Corvos
8d ago
How much work has there ever been for creative artists? I would bet that a solid 95% of art over the last 1000 years has been one of:
- Religious scene with fairly standardised iconography
- Portrait of commissioner or commissioner's loved one
- Pretty Landscape
Corvos
8d ago
FWIW I feel the same as you. I've been open that I would certainly have pressed that button when I was younger, and might now, and part of my resistance to trans stuff is that it's an infovirus that would have really fucked me up if it'd come ten, fifteen years earlier.
From that link:
To be clear, I never witnessed illegal behavior and never saw anyone who appeared underage in his presence.
One of the things that it's impossible for anyone in authority to say is that Epstein was not Jimmy Saville. Unlike our resident UK paedo, he wasn't going around children's hospitals and asking to meet the nice little boys. And even with Saville there's a fascinating reddit thread asking what the hell happened:
When someone has done something to endear themselves to the public, it can be hard to see what is really be going on and sometimes difficult to change that perception.
He fronted Top of the Pops at a time when music was beginning to be a part of everyone's everyday lives. As he was introducing new, exciting songs, people naturally associated him with the music. You'd be sitting around the tv, waiting for your favourite song to be played, and he was there, introducing it to you. People associated him with good times.
He went on to build that idea up. Safety campaigns, the idea that he cared about your kids' safety, TV shows where he helped kids dreams come true, charity events where he donated money to those who needed it all helped to associate him with good things.
That protects against an allegation here or there. Or some odd behavioural traits.
As he continued working for his causes, he built up some powerful friends. Meeting the PM, having royalty as friends furthered the idea that he was essentially good, even if he was eccentric. That warm, nice feeling when someone is remembering back to their favourite song they saw on the TV on Top of the Pops is linked with him introducing it.
I've always found it interesting that his personal assistant steadfastly refused to believe what he was really doing. She couldn't accept that he was an abuser. It took a very long time for her - even when faced with facts - to accept that he was a paedophile. And she was working with him every day. She associated him with doing good things and that perception is difficult to change.
and
I grew up watching Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It, and I remember his 'Clunk Click Every Trip' road safety adverts, and seeing his charity marathons on the news.
With hindsight, he was working extremely hard to attach himself to things that were popular or worthy. He wasn't everyone's cup of tea but most saw him as an oddball not a creep, and Britain loves eccentric characters.
When he died, some of the press reports emphasised how he never married, lived alone, and was close to his mother - basically implying that he was a sad, lonely, closeted gay man. There was a bit of a backlash to that, with people who knew him talking about his wide circle of friends. There was no mention of any allegations.
It was another year before the story broke. The public had no idea. Even the people who worked in showbiz or the NHS and had heard rumours couldn't have imagined the scale of his crimes.
(That last isn't true. Hospital people knew to give him a special room and send the children in, and everyone in the BBC knew. Famously, the one joke that the BBC vetoed from The Thick of It was about "what they'll find in Saville's basement after he's dead".)
and
Hang my head in shame time. When it first broke i thought it was a cash grab by the victims and it was a shame as he wasnt here to defend himself. To me he was just Jimmy Saville. He was always there so he didnt seem weird. Should probably add i accept he was a monster now.
But in Epstein's case 'rich man surrounds himself with nubile girls, one or two of whom may have lied a bit about their age' is not something that's going to make people's alarm bells ring.
Corvos
8d ago
May I suggest that it's more about When/Why? For example, I found myself becoming very authoritarian about immigration and drugs and trans, and I thought 'guess I'm not a liberal after all', then genAI happened and it turns out I'm still very libertarian about software and AI, which was kind of pleasing to me. @FtttG is generally quite liberal but was quite clear in the trans thread that (s)he doesn't think it's okay to write anything you want on a government form just because it makes you happy, and generally also doesn't particularly seem to like people traveling across borders as they please. (I criticise neither stance, I'm just noting.)
Who/whom correlates to some degree with this but doesn't actually match it. It's a bit like the saying that everyone is conservative in their area of expertise.
Don't know if you find this reassuring but maybe worth bearing in mind.
Corvos
8d ago
I find this take so hard to understand. I like talking about things, learning about things, thinking about things. The existence of vastly more minds (mind-like objects, I'm using shorthand here) with whom I can do that is great! GPT or other AIs don't mind me asking endless questions about beginner-level stuff, or helping with technical things, or working through ideas.
Granted, these AI are mostly junior partners at the moment, or at least 'experienced friend who doesn't mind helping if asked but won't do stuff of their own initiative' and perhaps I'd feel differently if I really did just become an appendage, but at the moment things are great.
Corvos
8d ago
I may draw a lot of flak for this, but I’ll slot a bunch of Brandon Sanderson in that category.
No, I owe a lot to Brandon Sanderson. As a very withdrawn teenager, Mistborn's message of
'Trust people, even when you can't prove they deserve that trust. Sometimes it works out.'
was exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it.
In general Sanderson was part of a wave of stuff (mostly Japanese) that made me realise how absolutely infested my usual media was with irony and nihilism, and I appreciate that a lot.
Corvos
8d ago
I see I will have to be more careful with my words in future. It’s like dealing with a puckish, Irish genie :P
In the UK, the government eats everything. I pay:
- 45% tax on what I earn (up to 60% if I earned more)
- 20% more tax on the remaining money when I actually spend it
- more in stamp duty if I buy a house or sell a house (which I can’t because the government taxes me too much and inflated away my small inheritance)
- 40% of everything that’s left if, somehow, I manage to die with some money left.
And everything is hideously expensive because whenever I go to the doctor or anything involving any skilled professional I (and any of their customers including the poor) effectively have to fund their extortionate taxes on top of mine!
Like, I know that ‘pay another 2% of tax that you can easily afford to make sure that the needy are taken care of’ sounds good but it’s a fantasy. The above is where that sentiment ends up. Very quickly you get ‘the government has to tax everyone to make sure everyone gets the support they need to pay their taxes’.
I do not believe that there is any level of taxation that does not either blight the lives of half the population and slowly melt the economy or clearly and visibly fails to take care of the needy. “The poor will always be with you” is not a moral statement, it’s just a fact. We cannot, long-term, take care of everybody that we might like to. And no politics, no ideology however well-meaning can make it otherwise.
“My father was a tool—“
“Yes, we know, Mr. Starmer. And so are you.”
I don't think you really appreciate the extent to which many people really, really hate illegal immigration. 'I will endure a high and probably unnecessary cost on a regular basis just to prevent even the possibility of making it slightly harder for ICE to do their job over the next few years, until the illegal immigrants are all gone' is a valid position, even if your cost-benefit analyses don't work out that way.
Broadly, people are well-aware that the Left is the party of pro-bono lawyers and suspiciously-well-instructed activism. It's not that weird that people on the right have started refusing point-blank any restraints that are likely to turn out to be a tripwire or a trojan horse. Personally I'm not sure whether I think giving ICE absolute carte blanche would help or hinder them in the long run, but I can believe the former. It works fine in Japan.
What I'm saying is that it's not about Left and Right, it's about the Ins and the Outs. At present, the Left is broadly In and the Right is broadly Out. (Yes, I know, Trump, trifecta, etc. The valence may change, but we're talking long marches and it mostly hasn't changed yet. Journalism schools are taking in centrist-left-educated students and producing centrist-left-aligned journalists).
The Ins are broadly in charge of the historic institutions, that's what makes them In. They pull them as far towards their own position as they can without actually destroying them. (That can be touch and go, look at the decline of Disney/video games). They have monkey-brained In stuff as well, because that's what they really like, but most of them recognise the value of being able to propagandise the middle and have their opinions/prejudices/interpretations laundered through the mainstream press, so they have to preserve them. It's the same dynamic when the Right is mostly In and the left are limited to silly student magazines.
Rather than 'the Right lacks an ecosystem that punishes partisan slop' I would say, 'the Outs by definition lack a significant ballast of centrists'.
An interesting consequence of this is that you can get good semi-mainstream right-wing media if you find a community where the Right is broadly In and include a signficant number of centrists. Religious magazines like Tablet and the Catholic Herald come to mind.
Corvos
9d ago
Prediction markets are really an idea from 15 years ago, smack dab in the middle of the conjunction of 'software will save the world' tech optimism and 'profit incentives are the best way to solve an optimisation problem' liberal economics.
Kalshi didn't propose mass-market betting because they were too naive to realise that
the love of money is the root of all evil
but because they believed the literal exact opposite, for better or for worse.
Did you read that one Scott article on ‘The Right vs. The Centre’ or some such? The issue is that the left-tinged media is just about good enough for most people most of the time, plus a big chunk of the MAGA partisans really does want some level of monkey-brained dunking (equivalent energy on the left too of course). What’s left when you exclude those two groups is a theoretical maximum customer base of maybe 20% of population across all platforms and that’s not enough to create and sustain a full on serious investigative media equivalent to the BBC or CNN. In England, GB News just about pulled it off but it’s clinging on for dear life.
Right-tinged blogging is cheaper so Substacks does well as does this place.
In general, I think Musk's takeover of Twitter really lends massive credibility to the idea that it works for better for both sides to take over large institutions rather than to recreate them.
Corvos
9d ago
I don’t know, but I would guess this is very much ‘if you have sex at 16 and your culture regards this as abuse then you’ll probably be traumatised, but if society regards this as the natural outcome then you’ll be fine’.
Corvos
13d ago
The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy’s sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.
[...]
The EU’s GDPR regulations are well-meaning, but do not go very far. It will not deliver much privacy, because its rules are too lax. They permit collecting any data if it is somehow useful to the system, and it is easy to come up with a way to make any particular data useful for something.
The GDPR makes much of requiring users (in some cases) to give consent for the collection of their data, but that doesn’t do much good. System designers have become expert at manufacturing consent (to repurpose Noam Chomsky’s phrase). Most users consent to a site’s terms without reading them; a company that required users to trade their first-born child got consent from plenty of users. Then again, when a system is crucial for modern life, like buses and trains, users ignore the terms because refusal of consent is too painful to consider.
To restore privacy, we must stop surveillance before it even asks for consent.
Richard Stallman (you may have heard of him)
Corvos
13d ago
It wasn't China who gave us trans, BLM, 'hands up don't shoot' in a country with no guns, Free Palestine, and woke. That was you guys. Thanks :)
Thanks, misunderstanding cleared up. Personally I disagree, I think that once you are seriously giving life advice to anyone except that handsome devil in the mirror, you are broadly out of the part of your career where young people are competing with you directly. I think that what you consider the 'cloaking' motivation is broadly the true motivation.
Yasslighting for e.g. writers certainly happens but it happens in the peer group of young losers + young one-day-maybe-not-losers. I guess maybe your talented 20-somethings are still encouraging their less talented friends but this is more to prevent social awkwardness than anything.
Corvos
13d ago
I read you as saying that the talented encourage the talentless to enter their field as a gambit to emphasise their own relative superiority.
My theory is that they don’t want to generate bad PR by discouraging their fans and emphasising the gap between them.
If I misunderstood your argument I apologise.
Corvos
13d ago
Agreed. I'm just saying I think you're overthinking it in that quoted passage. They're just trying to be nice in public even if the long-term effect is anti-social.
Corvos
13d ago
I'm a little confused. Does Ireland not give birthright citizenship though the father's line? Or is it that he had the option to pass on citizenship rights as the father but refused, and claimed to be the mother which wasn't accepted?
Corvos
13d ago
From that post:
one would naively expect that successful actors, musicians etc. would be incentivised to discourage others from pursuing careers in their domain, or engage in rent-seeking behaviour like guilds and so on. But there may be an alternative dynamic at play, in which moderately talented actors, musicians etc. are savvy enough to know that flooding the market with talentless hacks will make the legitimately talented stand out all the more — tall poppies look all the taller when surrounded by short ones
Surely they are simply smart enough to know that:
- They are already established and can't easily be threatened by people only now beginning a career (similar to those advocating DEI).
- They know that their fans will respond much better to "we've all been there, keep plugging," than to "dude, sorry, chances are you can't do what I can do".
I was putting that in Nybbler’s ’commodity’ category. My point was that ‘creative’ ‘raw’ ‘self-expression’ Art with a capital A has always been very rare.
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