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necrovore got a reaction from Boydstun in How to Balance Federal Budget
Balancing the budget could just be done mathematically. I think Singapore does something like that:
Have Congress spend "points" instead of dollars When the amount of revenue becomes known, determine how many dollars each point will be worth. This can get complicated for various reasons: it might still be necessary to use dollars for some things (e.g., interest on the debt), and there might need to be different types of points. Still, it should be possible.
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necrovore got a reaction from tadmjones in Reblogged:RFK's 'Show Me the Data' Game
This is the sort of thing that happens when science becomes a government bureau, and then that bureau becomes dishonest, and then gets caught being dishonest. Nobody knows what to believe anymore. Nobody knows how deep the lies go. This is not RFK's fault and I guarantee you that if RFK dropped out and Trump got somebody else, the same problem would still exist.
There are certain people in Congress who want things to go back to the way they were before, as if their lies had never been caught, and these people would only confirm somebody who is willing to go back to going along with all the old lies. They're still trying to push the notion that the government could never be wrong about anything, that it's a conspiracy theory to think that they ever could be wrong. Or lying.
I think it's better to be suspicious of government bureaus, especially now that we have a sense of what kind of trouble they can create.
You can find studies showing all sorts of stuff, and you can also find studies that have been retracted -- but were they retracted because they were inaccurate, or for political reasons? Was there arm-twisting going on behind the scenes? There is after all a lot of money on the line. Government money. Ayn Rand wrote that such money can make people indifferent to what's true and what's false. So how can we ever know?
It used to be that we trusted these people, but now there is no way of knowing what's true anymore, except to sweep aside all the questionable nonsense and start over again from scratch, from reality, which can be verified. Discovering reality is what science is supposed to do anyway, and that's the only cure for this particular illness.
So I don't see why RFK is dangerous. Maybe he'll make the bureaucracy less trustworthy? As if that is even possible.
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necrovore got a reaction from Jon Letendre in Reblogged:RFK's 'Show Me the Data' Game
This is the sort of thing that happens when science becomes a government bureau, and then that bureau becomes dishonest, and then gets caught being dishonest. Nobody knows what to believe anymore. Nobody knows how deep the lies go. This is not RFK's fault and I guarantee you that if RFK dropped out and Trump got somebody else, the same problem would still exist.
There are certain people in Congress who want things to go back to the way they were before, as if their lies had never been caught, and these people would only confirm somebody who is willing to go back to going along with all the old lies. They're still trying to push the notion that the government could never be wrong about anything, that it's a conspiracy theory to think that they ever could be wrong. Or lying.
I think it's better to be suspicious of government bureaus, especially now that we have a sense of what kind of trouble they can create.
You can find studies showing all sorts of stuff, and you can also find studies that have been retracted -- but were they retracted because they were inaccurate, or for political reasons? Was there arm-twisting going on behind the scenes? There is after all a lot of money on the line. Government money. Ayn Rand wrote that such money can make people indifferent to what's true and what's false. So how can we ever know?
It used to be that we trusted these people, but now there is no way of knowing what's true anymore, except to sweep aside all the questionable nonsense and start over again from scratch, from reality, which can be verified. Discovering reality is what science is supposed to do anyway, and that's the only cure for this particular illness.
So I don't see why RFK is dangerous. Maybe he'll make the bureaucracy less trustworthy? As if that is even possible.
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necrovore reacted to DavidOdden in Reblogged:The Dunning-Kruger Coalition Spurns Advice
First point: requiring licenses for a person to engage in a business is the epitome of leftist nanny-state thinking, the opposite of the position one would expect from a supposed free-market advocate. Second point: stop whining about Trump pushing the limits on government power when you just advocated a massively unconstitutional governmental action. Read Art. I, Sec. 6 and the First Amendment to the US constitution. Third point: a corollary of the second: there is no existing legal mechanism in any state for stripping a physician of his license to practice for an particular vote or expression of opinion. Argue that he deserves to be defeated at the polls, if you can make a cogent argument. Fourth point: this irrational ideology can be extended in infinitely many ways, most obvious “any Senator or Representative who is a lawyer and votes for a law that violates the rights of an individual deserves to be stripped of his license to practice”, or more simply “anyone who enables further rights violations should be permanently barred from existing”. Now that I say it, maybe that is the solution – it is much more principled than this ad hominem attack. Maybe you should issue a shoot-on-sight fatwa against any rights-violator.
Maybe you are engaged in the fine art of hyperbolic rhetoric and you don’t “really” believe what you literally said. There has been a recent exponential expansion of rhetorical lies in politics, where people knowingly say false things in order to make a point. Hitler knew that people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone ‘could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously’. Trump is famous for having repeatedly made the accusation that he was “cheated” out of the presidency in 2020. Should the big lie be promulgated because it might result in a desirable short-term goal?
Your question “Why wouldn't a President want to be surrounded by the best possible advisors? Who wouldn't want an ally to stop him short of making a stupid move?” is based on a premise that needs to be carefully examined. What kind of advice should a president be seeking, and what constitutes a “stupid move”? One answer is “whatever protects the political position of ruling party”. Another is “whatever yields the greatest common good”. That is complicated math: is it better to make 20% suffer 10% more, or should 1% be made to suffer 99% more. False dichotomy! As every Objectivist knows.
The question of the efficacy of vaccinations is a medical question, not a moral-political one. The only valid moral-political question about vaccination whether the government should, via taxation and regulation, control the development and distribution of vaccines (as opposed to letting entrepreneurs and customers in a free market determine what medicines will be created). The only competent question about a nomination for secretary of HHS is “What the hell are we doing having such a bureaucrat in the first place?”. The one relevant issue regarding RFK in this position is whether he will use the power of the position to massively violate individual rights, more so that others would. This question applies not just to RFK, but to every Secretary of HHS and the answer is “of course they will! That is the essence of the job description”. Any journalist who does not see this should have his license to write revoked (see the preceding paragraph about hyperbolic statements). The “best possible” advisor on federal health and human services would be an ideologue who advises that “health and human services is not within the scope of proper government”, one who completely rejects the premise that the government’s job is to make medical decisions for you. Let’s see, who was the most recent “best advisor” on that point…
To make the case that a particular nomination for a government position is “objectively bad”, you have to go beyond an irrational emotional outburst that the candidate is “objectively bad”. Give us some actual facts and principles that support the claim that these are “objectively bad” nominations, beyond the simple observation “There shouldn’t be such a position in the first place”. Links to equally emotional but factually unsupported denunciations of candidates as “unqualified” just kicks the can down the road. A person isn’t objectively unqualified just because Bernie Sanders or NPR say they are. Recall that Bush I was not a spy, yet was served as Director of the CIA. Where is the outrage. Leon Panetta was just another unqualified hack politician, who briefly served in the Army intelligence corps after graduating from college, where is the outrage? Indeed, his being unqualified – lack of exposure to CIA bureaucracy was a fact cited in support of his nomination.
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necrovore got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in Executive rewriting of The Constitution
There was an actual legal case in the UK a decade or two ago, where someone broke into a house, fell on a defective staircase, and was able to recover damages. But I don't remember that case precisely, so I made up something similar.
I'm pretty sure this is the sort of thing that Trump would stand against, though; that's my point.
Why? Are we supposed to just accept international law as it is, as if it were handed down from God, and that is the end of the discussion?
Even the Constitution itself is not the end of the discussion because we can ask whether the Constitution is right as it is, or whether it needs to be amended. By what standard do we decide whether the Constitution is right or needs to be amended?
How about reality, and what humans need in order to live in it, as the standard? Isn't that what Ayn Rand would have recommended?
It would be interesting to see an explanation of what in reality makes the concept of citizenship necessary, and where in reality the concept arises from. Once we have that, then it becomes possible to determine what can rightly be done with citizenship.
That's not correct. When people join together to defend their property, they are not giving up their property rights. They are expressing them.
It would only be "stealing" if they had no actual right to it. And that's the question that needs to be answered here.
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necrovore reacted to Harrison Danneskjold in Regarding Inclusive Institutions
You've mentioned SpaceX in a prior post, which is an excellent example of why the free-market side of any such argument is unambiguously correct. Without exception.
Until recent years NASA was the most advanced space agency on the planet. Which is not to say that NASA was any great shakes - they had essentially given up on manned missions to anything whatsoever, they'd built the God-awful space shuttle and they'd allowed all of the technology and infrastructure that was involved in the Apollo missions to deteriorate into oblivion. That's simply to say that they were the best of the singularly shabby crew of government projects that were doing anything at all in space.
The space shuttle, for example, was an attempt to save money on space flights. It was a reusable piece of a rocket, and by virtue of being reusable it was intended to cut costs in the long run. It was also by far the very cheapest piece of any rocket which they'd chosen to make reusable.
In a very real sense the space shuttle was designed upside-down, with the cheap bits being reusable and the expensive bits being disposable. It did almost nothing to the cost of sending any unit of mass into space and when Barack Obama put it into a museum, towards the end of his presidency, it was a mercy-killing.
SpaceX, as a private company, has accomplished this goal that NASA never could.
Furthermore, all of the stuff from the Apollo missions that allowed us to put an American flag on the moon has been abandoned since then. Not only were the Saturn rockets no longer being produced but many of their components (in some cases including absolutely anything that could be substituted for those components) were no longer being produced, and some of the key engineering details had been lost to time and negligence. When SpaceX was founded it was no longer possible to send a man to the moon again.
If you listen to moon-landing deniers this always comes up as a large part of their arguments. If we had actually put a man on the moon many decades ago, they'd say, how could we lose that capability after-the-fact?
Well, as Dagny Taggart learned in Starnesville, technology does not always progress in one direction. The moon today is not an unclaimed wilderness; it is a celestial Starnesville which NASA has lost the capacity to exploit.
Now, the Socialists will certainly point to SpaceX's government contracts as evidence that they are not, in fact, a private company. By this standard not only are there no private companies, but there are no private citizens either - after all, is there anyone who has not been given government money before?
Rand's argument about the propriety of engaging in the welfare system applies perfectly in this case.
One side of that argument is wrong.
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necrovore reacted to Doug Morris in Regarding Inclusive Institutions
The main reason that Objectivism has not gone into detail about how governments are to be funded is that it is the last reform to be advocated. We must cut government back to its proper functions before we can reform how it is financed.
However, Ayn Rand did give a general indication of how government is to be funded, with an example of what might be part of it. This was in her essay "Government Financing in a Free Society", reprinted in The Virtue of Selfishness.
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necrovore reacted to whYNOT in Do you agree with Yaron Brook on open borders for the US?
My rough impression is the "nation state" started coming under intellectual assault at around the same time Critical Theory was making inroads, un-coincidentally.
Those who are in any way proud and patriotic of their nation were tarred with the "Nationalist" brush, beginning the erosion of western self-confidence and promoting guilt and self-disgust.
"No borders" would require the jurisdiction of a World Government, as you must have heard openly opined by some dangerous dreamers. All I know is the general gist of the Globalist dream, I admit.
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necrovore got a reaction from whYNOT in Do you agree with Yaron Brook on open borders for the US?
The American Founding Fathers thought consent of the governed was important; they used it to justify their secession from England.
It's the opposite of a "top-down" notion e.g. where a monarchy or a group of elites rule over people whether the people accept it or not.
It's tied in with the idea that the government is the servant of its own people and not their master. (The services the government is supposed to provide are police, courts, and the military. Border patrol would probably fall under military since it deals with threats coming from outside the country.)
The government is supposed to recognize the rights of everyone in the country, regardless of election outcomes, so that those who lost don't have a valid reason to withdraw their consent to be governed.
The government should also recognize the rights of people outside the country, because infringing their rights could be viewed by their governments as acts of war.
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necrovore got a reaction from tadmjones in Do you agree with Yaron Brook on open borders for the US?
If he's not a threat then he should be able to get into the country through regular border checkpoints without any problems.
The problem is the suggestion that it's wrong to even look at people coming into the country, that we just have to let them all in. That's what creates the unnecessary risk. Some of them are criminals and terrorists who could have been blocked at the border but are not.
Foreign criminals and terrorists pose a different threat from domestic criminals and terrorists. Most people get good at things by practicing a lot, and yet domestically we can pay for good policing which allows people to be jailed for their first small offenses, so that they are denied the opportunity to get good at crime by committing lots of crimes, and also, once they have committed those first offenses, they can be (at least partially) denied the ability to organize and cooperate with other criminals. However, we cannot pay for policing outside our country; we cannot prevent people from getting good at crime and organizing outside the country (into gangs and even armies). We don't control foreign governments, so we can't prevent them from being incompetent, negligent, or criminal themselves. So our only protection from such criminals is to be able to identify them and stop them at the border.
We have a right to self-defense, and that includes the right to have borders, and to check people trying to enter the country, just like a doorman checking people who come into an apartment building. But the stakes are higher, because outside the country, we don't have any police.
it's not the hiring of a Mexican per se that violates the rights of others, it's the insistence that the border be open to just any random Mexican who wants to come over, regardless of criminality, regardless of affiliation with gangs or even foreign armies. If you help your employee evade such checks, or you help to do away with such checks in the first place, you may be abetting crime and even possible acts of war.
Denying us the right to defend ourselves amounts to sacrificing us (and our safety) to yourself.
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necrovore reacted to whYNOT in Do you agree with Yaron Brook on open borders for the US?
Necrovore, I'm thinking what nobody says outright, "open borders" is another product of altruism.
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necrovore got a reaction from tadmjones in Do you agree with Yaron Brook on open borders for the US?
In this case the only infringement of rights would be if somebody left the country involuntarily (e.g., by accident, or because they were kidnapped, or forced out at gunpoint) and could not return. That would be an infringement of their rights, or more precisely would be an unnecessary and completely artificial compounding of an existing infringement of their rights.
Other than that, I don't see any problems. Just like people don't have a right to trespass on my land, if the people of this country, under the laws of this country, decide not to have any outsiders anymore, then that's how it is.
Having it the other way implies that if some other country denies you entry, they are infringing your rights, and you have the right to forcibly enter that country.
Or it would also imply that if you live in a large apartment complex that doesn't allow you to have guests (supposing the complex has voted that nobody can have guests, in accordance with its own organizational charter), they are infringing your rights, and so you can just have the guests over anyway (and the guests have the right to force their way in, too).
I don't think it's right to prevent people from leaving the country voluntarily, though, even if leaving means they can't return. In fact ensuring that people have the right to leave (or defect) provides some insurance against authoritarianism.
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necrovore got a reaction from whYNOT in Do you agree with Yaron Brook on open borders for the US?
The reason why the border has to be patrolled in the first place is so that the government can protect the rights of the people already inside that border, such as their right not to be murdered, stolen from, trespassed upon, etc.
Am I infringing somebody's rights by having a lock on my door? What if I join with my neighbors in forming a "gated community" with a security guard; does that infringe someone's rights? What if a whole city of people join together to build a wall around their city, and have security guards, does that infringe the rights of outsiders? What about a whole nation doing that?
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necrovore got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in What is "Woke"?
There is the biological fact that a male can make a female pregnant, which applies to humans and all mammals. (But like the fact that spiders have eight legs, there are occasional exceptions, which are special cases and do not invalidate the general rule.)
For a woman, getting pregnant will change her whole life, so she rationally ought to have absolute control over this process. She should be able to choose whether to get pregnant, and if she does want to, she should be able to choose the father of her baby, and the timing.
A man, on the other hand, can easily make lots of women pregnant, and biologically this doesn't cost him anything, except for the risk of venereal disease. All the other costs for him are legal and cultural. Of course, those costs can be quite high, too, although there can be situations where he is willing to bear those costs because he wants to have children. These costs can be enough to change his life, too, so he should also be able to decide whether to get a woman pregnant, and which woman, and when.
So in a bathroom or any place where a woman has to remove her clothing with other people around, she wouldn't want to be in the vicinity of strange untrustworthy men who could conceivably make her pregnant against her will (or even have "recreational sex" with her that she doesn't want). She should not have to worry about such things. She should have some protection against those possibilities, even if the men put on women's clothing and "identify as" women. In some situations, such "identification" can be fraud. Having a women-only bathroom (which is biologically based instead of just social-role-based) is an easy way to provide that protection.
Culturally, there are other possible ways to provide that protection, and some other cultures do provide protection by other means, but I don't believe a culture should be changed by force or fraud. Private property allows that property owners can set various rules, and people can choose which kinds of establishments to patronize.
There are some considerations such as what kind of situation people can expect by default, if there is no sign; those considerations can properly be addressed by law or precedent or both.
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necrovore reacted to DavidOdden in Reblogged:A Catalog of (Recent) UN Atrocities
An even better solution would be for the US and all free nations to leave the UN, leaving it as a pig-sty for 4th world dictatorships. It's not like it's good for anything.
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necrovore reacted to Doug Morris in What is "Woke"?
I am not suggesting any such thing. I don't claim to know to what extent it is true.
I am stating that it is legitimate to use "cis" to mean "not trans". If there is a problem with the meaning of the word "trans", we need to resolve it regardless of whether we say "cis", "not trans", "intrans", or whatever, or even if we avoid referring to people who are not trans.
I am also suggesting that we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater when we react to toxic wokeness. This is true no matter how toxic the bathwater is.
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necrovore got a reaction from tadmjones in Dr. Peikoff on which party to vote for: GOP or Democrat
David Harriman has written an essay called "Why Trump's Victory Provides Hope For America."
Dr. Hurd posted it here: https://drhurd.com/2024/12/02/why-trumps-victory-provides-hope-for-america-by-david-harriman/
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necrovore got a reaction from Jon Letendre in Dr. Peikoff on which party to vote for: GOP or Democrat
David Harriman has written an essay called "Why Trump's Victory Provides Hope For America."
Dr. Hurd posted it here: https://drhurd.com/2024/12/02/why-trumps-victory-provides-hope-for-america-by-david-harriman/
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necrovore got a reaction from whYNOT in What is "Woke"?
Bullying is wrong regardless of who is the target or why.
It might be more to the point to ask how those psychological problems were instilled in the first place.
Why has the number of transgender people increased so much in the past few years? I read that it's up past 5% now.
It seems @Doug Morris is suggesting that it was always the case that as many as 5% of children were transgender and that pervasive bullying forced them to conceal it throughout their lives.
I think 5% is too high for that explanation; it's much higher than the natural number.
I also do not believe that the Left has decreased bullying when they support things like silencing and de-banking their opponents. (And it turns out the de-banking was definitely being orchestrated behind the scenes by the government: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/marc-andreessen-tells-joe-rogan-why-he-backed-trump)
You could argue that religionists have used bullying, too. That's true. They even used to burn people at the stake. But that doesn't make it right for the Left to do it (either).
I don't think it's moral to achieve or prevent cultural change by means of force.
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necrovore got a reaction from Boydstun in Beginnings and Endings Fun and Fine – guess book
Ayn Rand did write a couple of interesting things that seem related to your points here. She wrote Anthem and described it as a poem; she also wrote a short story "The Simplest Thing In The World" which she said was "plotless." (But I think the reason she called it "plotless" was because it was about a struggle in a character's mind and had very little physical action.) I have read both of these and I think they are great.
She also wrote something about how, in ballet, the dancers make it seem like they are flying weightlessly through the air, but it actually takes them a lot of work to achieve that illusion. From that and other examples I can conclude that good artists can make something seem effortless when it really isn't.
Faulkner does the same sort of thing that you are saying Joyce does; even though his style is stream of consciousness, he has definitely put some thought into what he is writing and what his characters are thinking and feeling. There is also a sequence of events, and plenty of reasons to feel emotions about them. In that sense, it is, at least, poetic. (Apparently some people on the Internet asked what "poem" Diane was reading from in Back To School.) I suppose this poetic quality was why I was able to read Faulkner. (But I did find some events confusing and relied on the appendix for clarification. I suppose Frank Herbert's Dune also relies on an appendix -- and it has a glossary, too...)
As for what novels I like -- I used to read voraciously in high school. To this day I am a fast reader, and The Sound and The Fury took me only five hours. This high reading speed has allowed me to read a lot, although lately I haven't been able to read as much fiction. (Please bear in mind that I don't read fast out of any desire or intention to read fast, and I don't purposely skip over anything; this is just my natural speed. It does often happen that I miss or forget things. Pleasure-reading isn't the same as "studying.") In high school I used to read Stephen King and I did read a little Clive Barker as well, but I also liked science fiction; I got captivated by Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Real Time (sometimes also called Marooned in Realtime). I got a single issue of Analog with the first quarter of that novel and for a long time that was all I had; later I found the rest of it. Years later, I almost put down A Fire Upon The Deep because the first part of it was told from the viewpoint of aliens and I couldn't figure out what was going on, but it became clear later and turned out to be a good book. Of course I should also mention Larry Niven for the Ringworld series, which was fun. Never got much into Jerry Pournelle though, and I actually thought Lucifer's Hammer (written by Niven and Pournelle together) was boring. I liked Ender's Game too.
There's almost certainly more stuff I haven't read than stuff that I have, and I haven't had occasion to read as voraciously as in the past. I miss the old bookstores; I went to Barnes and Noble recently and half the store is dedicated to toys and games rather than books, and they have very little in the way of computer books... even though I hear this varies from one location to another... is literacy going away?
As for the origin of the "Necrovore" handle, that's explained on my profile page.
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necrovore got a reaction from Boydstun in Beginnings and Endings Fun and Fine – guess book
The stream-of-consciousness stuff that Faulkner and Joyce write is to literature what Picasso's style is to painting.
I will admit that I don't have a passionate hatred for (some) modern art the way some people do; I can read it and not get sick or anything, but I also have a sense that it's "not all there." What I mean is that there's a certain disorderly vagueness about it, which I think helps make it popular in academia because it allows endless theories and thesis papers about what it all means, and even when there are contradictions there's no way to say which side, if either, is wrong.
Even Picasso is better than something like Jackson Pollock, whose paintings give me the feeling of "I could have done that." I saw a painting like that -- not by Jackson Pollock, but by someone else, a huge canvas with nothing painted on it but a big red rectangle or something like that -- at the Seattle Art Museum once. It make me suspect that there was a phone call that went something like this: "Hey, the museum just got another two million dollar grant. Want to make some art?" "Sure!"
In fact art and music are an easy way to launder money; just make a track full of sampled screaming and tape hiss and use the dirty money to hire people in shady countries to buy a few hundred thousand copies, and presto, you get all this nice clean revenue from your surprisingly popular track. Politicians can do this, too, when they write boring books about politics or their lives or what-not, which mysteriously sell way too many copies. This sort of thing is also why Hunter Biden was able to make art and sell it to rich and "artistically sophisticated" members of the Chinese Communist Party. Spotify once had a program to pay bonuses to "new artists" and, unfortunately, it was abused by certain people who found they could launder money and get back more money than they started with. Spotify had to discontinue that program, which is unfortunate for genuine new artists.
It's always nice to know that if you bought a piece of avant-garde art you may have inadvertently contributed to a money-laundering scheme.
Government grants plus the Cantillon effect can also do a lot of damage even though the money isn't "dirty" per se, it's just freshly-printed. (Then again, that does qualify as "dirty.") This damage can even extend out of the arts and into various forms of scholarship.
It's enough to make one want to give up on arts or music as a way of making a living, but I suppose it's also a very good reason to have a way to gauge actual artistic merit instead of holding that it's all subjective and that sampled screaming and tape hiss by itself can be art.
Good art should be hard to make. (It should also be hard in the right ways.)
I should note that there are some avant-garde musicians who can play an atonal piece that sounds like random notes, and can then (manually) play it again exactly the same way. It probably requires more skill to repeat a random piece like that than to repeat a more conventional piece where you have rhythm and tonality to help you remember it and even to help you play it. So I suppose I can count that as skill. As for me, I use computers. -- Also, I can see that filmmakers might have need of a variety of different kinds of music to set the moods for the various scenes in their movies and for each movie as a whole. Some movies or some scenes might be well-served by avant-garde music if it matches what the movie is trying to do. This is why there are instruments like the waterphone.
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necrovore got a reaction from Boydstun in Beginnings and Endings Fun and Fine – guess book
I should have been able to get the Joyce one, even though I haven't read it, because of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T3hXtyuX0g
(Didn't want to embed the link...)
Also, didn't know that the character (of Joyce's) doing the talking was the Molly Bloom that Peikoff was referring to at the end of OPAR. I guess you learn something every day...
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necrovore got a reaction from Boydstun in Beginnings and Endings Fun and Fine – guess book
I think it's We The Living.
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necrovore got a reaction from Boydstun in Beginnings and Endings Fun and Fine – guess book
I had to read both Light in August and As I Lay Dying in college. This was many years ago and I am going from memory so I probably have bits of them confused.
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necrovore got a reaction from Harrison Danneskjold in What is "Woke"?
A few people may have genuine sex issues with biological roots, e.g., people born with malformed genitalia (which might have been surgically "corrected" at birth but perhaps not in accordance with the child's hormones, which might have been unknowable at the time because they don't start expressing until later in life), or chimerical people (basically fraternal twins who are conjoined to the point of being one person, and looking normal, but having two separate sets of DNA, and some organs with one set and some with the other). These cases are very rare, but they do happen, and the law should not punish such people merely for existing, or shoehorn them into a categorization that doesn't suit them.
However, it's far too easy to brainwash perfectly normal kids into thinking they are transsexual, and given the sudden up-tick in the number of such people, that's actually the simplest explanation. Teachers can easily do this brainwashing because they have access to the kid every day and also to plenty of tools for rewards and punishments. The kid also does not have the experience to recognize the truth about what is going on.
For example the teacher can easily tell the other kids (when the target kid isn't the room), "Oh, he's really a girl, he just doesn't know it yet! Maybe all of you should help him figure it out!" This starts a lot of bullying.
Later the teacher tells the kid, "If you just let us do this little operation, I promise, the bullying will stop!"
Piece of cake. Unfortunately.