The religion of the scene. From The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen
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Martin Castille
129 posts
Martin Castille
@ContraVoltaire
I should be looking for beauty not arguing with ugliness.
Kali-Yuga Katılım Ekim 2023
59 Takip Edilen8 Takipçiler
The Union Station staircase sequence in The Untouchables (1987) is cinema operating at surgical precision. Slow motion, cross-cut tension, every footstep stretched to breaking point.
cinesthetic.@TheCinesthetic
Which movie scene completely freezes everything around you every single time it comes on?
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The generational divide is because you can't think in any other terms than generational divides.
Traveler@MilesTrav
Well you know, if the boomers just came out and said "Yeah, the economy has gotten really bad, and our currency has been debased. No matter what we vote for, the country gets worse, and the lives of our children are being degraded." I guarantee you that 90% of people getting mad at boomers would have no problem anymore. Because that's all we're trying to say. Instead, it's got to be some nonsense about imaginary avocado toast, and telling people to feed their children hardtack as a solution to buying a house. The generational divide is almost entirely because of boomers obsession with trying to act like they are some sort of hard asses, who lived through everything, and had nothing. Lol.
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So it never occurs to him that AI is nothing but the accumulated labor of the kind of people he wants to dispense with. And that in the hellish Terminator world he wants to build, he too would be redundant.
The Intellectualist@highbrow_nobrow
Tech Billionaire Marc Andreessen Explains Why He Believes AI Is Better Than Human Workers: "[AI] never gets drunk. Never gets sick. Never gets depressed because his girlfriend broke up with him. Never files HR complaints." x.com/Overlap_Tech/s…
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@SketchesbyBoze It's ableist to expect any competency whatsoever. Morons have rights.
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“It’s ableist to expect writers to write.” “Academics can’t read papers.” “How can a student possibly write a short essay?” You guys are slowly talking yourselves out of doing ANYTHING. It’s shameful how we now avoid any sort of intellectual effort. This is how brains die.
🅱️askerville 🇦🇪@WB_Baskerville
“Academics shouldn’t have to read the sources they cite” just the latest entry in the overwhelming theme of American life today: no one should ever have to do anything and nothing can be expected of them.
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@Paul_Heron_ I have remarked that Marx became a revolutionary because he didn't have the courage to be a reactionary. That passage from the CM is incandescent.
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True, but this was in the Communist Manifesto, a text often astute in its assessment of the state of things as they stand (circa 1848), even if the solutions it offers are bad.
”The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”
Capel Lofft@CapelLofft
I am currently reading this terrific book, and Cannadine argues that as the old landed classes rapidly lost their economic and political grip from the 1880s, what took its place was the rule of the middle class through bureaucracy. This seems to me highly relevant to now...
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@ggreenwald Glenn, thank you for your courage and integrity.
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I'll never get over how the primary grievance of the American Right for the last decade at least was that liberals go around screaming RACIST and BIGOT at everyone who disagrees with them or even makes a joke: all to shut down debate, get people fired, destroy their reputation, etc.
Now that the pro-Israel faction of the Right is in power, that's transformed from their primary grievance to their primary tactic. They spend all day screaming RACIST and BIGOT at anyone who disagrees with US financing of Israel and Middle East wars or the excessive influence of Israel loyalists in US politics.
Screaming ANTI-SEMITE, trying to get people fired, branding them as bigots for a joke (se the meltdown over Massie's "Tel Aviv" line) dominates their discourse. Just all day long, every day: accusing everyone of being a bigot. Just bizarre.
MT Cicero@InDeo_Speramus
@ggreenwald Why is Glenn still pushing anti-Semitic tropes? Who takes him seriously?
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Nothing is more alien to me than the idea of identity. What exactly is an identity? A self-caricature to save others the trouble of figuring you out? Who aspires to be a figure? Aren't we already sufficiently enciphered by the corporate and state machinery of administration?
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@CforCatholics So now it's the generational divide. Remarkable how divide and rule never fails.
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@mark_bauerlein Truly. Infantilism is the one thing art seems incapable of breaking out of.
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Is there anything more tedious and predictable than wall texts in a contemporary museum that issue one cliche after another of "breaking boundaries" and "challenging our expectations" and "dismantling concepts of . . ."?
Daniel Baryon@AnarkYouTube
Conservatives falsely think that art is nothing more than in-group signaling, because they feel alienated by the features that typically constitute good art: exploration of new concepts, boundary breaking, an ability to reveal the inner lives of people who are not ourselves.
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@2fast2tyler Yep, and there are feminists who will still go on and on about what an injustice it was that horrible men kept finding sexual allusions in her work. Basically, the art equivalent of women who go to gyms half-naked but complain of men ogling.
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At the Georgia O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe, this is the painting you see immediately after reading the placard explaining that she vehemently disagreed with anyone who said her works were about sexuality:
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Time has only sharpened Maistre's observation that the modern "belief in disbelief" leads to worse superstitions than the ones it supplants. Survey the insanities that are now liberal dogma and you realize how prescient the Savoyard was.
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@GKCdaily @blown_through @blown_through is a black hole with anti-Catholic bigots orbiting around it.
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@blown_through If you think "weakness" is merely physical, you don't even understand what you're trying to criticize. Chesterton fought against the barbarism of modernism his entire life, which is why he'll still be remembered when people like you are long forgotten.
–Editor
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G.K. Chesterton was unable to fight in the most significant war of his lifetime because he ate and drank himself into a six-month-long coma in 1914.
Jmy@JmyLss
“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked men; it is destroyed by weak men who cannot defend what is good.” — G. K. Chesterton
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@bernardtjoy In the other direction, the tendency is to imagine the future as mere amplification of the fashionable stupidities of the moment.
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21st-century people, particularly in the West, are infected very deeply with the virus of presentism. They are entirely incapable of thinking outside their own historically bounded frames of reference and so when they encounter a concept or a behaviour in the ancient world they are trapped in the habit of thinking of that ancient behaviour and concept as just an earlier version of what they in their complete, infinite, and eternal vision of the world know to be the case. There are only the sexual experiences of the now. There are only the psychological conditions of the now. There are only the scientific certainties of the now. The world is an inert thing to be discovered that does not respond to the means and methods of discovery or to the character of the discoverers. And, more fantastically yet, we, the 21st-century people, have discovered it and pinned it down in its eternal form. We have become a culture of unbelievable arrogance and hubris.
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@TLiterarian "literary sense, taste and discernment." And the courage to assert them.
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The very sad thing about this is that all it would take to easily avoid accidentally publishing AI is the same thing it would take to avoid publishing bad writing altogether: literary sense, taste and discernment. The story is poorly written, dull and full of vague overwriting and quasi-amusing nonsense. “Big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture, she had a laugh that shook dust from joists and a voice that could soften to coax a child from a ledge. She knew the ways of men hollowed by want until only one thing remained. She noticed the fresh-cut path and the way land bore witness. People talk about bush like it dumb. But bush keeps memory the way hair keeps scent.” Someone read the line “Big like women who don’t apologize to furniture” and thought “Yes!” Lol. This is the kind of lazy junk writing lit journals have been publishing for 30 years, unfortunately.
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelqu
Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize). "Not X, not Y, but Z" sentences everywhere, the "hums" trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing. A major milestone for AI, at any rate... @GrantaMag
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@KlassicalKat_88 The whole "counterculture" was a consumerist transgression. The apparatus of consumerism exists to agitate dissatisfaction with the old and mania for the superficially new. And for the young, especially, it is not easy to resist.
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We think of Susan Sontag as a radical firebrand, but peep this, Gentle Reader 👇
“What I didn’t understand… was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic’ to most people, and when allowed — as an arbitrary decision of temperament — probably unhealthy, too.”
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Also, as we know from what Pontius Pilate said to Jesus "What is truth?" indifference to the truth is the ultimate mark of power. That Foucault thought subverting the concept of truth would be liberating shows how little he actually understood about power.
Martin Castille@ContraVoltaire
It appears that Trump is a perfect Foucauldian. He believes all relations are power relations and truth entirely discursive. There's no indication that anyone in academia has noticed this.
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It appears that Trump is a perfect Foucauldian. He believes all relations are power relations and truth entirely discursive. There's no indication that anyone in academia has noticed this.
English