Creativity, Markets and Blindness

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Is it time for “the right abandoned artistic fields” and “the right isn’t very creative because of [psychological reasons that make no sense]” again? I still had my “You must obey the pope even when he’s not speaking ex-cathedra and is running his mouth on politics” decorations up. And it was a slog to put them up when I’d just put up the “The US is going to start nuclear war” decorations. At least “the right isn’t creative” is a seasonal festival, returning on the regular, predictable as the seasons.

It’s all so TIRESOME. Sometimes I feel like this blogging things is mostly me standing and screaming into the hurricane, and no one listens until someone else picks up the cry and suddenly people listen to THAT person. It’s annoying. I don’t think I’m a priestess of Apollo, and anyway, what I say aren’t prophecies, just what anyone with two brain cells to rub together and a willingness to open their eyes would see.

You know the myth, right? It’s sank into the collective consciousness, and people bring it out on the regular as a “everybody knows.” (Always be wary of “everybody knows”. Not so long ago everybody knew that the USSR was beating the US in war technology and just so much better equipped and organized. And everyone also knew that if you lined up Chinese four by four and had them jump off a cliff, the line would never end, because they reproduced so fast. Yeah.)

It goes something like this: The left controls the arts and the culture, because the left is SO creative. This makes sense because they’re independent minded and ready to challenge conventions, which is essential for creation. Meanwhile the right abandoned the arts because they didn’t think the arts were important, and preferred to be in fields like engineering and sales and such, where there’s more money and they don’t have to buck convention. Because the right is convention-bound, stodgy and never willing to question authority or received wisdom. So, even if they could create, their stuff would be boring, because there would be nothing new in it.

I’ll concede this is absolutely true… In the movies and books produced by the left where the entire world is stuck in an imaginary 1950s, where every communist is a sweet, wild free spirit and everyone who opposes them are hypocrites living conventional lives.

In the real world this myth has more problems than I can begin to explain. But I’m going to try.

First of all the most recent resurgence of this arrant nonsense was someone self-described as right (of course) on twitter throwing a fit because a new publishing house supposedly on the right is only publishing non fiction, and it’s all rehashed stuff. Now, this publishing house was started by Tucker Carlson, presumably to have another means to scream about the Jewish threat or menace question. (I’ll admit I’m a little sore at the Zionist conspiracy right now. Look, they say regardless of ancestry I can’t have access to the space laser controls. They say that they know exactly what I’d do with them and so I can’t have them. I say they have no idea what I’d do with them. I’m a creative. I have so many ideas… Anyway….) But also, what does what a publishing house even if it were run by someone sane and not in the pay of radical Islamists, have to do with creativity? How does it prove the right isn’t creative.

Then as — mostly some of you — started doing yeoman work in smacking the idiot, the whole myth came tumbling out. (Look, if you put nonsense in your head, think about it before you vomit it out.)

First there is the reason the right isn’t very creative. The most real-world-adjacent one is “Because there’s no money in it.” Now, that’s true for the vast majority of artists and writers. I make probably what I would make as a medium-paid secretary in this region, and that puts me in the top 1% of authors. For most traditionally published authors, in the days I was in that treadmill, the income was 5k per book and a book per year. I’m given to understand it’s lower now, but I haven’t cared enough to look into it. This is why book writing has devolved to the province of married (or wealthy single) women and gay men. I.e. those who have other means of income. This is a problem for various other reasons, but it isn’t actually RELATED to a left versus right.

I mean the idea that the left isn’t at all interested in money is, again, only true in the movies and books the left produces. In real life most leftists are being paid handsomely to not examine the contradictions inhering in their positions. Very handsomely. I’m often flabbergasted at how much they get paid by NGOs and cultural this and that to do what I do here every day for not much at all.

Look — pinches bridge of nose — if the right wingers were motivated solely or mostly by money, they wouldn’t be on the right. The left has the pipelines of book to promotion, to TV expert to….

So you can take that little marker of “The right only cares about money, so they won’t do art.”

Okay, you say, but the right isn’t creative, because they believe in received wisdom and are afraid to say or do anything out of line.

Are you for real now?

I’m sixty three (dear Lord, it sure flies by when you’re having fun) and ALREADY I was taught all the leftist shibboleths and leftist worldview in school in the mid 20th century. We all were. The education was already infused by Marxist assumptions about class and the behavior of the various widgets classes. Not to mention races, etc.

And the culture was already hard-core dominated by leftists back then. Don’t believe me? Go watch any old movie and analyze the stereotypes deployed. It’s all the creative, poor-but-idealistic leftist against the rich powerful and most of all evil businessman/woman. Or the religious man and woman. Or both. Old book have this too. Even Agatha Christie, who — sorry, but it’s true — was kind of the distilled wisdom of British middle class for her time treated communists as sort of cute little pets. Wrong, of course, but oh, so morally invested and burning with righteousness.

So in fact to become anything to the right of Lenin we had to reject received wisdom, look beyond what we’d been taught and think for ourselves.

Also, let’s be real, anyone looking at the current literary dahlings and/or Hollywood and saying that’s solid left because the right has no creativity and doesn’t question received wisdom needs their head examined.

The left’s cultural output has become the same slogans they shout continuously, with threadbare plots through which embodied stereotypes of their oft-told-tales walk. There are no real people, no real conflict. They’re never ending (mostly im)morality plays recreating things they drank with mother’s milk. Which is why it’s not doing particularly well.

And this is because on the left you can get kicked out of the club for doubting even one little piece of the bolus of received wisdom that makes up the “leftist view”. You’re leftist in everything but you think that trans women shouldn’t share abused women’s shelters? Into the outer darkness with you, as J. K. Rowling found out.

So, the right not being creative because we’re just parroting received wisdom is nonsense. Once more, if that were true, we’d be… leftists. Because that has been the received wisdom for a hundred years and counting.

No, the truth is that Marxism first captured educational institutions, starting with the more elite ones. Look, it is an obvious mechanism. Academics feel that they aren’t appreciated enough. They spend years studying and working and in the end they get prestige, maybe, but very little else. So a gospel of envy, telling them that everything should be controlled by the government is received with glad cries. They just ignored the bit about the workers, and decided they’d be in charge. After all the lunkheads will need the big brains to guide them, right? In fact, Marx was one of them, in spirit if not in fact, so they took to him like a pig to his wallow.

From there, because academics are prestige and because “the smartest people believe this” it was a trivial matter to conquer the beachheads of the culture, in the form of newspapers, publishing houses, filmmaking studios, etc. And this at a time when the technology made those centralized and easy to control with very few people relatively speaking.

Once they were in, they only hired their like, because after all, anyone who believes differently is both stupid and evil, and you SURELY don’t want to hire THOSE people.

And since they could crank out endless myths of the stodgy conservatives who were stupid and evil and hypocrites, that myth did more of the work than any conscious decision to discriminate. The average person fed on the mass-information-entertainment industrial complex knew what was REALLY going on in the life of a seemingly pious minister or a seemingly clean-living business man. And anyone who tried to write different was just trying to perpetuate that evil.

Etc. Ad nauseum.

It was a very successful inverting of roles, which has allowed the left to successfully paint themselves as fighting the evils of a right-dominated culture which has existed for at least 100 years.

The creatives who could not, would not parrot the line at least enough to get in? Were never seen, published or hired. And those who managed to parrot it weren’t doing any good, because they couldn’t question the line, of course. Any step out of the perceived wisdom and they’d be cast down into the outer darkness.

That’s the only way — for those of you who are following at home — you get the cultural machinery captured by ONE side of the debate. It’s if the other side is being kept forcibly out.

So what’s to be done?

Well, the left has run out of creative steam. To be fair, they were starting to run out pretty hard in the eighties. They only sold because they were (quite literally) the only game in town.

And fortunately tech now allows for indie publishing and really art distribution. No, you won’t get in the prestige channels. If you want to get that you must be a hard-dyed …. I think Maoist at this point. They keep moving left. BUT you can, and many of us do, make a living in the vineyard of words. It’s not crazy money, unless you hit big, but it’s decent for indoor work, in the warm/cool. (Depending on season.) And you can do it until you die with your hands on the keyboard. You’d want to anyway, so why not?

Now we still can’t do movies, true. But it’s this close. It’s so close you can taste it. Well, I can. I want to get healthy so I can play in THAT playground too. Because, ooh, boy, 12 year old me is somewhere inside my mind having spazzfits of excitement. I want to play with that. I’ll be most seriously displeased if I’m too old to do it by the time the tech is here.

Publishing houses? Well, there’s a place for them, but they have to be small and ELASTIC. I am not privy to their inner works, but from the outside Raconteur Press seems to have a good model and be adapting fast.

BUT the important thing? You don’t need them. Sure, if you want them, you can find one, probably (Be careful. I’d recommend Rac, but I don’t know much about other new presses and some don’t do much for you.) BUT you don’t need it.

You can just do things!

Now go do them. Because if you must create, there are so many channels to get it in readers’ hands.

Do I need to say it? I will anyway: What a time to be alive!

Stop arguing over whether the right is creative, and go create.

134 thoughts on “Creativity, Markets and Blindness”

  2. spooky, spooky picture. Don’t know where you got it but put reddish brown hair on it and it’s a ringer for the wife ca., 1988.

    One of many gifts datarepublican has given us is the answer to “where’d the money come from, how are they all so rich?” The answer, that it comes from us, is infuriating if unsurprising, but at least we know.

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    1. True, but Elon Musk figured out that they were throwing government money at electric cars and rode that horse long enough to put together even more pieces of his dream of an interplanetary humanity. So, be smart, take what they give you, and use it for good instead. :)

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        1. It tends to corrupt. As Rod Serling once said, Hollywood sucks you in. It pays you more money than you’ve ever seen. You buy a big house, and then they’ve got you.

          OTOH I wasn’t going to turn down a COVID check or whatever they were calling it when the feds wanted to give me money. As Yossarian said, “I’d be a damn fool to do any different.”

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          1. ” what I say aren’t prophecies, just what anyone with two brain cells to rub together and a willingness to open their eyes would see.”

            Alas. Methinks thou dost give too much credit to people having two brain cells. More like Sturgeon’s Law applied to people. “Ninety percent of people don’t know crap.”

            As for the COVID check, like any money the government gives you. Don’t spend it. Either use it to pay off debt or invest it. Because Uncle Sugar is going to try to take it back sometime.

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            1. We used it in place of what we would have had to pull from investments. Essentially … Invested it.

              The ones in trouble are the ones who looked at it like fairy dust. Same as those who didn’t have to pay rent. Cue surprise and outrage when they suddenly not only had to pay *rent, but had to pay back rent. Um. No s***, lacking-in-any-brain-cells.

              (*) Student loans. House payments. Pick one, or something not listed.

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                1. Son worked through all the covid shutdowns. Employer provided cabinets for apartments including low income builds in California. All three of us still got the payouts. Son just put his into savings. We were (and are) on SS.

                  In fact, I don’t know of anyone who was not working. Everyone seemed to be essential services, one way or another. Even the local restaurants, one way or another, kept staff on. We did take out, more than we normally would. I guess you could argue we passed on the windfall.

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                  1. Good for all of you!

                    I wasn’t talking about regular payouts. IIRC there was some kind of one-time check sent out. As for COVID itself, I kept working despite the Facade In Chief of the U.S.’ mandate that insisted I get the jab or never work again, I fought it and won. So I kept working. Had to take regular tests to prove I didn’t have it, wear a stupid useless mask at work and in stores. I fought it publicly because I could have retired and had no dependents, and I knew others who were more pressured by financial blackmail.

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                    1. My wife and I got the Covid shot (the Pfizer version, I believe) because that was the only way we would be allowed to travel that Christmas to let the kids see their grandparents. (One of whom was born right at the start of the lockdowns so his grandparents hadn’t yet gotten to see him in person and he was nearly two years old). Basically, our family visits were being held hostage. Thankfully, neither of us experienced any side effects (that we could detect, anyway) and we never did get any boosters.

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                    2. Son wore masks and safety glasses at work. Better masks than what medical hands out. When one works with items that produce wood dust, definition of his work.

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                  2. The wife and I both worked all the way through the covid BS, funny how my big box retail employer and the truck stop chain she worked for were “essential” and perfectly okay for large numbers of people to be in. While they tried to shut down every small business they could……

                    Didn’t take us long to realize we were being played, too many things didn’t add up. As to the “covid relief” money we stuck it into our savings, used some of it to pay off debts. Figured it was just getting some of the too high taxes we had been robbed of over the years back.

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                    1. Local big box (Costco and Kroger), were counting number of people in an out, with a maximum, except Pharmacy. But they were open. Smaller? They pivoted to online, and appointments (pick out something online, make an appointment for fittings). The local DariMarts were “critical” for milk; not all are associated with gas stations. The other facilities I noticed surviving were hardware, and livestock supplies, etc. Again “critical services” one way or another. This is Eugene, FWIW – where Salem had close reach.

                      What did suffer were the restaurants that couldn’t pivot to takeout. One local/regional chain was extremely rocky already. Didn’t take long for them to fold. One shopping center survived despite only one tenant having takeout (pizza). The other tenants being mini-golf, laser tag, pool, bowling, sports gym, etc. Reason? Facility family owned. The property has been paid off for generations. Fourth, or fifth, generation is moving into management now. All they had to do was insure taxes and non-family employees were taken care of (family was implied). Yes, we got pizza from them (would have swapped with Roaring Rapids on Franklin, too, but that is too far to drive, and they don’t deliver this far north. Also, *family owned.)

                      (*) Not continuously family owned. Great-grands (I think) cousins bought back the property from corporate pizza conglomerate that went away. Put back in the antique Marry-Go-Round, added two outside 18-hole mini-golf. Their grandchildren are now transitioning in as staff and junior managers.

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                  3. We’re in the South and it was the same way. As I said, I worked tax season 2020 and 2021, so I was meeting people five days a week. Wore a mask when I had to or relied on the Magical Plexiglas Shield of Protection in 2021.

                    So far as I know, I’ve missed covid so far and hope to continue the string. This year’s flu was quite bad enough, thank you.

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                    1. Covid nearly killed the local Huddle House, even though it’s a chain, because it wasn’t managed well. Now it’s ours, with our son managing it and it’s almost turning a profit. Also providing another hangout for lonely or sociable people.

                      And we do takeout now. It makes a difference.

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              2. All the marxoid students in my neighborhood during Covid declared a rent strike. (blah blah reasons blah)

                There are no more “students” in my neighborhood. Some working folks who attend classes towards a degree, yes. “Oh, you are a student at UMarx! Well perhaps dorm life would suit you.”

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          2. I had no choice because I was put on furlough within days of the lockdowns at my job, ran out of vacation time by June to pay for my health insurance, paid for it until I was fired that August, and had to live off a combination of unemployment, gigs, and doing anything that wouldn’t risk getting me sick from COVID because of Mom’s heatlh issues.

            At the very least, I was able to save up enough money that when I had to get a loan for a new car, I was able to pay off about a third of the total price.

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    1. I want a meme with two frames. First, an endless line of Chinese throwing themselves off a cliff. 2nd frame, reversed, shows people at the bottom of a short drop picking themselves up to run to the end of the line.

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    4. Expeditously, while waiting in the queue?

      Actually the answer is contrary to the commonly held mythology, they were not, thus the demographic decline they have now made public, as encountered by every single centrally planned polity in the history of ever.

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        1. Peter Zeihan can be off the rails a lot, but his core demographics stuff comparing various countries puts the US in the “not great, but not so bad” category, unlike Japan and South Korea and much of Europe.

          The correlation with human fertility drops at the highest level is with increases of wealth, and one notch down that wealth correlation appears to me be actually with urbanization, but I wonder if all that is really just obscuring the effects of that urbanization on degrees of control. Urban political structures always keep ratcheting controls and taxes ever higher, imposing ever more burdens on the productive folks in order to secure their power, and I wonder if that ratcheting control environment, maybe combined with population density effects, turns off the reproduction switch, interrupting that instinct.

          It’s too bad social science isn’t a real science, otherwise this would be interesting stuff to study.

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          1. Some parts of the “higher controls and taxes = fewer children” effect have been pretty conclusively measured, such as the ever-increasing age of car seat requirements reducing the number of families who have a third child. Four children and you can’t fit the whole family in a 5-seater car anymore, so you have to go to a minivan. Families who can’t afford a minivan, or who live in places where the large size of a minivan is impractical (there’s urban areas again), will often stop at three children for that reason.

            With three children, in theory you could put two car seats in the back and the oldest child in between them with just a seat belt. BUT… in many U.S. states, the oldest child (who is probably 6-7 years old or less unless you have been spacing out your kids far more than most families do) is still legally required to be in a car seat, meaning you just don’t have room to fit all three kids in the back (and you can’t put any of them in the front passenger seat either). So it’s either two kids or upgrade to a minivan, and some families who would have had a third child choose to stop at two, reducing the state’s overall population growth.

            I haven’t even touched on taxes, cost of schooling, etc. either. There are many reasons why I think you’re on the right track with that “political control reduces family size” idea.

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            1. You forgot to note, the SUV/Van must be three rows, at least 7 seatbelts, for 3 or 4, child boosters. If you are also hauling kennels (dogs or cats), well, you are not. There isn’t a lot of room behind that third seat. Not even in the bigger SUV’s or Vans, let alone smaller SUV or Van.

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              1. The old E-350 vans, if you use belt extenders, can fit three boosters across.

                Although you’ll want the big kid on the outside because they can and do shove eachother off the seat and boosters make that easier.

                :mimes the strapped-in 10 year old slowly tilting counter-clockwise into the door:

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          2. Cities do require control because there’s not the “just read the room” ability for the entire metro (it’s part of why Odds tend to like cities even if we don’t like people)– I suspect the ever increasing cost and decreasing return on labor has more to do with the way that cities are easier to capture feedbacks like “elections” for fun and profit.

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  4. So true! We could start with memes, of course – “the left can’t meme” is more than a slogan. But go beyond that to earning a living (OK, granted, the left has no interest in the earn part, but) – those on the left who try doing this wind up with yet another coffee shop or craft store offering nothing but proximity to recommend it, while their opposite number on the right is out creating businesses like no one’s ever heard of. And in the “yet another” realm – for how much longer will we have to endure stupid remakes of what were originally perfectly satisfying films, books, or any other old (very or not so) media?

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        1. Occasionally they do. I watched the Ocean’s Eleven remake before I ever saw the original. The remake was a really, really well-executed heist film, with tight plotting, and a scene near the end that made you reevaluate what you thought you were seeing in earlier scenes. I love when a book does that (Ender’s Game, for example) and I discovered that I also love it when a film does it.

          Then I watched the original, and yawned my way through it. I kept waiting for the interesting part, and it never came. It was a vehicle for the Rat Pack to show off, nothing more — so if you are of the generation that didn’t know who most of those folks were (I know the names of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., but wouldn’t have recognized their faces if shown a photo with no context — heck, the same is even true of Frank Sinatra) then the appeal of having all those guys playing in the same film is pretty much lost.

          Then when the Ocean’s Eleven remake was so successful, in true modern-Hollywood fashion, they made two sequels. And while Ocean’s Twelve had a few interesting bits, it was enough of a waste of my time to watch that I never spent the time to watch Ocean’s Thirteen. I only really liked the bit where Julia Roberts plays a woman who has to pretend to be Julia Roberts, but her masquerade is exposed when she runs into Bruce Willis (played by Bruce Willis) and doesn’t remember details from a recent film the real Julia Roberts was in with Willis. (The recent film exists in-universe, but doesn’t exist in real life). That part was fun; the rest of the film was forgettable.

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  5. Half of the problem is that nobody can agree on what “right-wing art” is. Off the top of my head, it can be:

    1. Art with a right-wing creator
    2. Art with a vocally right-wing creator
    3. Art with conservative values
    4. Art with Christian values
    5. Art with an explicitly right-wing political message
    6. Art with an explicitly Christian message
    7. Art that’s sane and not explicitly left-wing
    8. Art with clear heroes and villains and a generally optimistic tone
    9. Art produced by a conservative organization
    10. Art produced by an approved conservative organization
    11. Any of the above, but only if the person speaking has heard of it
    12. Any of the above, but only in respectable media (not games or anime)

    I wish I were exaggerating, but I’ve seen variants of all of those in the wild. And while a few of those are sane and seem like reasonable targets to hit, it only takes a handful of people touting the insane definitions (or one Matt Walsh) to derail the conversation completely.

    Then you get into the debates over money, and everything goes to pieces. Depending on who you ask, conservative patrons don’t invest in the arts, or they want to make money off it, or they meddle too much in the creative process. Should we copy the leftist NGO pipeline to push our own unprofitable art? If not, can we expect to see the kinds of results they get with decades of institutional capture and billions in subsidies?

    On and on. Note that all of this is on top of the misconceptions about creativity, stodginess, and practicality that you mentioned in your post. Not only are our oars Swiss cheese from a century of propaganda, but we’re all rowing in different directions.

    What a mess.

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    1. (Double-posting to approach this from a different angle.)

      There are two ways I can think of to attack the misconceptions about conservatives as artists. The harder one is to have such an incredible series of successes that everyone gets it through their heads that conservatives are creative and leftists are conformists. Note that one or two annual non-woke blockbusters is demonstrably not enough. It has to be a Renaissance.

      The other approach is meme warfare. Slogans like “The Left Can’t Meme” and “Get Woke, Go Broke” have been staggeringly effective at cutting the legs out from under the Left. They are catchy, widely applicable, and deployed often enough to become reflex. The Left’s vaunted status as creative taste-makers is in freefall.

      However, there hasn’t been a similar push to hype up the Right. So the same person will (correctly) bemoan the lack of talent in Hollywood, then turn around and complain that the Right isn’t creative. Half of the delusion has been rooted out, but the other half persists.

      I’m not sure what kinds of memes we need. “Your entire conception of the Right as non-artistic is the product of decades of Marxist institutional capture” is neither pithy nor all that persuasive, even if it’s true. Movements like the Based Book Sale and Comicsgate are a good start, but not a complete solution. But there needs to be a memetic, cultural component that’s currently missing.

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    2. Only one I can think to add would be:

      13, art that flatters my specific flavor of conservatism, generally by spending more time doing a Take That! to competition than actually making a case or even going after the (powerful, and thus dangerous, and hey sometimes I agree with them) liberal ideas.

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          1. One of those exhibits had staff change it every day or two. I can’t remember if it was the banana or something else perishable.

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          2. Like money laundering and/or bribes.

            Not the actual banana-taped-to-a-wall art, that one was sarcastic commentary on modern art. (And the banana can be, and has been, replaced when it gets old, or gets eaten).

            But people buying Hunter Biden’s artwork for about $50,000 (per piece, he allegedly made about $1.5 million total from artwork sales between 2021 and 2024, dates which nobody here needs explaining)? The “bribe” aspect is obvious. Less obvious, though, is the usefulness of modern art sales to money-laundering specialists, who could easily hide $100,000 in a $2.6 million purchase. (Who’s to know that the buyer only paid $2.5 million? The receipt says $2.6 million, and that matches the bank deposit; who’s to know that the other $100k came from somewhere… else?)

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          3. Iirc, it didn’t last that long. Someone else did a “performance art” and ingested it.

            This fulfilling the ontological purpose of fruit and the sociopathic function (“to be consumed! eat noses! eat toeses!”) of Modern Art™.

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          4. Iirc, it didn’t last that long. Someone else did a “performance art” and ingested it.

            This fulfilling the ontological purpose of fruit and the sociopathic function (“to be consumed! eat noses! eat toeses!”) of Modern Art™.

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          5. Iirc, it didn’t last that long. Someone else did a “performance art” and ingested it.

            This fulfilling the ontological purpose of fruit and the sociopathic function (“to be consumed! eat noses! eat toeses!”) of Modern Art™.

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  6. I think we’re maybe two years out from getting the last remaining kinks out of AI movies: image consistency, lipsync/emoting, and editing. (Some would add physics, but given how little most film industries cared about that even before cgi effects, I would rank it with the nice to haves).

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  7. Regarding the Pope. I don’t really have a stake in this anymore since I got myself excommunicated and eventually migrated to the Orthodox Church, but it really annoyed me when the Vatican finally elected a pope who chose my patron saint’s name, and he turned out to be a communist. I had similar hopes with an American pope, but I should have known better. You know that old definition of an optimist as someone who never learns from experience? <insert shrug emoji>

    Not that I have any grandiose claims about the Orthodox hierarchy being more saintly. At least in the US, they’re so small and fragmented that they seem to concentrate on matters of faith and are not up to sucking on the government teat.

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    1. At the time of his selection, someone had a nice thread laying out the politics of the choice. IIRC, Leo was a compromise pick to block the progressives from getting their first choice. Not conservative, but not as radical as they might have wound up with otherwise. (And American to try to counteract the drop-off in American donations of late.)

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    2. but it really annoyed me when the Vatican finally elected a pope who chose my patron saint’s name, and he turned out to be a communist

      Don’t buy it.

      I chased after the first half-dozen times or so that “Pope Leo takes vicious jab at Trump/US/War in XYZ,” and each time when I found the actual original statement, they’d picked one line that might possibly involve the US if you accept the insane assumptions, and utterly ignored massive paragraphs of very obviously describing the actual bad actors from Russia to Iran to Paliwood. Seriously, if you think “don’t kill civilians” when talking about the Middle East is targeting the US…. well….

      Treat it exactly like any other “authority” where “MEDIA SAYS THIS GUY SAYS” thing:

      Do they actually directly quote what was said?

      If they use a sound-bite, is it more than half a sentence, and do they have the question that the person interviewed was asking?

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      1. Thanks. Good point. I hadn’t bothered to go to the actual sources on this Pope because I really don’t care anymore. Sigh. I suppose I should repent for the laziness on my part. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa, or I should add, in the, for me, more appropriate Greek, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison.

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        1. I am Catholic, and I don’t usually bother! He doesn’t have authority on those matters, and the folks reporting it actively wish us harm. They wouldn’t be saying anything if they thought it would not be harmful.

          That said, I will call out the Vatican…for attaboys.

          There’s been a revamp of the website, and where Pope Francis’ stuff was sitting there with “yeah he did a meeting on this day” and then like six months later you got one copy of the script in Italian or something,

          Now, the by far hardest part (and it is actually hard, they think that “the Pope said Tuesday” is a good description) is finding out where the claimed statement was made, and then translating that into an actual description, and so far every time it’s been actually up on the website. And they’re updating the documents/ speeches/ letters/ audiences/ homilies/ kitchen sinks for prior Popes, too, you go to the bottom of the main page and click on their name/image.

          Previously, my usual best route was to find a phrase, use that phrase to find a transcript, use that transcript to find a location, and so on.

          https://www.vatican.va/content/vatican/en/holy-father/leone-xiv.html

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          2. Like all the eejits who proclaim, “judge not, that ye be not judged’ in defense of their deviant conduct, attitudes, etc., and consider that a mic drop moment.

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      3. Having recetly finished another tour through The Divine Comedy, I find myself thinking, “Dante made a special place in Hell for that,” so much lately. And the cirtle devoted to, “Sowers of Discord,” is a prime example.

        It would be full of moderns running with Mohammed and Ali and Bertrand de Born. (Yep, Dante classified Mohammed as a Christian heretic and sower of discord).

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  8. I’d finally understood intellectually that the whole ‘art is left wing’ thing was bunk for a while now, but the whole cultural interchange on X right now has really made me understand it on an emotional level.

    In particular, the way a lot of Japanese were actually a bit mystified as to why so many middling anime were so popular and, by some people, so beloved in the west, stuck me. It was because they did not hate the viewer.

    And I think for many of those people, it was the first time they’d encountered anything that didn’t tell them the world would be better off with them not in it.

    When all art, all media, everything you are bombarded with every day tells you to curl up and die, it is not about who is creative or not. It is about who is willing to make their bones off of such a thing.

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    2. And now that word is getting out about what the localizers have been doing to anime and manga the last several years, it’s amusing to see the rather (justifiable) heavy-handed response from the other side of the Pacific. While I haven’t confirmed, I’m hearing that some Japanese writers are going so far as to encourage fans to pirate their work instead of supporting the (licensed) localizers here in the US.

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  9. Most of my creativity, no one ever sees because it goes into keeping a workaround for a fundamentally broken system working. (The government is involved. Of course it’s broken.) This not only provides me with a Day Job, but in its own way, keeps civilization running despite all the indoctrinated idiots with credentials doing their best to ruin it.

    The left has no idea how much creativity is demanded in the Trades just to accomplish, build, and maintain things… the closest they come to the concept is recognizing that the old eccentric guy who keeps the servers all running is some sort of wizard.

    While they’re sucking up more grant money and dying their hair a Blue Not Found In Nature, and thinking that this makes them creative, we’re over here going “You want water to flow uphill and everything to ‘just work’ despite having completely borked the build and the budget? Oooooohkay, this is gonna get interesting. Go get me more coffee, and stand back.”

    And yeah, I write novel, too, in my downtime… and they never have to default to “if everyone would just” in order to make the story work.

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    1. I would note that I am almost certainly a crap plumber.

      I’m ninety percent sure that if you gave me a practical test, out of ten trials, I would skip important steps or fail to do the slope correctly a sufficient number of times.

      In theory, if someone laid out the genuine full recipe, and held my hand, I might be able to execute it on it.

      (moving to the general case…)

      In practice, predicting recipes is hard because almost every situation is a little different.

      Experience can interpolate between recipes one has previously done.

      Creativity is part of the problem solving toolkit, for getting something done correctly with parts of the recipe.

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    2. The thing is, it is clear we’re past the point where there is enough creativity to keep it running, especially with the loss of Boomers who weren’t replaced (for various reasons) in a lot of trades. A lot of the knowledge base needed to be creative and keep things running is going to disappear in the next 15-20 years. There physically aren’t enough GenX to keep up and not enough Millennial were encouraged to even learn it.

      I almost wish I was going to live long enough to watch the Millennial Awfuls get the world they’ve been building.

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  11. The Right is more creative because they create things of value. Fewer items, vastly higher value. The Left tries for quantity. Vast heaps of drek with occasional controversial valuables.

    (The left produces hundreds of thousands of “Star Fleet Academy” items for every “Kalashnikov”)

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    1. Wasn’t there just some fat black female producer-writer-content provider-whatever – just linked on Insty or AoSHQ in an almighty snit because of having to back off DEI … because the big money production companies are running scared, since it turns out that most of the potential audience doesn’t really care for DEI-based lectures. Basically, she was PO’ed because no one was buying the only thing that she had to sell…

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      1. …and blaming ‘Whiteness’ and ‘Systemic Racism’ when ignored by the audience. “They all hate me because I’m a Body Positive Person Of Color!!”

        No, dumbass, nobody wants to read it because it’s crap.

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        1. That’s the go-to for all of it these days. “Misogyny” is the default explanation nowadays whenever a video game fails due to wokeness. “All of those basement-dwelling chuds just don’t like female leads in their video games.”

          Two seconds of actual thought will put the lie to that. But it’s the narrative that matters.

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          1. I’ve had people tell me to my face that they won’t read what I write, because I’m female.

            Is it misogony? NOPE! It’s having been burned too many times by (critical drinker voice) STRONK FEMALE CHARACTER (/critical drinker voice).

            They always look a little surprised when my response is “Great, don’t read me! Find something you like to read, and enjoy that instead!” …but seriously, I’m not going to find readers by trying to convincing people whose minds are made up… and I may not be what they’d like anyway!

            But I am going to keep writing, and publishing, so for the tiny audience out there that does like what I write, they have something to read.

            And in my Day Job field, I shall keep being myself, and competent, to try to balance the influx of females stuffed with Narrative… both in being an example of competence no matter what my bio-plumbing is, and in occasionally breaking the illusions of the children that they ain’t shattering no glass ceiling; I been here for decades, and I was by no means the bleeding edge.

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              1. Yeah.

                One of glorious things about Indie publishing – it doesn’t matter if it’s my husband writing westerns when NYC decreed “Westerns Are Dead”, or you writing offbeat cross-genre fun things like Witchfinder and No Man’s Land, or me writing tactically correct romantic thrillers… or all these lovely things you’re putting up in the People Who Don’t Hate You promo posts…

                We writers don’t have to lose any brain space to wondering “But what if The Popular People don’t like it?”

                We can just shrug at at the haters, shake it off, and publish our stories anyway!

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            2. Unfortunate, but I get it. I find myself second-guessing all too often these days (and I didn’t use to) when I learn that the lead character in something is either a woman or a minority. It’s a survival mechanism, particularly when the writer/director/person in charge is someone that you’re not familiar with.

              And even then, sometimes there’s a sudden shift in that person that has you saying “Hmm….” to yourself when you experience that person’s latest work.

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              1. It’s especially disappointing when they consistently, and skillfully, and accurately, write or portray a stong conservative character that is a heroic good guy (or gal), but then their words and actions prove they don’t actually understand their character at all and never did and probably never will. It’s like… “Did you actually read your own book?”

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            3. I actually got this, from a woman. “They only accept you in the shop because they like having a little cute fluff around.”

              She didn’t like it when I laughed and said, “No, ma’am. It’s because I fit into small spaces and don’t drop tools.” Being interested, a hard worker, and wanting to learn also helped. The planes didn’t care if you had a Y chromosome or not. Safety wire stabs all comers.

              As for creativity? Who’d have guessed that my most popular single book to date would be about a middle-aged merchant who just wants to get home without losing money of getting kicked by one of his beasts of burden (again). It struck a chord with readers of a similar sci-fi series, and the rest is history (and lucre.)

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              1. The men will be bull-in-a-China-shop clumsy. The women are more likely to object to a female whatever.

                I was, early in my Federal career, one of the few women around and never had any problems from either sex. I suspect having the attitude of, “It doesn’t matter to me, I’m just here to do a job,” helps.

                The closest I ever got was overhearing a conversation between a secretary and a male instructor where he said something mild about my being there to help verify a manual. The secretary replied he didn’t have a problem with a female instructor, did he?

                His reply: “Well, she’s just a teacher!”

                I kept my mouth shut, but I’m sure the secretary and I were both thinking, “So are you.” I just thought it was funny.

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              2. Indeed, safety wire is an equal opportunity assailant.

                One of the best wrenches I worked with was a tiny slip of a girl named Sue. Sue could climb into the hellhole of a Huey helicopter – with the cargo hook installed.

                I finally snagged a date with Sue for an early May Friday night. Friday morning our Director of Maintenance told me to go home and pack a bag; I was going to Alaska that afternoon to chase forest fires. Turns out I kinda dodged a bullet – a buddy of mine dated her that summer and Sue was the epitome of the protagonist of the Jose Cuervo song, too much for this non-cowboy. By the time I got back in mid September, Sue had moved on to Boeing.

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            4. I keep thinking of that sort as wanting people to read their Edifying Story with a Moral Lesson – in other words, they’re wannabe Sunday school teachers who wouldn’t be caught dead in Sunday school.

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              1. And since they’ve never had any Morals, or served as a Good lesson, and their idea of Edifying is a crumbling cesspool……

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                1. Drill Sergeant “C”:

                  “Some folks, their highest purpose in life is to be someone else’s bad example. … Don’t be that person.”

                  He was -so- very right.

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    2. I dropped the draft, because I got silly. An idea from it was useful.

      I could put all of my time and energy into shitposting, regardless of whether anyone wants to see it.

      Lots and lots of stuff is pretty temporary.

      If I care whether people choose to keep what I produce, then I have to consider whether it works, and what they actually want.

      TRades, sales, engineering, done right these are not just satisficing cronies running the academic journal of ‘who-the-f&ck-cares’ studies.

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    3. Also, it’s not an accident Kalshnikov, Korolev, and others were older than the USSR even if only by a year or two. They came up either before the Soviet system or before it completely corrupted what had come before.

      Those men built groundbreaking versions of what they built. By the 60s when computers hit the Soviets were mostly reduced to knocking off Western designs because they were already behind in one generation.

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      1. And to be fair, the Kalashnikov is at essence a very nice clever rearrangement of various bits and bobs from other designs. He got the rearrangement pretty right, and especially got the hammer-one-out-of-an-old-shovel aspect right for what the Soviets really needed, but it is not nearly as innovative as Stoner’s Armalite designs.

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        1. However, the Kalashnikov rifle is vastly easier to make, to maintain, and to use, versus the Stoner / M-16. Thus, for anyone but us, it is usually more than sufficient.

          And when -we- make the dang things? Have you seen any 100% American AKs? Wow.

          Which is why over 100 million AK series rifles were produced (are being produced today!) and most are still in use, and likely will be for another century. Because very few armed forces can make up an entire army of mostly Centurions. The US Army is so unusual that it is almost impossible for the average American to understand what “Army” usually means to the usual human being elsewhere on earth. Jobs done by a PFC in our Army are officer work in Russia. Not even our NATO partners measure up, although they get closer. (and lately? lol)

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    2. Scald out the Preamble to the Declaration in Arabic across the Sauds’ “Empty Quarter” and into the edges of Iraq and Kuwait, burning the sand to glass…

      Why yes, that is in 16-km font. Why do you ask?

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  14. One thing the left never has is responsibility, they’re not responsible for their failures, sexual desires, hatreds, religion, god, ( It’s okay to hate other colors in private because all white people are racist see how that works ). Their whole identity is avoiding responsibility. Which is also why they ill always fail.

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  15. There’s no doubt book publishing economics has turned upside down and Möbius loop pretzeled into something unrecognizable, but to be fair, that $5k per book was pre-Autopen-monetary-discontinuity, before the Autopen Interregnum Inflation Event that made $9/doz eggs a thing.

    One needs to go do math by figuring out how many Troy Oz. of gold that $5k was that year, and then price that gold now, to compare real values.

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        1. Too soon to bet on because the left still gets a vote to put a stranglehold on it, but looks like the saying “God looks out for the United States”, is including California. Did anyone have two republicans running against each other for the governor, given the California jungle primaries on their bingo cards?

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            1. They have everything else in the state, from the media to the Assembly and Senate to the massive bureaucracy, the courts and the unions, and almost all the local governments top to bottom, so they will just do what they did to Ahnold (yeah, I know, but when he won they were scared of him) and wait out any non-donk interloper.

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          2. The full Otto Von Bismark quote is “There is a providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America,” so the Formerly Golden State is covered under the first three.

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          3. I, for one, hold out for the epic humor if the two republicans top out the eight donks, and thus exclude the donks altogether in November.

            Heck, even if we wind up with another Conan the RoidRINO, its still epic humor.

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  16. My sample is skewed, of course – myself, other Huns and Hoydens, the ‘Rons and ‘Ettes over at Ace, etc – but I think what we have is “craftsmanship”, or “attention to detail”. Sometimes that results in quality engineering. Sometimes, computer code. Sometimes, traditional ‘fine arts’. And yes, because we put a lot of ourselves into it, we expect to get paid once in a while.

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  17. It’s not crazy money, unless you hit big, but it’s decent for indoor work, in the warm/cool

    If you do make it big they’ll come up attractive shackles to get you to join them, see the recent statements from the author of Dungeon Crawler Carl, although he may have had those politics before and just been smart enough to shut up (I heard the early books were a bit political and that stopped due to feed back).

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  18. Miss Sarah, we all know the Bible says all have sinned (Romans 3:23), so I think that just following the Bible might be the best way to be a good Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyterian, etc. We already know all Mark I, Mod. 01 humans are occasionally (or more often) just wrong, be they Pope, President, Reader, Writer, or even Editor. /smile

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  19. I say they have no idea what I’d do with them. I’m a creative. I have so many ideas…

    Sign your name on the White House lawn. It’s the obvious thing to do, sure, but it’s got a flair to it. Combines not-so-subtle threat (those lasers could have been pointed a couple hundred feet over in that direction instead) with artistic flair, and also conveys the message “I’m a reasonable person, as long as my demands are met I’ll leave you alone”. Whereas drawing a rude picture with said lasers on said lawn would convey a different message, “I’m an immature child who probably can’t be negotiated with”. So stick with the classy signature, you’re far more likely to get the results you want that way.

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    1. Muahahahahaha!

      I dunno, Our Beloved Hostess might first do a classy signature… then come back with “Kilroy was here” and a Simon Jester, and TANSTHAAFL on every step in front of Congress, and….

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  20. If the Left is so creative, how come they’ve spent the last ten to fifteen years recycling the same tired crap over and over?

    They probably ran off anyone truly creative because they didn’t check the boxes…

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    1. Worse, they take the same old stuff and make it much, much worse.

      The line from the recent South Park episode summed it up quite well. “Stick a chick in it, and make it gay!” That’s not all that happens, but it captures the sentiment quite nicely.

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      1. fren

        I would guess that the South Park episode might actually be five or ten years old.

        (Well, I have egg on my face. Only three years old. And it was Cartman Kennedy saying “Put a chick in it, and make her lame and gay”.)

        I’m horrified, of course, that Parker and Stone would stigmatize disability representation, which is really important and … I’m not able to keep a straight face when I say that, am I?

        Anyway, there is of course the joking response thought that Parker and Stone ruined their original artistic masterpiece midway by adding female characters, and implying that some of the adult characters are homosexual. (I was actually surprised to learn that Parker and Stone are apparently not homosexual. Apparently coming out of California as an adult refugee is a bit more of a harrowing experience.)

        Before I looked up the Kennedy joke, I was wondering what a South Park with no female characters would be like, and wound up imagining a completely different show, that is maybe hogwarts crossed with a US junior military academy. (Really, it is more a set of skits involving a diversity of male instructors.)

        (And of course I invent an alternate historical timeline for it, that is absurd and whimsical, and I’m pretty sure I just include a bunch of space aliens that are cosmetically different humans and came into the timeline between the 1920s and 1990s. Anyway, the following things should never exist, much less in the same setting. The American Co-Prosperity Sphere. The American British East Indies Company. The American Dutch East Indies Company.)

        Anyway, the students are more or less Americans first, humans second, students third, and wizards fourth at the highest.

        I will say, that I don’t identify as having an imagination these days, largely from depression at the fact that the skillset I spent the last years on is still one where I haven’t put in enough work on the basics to do very much with.

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    2. Precisely. But they continue to run with the “the left is creative, the right is stodgy and hidebound, not to mention hidey and stodgebound” idea because that’s what they were taught, and they have never questioned what they were taught. (If they did, they wouldn’t have a job anymore).

      Speaking of not questioning what you’re taught, another common failing is thinking the world is still what it was back when you were young. (Look at all the leftist protestors thinking they’re still in the 1970’s). I’ve heard religiously-conservative speakers (preachers or commentators) advancing suggestions that would have been a good idea in the 1990’s, but the world of 2023 or 2024 or 2025 is much different than the world of 1995. They’re still talking about social issues that were a big deal in 1995, but don’t have a thing to say to help kids resist the social pressures of today (they have lots to say to help kids not have sex before marriage, but don’t say anything to tell kids “hey, those people telling you you’re probably trans? Don’t listen to them, here’s why they’re wrong” because they’re just not aware of the messages that kids are receiving now: they think high school is still like it was in 1995 when they graduated).

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      1. Take ‘there is no highlander 2’, and imagine someone dishonest and delusional enough that they have convinced themselves that there is no skinsuiting, because they are convinced of things like ‘there was only one star wars movie’, and so forth.

        Such a person could be hard to have discussions with.

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