a few seconds here and there to get the gist.) Ultimately she wanted people to recommend books that employed NONE of these troublesome tropes. But how about, instead and to use a current left-ish academic buzz-word, someone chose to *interrogate* those tropes? Or subvert them? Take, say, the female being rescued…what is more interesting, that it never happens or that someone explores why or what it means to the character’s involved?

    No narrow writing, people!

    1. We say “shallow” but quite frankly, I like some shallow entertainment. Complaining that something doesn’t have depth doesn’t quite do it.

      Personally I’ve found a lot of “shallow” fiction to have depths that aren’t initially apparent. But you only get to see it if you are willing to; starting with the premise that nothing is there doesn’t exactly help.

    2. I like that it’s all out in the open and the pretense is dropped. For me the best is the exposure of the Uni Party. Everything is clear now. The battle lines are drawn. I can look to the left and right and see my allies and I fear what’s to my rear much less since they are now ranged with my enemy, where they belong.

      Noli messorem timere as Pratchet should have said.

  20. “Confident cultural movements don’t try to shut down dissenters and don’t deploy antifa to tar [or in 2020 physically attack] anyone who doesn’t agree with them with the brush of extreme right wing.”

    They’re so insecure that even a single person saying “no” to their dogma is enough to send them into a frenzy of impotent rage.

  21. Sarah, why must you insist on repeating lies?

    I looked at the barn just this morning and the law clearly states

    No animal may sleep in a bed WITH SHEETS.

    Onward to success!

      1. It’s one of Squealer’s revisions to Old Major’s Seven Commandments Of Animalism.

  22. I ran smack into that lefty creative myth when I went back to college when I was 38. I killed that dream for a few of the professors. The rest wanted to put me under a microscope. So yea– I found a lot of the left creatives very uncreative. Doesn’t mean there isn’t some who are highly creative. It just means I didn’t meet any.

    2. It takes a great deal of creativity to so effectively dodge Reality.

      Combining that creativity with the skills and disciplines required to make decent Art, however … well, let’s give them credit for having the creativity to redefine Art so that it requires neither skill nor discipline.
      –

  23. At least some artisans – weavers, potters and other hand workers – are often progressive, and tend to assume if you work with your hands you are, of course, in absolute political agreement with them. This has been awkward on occasion.

    Me, when I demo (spinning), I usually give my. “God bless the Industrial Revolution,” talk. Which ends with me rejoicing I can spin because I want to, not because I have to.

    1. How fast does a spinning wheel produce thread? I guessed two yards a minute, a long time ago. Was I close?

      1. Having seen spinning wheels in use (and attempted to use one – it is as much a learned skill as anything) I’d say that even if you are wrong, you are not very wrong.

        Hrm.. as for reducing the need for man(woman)power.. which came first? The wheel (for the barrow) or the drop-spindle (no need for a second person to play ‘take-up’)?

        1. Not merely a skill is acquired, I suspect. It probably takes a bit for the novice spinner to acquire calluses sufficient that fingertips are not daily sliced to ribbons.
          –

      2. I’ve never tried to time myself. It’s allegedly about four times faster than producing the same amount via hand spindle, but spindle users tout the greater portability as at least partial compensation.
        Mind you, one of the points I use in the talk is a 17th-century woodcut of a landscape in what is now Yugoslavia. In the image a middle-class woman is standing at the top of a hill, decorously spinning flax on a drop spindle while she looks out on a harbor. And in the background a peasant woman is leading a donkey loaded with firewood, another cord of wood on her back….and the donkey’s reins are tucked into her belt and she has a distaff tucked under one arm so she can spin as she walks. Because to get enough thread for all your textile needs, you pretty much HAD to spin every waking moment you weren’t doing something else.

    2. Lord, yes. My first crafting love is beadwork, specifically beadweaving, and in all the years I’ve done it I think I’ve found ONE loud conservative and a couple of quiet ones besides me. I love shiny things and colored things, and I don’t give a damn about crystals except insofar as they’re properly faceted.

    4. Doing it because you like to rather than need to makes a huge difference. Had-cranking a coffee grinder can give you some illusory sense of having greater control over the quality and consistency of your brewing but it is a royal pain-in-the-arse to have to do it for your morning hot cuppa. (I wager few of those praising that “extra control” drive a manual transmission.)

      I sometimes suspect that one reason for cancelling the Little House books is the factual depiction of life in Nature. The family efforts to hand-grind wheat enough to survive a Dakota winter certainly ought instill appreciation for production-ground flour.
      –

  24. I just saw a bit on the news that Dr. Simone Gold, an emergency room doctor with 20 years experience, has been censored, fired, and is now getting hate and death threats for participating in two videos with about a dozen other doctors discussing, among other things, using chloroquine to treat coronavirus.

    The videos were removed. Her own personal web site was taken down, and her URL blocked.

    2. I also gather she has hired Lin Wood to bring defamation and wrongful discharge suit. He’s also taking on representation of Carter Page. For all the business Wood has gained he ought be rebating attorney fees to Nick Sandmann.

      According to Wikipedia, “Wood’s first libel and defamation client was Richard Jewell.” Funny – he don’t look much like Sam Rockwell.
      http://www.linwoodlaw.com/
      –

  25. “… thinking that communism was a cute and unexplored idea correlated highly with wanting to write fiction,”

    In fairness, it is only in fiction that communism works, so devotees of the philosophy are naturally going to turn to that venue.

    Sadly, for communism to work requires bad fiction, the kind i which all the characters are two-(at most)-dimensional.
    –

  27. “It’s only movements who are afraid the opposition has a point and has more adherents than they do that feel the need to be that violent.”

    And that is the difference between the Progressive Socialist Left and the Conservative Right. Those on the Right have no problem with preparing for, and employing violence. We’re actually quite skilled at it. The thing is, we don’t go around initiating the violence. Call it a character flaw, being a Boy Scout, or a John Wayne-ism, we almost always wait for the bad guys to throw the first punch before we get down to being the best there is at what we do.

    2. “we almost always wait for the bad guys to throw the first punch …”

      There’s also the fact that we suffer from “Big Guy Syndrome” — the knowledge that we’re a) going to be told to “pick on somebody your own size” no matter what the provocation and that we’re never going to be given the credit we deserve for winning (comparable to a guy getting into a fight with a girl: even if she’s built like a Russian weightlifter and has thirty-five pounds more muscle, it is lose/lose for a guy).

      Then there’s the aspect we share with Israelis:

      An Englishman, a Frenchman, …, and an Israeli are captured by cannibals. The cannibal leader offers them one last wish before being slaughtered for the pot the following morning. The Frenchman wishes for a goumet meal, fine wine, and a beautiful woman. The other nationalities asked for appropriate stereotypes. The Israeli asks the cannibal chief to kick him in the rear. Puzzled, but forced by the tribal custom, the cannibal chief does so. The Israeli pulls out an Uzi and slaughters the cannibals.

      The others ask the Israeli why he did not pull out the gun and rescue them before. The Israeli answers – “I did not want to be condemned for aggression”.

      HT: Legal Insurrection (and Duck, Duck, Go) for 2010 comment saving me having to type that out.

      The point being that you some folk never start a fight because you can never win a fight, merely survive it.
      –

  28. It’s always been their intent, partly because the USSR always considered itself “Eastern” and in communist propaganda, the perfect state was always an appendage of Russia.

    In fairness to the RusComs (did I just type that?), that is part of their cultural inheritance. The thinking has a long history in Russia. Some Tsars considered themselves heirs to the Byzantine Empire. There are still people arguing the Russian Patriarch is the logical heir to Constantinople as one of the Five Patriarchs of the Church.

    In both editions of A Quick and Dirty Guide to War the Soviet military was discussed as Russians because Jim Dunegan and Al Nofi both argued the Soviets would come and go, but Russia existed first, was persisting through, and would remain after the fail of Communism.

    Now that I think about it, they were rare people expecting the USSR to fail in the early to mid-80s instead of assuming it would last forever.

    1. I have heard recommendations for the best book to read to understand the USSR is La Russie en 1839.

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