> For example, do all people have a right to health care? No, because, in the extreme, it leads to logical contradictions with other rights. (E.g. Doctors being forced to provide care at gunpoint.)
In the same vein, people do not have a right to a fair trial--in the extreme, this would lead to a contradiction with other rights (e.g. judges being forced to practice law at gunpoint).
> people do not have a right to a fair trial--in the extreme, this would lead to a contradiction with other rights (e.g. judges being forced to practice law at gunpoint)
Could be avoided by restating it as "a right to be tried fairly or otherwise not tried". The right of the citizen to have crimes against him investigated and brought to justice, that's another matter.
Your counterpoint doesn’t make sense because the government establishes laws. A trial is an application of the laws of that government. The quality of a trial being “fair” is just a marketable quality of that government.
Healthcare, on the other hand, is not necessarily the government’s domain because people have the freedom to live unhealthily if they want. There is no law which says you must keep yourself healthy. How do you even measure that for different people? For what it’s worth, I think people should get universal healthcare because populations getting sick impacts productivity.
> From 2000 to 2015, the number of states with these punitive policies increased more than 2-fold from 12 to 25, and the number of states requiring health care professionals to report suspected prenatal drug abuse to child protective services or health officials increased from 12 to 23
and i know a policy isn't a law but the word punitive is right there, so
People take drugs recreationally, but that doesn’t always translate into worse health outcomes. The term “substance abuse” is also unnecessarily judgmental in this case because it assumes lack of self-control. Someone can be in control and take drugs, and not worsen their physical or mental health. But a growing fetus will be impacted by whatever drugs are taken by its bearer, either mother or surrogate (we don’t know). So I get the point you’re making, but the law you’re citing doesn’t work as a good enough counter example to my point (at least I don’t think so) because this law isn’t about the individual’s health, but about the fetal health.
I think a better counter example to my “there’s no law which requires health” statement are anti-smoking stipulations against people born after a certain year. So essentially, anti-smoking laws do make an assumption that you’ll get unhealthy if you smoke, and therefore you shouldn’t. However, policymakers can say that you’re not obligated to healthcare as a right because there are different laws which are already protecting your health, and they would be right in their own place.
The reason I think universal healthcare makes policy sense is that health outcomes are dependent on randomness. Someone can have bad genetics, or be born into environmental conditions which impact their health, both things which are random and not under personal control. I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave national productivity up to randomness, especially when environmental factors like pollution can have deterministic effects, like worsening population-level health outcomes. For a country as big as the US, healthcare should be left to the states to decide, but most states will find that providing healthcare will result in better productivity (I think).
> because this law isn’t about the individual’s health, but about the fetal health.
this is just twisting definitions. The law can't remove the fetus if the person carrying it is abusing drugs (or whatever), so the law applies to the person carrying the fetus. That is a "law that says you can't be unhealthy" and the reason is "because it hurts the fetus".
we also put people that have pica disorder into mental hospitals, because they eat things that are not healthy.
That's why the whole concept of rights is completely useless. It has no real metaphysical bearing and people just use it as an ever expanding wish list. There are only values and morals that arise from the synthesis of values and truths.
The notion of moral rights can be seen as a form of value and as such is about as workable as other notions of value e.g. virtue, duties, obligation and the good.
Your example proves my point. If there are no judges, the government has to let you go free. They don’t force anyone to become a judge.
A better example might be that your right to a jury trial conflicts with my right to freedom of movement, but the government explicitly resolves that contradiction by making it a crime to avoid jury duty.
Your example proves my point. If there are no judges, the government has to let you go free. They don’t force anyone to become a judge.
What about the victims' right to justice and to be secure against violations of their rights (bodily integrity and health, property, freedom of movement and flourishing)? If there are no judges and all the criminals are left to roam the streets, they are free to continue victimizing anyone they choose. Seems to me that these rights have a lot of mutually incompatible features. You can't provide for one person's rights without compelling action from another.
> But the case was thrown out in August 2023 — not for a lack of evidence, but because the Crown took too long to bring it to trial under a set of strict timelines that have reshaped the way criminal cases are handled since a landmark 2016 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Yes, but it's nonsense to equate identity with difficulty. The goth scene originated in a London nightclub, for goodness' sake (the Batcave). There are goths in every big city, and in a lot of cases they move to places _where the scene is_ so that they can participate.
Basically an uninteresting conclusion. Of course a "non-expert" reader isn't going to be able to distinguish between AI and Walt Whitman--a "non-expert" reader likely won't even know who Walt Whitman is. "Expertise" is needed to even make the question meaningful.
Fine art is a matter of nuance, so in that sense I think it does matter that a lot of the "human art" examples are aggressively cropped (the Basquiat is outright cut in half) and reproduced at very low quality. That Cecily Brown piece, for example, is 15 feet across in person. Seeing it as a tiny jpg is of course not very impressive. The AI pieces, on the other hand, are native to that format, there's no detail to lose.
But those details are part of what make the human art interesting to contemplate. I wouldn't even think of buying an art book with reproductions of such low quality--at that point you do lose what's essential about the art work, what makes it possible to enjoy.
That’s a great point, in a similar vein I routinely see people post photos on social media taken with their phone, side by side with a photo taken by a high end camera, saying “I bet you can’t tell the difference, expensive cameras are a waste of money when phones are so good”.
Well of course, you’re comparing 1.5 megapixels compressed JPEGs. If you display those photos on a large monitor - let alone print them - the differences will be immediately obvious.
Which do you think is cheaper to produce, agitprop or deep investigative reporting? If no one pays for news, which do you think will grow in proportion to the other?
What is passed off as "deep investigative reporting" is actually agitprop, especially when reporters interface with and are concerned with maintaining access to the national security apparatus.
Yet, at the same time, the same journalists think they're "defending democracy from darkness."
I hate that propaganda has become a thought-terminating cliche. First of all, it's not necessarily a bad thing. "Agitprop" is literally what brought the deeply isolationist Americans to finally act in World War II. Also, just because you suspect that some journalism from a publication is propaganda doesn't invalidate the usefulness of all journalism from that publication like the Washington Post's opioid database.
> "Agitprop" is literally what brought the deeply isolationist Americans to finally act in World War II.
I thought it was Pearl Harbor.
>just because you suspect that some journalism from a publication is propaganda doesn't invalidate the usefulness of all journalism
Usefulness for whom? If by useful you mean to manufacture consent to do whatever businesses and governments would have done if it weren't for the pesky public getting in their way, then yes, sure. We wouldn't have had the second Iraq war, or the first for that matter, if it weren't for the hard work of the journalists at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Japan wasn't stupid enough to rouse a sleepy giant for no reason. It's no coincidence that the majority America's western fleet was docked on tiny islands thousands of miles away from any then states. The US had also implemented an embargo and provided significant aid to the Allies through Lend Lease. If they didn't attack America during Pearl Harbor, they would attack a ship that's blockading critical oil shipments. Propaganda played a huge role in American's acceptance into these escalations [1].
> We wouldn't have had the second Iraq war
Yes, I knew you were alluding to this, which is why I brought up WWII as a counterexample. My point is that just because you think their geopolitical reporting was counterproductive doesn't change the value of their opioid coverage [2] which lead to multi-billion dollar lawsuits against CVS and Walgreens.
I understand your desire to connect the propaganda industry with the "last just cause"—83 years ago—but lying to the public is not virtuous.
Was it virtuous or justifiable for Jeffrey Gettleman at the New York Times to fabricate, out of whole cloth, stories of rape [1] to soft-shoe the genocidal policies of a foreign government? Who benefits?
Just because an author of the New York Times article made some angry tweets and some people disagree with her narratives doesn't mean that they were fabricated. That's besides the point though. If you're happy with the Intercept's reporting that gets heavily cited by the article you posted, does that mean you're happy to pay for it?
> Just because an author of the New York Times article made some angry tweets and some people disagree with her narratives doesn't mean that they were fabricated.
No, the fact that even the families of the victims say they fabricated stories about their daughters, and that they had no sources outside government propaganda mouthpiece, is what makes the stories fabricated.
Not sure that paying would make things better anyways. If everyone was paying then there would be enough revenue for the news to produce the real/biased reporting/agitprop that their customers demand.
> My point is that if a musician is good, they will earn money proportional to their success. If the argument that it's the promotion that makes them successful, then the argument is less correct today than ever before - the advent of the internet means there's no more strict radio slots etc, which is unavailable to an amateur or starting musician.
This is an unimaginative way of looking at things. For one thing, many people do still listen to the radio, where slots are still limited. Those who don't listen to the radio often listen to equivalents of the radio--Spotify or Apple Music playlists that are curated and quite likely involve the same kind of payola issues that the radio had.
It's the same structure: musicians reach their audience through a middleman that has an interest in promoting a particular group. Spotify is only a piece of this, you also have album promotion campaigns, brand tie-ins, and so on. (For example, did you know that the artist who plays the Superbowl half-time gets paid a pittance for it?)
> Even if you reset today's system - for argument's sake, we make everybody forget all previous musicians, and start from scratch - what would happen is that those musicians that are "good", measured in popularity, will garner more and more audience and popularity, leading to what looks like today's system (but just with perhaps a different person)
The whole premise of this is that there's a universal quality of "good" that you can assess for a particular musician. That's nonsense. Some people love Taylor Swift, others can't tolerate her. Some people find a Bartok string quartet sublime, others think it's just noise. There's no universality to appeal to here. At best you can create an average over the population--but that changes from time to time, place to place, demographic to demographic.
Popularity involves skill but also luck. That's why there are so many "one hit wonders": musicians who happen to be in the right place at the right time but are never able to repeat it. For every musician with a steady career, there are many of these.
> That's why my condition, if you wanted to equally distribute the profits of music making, is to segregate markets into small, non-overlapping segments. You will not be allowed to pay for or listen to music from another market segment. This way, no matter how good or popular a musician is, they only ever earn the maximal of their own (small) market. But i don't see why such a system is good, with the exception that some bad musicians gets to be the big fish in a small pond.
This is already the way genres work, with the difference that these segments are voluntarily chosen. There are people who listen to, for instance, modern classical and almost nothing else, or death metal and almost nothing else, etc.
I think a good system would be one that works like ours, but with more to cushion artists from the random contingencies of the market. A lot of this already exists--grants given to artists in areas that are deemed culturally valuable, for example. Laws placing minimum prices on music licensing for film, TV, etc. Probably there should be laws forcing Spotify to be more transparent about royalties and promotions as well.
I think his prose quality varies widely from work to work. Typically it's not great. In Atrocity Exhibition it's beyond bland, though--almost bureaucratic in its mechanical periphrases, repetitive, clinical and bizarre. I can't imagine that's not intentional. And Crash, if you can stomach it, is outright pungent. At times it reads like an airport novel, at other points it's hallucinatory. Most of the rest is written indifferently, interesting for the ideas but not the writing.
Surely a serious musician is going to want to create music that rewards attention, not music expressly built for distracted people on shitty speakers they can barely hear.
> Surely a serious musician is going to want to create music that rewards attention
Not always. Consider Robert Rich's very serious idea of "egoless" music which isn't intended to command attention but to leave space for the listener's own internal attention and creation.
In his sleep concerts listeners even fall in and out of unconsciousness, presumably experiencing some interesting dreams as well.
> music expressly built for distracted people on shitty speakers they can barely hear
An apt description for many things, from wax cylinders to AM radio to MP3 to to music played on smartphones. Which is to say: all popular music since the 1890s, "serious" or not.
In the same vein, people do not have a right to a fair trial--in the extreme, this would lead to a contradiction with other rights (e.g. judges being forced to practice law at gunpoint).
> I have to laugh, even as a liberal myself.
Probably not as much of one as you think.