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Pls differentiate between the glory of having your (probably vicariously) Empire step on the faces of lesser surrounding nations as a terminal goal, and the aesthetics of deadly weapons, high morale, all that.
Why would I? The Warhammer-like (actually clearly superior) aesthetics is just sugarcoating for the terminal goal of the Empire, and a yet another vehicle for justifying it in minds of the target audience. I'm the target audience for Russian imperialism; Russian imperial aesthetics is the sugar coat, the vehicle, the high-grade anaesthetic for the doctrine that sends my less lucky brethren into the trenches near Bachmut, or wherever the frontline of this hell currently is. Sure, they're also pushed by conformism and material interests, but every marginal point of persuasion and dissuasion of dissidents counts. Ramsay aesthetics, likewise, send people into Antifa. A lesser evil, perhaps, but in a higher-impact locale.
My argument is that once you learn to recognize patterns of thought of authors and terminal goals of essentially political art, you lose almost all interest in «compartmentalized» and «differentiated» readings and justification of their topics on grounds of «free speech» or «artistic expression» or «preference» or whatever, because you see all those grounds and frames as being ultimately false and or myopic and or beside the point; you start relating to the given piece of political art on the basis of its instrumental essence as informed by terminal goals of its manufactures, not patterns of its sugar coat.
I can still appreciate the technique and the quale evoked conditional on abstracting away from the essence of the art piece, if I so choose and no part is too intrinsically grating (like I imagine Piss Christ is for devout Christians). That's easy enough. But that's a more or less academic discussion, not in any way a valid justification for material support of authors and distributors.
@Fruck fair enough that this was not mainly addressed to you. But. I suggest you work on your self-esteem. Many people, not you alone (e.g. the obviously smart @f3zinker) say I'm hard to parse, which does not make me smart at all. The apparent obscurantism is on me, not on them. I try to be as clear as the pragmatics of my message allows, but seems like that's not good enough. If you don't see how my response relates to your defense of preferred entertainment, I shall do better to explain myself whenever I get back to this issue. Some day when I'm less drunk.
Refusing to mistake the volume of thing for its surface and acting accordingly is not censorship.
There are hundreds of lifetimes worth of prime knowledge that Michael Bay is obscuring from you. I suggest (only half in jest) that you try some Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko – I've listened to his «The River Sparkles» (1892) today and it was good and enlightening. You've grown up in an environment where knowledge is dwarfed by content that apes the shape of living words and human lives as grotesquely and adequately in the low-order technical sense as Stable Diffusion apes human imagery. Same for me.
We can and indeed must do better than that, if those values you profess are genuine.
That's a good start. I am saying that there is a genuine reason not to give him any. It's not just that he's a tribal political enemy. It's that he is a political artist – which is very different from an artist who also has opinions about politics. Understanding this difference is useful strategically. But if you don't care about winning, how about that: it's crucial to developing taste for art as such.
Hey, I'm sorry it took me so long to reply. I wrote a reply but brave refreshed and I lost it all, and since then I have been off for work. Anyway I basically got what you meant by directionally correct completely backwards. And the things I will consume were plumbing the depths, not my whole diet. But you are definitely right about how easy it can be to get lost in content, nigh valueless super-stimuli relying on a plausibly obfuscated absence of originality, where even the twists are expected - audio-visual codeine and tums. Which is why I always appreciate it when you link Russian (or mostly Russian) authors, you are my only exposure to them. I haven't found The River Sparkles, but I did find a copy of The Murmuring Forest and Other Stories at the Esk library (!), so I am reading that now.
Thanks!
The River Sparkles was just a random obscure little thing I've been listening to at the moment. You can read Nabokov or something, thankfully he wrote directly in English. My favorite work of his is probably Invitation to a Beheading, though I've started Ada recently and it's already competitive. Kuprin is great too... Of course there are tons of increadible non-Russian authors.
It takes effort (and, in my case, took years – Russians tend to develop allergy when we have Dostoyevsky etc. forced down our throats by midwitted teachers with poor understanding of the source material in school) to start appreciating «old» literature, but what's remarkable is that the impression of it being slow-paced and non-stimulating is false. Those authors were highly intelligent and it's actually very dense in information and psychological detail, just not in poorly thought-out narrative events.
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