Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
So what is your basic definition of the Red Tribe, exactly?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production (by which I mean things like scholarship or art)
That depends on what you mean by "Red Tribe" (everyone seems to have a slightly different definition).
It's not particularly hard to list right-wing intellectuals and artists. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Pound, Eliot. There was an intimate link between Italian futurism and Mussolini's fascism.
I think Yarvin's concept of the dark elves is useful here: internal traitors to the Blue Tribe who align with Red Tribe on certain key issues and provide intellectual and cultural support to the reds. If your definition of a Red Triber is a person who prioritizes "income/general social status" over intellectual development, then sure, ex hypothesi such a person will take little interest in cultural production. But you're ignoring all the dark elves who very much are in the business of thinking "conservative" thoughts, and as others in this thread have pointed out their perspective has been systematically censored in elite institutions.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Sure, if they already have that capability and it’s only regulations holding them up then it is real self driving.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Self driving = ability to do 100% of what a competent human driver can do in any location, without geofencing.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
He knows reds don't have the temperament or interest to "show up" for museums or libraries
Well... isn't that just a skill issue then?
Regardless of the institutional form it takes, there will always be culture of some kind, and it will indeed belong to those who show up. A purely destructive strategy with no positive program for cultural production of your own is not viable in the long term.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
I'm the biggest enemy of AI art on TheMotte, and even I recognize that a lot of AI paintings are pretty darn good! It's not at the point where it completely obviates the need for human artists (which is why people are still employed as professional artists as of March 2025), but in the range of tasks where it is successful, it's clearly good at what it does.
I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that AI does nothing. It does a lot. It's just a question of whether and when we're going to get true AGI.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
I've always been more skeptical of the singularity than the average mottizen -- not outright dismissive, but skeptical. I've become more confident in my skepticism over the past year after seeing the diminishing rate of progress in frontier models and the relatively disappointing launch of GPT-4.5. I feel more assured now that currently known techniques won't lead to AGI.
Not to say that there won't be impact to individual jobs and industries, of course. There are plainly people who find LLMs to be very useful even in their current state, and LLMs aren't going anywhere. But I don't think that o3 or even o4 or o5 will lead to a cataclysm.
some relatively minor additional work
The first 90% of the project takes the first 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the time.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
Can these perspectives be reconciled?
Sure.
Some men evidently accomplish a great deal without being "fit" in the physical sense. And that's perfectly fine for them. That is their "health". But we might still find it regrettable that there are opportunities they never explored, because in the general sense every choice involves forsaking other possibilities and there is always something regrettable in this despite its necessity.
One of the greatest lessons I took from Nietzsche is how to approach things with more nuance. Something can be good, and virtuous, and necessary, and regrettable. Something can be bad, and deleterious, and undesirable, and yet still necessary. You can mix and match.
Is there a good as such? Have not all attempts to define such a thing failed miserably?
There is such a thing as "the good", but it escapes any attempt to define it in terms of basic axioms or repeatable guidelines.
Once upon a time, I did not care much about conventional notions of health, because I quite consciously did not particularly wish to live to advanced age. Now I contemplate that I am rather unlikely to live to hold my grandchildren, and rather likely to leave my wife a widow, all promises to the contrary, and I wish I had not been so foolish in my youth.
You probably just made the wrong decision then. No one ever said that people couldn't just be wrong. There are innumerable healths, which means there are innumerable unhealths as well.
Concrete examples would be really ideal here
Concrete examples illustrating which part, exactly?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
There is no health as such, and all attempts to define such a thing have failed miserably. Deciding what is health even for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your powers, your impulses, your mistakes and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more one allows the particular and incomparable to rear its head again, the more one unlearns the dogma of the 'equality of men', the more the concept of a normal health, along with those of a normal diet and normal course of an illness, must be abandoned by our medical men. Only then would it be timely to reflect on the health and illness of the soul and to locate the virtue peculiar to each man in its health - which of course could look in one person like the opposite of health in another. Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can do without illness, even for the development of our virtue; and whether especially our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge do not need the sick soul as much as the healthy; in brief, whether the will to health alone is not a prejudice, a cowardice and a piece of most refined barbarism and backwardness.
The Gay Science, Book Three, §120
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8d ago
I was going to write a top level post about it but I decided not to rush it. The situation is still evolving by the day with the potential for outcomes to swerve wildly, and it will take at least a few months or more to really get perspective on Trump’s actions over the past two weeks.
My main fear here is that we’re going to end up with the worst of both worlds. Europe is already talking about canceling deals with American defense contractors… which is, ok fine, people voted for more isolationism so more isolationism is what we’ll get. But the problem is that we’re still sending aid to Ukraine, on top of freaking out our allies in Europe and making ourselves seem like a less reliable partner.
The idea of being more isolationist is that we get to stop throwing money into the black hole. If we’re still doing that, and everyone hates us anyway, then what’s the point? You either go all in or all out, don’t half ass it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10d ago
Is that relevant to your evaluation of whether DOGE should be allowed to seize their headquarters?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10d ago
Elon Musk’s DOGE Uses Police to Seize Independent Nonprofit
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency staffers used police and private security to forcefully take over the U.S. Institute of Peace on Monday.
The USIP, an independent nonprofit founded by Congress, had its president, Greg Moose, and its board fired last week by the Trump administration. The Associated Press reported that DOGE workers on Monday had law enforcement escort them into USIP, which is not located in a federal building, after previously being denied access.
“DOGE just came into the building—they’re inside the building—they’re bringing the F.B.I. and brought a bunch of D.C. police,” USIP lawyer Sophia Lin told The New York Times as she and other staff members were forced out of the building.
Obviously, if you wanted to paint Trump as a dangerous authoritarian fascist, this is exactly the sort of thing you'd point to as Exhibit A. So I'm trying to determine if this is actually as bad as it sounds, what the steelman is here, and the extent to which this may or may not have been under the purview of the executive branch's legitimate authority.
The linked article and their website describe USIP as a "private" nonprofit that was "founded by Congress". Obviously, the government using the police to forcibly seize private property due to political differences is not a good look. Presumably there are legal minutiae here that would determine the extent to which this organization is or is not still subject to the government's authority (is any organization "founded by Congress" subject to federal government control in perpetuity?).
As a side note, the Trump administration seems to REALLY hate US assistance to foreign countries and they're doing their damndest to shut it off. USIP describes itself as an "independent organization dedicated to protecting U.S. interests by helping to prevent violent conflicts and broker peace deals abroad".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11d ago
The tacit agreement was that they wouldn’t have to be capable of fighting their own battles (and in the case of say Germany, a lot of people didn’t want them to be capable of fighting their own battles — the memory of WW2 was still quite fresh when the Berlin Wall fell). For the sake of stability in Europe, the agreement was that countries would become semi-vassals of the US empire in exchange for the US’s protection.
Not to say that the terms of this agreement have to be binding for all eternity. If a new arrangement is needed then so be it. But this idea that European countries did something “wrong” by not maintaining a larger military presence is, I think, lacking in historical context.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
13d ago
You could argue that the mere act of creating art at all is already an admission that there is something deficient or lacking in nature such that it needs to be supplemented by human creation.
And artificial/non-natural subject matter has always existed in art, see for example Hieronymus Bosch or the three headed Jesus paintings.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
13d ago
If all of the policies that would reverse this state of affair are firmly outside the Overton window, then unfortunately it is an inevitability rather than a choice. The choice was made a long time ago.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
13d ago
Close. The issue is that they think they can have European urbanism without a European population.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
13d ago
"Sensible cities and walkable environments" is code for "we want to force people to use public transportation because cars give you too much freedom". And you really do not want to be forced to use public transportation in America.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
13d ago
People in general far prefer natural environments to man-made ones, studies on the topic have tended to show that people find landscapes that depart far from the rule of nature more uncomfortable than those that don't.
Right, but there's a high correlation between the types of people who tend to prefer man-made beauty to natural beauty, and the types of people who tend to become artists. So their own aesthetic preferences get amplified and displayed to the public.
I would be fine with architects building these things if they were just making art for display in a dedicated space.
There have to be limits of some kind, of course. But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.
it's a bit unclear where the defence of Eisenman starts
The most relevant section is everything between "McGowan and Engley" and "the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14d ago
Why is modern architecture so bad, and so common?
I know you said that you wanted to talk about "modern architecture" as a whole and avoid quibbling over the details, but, it really depends on what you're talking about specifically. It varies from building to building. I think that some modern architecture is quite pleasant! Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example, but I find them to be comforting and nostalgic. Where other people see a dystopian late-capitalist hellscape, I see the familiar sights of the family road trips of my youth. YMMV.
Admittedly I'm a complete plebian and philistine when it comes to architecture. I've never made any attempt to study architecture qua architecture at all.
Another study from the same year found that architects tended to prefer the person-built environment, whereas non-design students tended to prefer natural settings. This is relevant considering the fact that much modern art and architecture tended to be highly conceptual and focus on rejecting the rule of nature in favour of designing for the new era of machine, as described by Jan Tschichold in his book "The New Typography".
This goes back to at least Hegel (and by that I mean, he was certainly not the first human to ever find man-made beauty superior to natural beauty, but he did give it articulation as a self-conscious philosophical principle):
Our topic proper is the beauty of art as the one reality adequate to the Idea of beauty. Up to this point the beauty of nature has counted as the primary existence of beauty, and now therefore the question is how it differs from the beauty of art.
We could talk abstractly and say that the Ideal is beauty perfect in itself, while nature is beauty imperfect. But such bare adjectives are no use, because the problem is to define precisely what constitutes this perfection of artistic beauty and the imperfection of merely natural beauty. We must therefore pose our question thus: why is nature necessarily imperfect in its beauty, and what is the origin of this imperfection? Only when this is answered will the necessity and the essence of the Ideal be revealed to us in more detail.
[...] spirit cannot, in the finitude of existence and its restrictedness and external necessity, find over again the immediate vision and enjoyment of its true freedom, and it is compelled to satisfy the need for this freedom, therefore, on other and higher ground. This ground is art, and art's actuality is the Ideal.
Focusing in on some specific examples:
Peter Eisenman's House IV is one of the most infamous examples of this, a fantastic example of utter psychosis where he split the master bedroom in two so the couple couldn’t sleep together, added a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms.
I've always thought that House IV was quite lovely! Whether I'd actually want to live in it is a separate question; but I don't judge a painting or a film by how much I'd want to live in it, so it's not clear why that constraint should be applied to architecture.
I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
16d ago
not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed
Strong “in this moment I am euphoric” energy.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
16d ago
Although not "culture war" in the traditional left vs right sense, the development of AGI still has wide-reaching cultural, political, and ideological implications. The more theoretical/philosophical AI posts are a pretty natural fit for the CW thread. News items about more specific/incremental AI advances maybe not so much, but starting with the first ChatGPT there was a period where there was a lot of interest in AI on TheMotte and people got used to talking about it in the CW thread, so, it just kind of stuck.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
16d ago
It is worth talking about! There’s a lot you could say about the role that the stock market plays in the right wing imagination, its relation to anti-elitist attitudes, etc. You could turn that into a great post. But you have to actually write that post. You can’t just post a bare twitter link and say “take a look at these jackasses”.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
16d ago
Let me try to cut right to the chase. I can confirm much of what you say here.
Yes, I do wish that my philosophy had a better spokesman. Certainly. I'm concerned about how Trump's behavior has seemingly become more erratic since his first term. I wouldn't say I'm "alarmed" yet, but I am concerned. I don't in any way support his aggressive rhetoric towards Canada. Maybe he's going senile, maybe this is just what he always would have been like in the absence of guardrails, I don't know. It's not ideal.
But nonetheless my support for him remains. The anti-woke vote is always the correct vote, full stop. That's basically the long and short of it. I mean, these people literally can't help themselves. They can't stop themselves from hating white people. They're running around with their hair on fire about the collapse of the rules-based global order and yet they still manage to find the time to get their jabs in at white people. Any action which decreases the cultural and institutional power of these people is ipso facto correct, even if it's risky.
So, yes, I'd prefer a more competent figure at the helm. But if Trump's the best anti-woke option we've got then so be it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
18d ago
I support:
-
Reorientation of Russia/Ukraine policy
-
Offering asylum to white South Africans (assuming he actually follows through on that)
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Strengthened border enforcement and ICE raids
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DOGE and the general plan of reshaping the civil service / deep state to be more right-leaning
I oppose:
- The bizarre threats towards Canada and Greenland
- The crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters
I'm neutral/unsure about:
- Threats to withdraw from NATO
- Tariffs
So overall I'm still happy with my vote. No regrets. Honestly nothing earth-shattering has really happened yet, we're largely still in "nothing ever happens" territory despite what the breathless 24 hour news cycle would have you believe about the "abdication of American soft power".
A lot of the stock market is probably fake and gay anyway and as others have pointed out a correction could be healthy in the long run.
They say they do, but whether they actually do is another question. And at any rate, constant newness is not a reasonable demand. Creative work always falls into regular patterns; in both the sciences and the arts, the majority of work consists in simply filling out the details of a given paradigm, rather than actually pushing at the boundaries of the paradigm itself. True innovation is hard, and at this point in human history, the possibility space of the traditional plastic arts has been explored pretty thoroughly.
A sculpture that consists of, say, a few loose pipes and concrete slabs strewn about the floor, which are alleged to represent the struggle for Palestinian liberation, is just as much of a genre piece as a representational painting of the deposition of Christ. It follows genre conventions, it shares a clear lineage with other works in the same group, etc. It's just that "abstract sculpture paired with a leftist artist statement" is a politically favored genre, whereas "representational Christian painting" is a politically disfavored genre.
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