The US has 338M people and they are claiming $763B PER YEAR for art. That's $2257 PER YEAR for every man, woman, and newborn infant in America. Total BS. Even if you include music and movies and TV, this is still way too high.
It's also dishonest, since this is a politically motivated attempt to counter cuts in NEA funding, yet very little of TV, movies, or music is sponsored by the NEA, which just goes to show how unimportant it is except to pseudo-elites who think that a urinal in a museum is art as long as the rabble don't approve of it.
Without the arts there is no content. Goodbye internet, radio, TV & films. Telcos and the consumer electronics industry? A tiny fraction of its current size. You have to be truly delusional to think that $2K per year is some sort of low-ball number for this. If anything this number is minimizing the second-order effects.
You've missed my point entirely. The OP is playing a game by defining arts (clown mask on) to be all of the entertainment industry (and citing that size in the headline) while supporting an argument for (clown mask off now) the NEA, which is an organization for the Fine Arts, not Katy Perry videos and iPhone apps.
Of particular concern to some was the use of Palantir as a tool that could aid investigators both in connecting suspected gang members to others in the community, and in identifying people deemed at high risk of either committing gun violence or being the victim of it.
??? Isn't that precisely what the tool is meant to do?
Thank you so much for reminding me of his writing. I fell in love with a Greek woman on Crete many years ago. It was one of the most painful times of my life when I realized that I could not stay there with her, or she with me. Cavafy's poem Ithaca has haunted me whenever I'm reminded of it:
Reading this, I couldn't help thinking of an observation P.J. O'Rourke made after visiting the DDR ("East Germany"): "It takes a special kind of economic system to turn a nation full of Germans into a third-world country".
Nails it. Great quote. And you can't reverse the damage of this economic system overnight, especially when almost all of the young people willing to build and create something new have moved away.
The last part of your reply is especially important: East Germany is most likely the blue print of what will happen to the southern portions of the European Union. I am surprized this is not discussed more widely. Deindustrialization with most of the educated young generation moving away. This trend is hard to reverse.
> Alito concurring...That's very interesting language coming from conservative Chief Justice Roberts.
Your implication seems to be that conservatives are the ones pushing weak privacy laws. I'll grant that many conservatives have been weak on privacy protection, which is one of the reasons that I'm a libertarian. But the primary parties arguing here for nearly unlimited cell phone search were "The Obama administration and the state of California, both of which sought to justify cell phone searches...".
That's not my implication at all. My point is simply that it's rare, for obvious reasons, for conservatives to invoke changes in the world as justification for, well anything.
"Conservative" generally means "skeptical of change". So it depends on how you look at it. I'd call myself conservative, and I want to conserve my 4th Amendment rights as I move from carrying papers to carrying digital data.
So you can say "the world has changed and now we have to protect cell phones" to say it's a progressive position, or "people still carry information and the government still can't search it without a warrant" to say it's a conservative one.
"Conservative" refers to the vague party/ideology that more smoothly (than "liberalism", that is) allows for-profit coroprations to co-opt the government to achieve the regulatory situation for maximal wealth accumulation. It refers to nothing else. To pretend otherwise is to further facilitate the maximal wealth accumulation.
Not only is that unhelpful, it's also untrue. It doesn't capture the goals of the tea party movement for example.
It's true the outcomes of conservative ideology are often what you say, but that doesn't make it a goal anymore than the fact that there are welfare cheats makes cheating on welfare a goal of progressive politics.
"It doesn't capture the goals of the tea party movement for example." It doesn't have to, it just has to "capture" the reason that the movement gained popularity over any other movement. Theories explain why phenomena occur, it doesn't matter if the people who are part of the phenomena disagree.
Is there an adjective you use as (obviously incomplete) shorthand for your political viewpoints? Because I'm sure it could be similarly redefined using only its negative outcomes.
I, on the other hand, hope that the three men that Marquez's close friend Castro had executed for trying to get to the US on a boat will rest in peace. Not to mention all the dissidents who died in his prisons.
Marquez lived in Cuba and for decades witnessed the daily suffering and poverty of the Cuban people. The endless monitoring of Castro's secret police. The constant rationing of basic necessities (though not for Castro or Marquez, who lived lives of luxury).
He was a master of writing about the lives of the people of Latin America. But he walked the streets of Havana, saw what anyone could see, and never wrote about any of that. Perhaps he was too busy sharing a fine repast with Fidel and Raul to get around to it.
I have no love for Castro (maybe some contempt), but I think Marquez here is approximately as culpable as Shostakovich, which is to say not. He was a writer, not a reporter, and if we try to pull an artist down to the level of politics it's a lose-lose if we're successful.
On one hand, I largely agree with you, about the utility of holding someone responsible for what they didn't do, which would have been at great personal cost.
On the other hand, I believe Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would like to have a word with you. Out back, in the alley.
Seeing your comment downvoted just shows this cliched simpathy for the left that was a fad in the 60's and 70's for anyone who wanted to be perceived as an intellectual (sure it worked to get chix by then); its still kicking and alive it seems. By that time you could sell a scam that steals a nation resources as love for the poor.
But today after we know what happened in Cambodia, Ethiopia, North Korea - to cite a few - under comunist regimes; being a simpathizer of communism just can evidence either ignorance, lack of empathy and sensibility or attachment to an old hungover hipster fad.
That said, I enjoyed reading cien años de soledad but I also know that Macondo would be no better under communist rule.
I'm a guy, and I grew up pretty rural and it was not terribly uncommon for some of these ideas to float around. Many girls I knew were not taught anything at all except all the various religious negatives about women's reproductive bits and as they hit puberty had no idea what to do.
A few teachers in my high school took it upon themselves to provide a sort of underground sex-ed for some of the girls who couldn't get parental permission for the official classes.
There was a fairly large Pentacostal group at my high school (you may recognize them as guys dressed like 1920s farmers and girls with long hair and all denim floor length skirts) and this group of teachers were a virtual life-line for those girls. [1] [2]
1 - To get an idea of what the mindset is read this page and the comments http://www.themodestmomblog.com/2012/07/why-i-wear-skirts-al... and then meditate on why women growing up in this have a terrible lack of knowledge and misunderstandings about their bodies.
I don't want to make assumptions about gender on HN, but if you grew up female it was kind of hard to avoid. You can just search for "tampon virgin" and come up with a ton of sites and people that try to reassure girls that using a tampon doesn't mean you lose your virginity.
I also grew up in LA and not in the middle of some super conservative area, but my girlfriends used to freak the hell out when they needed to dip into my stash during emergencies and all they found were tampons. Sex ed until I took the high school edition didn't help much there either. It was only into high school/college that tampons were way more commonly used. Today I still have a mix of tampons and pads in my bathroom for anyone that needs it.
For the other stuff...idk. I hang out in /r/twoxsex and used to hang out on the VaginaPagina LJ community and read the hell out of Scarleteen among other resources. It's a bit self selecting, but there's a lot of myths that get busted often. One I can think of - I started hormonal birth control really early because I had very heavy+painful periods with iron deficiency anemia (like, passing out in the middle of the street bad) and my parents and I went through a couple different doctors that were all judgmental about a 13-14 year old on the pill. I eventually just went to Planned Parenthood for gynecology needs (amazing people!) and they were all understanding and hush hush because parents of other women would sometimes illegally pester them for more information. So there's the "young teen/woman on birth control must be having sex and not need it for anything else" bullshit right there. Another one: right now I have an IUD, and everyone feels the need to tell me about the one friend of a friend story about a uterine perforation - legitimately a risk, but not like it's an inevitability for everyone using the IUD. There's also the twist on the tampon virginity that involves the menstrual cup. I also like to talk about skipping periods since I used to do it for a few years, and so. many. people. think it's a terrible thing to do. Meanwhile every doctor I had since going to Planned Parenthood thought it was a good thing to do, and this year for the first time in ~14 years since hitting puberty I finally have normal levels of iron without making an effort to supplement it. It's pretty wild. So much of it is so everyday if you spend enough time around frustrated women that I almost forget that these are really big problems.
> if you grew up female it was kind of hard to avoid
>I also grew up in LA and not in the middle of some super conservative area
>So much of it is so everyday if you spend enough time around frustrated women
I grew up in a fundamentalist conservative family in the midwest who believed the earth was 5,000 years old. Even we thought the "tampons kill your virginity" thing was ludicrous. I can believe it's a problem in the third world, but suggesting it's a common modern day belief in a first world country like America seems a bit hard to believe.
(A lot of religious people are still weird about the pill, though.)
This is one of those unusual posts to which I have nothing of value to add, but feel compelled anyway to take the time to say that it's one of those insightful perspectives that I find inspiring.
Heidegger ... was member of the Nazi party throughout the war, in good standing at the beginning and bad standing at the end, but he never rebelled or retracted publicly -- complicated person.
He was not just another member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, he was Rector of Heidelberg University while Hitler was gambolling about Europe. Is "complicated person" what we're calling them these days? I can think of other words...
There are two ideas of deconstruction I find useful.
The first is basically Nietzsche,...
If it's from Nietzsche, then it isn't from deconstruction at all, so why attribute it to them? If instead you are saying that these are all ideas of deconstruction, then you're being arbitrary, I think. Walter Kaufmann, N's greatest interpreter and translator, attacked academics who did what I think you're doing here. They would perform exegeses of N's texts and then, oh happy day, find that N. supported their ideas in a preliminary way, then cite him as an authority and attach him to their ideology.
So when the Libertarians have an "objective" system that shows that markets are best in an objective way... they are all just protecting their jobs.
Umm, what jobs? The fraction of libertarians who get remunerated for their political beliefs is damn small. Since libertarian views are outside the mainstream, in some environments there is actually a real danger of being punished for refusing to conform to the norms of whatever sub-group the libertarian finds himself in. It's much easier in life to run with the herd. You don't end up being lunch as often.
The deeper problem with your comment is that you seem to be implying that N. was a relativist. He wasn't. See John T. Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology, for a solid refutation of this (common) claim.
Every metaphysics hides an implicit morality of the universe, and every morality hides an implicit and very down-to-earth will to power, and this will to power is a good thing and the drive of Life itself manifesting in human ideas. N's big example is Judeo-Christianity, and how by inventing a selfless morality a bunch of folks took over Western Civilization in very concrete ways.
I could "deconstruct" this all night long, but I'll keep this short.
1) N's ideas on the will to power were never fully worked out and settled, so it's difficult to say with certainty what he believed in many cases regarding W2P. That said, he seemed to believe that...
2) W2P isn't good or a bad thing, it just is, like gravity. Our moralities are reflections of some inner drives, all of which are manifestations of W2P. Those moralities that derive from an inner sense of fullness and overflowing N. judges to be good. Those moralities that derive from an inner sense of deficiency, self-loathing, and especially revenge, N. judges to be bad.
3) The early Jews and Christians were heavily persecuted by (variously) the Pharaohs and the Romans. The "slave moralities" they invented were quite different from the "master moralities" of the aristocratic Greeks. Slave moralities are motivated, at their core, by a drive for revenge against the people who brutalize them. Since they are slaves, they don't have power in this life to take their revenge, so they invent another life (the afterlife, the Thousand Year Reich, the Age of New Socialist Man, the Dar al Islam) in which they will enjoy pure happiness and 76 virgins and the "evil ones" (Pharaohs, Romans, Jews, Capitalist Exploiters, Infidels, the One Percent) will suffer (the Fires of Hell, Zyklon B, beheadings, property nationalization, starvation by Maoists (my wife had fun with this one), execution by the Khmer Rouge, etc.)
It's fascinating to watch all of this play out in America today, with Obama explicitly calling last October for his supporters (the core of which are the descendants of slaves who were brutalized by their owners) to "vote for revenge", the coming glorious age of Hope and Change, the coming destruction of the evil One Percenters (as soon as Obama and his fellow One Percenters finish their golf games on Martha's Vineyard), etc. [I suppose we should cheer up. I mean it's not like he's running a massive surveillance state and murdering American citizens and foreign innocents via drone strikes without judicial review while his propaganda media manufactures consent for his policies.]
> He was not just another member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, he was Rector of Heidelberg University while Hitler was gambolling about Europe.
He was rector for a year and then resigned. He kept his party membership current though. He spent the last years of the war digging trenches, so he wasn't inner circle in the least.
It's also dishonest, since this is a politically motivated attempt to counter cuts in NEA funding, yet very little of TV, movies, or music is sponsored by the NEA, which just goes to show how unimportant it is except to pseudo-elites who think that a urinal in a museum is art as long as the rabble don't approve of it.