There’s a bit of a problem with the group of transhumanists we have around nowadays. A fair number of them are merely passive, accepting, waiting for the next change. I realize that not everyone has the time or energy to commit to any kind of action, but I’ve seen the issue raised of “how about we, y’know, do something about this?” and someone pipes up, “I prefer transhumanism as a philosophical movement!” and everyone starts agreeing and saying politics is a dangerous practice full of -isms and so on and so forth that is corrupting to Pure Ideals. Some say, “well, I think everything is inevitable” and thereby justify their non-involvement, to great applause.
This is a non-productive stance. We owe it to our selves and our future to work to change it to one that is better. No force is unstoppable, and no philosophy is pure. (788 words)
Why do we think the “freedom to change your body” is assured, and will
not become “actually, you have to change your body in this specific
way”?
YES YES YES YES YES
As a trans woman, witnessing the rise of the “low T” industry has been fascinating – and more than a little frustrating. The complex that’s emerged here is seemingly designed to ensure that as many men as possible will be on prescription testosterone. A man might feel tired, and he happens to see a commercial about how this could be “low T”. He’ll go to a site like IsItLowT.com, and a quiz that might be no more accurate than a coin flip will tell him to see his doctor. And he’ll make an appointment at his local “low T clinic”, where even normal ranges aren’t considered high enough. Before you know it, we’ve got a billion-dollar market on our hands.
But many trans people require treatment involving sex hormones as well. As Dr. Abraham Morgentaler writes, “It could be said that testosterone is what makes men, men. It gives them their characteristic deep voices, large muscles, and facial and body hair, distinguishing them from women.” So it’s no surprise that trans men would often want more testosterone, and trans women would often want to get rid of theirs and replace it with estrogen.
Yet our experiences of engaging with the medical system could not be more different from that of cis men seeking treatment for low T. A spokesman for AbbVie described campaigns like IsItLowT.com as “disease state awareness initiatives”. But there are no major marketing initiatives raising awareness of transition treatments, or running commercials suggesting that if you’re tired and depressed, you might be transgender. None of these businesses are promoting websites about gender dysphoria, or offering unhelpful quizzes that tell a significant fraction of cis people to talk to their doctor about transitioning. And there are no multi-state chains of clinics focusing exclusively on transition treatments – let alone telling cis people that even if they’re healthy, transitioning can make them feel even better.
There is no overbroad promotion of trans medications – because most of the time, we don’t even have access to the basics. Medical transition is recognized as effective and necessary by the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Unlike “low T”, transitioning isn’t the subject of any real medical controversy. But if you haven’t yet realized you’re trans, you’re not going to learn about it from a commercial break during Monday Night Football.
[http://genderanalysis.net/2014/09/low-t-a-tale-of-two-hormones-gender-analysis-01/](Low T: A Tale of Two Hormones)
Any technology will be co-opted by normativity unless people actively pump against entropy.
Every tool of our liberation will turn into yet another prison if we don’t constantly work to liberate ourselves.
The system will always find a creative way to fuck you over because it is just so slightly biased against even acknowledging that someone like you might ever exist.
Right now, we are already having impressive ways to seize control of our bodies, and those ways are hypocritically regulated to reinforce, not undermine, the oppressive structures that surround us.
(this is also one of the reasons why I find the ideas of a state-run queer/feminist/anti-tradition social engineering conspiracy utterly laughable; you haven’t seen but a tiny fraction of the diversity we could have if human creativity was genuinely unleashed from its shackles!)
@socialjusticemunchkin, you were recently talking about a libertarian approach to human genetic engineering, perhaps you would be interested in the dialogue conducted by @davidsevera under way at veracities.online on this very subject.
Given the number of libertarians and libertarian-leaning folk in these parts I am curious how the precautionary side of the debate will be received and whether anyone is willing to jump in and play devil’s advocate!
I sorta would want to argue about this, but my issues are about possible negative consequences rather than certainties.
In truth, I don’t think it should be categorically forbidden, but think some caution is in order. One big issue is that the argument here is over a hypothetical we’re still a not at with consequences that won’t become apparent for a while. Honestly, the thing I would most want is for people not to oversell it.
Precautiones is all about the precautionary principle, after all! :)
There are some possible tragedy of the commons effects, as with existing issues like sex-selective abortion, which is just an extreme case of parents exercising choice over the genetics of their children.
(Also accidentally causing human extinction when parents universally choose mutations which boost IQ by ten points but also turn out to cause sterility, oops).
Yeah, one the big ones is: “We still don’t really understand the genome or the mind very well, please don’t accidentally make an entire generation of psychopaths“
It’s definitely too soon to know anything for certain. I think it’s interesting if not necessarily too useful at the moment to think through the potential pitfalls and probable dynamics as sort of a roadmap.
I’d imagine that, at least at first (and possibly for quite a long time?), any alterations to the genome would be made by selecting from within preexisting natural variation. Most personality traits are influenced by countless genes, so it’s not likely that we’d hit upon some weird combination of alleles that led to psychopathy, but there’s no guarantee of what might happen if we push the distribution of a given trait dramatically in one direction. Certainly I’d hope we have an understanding of how various pathologies arise well before making any major changes on a large scale, and I’d hope the research moves fairly slowly.
Libertes all the way.
My anarcho-utopian side says that letting children pursue grievances against their parents (instead of treating them as almost property like now) would be a far better solution than having men with guns kidnap or ransom people who try to do different things than what the mob wants them to do.
My cynical pragmatist side says: “Hello, convicted fucking criminal speaking; if the PoliceMob ransomed me forestradiol, how in hell would I trust them not to fuck up regulating genetic engineering just as horribly?” They can pry CRISPR from my cold, metallic upload hands once I can just sudo straight to my root account, but until then I will not surrender one inch of bodily autonomy.
Yes, there will be terrible consequences if we let parents CRISPR their kids freely, but the only way to reduce the obvious consequences would be to sweep them under the rug and turn them into even more terrible but just less-visible consequences with an FDA of genetic engineering. Sure, kids won’t have two heads, but neither will they have very useful augmentations. I’m not expecting anyone to start shooting bees or lightning from their fingertips so this is kind of a no-brainer.
Seriously, the things the system does to trans people or drug users are very illuminating of how it “wants” to treat all unpopular self-modifications and exercisings of bodily autonomy: with brutal repression and giving in only as little as it can. I won’t make its job one bit easier by consenting to such things instead of resisting all the way. I trust a free society to do better than the state, because the bar is set so low I’d need the help of an oil company to reach it (snark intended).
People in the comments of the latest SSC are already pointing out that he seems to be understating the possible dangers of coordinated “meanness”*, but more worrisome to me is the flip side: if coordination is the minimum bar, then you should never be assertive or contrary unless you can convince a big enough** group that you’re in the right. Sure, argue all you want*** for your beliefs, but until you’ve won don’t you dare act on it, that would be unsafe and unstable!
A slave who escapes to freedom, a gay couple holding hands in an intensely homophobic community, a doctor in, say, Massachusetts refusing to perform an abortion, a vegetarian declining meat served to them, etc. can all be in violation of this coordination rule. How do we decide which are OK to do? At some point, you have to get below the meta level and actually evaluate the moral object level situation at hand. It’s true that people have made horrible choices based on their object level moral beliefs****, but hiding behind abstraction and symmetry isn’t actually a viable option much of the time.
* Accepting the mean/nice dichotomy as somehow important in morality is another issue here
** And who decides what “big enough” is here?
*** If you’re lucky enough to live in a society with free speech norms… otherwise, I guess you’re limited to private agitation among people who you’re confident won’t be hurt by your arguments?
**** It’s also true that people have made horrible choices based on their meta level moral beliefs, so.
If only we had a very easy heuristic for deciding when something is an actual violation of important rules and when something is just people wanting to be assholes to unpopular people… something like “auto-determination” or “bodily self-nomy” or something like that…
On the other hand, we should feel mostly safe around people who agree that meanness, in the unfortunate cases where it’s necessary, must be coordinated. There is no threat at all from pro-coordination skinheads except in the vanishingly unlikely possibility they legally win control of the government and take over.
I admit that this safety is still only relative. It hinges on the skinheads’ inability to convert 51% of the population. But until the Messiah comes to enforce the moral law directly, safety has to hinge on something. The question is whether it should hinge on the ability of the truth to triumph in the marketplace of ideas in the long-term across an entire society, or whether it should hinge on the fact that you can beat me up with a baseball bat right now.
This really makes me want to scream “check your privilege” because as a trans person I can’t feel the safety of only skinheads being interested in coordinating meanness against me. For fuck’s sake I’m a convicted criminal already just for trying to exercise my bodily autonomy in ways that the rest of the population has shown itself extremely interested in coordinating meanness against.
If they can ban unprescribed estradiol the system has way too much power and needs to be destroyed immediately. Okay, not quite, but it really needs to RIGHT FUCKING NOW MAKE IT STOP.
People should not be able and/or allowed to coordinate meanness against other people simply exercising their bodily autonomy except in really specific cases like anti-vaxers (who willfully expose others to clear harm so the principle of “it’s okay if you don’t harm anyone else” still holds!).
But on the other hand these “technolibertarians” don’t actually seem to be that libertarian. In fact, I get very strong “these are the exact same people who built the nordic eugenics programs” vibes from them. The same naive “I can run people’s lives for them” progressivist elitist attitude, which in business simply either results in a product that solves someone’s problems, or bankrupty, but which in government has historically had the failure mode of forcibly sterilizing about 1% of the population. They don’t seem to reject the idea of running other people’s lives for them, but rather simply to think that they could do a better job at it.
There is a very serious difference though: They do not impose this on you from the barrel of a gun which is very unlike most eugenics programs.
It is becoming harder and harder to have a social life without giving
Zuckerberg
acces to your private data, but at least he isn’t hiring people to show up at your house with uniforms and truncheons because you decided to stay away from him.
Is there a potential problem? Absolutely! Power, a lot of power, is concentrating into a very small area. If they ever decide that they should use the power of the state to impose on you, it will be easy for them. So far, they haven’t.
Yes, this is currently true. But the mindset seems to be the same, and refraining from such violence doesn’t seem to be the product of principles but rather of opportunity and situation, and that is why the idea of those people taking over the government is frightening. Not as frightening as the idea of Actual Democracy where the bottom 50% in informedness actually have 50% of all power, but frightening nonetheless. It might be better than what we have now, but it would be staggeringly sub-optimal with some very bad failure modes that only the less-inherently-coercive nature of business is keeping in check.
If those people ever start doing a significant amount of democratic politics, I’d expect such failure modes to emerge relatively quickly. The desire to use the state to optimize others, and the ideology of interconnectedness that legitimizes intrusions into people’s personal autonomy are there, and have the potential to turn really ugly and oppressive if combined with bias and lack of hard-to-transmit information about other people’s situations (which the STEM class is displaying in staggering abundance).
And politics happens outside the state as well. Facebook may be well within their rights to require “real names”, but this has massive knock-on effects in outing people and exposing them to stalkers and abusers etc. and may result in someone else showing up at one’s house with the means, motive and opportunity to do violence. And Facebook may be allowed to set their own policies, but banning nudity while allowing violence and hate speech is not apolitical. It’s not even a Grand Principled Stand for freedom of expression; it’s simply a rather cynical acquiescence to certain norms over others, with certain outcomes instead of some different ones.
The desire to optimize without thoroughly understanding shows very well in the real name policy. So many not!white-upper-middle-class-men have expressed that such policies have certain predictable results, due to which it has recently been made less stringent which imo shows that the entire situation could have been avoided if Facebook had been a bit less activist about things it didn’t know enough of, right away instead of having to be told it with a backlash and a lot of innocent people getting hurt. Just because I don’t want to make things worse by having PoliceMob be able to get involved in this doesn’t mean that I consider such private policies to be above scrutiny and criticism.
Probably hedonic utilitarianism tbh. I would say suicide rights but there seem to be quite a few closet supporters. Or are you sending this in the hopes of getting a more provocative answer?
If you want us to not be closeted, I support suicide rights. Not because I’m actually pro-suicide, but rather because the preventative measures appear to be way worse than the disease. Also, every time people campaign for more bodily autonomy, people accuse them of basically legalizing suicide, sooo…
^– This is me also. I have never been suicidal but I have been moderately depressed and knowing that my state was only “moderate,” I absolutely support the ability of people who are somehow capable of feeling even worse to stop feeling worse.
Suicide_rights.support.uncloset.activate
I don’t want people to die, and I will certainly seek to build a world worth living in, but autonomy is always the first principle. If you want people to not die, how about making life bearable instead of setting the lower bound for its horribleness artificially low with non-consensual barriers to exit? Nobody else shall be allowed to control anyone’s life or death.
This shouldn’t be so hard; letting people to be excessively miserable without a way out is a really powerful way to have miserable people around (mostly in institutions, where they are under the power and control of someone else), whereas if people were allowed to kill themselves and people who wished them to not kill themselves weren’t allowed to take away that choice, they would be forced to implement more creative and human-flourishing-conductive solutions to people dying.
Once again, personal autonomy creates a superior incentive structure while allowing coercion destroys everything beautiful.
Okay, lately I’ve been becoming more and more suspicious about the techno-libertarianism/utopianism that seems to be increasingly popular in silicon valley and among the STEM culture more broadly, including the corners of the internet I frequent.
There seems to be a very anti-democratic strain to this sort of thinking. Like, the motivation seems to be to develop technology in such an unrestricted and unregulated way as to get around those annoying things like democracy, politics, and culture, in order to create broad based, systemic, and, in their eyes, positive changes to society.
Let our Virtuous Intelligent STEM Heroes break free of the shackles of democracy and government and politics and culture so they can go forth and lead us into a new and Better age with their genetic engineering, AI, big data (and cough constant surveillance cough), private foundations, and so on.
And this trend makes me nervous and suspicious. I don’t think STEM people are any more virtuous, wise, or knowledgeable about ethics as anybody else, but I feel like a lot of technolibertarians/utopians think they are, probably based on some very one-dimensional idea of what intelligence is whereby if you are smart enough to do math well you are obviously smarter at ethics and politics too. I worry that really it’s just one very-self-confident group that is already very powerful, in its technology and its wealth, advocating much more power for itself so that it can impose its (not obviously correct or better than all other) value system on the masses through the technology it creates without any oversight or checks.
It’s actually kinda authoritarian, albeit in a non-standard way, despite being couched in the language of libertarianism.
I agree the cluster you’re talking about isn’t perfect, but - have you talked to actual normal people? They already have too much power, and we’re lucky they don’t have more. Given their authoritarianism, puritanism, status quo bias, sacred values, pathological egalitarianism, etc, routing around these kinds of people is good.
To a first approximation, you’ll get closer to the truth in ethics by adopting a negative “skeptical” strategy towards other people’s moral claims than by making your own positive theories. And at least the technolibertarian cluster is decent at that.
As for it being authoritarian, that’s the same kind of conservative relativism that Eastern European national conservatives (e.g. Putinists) talk about when they complain about the West forcing homosexual equality down their throats. Rejecting other people’s (in this case, the masses’) imposition of power is libertarian and not at all authoritarian, and that’s what’s happening here.
I’m not exactly a central example but I felt like this post was talking about me, so it probably is.
Democracy has a very anti-me attitude so I don’t see why I should have anything but an anti-democratic attitude, when said anti-democraticness simply consists of “don’t impose your values on me no matter how much you think you know better than I do”. Because when people call for democracy on topics such as genetic engineering, I hear “let’s have the mob vote on promethea’s body”. I’m usually correct in hearing that.
But on the other hand these “technolibertarians” don’t actually seem to be that libertarian. In fact, I get very strong “these are the exact same people who built the nordic eugenics programs” vibes from them. The same naive “I can run people’s lives for them” progressivist elitist attitude, which in business simply either results in a product that solves someone’s problems, or bankrupty, but which in government has historically had the failure mode of forcibly sterilizing about 1% of the population. They don’t seem to reject the idea of running other people’s lives for them, but rather simply to think that they could do a better job at it.
Sure, they are better than the mob, but these technoprogressives seem to be other-optimizing way too hard and trying to replace democratic coercion with economic-cultural coercion which is not that much of an improvement.
The culture is good at solving white upper-middle-class men’s problems, and other people’s problems as far as they resemble white upper-middle-class men’s problems, but they are worse in solving even white upper-middle-class women’s problems, in a way that would have been perfectly predictable if they had had a healthy dose of austrian economics as a background assumption. The anti-democraticness of “I don’t consent to being paternalized by the mob” is not the anti-democraticness of “people should be paternalized by my culture and company, not the mob”.
Carson + Paul is obviously the best choice. Heal the world + never worry about being sick or getting STDs + end the drug war. Only downside is spending three hours a day praying, which is honestly the easiest downside to deal with.
Also I think Paul’s running mate bonus is supposed to say “decriminalization” in the last paragraph.
Kasich is better than Carson I think. If you have a legion of 11 million loyal followers willing to heed your beck and call you could do pretty much anything and it would be a lot more fun than standing around all day touching people and feeling guilty every second that you’re doing anything else
I’m trying to figure out why Ted’s running mate bonus is supposed to be a good thing lol
I mean you could probably earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a day curing AIDS and cancer if you really just wanted to use it on yourself. Which is arguably just as good if not better than having 11 million loyal followers.
Or you could tax the ohioans just a few dollars a day each to earn a hundred times more.
Assuming “Ohio” means the legal state of Ohio, and not “the territory which currently forms the state of Ohio”, Kasich/Paul is totally OP and broken.
First, I legalize individuals and communities choosing which state to belong to democratically. The other states may whine, but governance only with the consent of the governed doesn’t violate basic rights, so with Paul I can totally do it.
Then I end the drug war. In Ohio, because I’ve legalized states setting their own drug laws.
I decriminalize states setting their own immigration rules, and open the borders in Ohio, defining ohioans as “anyone present in Ohio, or who announces their decision to join Ohio, or who has previously fulfilled either condition and has not renounced their ohioanness” (thus, making me immune to assassinations as anyone who would try to do it would have to travel to Ohio, become ohioan, and stop wanting to assassinate me and start wanting to protect me instead).
Then I implement a basic income in Ohio (for those who have been ohioans for a sufficient amount of time, as I have previously suggested). And all the other cool stuff, in Ohio.
Everyone would give anything for the cause, so I ask the people to be excellent to each other, and otherwise be free to do whatever they want as long as they don’t deprive others of the same right (but if they wish to give to charity they really should prioritize EA instead of Make-a-Wish). Crime in Ohio plummets to zero, and so does poverty, deprivation, and coercion. The economy gets an immense boom from the immigrants, and the abolition of zero-sum and negative-sum bullshit games, and all people working together for their prosperity, like a weird libertarian (or, in fact, full-blown anarchist in all but name) version of North Korea’s propaganda films come true.
The obvious consequence is that a lot of people would want to be a part of Ohio. Just as planned. It won’t take long until Ohio has a population of approximately 200 million and covers a vast fractal shape encompassing most of the major cities.
Then I become the president of the US in the most overwhelming election since Washington, seize control of all brances of the government, and turn my Paul powers to international law instead. Rinse repeat with a bit more restraint to not provoke a nuclear war, and I’ll soon have acquired most of the Americas, the major liberal cities of Europe, and vast swathes of territory in Africa as well (I’m deliberately not touching Russia or China because that way lies armageddon), in this only-nominally-stateful community of freedom and dignity.
It’s immune to invasions because open borders mind control magic, it’s immune to terrorism because surely you wouldn’t want to hurt your fellow ohioans, it’s immune to pretty much everything except ICBMs. For ICBMs my policy will be a clear and ruthless MAD if attacked, but otherwise non-interference in the affairs of the other superpower and the little regional Shitholistan with a superiority complex propped up by its ridiculous nuclear arsenal. In fact, I can afford a comparably submissive foreign policy, letting Russia pick the arctic oil and China get whatever gas fields it wants because our anarchist regime is too rich to care about such slim pickings.
We’re going to outer space instead. All the labor and ingenuity currently wasted in pointless things will be redirected in a program of technology and space colonization (and AI research but I’m assuming no FAI because it kind of cuts everything short and turns things boring). We’re going to cure all the diseases, conquer the Moon, Mars, and everywhere. We’re going to win.
A wise man once asked: “Why does everything always end in world domination with you guys?”
The rationalist answered: “Have you ever tried giving us a scenario that did not have world domination built in?”
To the US I came seeking fortune But they’re making me work til I’m dead The congressmen have it so easy The bankers put gold on their bread The people of the world are so hungry But think what a feast there could be If we could create an anarchist state That cared for the people like me:
I am the man who arranges the blocks That descend upon me from up above. They come down and I spin them around Til they fit in the ground like hand in glove. Sometimes it seems that to move blocks is fine And the lines will be formed as they fall - Then I see that I have misjudged it! I should not have nudged it after all.
Can I have a long one please? Why must these infernal blocks tease?
I am the man who arranges the blocks That continue to fall from up above. Come Ohioan! To the every last one! An individualist regime of peace and love. I work so hard in arranging the blocks But the landlord and taxman bleed me dry But Ohio will rise! We will not compromise For we know that the old regime must die.
Long live freedom, burn the flags! We salute the orange and black!
I am the man who arranges the blocks That continue to fall from up above. The food on your plate no concern of the state An individualist regime of peace and love. I have my choice in arranging the blocks Under promethean rule, what you say goes. The rule of the game is our rights are the same And my blocks can make my own-shaped rows.
Long live Ohio! It loves you! Sing these words, you know what it’ll do…
I am the man who arranges the blocks That are made by the men from Shitholistan. They came two weeks ago and back there they won’t go Now they’re working to our world conquest plan. I am the man who arranges the nukes That will make all the Putin keep away The hopes have come back, and ‘Murica is Black! Let us point all our dollars at EA.
We shall live forever more! We can start an altruism war!
I am the man who arranges the blocks That are building a highly secret base. Hip hip hurray for the AS of A! We are sending our men to outer space.
I think John Kasich needs errata.
Okay, Kasich is nerfed down to “the physical area which currently corresponds to a state called “Ohio””.
Rubio/Paul it is then. I can convince most people to do most things, now let’s see who was the person whose superpower was “win-win” which synergizes very well with this… right, it was me. And let’s check who has been whining about the state criminalizing all kinds of things pointlessly… again, how convenient.
So I’m starting in SF this time because Ohio sucks if I can’t make it encompass non-sucky places. I can convince most people to support my bostadsrett housing reform, I can decriminalize (important! no legalize because legalize means regulation, just decriminalize) drugs, sex work, immigrants, etc. in around 5 minutes, and most importantly:
“would you kindly introduce me to the most influential person you can, tomorrow”
I’ll reach Musk in a week, two at most. Won’t even need to wouldyoukindly him to work together on things. Instead, I’ll wouldyoukindly the asshole billionaires, like Trump, to donate money to EA; the rest of the world I’ll just convince.
I’ll wouldyoukindly the government (a private plane and convincing everyone that I, as a famous and trusted person, don’t need to be metal-detectored) to govern less, both at home and abroad. I’ll wouldyoukindly Putin and whoever is in charge in China.
More subtlety than with automagical Kasich, but even then I’d be a very strong thumb on the scales and the best lobbyist ever. I’ll convince people that they should not regulate everything; that mosquitoes should be eradicated; that copyright and patents should be abolished (with a bit of wouldyoukindlying the key people as well); that people should share 3d-printers to provide necessities to everyone instead of having horrible humiliating, degrading, and economically harmful means-tested bullshit systems; that we should go to space and mine asteroids; that we shouldn’t tolerate powerful people kicking around poor and unpopular people and systematically depriving them of their land, labor, stuff, health, and lives with the guns of PoliceMob; that we should build robots; and that people should be more excellent to each other, etc.
So basically immortal robot supercharged William Penn. It’s still going to be a very me-shaped world in just a few years. That’s if “obey me for the rest of your life” is already assumed to be out of the question (I could use that on people who have forfeited their deontological protection from such things by doing sufficiently evil things).
Seriously, people don’t realize how easily things lead to world domination. All in all, the game is really inbalanced; Fiorina is just a shitty choice, Paul is stronger as a secondary than as a primary, so is Bush. Trump is strictly inferior to Rubio, etc.
It’s kinda stupefying how many people when they learn something about other human beings that they had never heard of anything like it before and never imagined anything like it before confuse “I just learned” with “this is brand new and is an aberration that has never existed in the entire universe before now. I must decide if it should be allowed.”
Also how few people react with “wow, that’s cool. I live on a rock in space with these creatures just like me who do things I could never have imagined”.
Sometimes I feel like people say “diversity is interesting” but they really mean “I like when I learn a new thing that is still enough like all the old things to be comprehensible to me”
Like do you actually think it’s great that this world has people who suspend themselves from body piercings and people who sexualise balloons and people who dress up as dogs for fun on the weekends? Because I legit do. Or do you just think it’s quirky that some people have pink hair?
My moral philosophy rests upon a foundation of making more variety in the Universe so we all have decent lives. I might, possibly, never suspend myself from body piercings or wear an animal costume, but I’d be a monster if I stopped people from doing that sort of thing. Yes, I do take acceptance, enabling, and encouragement to an extreme (had serious conversations with @woodswordsquire about whether creatures that experience suffering constantly should be made in morphological freedom utopia), but in a Universe where humans tend to be horrible to anything that’s a bit different, there needs to be some balance.
It’s kinda stupefying how many people when they learn something about other human beings that they had never heard of anything like it before and never imagined anything like it before confuse “I just learned” with “this is brand new and is an aberration that has never existed in the entire universe before now. I must decide if it should be allowed.”
Reblogging especially for this. These kind of people are Worst Humans and should stop doing it.
Also, please don’t make constantly suffering creatures in morphological freedom utopia. Morphological freedom utopia is not for suffering-creation purposes.
I have… mixed feelings about this article? For one, it denigrates both (admittedly masturbatory) avant-garde works and popular works in favor of a very narrow view of High Art, which I’m not fond of; there is also, perhaps unintentionally, a tone of nostalgia and longing for kings and robber barons, their “better taste” justifying their equally terrible (if not worse!) political/economic actions.
It’s an interesting topic but the actual execution feels very poor + simplistic.
Yeah this article takes a bunch of interesting topics and does just about the least interesting thing it could with them.
The trend among the super rich to seek out populist cultural experiences is important, but not in the way that the author thinks it is. The fact that dictators listen to the same pop stars as their citizens but can also afford glamorous private concerts with those stars says something about the way displays of power work in the modern age. There’s a reason they’re not building opera halls, and it’s not just a matter of taste.
That… doesn’t seem quite right.
(I remember opera in recent times as being popular with Literally Everybody Who Can Perform The Upper Class Identity Temporarily, which can be anywhere from the top 10% to top 50% of the population, and individual songs or light opera, and burlesque that grew up in parody of it, being even more widely popular)
There would seem to be three or four broad categories: Modern Popular, Traditional, Modern Intellectual, and the Anti-Art offshoot of Modern Intellectual.
Modern Popular is usually opposed to Traditional on the basis of modern snobbery, but from my (Reactionary Reconstructionist) point of view Modern Popular is actually pretty close to Traditional, at least when the totally unmoored wierd shit category is removed.
Also a lot of people forget that the lower-class forms of Traditional ever existed.
A fucking ugly yacht painted in dazzle camoflauge is opposed to both Traditional and to Modern Popular.
Maybe it’s because I’m feeling pretty sick right now but I’m not really clear how this disagrees with my post. I meant that having your name attached to an opera used to be an effective way of showing you’re a big deal, but these days having Beyonce play at your wedding works much better. The article attributing everything to personal taste is missing the meaty stuff. Not my best phrasing up there though.
Edit: okay just reread and I can totally see how my post came across. I didn’t mean to imply that opera was never popular.
Excuse my amateur history and sociology here, but isn’t that just a facet of the decreasing popularity of patronage* systems in general? Rich people used to show off their wealth by sponsoring artists and musicians long-term, but now it’s more fashionable to shop around and to know what you’re getting before you buy it.
This seems like a result of consumerism (I guess this is the best word available for the not-capitalism-but-associated-with-it thing that academics call capitalism or neoliberalism sometimes?) and larger urban centers. There are far more works of art and entertainment available, so why would you sponsor a single artist or musician for years when there are hundreds of equally deserving creators out there? Especially since it’s become much higher-status to be seen as a buyer and consumer.
*Patreon is a really far cry from Maecenas and Vergil for reasons I won’t go into because I’m tired and should probably be writing proofs not shitty history speculation. Mostly just the degree of commitment and the level of showing off involved. Also, not to be confused with the Roman patronage system that was actually called a patronage system–that was more like a hierarchical kin network without the blood relations, and had nothing to do with art.
Put bluntly, the upper class just aren’t as classy as they used to be.
So too has public funding for high art taken a beating. While Americans might yearn for the sort of well-funded public arts programs they imagine Europeans prioritize, the reality is much bleaker. Despite Europe’s zealous emphasis on promoting a rich culture for a united continent, the European Union is constantly hacking away at centuries-old institutions in the name of belt-tightening.
I am quite irritated at these “old Art is dying because nobody wants to pay for it” thinkpieces.
Austerity is hurting opera? Why should I care, austerity is hurting people too and people are far more important than opera.
The state isn’t funding enough High Art?
Let the people choose the art they want to have, and if they are Wrong, anyone is free to try to do differently. Every euro in public funding for the arts is an euro not in the pockets of basic income recipients, and the stuff we europeans use the art money on is pretty bullshit. The government has no place deciding what art is worthy of support and what isn’t.
