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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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This approach of maximizing disharmony and harm can be generalized to all socialist art.

Do you think this portrayal of his views is more honest than his portrayal of Eismann's views?

Disharmony in art (in any amount) is so obviously harmful that you'd have to be low IQ or a motivated thinker to disagree.

That's not what he said. He's saying one of the reasons one might deny that Eismann's aims to maximize disharmony is because they're too low-IQ to understand what he's saying.

Disharmony in art (in any amount) is so obviously counter to the purpose of art that you'd have to be low IQ or a motivated thinker to disagree.

That's not what he's saying. He's saying that in the even that you do understand what Eismann is saying, you might be inclined to go into denial, because no one could be this comically evil.

The quotes from this specific debate will likely not change my mind on 2, 3 and 4.

What is the point of all the navel gazing about what Eismann specifically said, if you're not going to change your mind about anything substantial then? If it's just about the specifics of what he said, maybe focus on that?

I do think OP would generalize to all socialist art. Ex. here.

I’d say 3 and 4 are covered by the “middle school” section. OP is using Eisenman, socialists, disharmony as moral imperative, and Brutalist high schools interchangeably. He also categorically ignores the possibility someone might agree with one or more of those things. That partitions anyone who does into the stupid, the motivated reasoners, or the evil.

What is the point of all the navel gazing about what Eismann specifically said, if you're not going to change your mind about anything substantial then?

Not the person you’re responding to, but the entire discussion is pointless if its main outrageous premise turns out to be completely false. You’re not going to convince me on points 2 through 4 either, but if Eismann did in fact explicitly say he wants to inflict psychic harm, then we can have an interesting discussion about why such cartoonish levels of villainy are allowed to exist in society.

Instead, it appears that Eismann only talked about creating artistic disharmony, and then you equivocate artistic disharmony with psychic harm. The original question of “How is that possible?” is answered with “Because the scenario presented simply wasn’t true.”