hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it.
I don't think this actually happens. In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it's more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful. In my experience even the "good" pieces of modern art are only good compared to the absolute drek that is most modern art.
Edit: By modern art I mean "art belonging the the genre commonly called 'modern art' ", not "any art produced since the mid 20th century".
In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it's more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful.
Ah no but you see, modern art is good. Your move.
Seriously though, would I be right in saying you come from a background where most people can be expected to have an educated opinion on art? Because that's the only way I can imagine you've never met someone who claimed to hate modern art but folded completely after waiting to meet someone inside the Tate Modern, or catching a documentary one day. It's just too common in my experience, and yet I've never seen or heard of anyone doing the same thing with modern academic music or painting. I'm left to assume that they are genuinely lacking in the qualities which make naive audiences enjoy them and their reputation is reliable for everyone.
That just won't fly though for modern art, which was frequently very popular. Rather I think that what's happened is that the Young British Artists were not even trying to be good, especially as the bubble went on, and their output was as much confirmation as people needed to assume that they are also part of the down to earth sensible people who only like "representative art", when frequently they aren't.
Who knows, maybe is a couple decades describing something as "awesome" will sound as silly and passe as describing something as "groovy" or "funky" does today.
Doesn't it already? Presumably it depends on the level of exposure to the "awesome" cluster of tropes, but I think comics are the ground zero of the trend and the backlash is well underway. What passes for tastemakers in that medium are pretty down on the cluster - if you describe a Grant Morrison or Tsutomu Nihei piece as awesome they'll say they see where you are coming from, but it's a good comic too! And to dismiss a work as "awesome" is to suggest it's written for the blurb. Relevant
Who knows, maybe is a couple decades describing something as "awesome" will sound as silly and passe as describing something as "groovy" or "funky" does today.
Doesn't it already? Well presumably it depends on the level of exposure to the "awesome" cluster of tropes. I think comics are the ground zero of the trend, and what passes for tastemakers in that medium are pretty down on that cluster - if you describe a Grant Morrison or Tsutomu Nihei piece as awesome they'll say they see where you are coming from, but it's a good comic too! To dismiss a work as "awesome" is to suggest it's written for the blurb. Relevant
If the original work is itself a satire, do you try to make a humorless version of it?
I think worries about status seeking false preference formation start to break down when you apply them to comedy. For one thing laughter is involuntary, so you should know if you are faking in the teenager pretending to like spirits sense- you can't half convince yourself you find something funny if you don't.
For another the social aspect is often inherent to the form. Saying that you don't really like Steptoe and Son because you wouldn't find it funny if there wasn't a laugh track, or you didn't really like that Stewart Lee because if you were the only person in the room you wouldn't have laughed, doesn't to my mind make any more sense than saying you don't like dance music because you wouldn't listen to it on your own or you "only" like a song because of a happy memory associated with it.
Unlike you, IANAL, but killing burgulars would be legal in most places if you can convince the courts that someone's life/health was in serious danger at the time, and that violence was the only reasonable option, wouldn't it? I mean, as long as you can argue that the violence was not excessive relative to what it would take to passivate the dangerous burgular, and that death was an accidental side effect and not intended?
That is, for some local interpretations of "serious", "reasonable" and "excessive", surely. Is it your impression that these things are interpreted too much in favor of the burgular in some places, or do you object to the principle that danger-to-life should determine whether killing trespassers should be legal or not?
I am new here on Less Wrong, and I hope I don't invite too much mind-killing here… But still, I'm a bit curious about this.
He might be offended by the fact that he'd have to go to trial and plead guilty. There was a case over here of a guy who got tied up with his family for hours by burglars, who broke free and beat one of them into a coma with a cricket bat. He initially refused to plead guilty and received a fairly lengthy sentence- commuted on appeal once he actually had the sense to admit it and plead circumstances.
You'd really have to look at entitlements you'd use as well. For example in a country with state health care plans you will pay more in taxes but not have to spend as much on a health care plan. I wasn't suggesting a specific metric, obviously.
I don't think this is true? Britain at least spends a smaller proportion of government revenue on healthcare than the US does, and I imagine France and Australia do as well. Or if you are comparing british style to french style, the trade off is price vs quality, not where you pay.
It's probably worth considering taxes relative to whatever job you are applying for, and the gov't services in line with all the other benefits.
It would be helpful if you narrowed down to a specific claim which you consider to be gratuitously and obviously wrong.
For instance, your quote contains the claim that, of the regimes described, only Israel has survived to this day. Is it your contention that Franquista Spain has survived to this day, or that Israel has not survived? If that is not your contention, then you do not, after all, object to the whole quote, but object to only part of it. And yet you dropped the whole thing into your comment, apparently expecting your reader to know what section of the quote you object to.
I quoted the whole thing because the structure is central to the thesis. He's comparing the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and so on with the revolutions that took down Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. That South Africa and Rhodesia were taken down and the Vietcong were not is perfectly true. That this is evidence the American government spent more effort opposing Apartheid than the Vietcong is something else entirely - conspiracy theory. Not merely in that it proposes a conspiracy but in that it does not bother to argue for one, the state of the world is evidence for the existence of a body that wanted it that way- except where it isn't, in the case of Israel.
That said, I quoted the whole thing to provide context, the claim I find impossible to grasp is that the US was not really opposed to the USSR and is not really allied with Israel. This requires either a definition of the US government that is separate from the people that actually run it, an assertion that the people who appear to be in charge don't really run it, or that they secretly hate Israel and love communism.
The passage above seems quite obviously true, indeed pretty much common sense. Do you have any specific points in it that trouble you, or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other. You quote the article as if it was obviously unreasonable on sight. I am puzzled, and would like to understand what is unreasonable about it.
Recall, for example, when the pentagon was allied with the Northern Alliance, the State Department was allied with the Taliban. The state department ordered the Northern Alliance not to enter Kabul, much as it demands that Israel give Jerusalem to the Palestinians. The Pentagon furtively indicated it was fine with the Northern Alliance entering Kabul, which resulted in something close to shooting war between the Pentagon and the State Department. The Northern alliance, contrary to orders, entered Kabul and threw the Taliban out of Kabul. In the end, the state department, and thus the Taliban, won, in that the Northern Alliance was suppressed, and replaced by a government that is is composed, like the Taliban, of Pashtun, unlike the Northern Alliance, composed, like the Taliban, of Radical Islamists, unlike much of the Northern Alliance, but nonetheless is supposedly at war with the Taliban and supposedly on our side, not withstanding its habit of burning bibles, executing Muslims who convert to Christianity, and executing Muslims who try to rationalize away the more disturbing parts of the Koran, odd behavior for a supposed ally of us and supposed enemy of the Taliban.
You may think this account of the current war is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that the State Department ordered the Northern Alliance to not enter Kabul? Is it not odder that the current government of Kabul has policies that are a lot closer to the Taliban than to the policies of the Northern alliance?
And if the US is on Israel's side, is it not odd that its policy is that peace should be made by the stronger side yielding land and money to the weaker side?
If Mencius's account is obviously odd, are there not a lot of even odder aspects about the conventional account?
This is not the place to argue whether his view is correct, but I would like to understand why some people find his view hard to swallow. Of course it comprehensively contradicts official history, but no one seems troubled by versions of history that contradict yesterday's official history in a leftward direction.
Well the stuff you've detailed about Afghanistan being a rogue puppet state brought to heel is an untroubling version of history that contradicts the official variety in a leftward direction. I see Constant was quite right to ask what I objected to in the quote, but I thought it obvious which bits were novel - that Israel is an enemy of the US and the Vietcong were not. It's not that these are troubling, I like being troubled by heterodoxy, but I like it for the opportunity to model their thought processes.
And I understand how someone can believe in the idea that the US is against Israel and for Communism, but I MM actually seems to think it's true- he thinks the US funding of Israel is explicable in terms of wanting to see Israel destroyed, and the invasion of Vietnam in terms of curbing the anti-american tendencies of communism. And I can't see what those explanations are.
Likewise, I can see someone interpreting America's attitude towards Israel as being overly pro-Palestinian, but MM actually goes ahead and describes what the world would look like for this to be true - there would be a Palestinian lobby which dwarfs AIPAC and J-Street in size. And he doesn't notice the world he's describing isn't our own.
Thanks to the link to Moldbug article, started reading him a month or so ago after he was recommended by another LWrongian. He seems to be one of those thinkers that is either horribly wrong or horribly right, but isn't a bore and carries quite a bit of insight.
Some of his ideas are indeed unsound and with some serious blind spots, but on the whole, I'd say his analysis of the modern-day institutions and social order is spot-on, and more accurate than practically any other source. Generally, the closer the topic is to the present day, the more correct and insightful he is.
Also, his earlier writings from 2007-2008 are much better than his more recent work. You can find them all nicely indexed here.
Huh, I found the opposite, in the abstract he's insightful but his descriptions of modern day reality seem to be coming from some bizarre counter-earth, for instance:
"The pretend enemies (such as the Communist countries in the Cold War, other Third World nationalist thugs, revolutionary Islamists, etc, etc) are actually best defined as partial clients. Unlike full clients such as the OECD democracies, their friendship is only with one side of the American political system (the left side, duh). If their "anti-Americanism" actually reaches the level of military combat, the war is a limited war and essentially a civil one. Right enemies include: Nazis and other fascists, of course; apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia; the Portuguese Estado Novo and Franquista Spain; the Greek colonels; and, of course, Israel. You might notice a property shared by all but one of the regimes on this list, which is that they don't exist anymore. Sometimes there will be patron-client relationships on the right side of the equation, but they are always tenuous. Even in the last case, the "Israel lobby" is a piece of dental floss compared to the arm-thick steel cable that is the Palestine lobby. (You'll notice that USG's policy is that the war should end by Israel giving money and land to the Palestinians, not the other way around.)"
He's perceptive and erudite enough that when he says something so gratuitously and obviously wrong I sit there for ages thinking hang on, is this just something I don't want to believe- a politically correct myth I don't want to let go of. It disturbs me how often the answer is no, but I genuinely cannot see a way to make passages like the above make sense.
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The problem is more dramatic in architecture. The latter is the point where the crisis of modern art moves from a bugbear of the chattering classes to a genuine problem. If someone insists that you just need to learn to appreciate some ear destroying extended technique violin piece, you have a difference of opinion. If someone insists that the solution to the residents of the new brutalist tower block wanting to kill themselves is to educate them on the finer points of architectural theory, then you have a civic problem. (Incidentally, are there any other forms of art that require the destruction of old pieces?)
With food though, "just learn to like it" is absolutely good advice as, a childish aversion to, say, cabbage is an unnecessary barrier to eating arrangements that could be solved with a few meals. And because food is such a flexible art form, learning to appreciate new elements dramatically increases your enjoyment. Though I suppose these are really two sides of the same coin, like the OPs definition of art snobbery as insisting that art should not contain certain features that indicate the wrong culture: perspective, raw meat, any consideration for the surrounding space whatsoever, etc, etc.
The problem is that artists generally like to focus on reducing the number of features, partly because it makes it easier to compose but mostly, I suspect, because it makes it easier for other people to compare your compositions. This is most obvious in fashion (take one accessory off, even after accounting for the fact that you were going to have one accessory too many) but compare any home recipe to any cooks recipe, the former will have all sorts of pinches of this and that and the other added in which make it taste muddier, which is not necessarily worse but harder to analyses.
This is the blockbuster problem basically: if you want to appeal to a lot of people you have to do a lot of things, and then the quality of your work will just be an average of how each person thought you did on the stuff they cared about. So you insist that dance scenes aren't serious and a real director doesn't put dance scenes in their movie, and gradually the quality improves (from the artists POV) even as the appeal narrows.
There's probably an economic paper treating this like a market with artist surplus and consumer surplus, with the artistic surplus narrowing to nothing as you reduce barriers to entry for artists.