Tractatus
8d ago
That's like saying once a picture is out of the hands of the painter, it stops being art because the viewer might look at the right side of it first or the left, with no control from the creator. How can one ensure proper creative expression?
No, that's not even close to being a valid inference from my statement. If I change the orientation of a piece of art such that it no longer communicates what the artist intended, then the piece does not cease to be art, but instead becomes my art, as it now expresses what I desire it to, and not the creator intended.
That you would jump to such an unfounded conclusion speaks volumes about the base assumptions on one side of this debate.
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8d ago
Have you ever played a video game in your life? This is a serious question.
No, it is not a serious question. I will not entertain this discussion any further, as you are incapable of being reasoned with.
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9d ago
How can anyone say an entire medium isn't 'art'?
Literally everyone can say this. Selling pork chops at the supermarket isn't "art," no matter how many emotions it may make you feel to observe the process in action. This is a complete non sequitur. "Choice of medium" in fact has no bearing on whether an act can be considered "art," and, in truth, the correct question should be "how can anyone say an entire medium is art?" Art is defined by being an act whose principal purpose is creative expression of the creator (this is why video games fail to be art; once they're put in the hands of the player, the creator has no control over the creative expression. A "Let's Play" of a video game might be considered "art," depending upon the intent of the uploader; the game itself never can be). There are no shortage of films, television shows, and songs that are not, and do not aspire to be, anything more than commercial cash grabs. I am fully of the belief that, no matter how much I enjoyed The Transformers as a young boy glued to the TV set in the early 80's, those were 22-24 minute long commercials for toys, not art.
After decades of 'modern art' visually indistinguishable from detritus it's far too late for these pretentious critics to start battening down the hatches and enforcing rigorous standards.
An artistic work being of poor quality doesn't change the fact that it's art; and in fact, pointing out how it's low quality is part of criticism.
Thank you for illustrating perfectly the point I mentioned in my post; that this isn't in fact a debate about whether video games are "art," but a completley confused, cargo-cult belief that if the skeptics can just be convinced that video games count as "art," then that means the hobby is valid.
Tractatus
13d ago
Bad analogy (NB: they all are), and overall just bad analysis. Movie criticism is a subset of art critcism overall, and part and parcel of criticism is understanding what is, and the purpose of, art. Besides which, Ebert isn't standing on credentials to determine what is or isn't "art," he's making an argument.
clo is quite correct; fans of Laufy incorrectly believe that if they can win the argument over whether or not her music counts as "jazz" means that her music will be taken more seriously than if it were not. This is the same dynamic we saw in the "video games are too art!" debates, where gamers were confusing "art" with "merit," and made completely confused arguments in their defense (inevitably falling back on "I felt emotions!" (this is not what makes art "art"), driven by years of ridicule in the mainstream about video games being a "lesser" hobby.
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16d ago
That's just poor phrasing by Scott; it's clear from context that what this should be saying is "a new vision of the Architect as Artist"
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17d ago
For what it's worth, reporting claims members of the President's own party were blindsided by this. Rumor mongering is afoot; I've heard in a streamer's chat that the current rumor is that the Minister of National Defense, Shin Won-shik, suggested this course of action, but take that with boulders of salt.
Tractatus
24d ago
"Even if Trump was a bog-standard Democrat in the 90's, which he wasn't..."
They're saying this based off of his political positions that he espouses in public, for all the world to hear, and comparing this with where the two national parties have stood over the years. Everything Trump has campaigned on was Democratic dogma in the 90s, and, having lived through that period, your insistence that a) broad-based tariffs, b) eliminating illegal immigration, c) insisting that allies pay their fair share of maintenance of the international order were, in fact, anathema to 90's Democrats is just outright gaslighting. Those were absolutely policies publicly supported by the majority of Democrats; "nobody is illegal" isn't a mantra that exists in the public conscience until the rise of Woke.
"...resisted almost all activist demands for Blackrock to divest from arms companies and fossil fuels firms..." Which has nothing whatsoever to do with pushing Woke.
"...money invested in ESG-focused funds..." This is just hilariously missing the point. Blackrock doesn't just "invest" - it provides day-to-day funding for businesses. You don't get access to those funds if you don't meet Larry Fink's requirements on diversity, which is why I had to sit through interminable videos of my CEO (and other bigwigs) verbally fellating Fink's (Fink is praised by name) diversity initiatives and how vitally important they are, never mind the obvious negative impacts it has had to our company's performance.
edit: also, what makes you think that only the funds specifically marketed as "ESG-focused" get your money? Look up your company's 401(k) plan information; I assure you, even if you're not chosing to invest in ESG funds, your money is still going there.
Tractatus
1mo ago
She just did a land acknowledgement before a concert, and yes, it was as cringe as expected.
Swift is following the normal trajectory of what is expected of white women in America; signal being socially progressive, be a striver, support neolib Democratic Party candidates.
Tractatus
1mo ago
Because absolutely no last-minute polls existed that justified his sudden shift the day prior to Election Day 2016. Nate knew something was wrong with the polling, and put his thumb on the scale to make Trump look better than his model said.
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1mo ago
"Selzer was also an oracle up until random number dialing in Iowa stopped working." I certainly did...back in 2004, when she confidently predicted a Kerry win in Iowa.
Anyne looking at Selzer's methodology should be discounting her on that basis alone.
"...the reality is that polling methods haven't adjusted for Trump and the response bias issue with his supporters..."
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1mo ago
Tractatus
1mo ago
When I went into work this morning, the credit team that negotiates with the banks for funding to keep day-to-day operations going had to prove, to Larry Fink's satisfaction, that we were on track to meet DEI goals. That these DEI goals are in blatant violation of laws protecting investors from their wealth managers absconding with their investments in order to further their own political policy objectives, even when this is to the blatant detriment of the investors, is somehow completely irrelevant.
Presumably, sometime after taking the Oath of Office, President Trump will once again - he did this in 2017, remember? - issue an Executive Order clarifying that taking your investor's funds to give sweetheart loans to companies that are adequately woke is, in fact, a violation of investor protection laws designed specifically to stop such actions. And presumably, the Department of Justice will once again laugh this off and and advise the President that "the Executive has passed his Executive Order. Now let us see him enforce it" just as they did back then, until such time as a friendlier administration can take power and issue an Executive Order mandating that such behavior be done.
Tractatus
1mo ago
And he'll still bend the knee and tell his fans to vote for the neolib shill over the populist candidate that is the only person that has the faintest chance of sticking up for the working class, and he'll do this until they're shoveling dirt over his grave. He'll do this while getting in his Audi R8 and yelling "No Refunds!"
Tractatus
1mo ago
The coverup, obviouslyl. It requires us to pretend history began circa 2019 to pretend that BLM represented a ground-breaking, once-in-century event that the Reagan landslides, the Chance to Bury Racism Forever that was 2008, or ushering in Camelot with JFK that previous elections couldn't dream of coming close to.
Tractatus
1mo ago
sadly, I know waaaaay too many Christians devouring media insisting that the Rapture is happening any day now.
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1mo ago
She pulled this same stunt in 2020 for the Senate race; which, to be fair, did manage to get the RNC to panic and blow money there until she put out a "new" poll showing them up by 10.
She's a hack; even if she weren't, her methodology is to triple-down on landline phone polling, but only counting guaranteed voters. How anyone expected this to be legit is beyond me.
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1mo ago
The continued glazing of Nate Silver, and the absurd belief in the validity of modern polling, betrays that the Rationalist/Rat-adjascent community is pathologically obsessed with appearing to be "scientific," at the expense of actually being right.
As I have pointed out ad nauseum, the shift to landline surveys has destroyed polling. No, Nate was not "less wrong" when he shifted his probabilities in 2016 to give Trump around 30%; there wasn't a single poll at the time that justified his change, but you lot still want to believe his model has any validity, and we'll be playing this same song and dance 4 years from now, and likely, until the end of the republic.
Tractatus
1mo ago
You get that it's not 1972, right?
Do you really not question why literally no-one in the Democratic Party has addressed this issue by going on to CNN and saying "What gives? The Party decides the nominee, not the voters; why do you all care so much how badly we're rat-fucking you?"
Voters expect the parties to put forth the candidates they voted on, not whoever they selected behind the scenes. This isn't "let's get together and decide the nominee behind closed doors in a cigar smoked room" anymore.
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1mo ago
GOF research was being funded by Fauci the entire time it was supposedly "banned"
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2mo ago
Nate wasn't doing polling, he was placing odds on election outcomes. Why you think "that logic" has anything do with the potential accuracy of any given poll is beyond me.
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2mo ago
No, Nate isn't "less wrong" because 95% chance of winning and 70% chance of winning don't actually have a meaning in this context. How could you even make such a judgement? How do you know that if we had access to 100 different universes with the exact same 2016 race, Hillary doesn't win 95% of them?
It's absurd to claim that Nate Silver's model was more accurate because it gave marginally better odds of a Trump victory; that's not even getting into the fact that absolutely no new polls were available to Nate that showed a tightening race - this was purely Nate fudging the numbers because he knew something was off (something he used to constantly do with his sports prediction spreadsheets he made his bones on)
Tractatus
2mo ago
Polling inaccuracy is because of declining response rates resulting in oversampling of hyper-engaged partisans, which can't be controlled for, not whether or not Trump is on the ballot.
It is, when taken in context with the rest of the statement. Part of the reason I resisted making the jump from the reddit to this site was precisely this sort of argumentative style, where a statement is plucked entirely from its context, and debated with assumptions not part of the original claim. It's a waste of everyone's time.
The claim is that creative expression cannot exist since the player interacts with the programming to create the "work." Therefore, the programmer cannot say what the creative expression "is" any more than the coder of tax preparation software can say his program has "artistic meaning" without the user inputing values, or any more than the designer of a car's ignition system can say his diagram is "artistic expression."
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