Why do you think you have a magic entitlement to that land if the cities are full of starving "screwed" people? If things are that bad you'll end up with some version of a Stalinist revolution, ther land will be taken into collective ownership, and the landowners who sat there feeding their faces while the masses died of hunger will not be regarded or treated well.
Once you get to the point where people are literally starving, all bets are off. Things like property rights and the rest go out the window. When push comes to shove, you can't kill all the malnourished mob before they get you.
I am not interested in associating myself with you or anybody else for that matter. If i wanted to be partners with somebody, I would start a corporation or another type of business where success would depend on both of us, but I don't trust people to do the work even then, that is why I am not in a partnership like that and no way in hell I want to be in a union with anybody. I will take my failures but also my successes on my own terms and merits, I want to have nothing incommon with you, with your failures or successes I don't like you or anybody for that matter.
Also much good are unions if companies can just fold and open somewhere else.
Because like communism, the concept is vastly different from the implementation.
Around here, unions are just as corrupt as capitalists. But at least the capitalists, in some small cases do actually create jobs.
It is not the job of unions to create new employment. They are there to protect existing workers. Why is that a difficult concept?
The idea that anything or anyone that doesn't directly create wealth is a bad thing is pure free market ideology that ignores reality. Society is about more than just making money. Yes, that's socialism, and that is why Americans generally don't like unions, any more than they do government laws to protect workers' rights, levy progressive taxes, get rid of discrimination, and so on
A week or two ago there was a discussion about software engineer unions, and from my perspective it seemed that more comments were against unionizing than were for it.
Unions are socialist or collectivist and America doesn't really do socialism or collectivism. Then individual Americans wonder why they get shafted by their employers in the name of free market efficiency.
I have never really understood why many Americans are so hostile to unionization. There appears to be decades of brainwashing in action and mythos regarding correlation between hardwork and financial success.
Americans generally seem to believe that they live in a classless society, and unions are a reminder that they don't.
If the free market worked as "anarcho-capitalists"/libertarians ideologues seem to think it should, there would be no need for unions, because everyone would be on a free and equal footing to negotiate their own wages and conditions.
The fact that this is laughably far from reality disturbs their world-view, so they like to blame the unions for not fitting in with their laissez faire dreams.
Why must everything be right wing? You realize WWI, and then indirectly, WWII were caused by left wing extremists called anarchists
That is by far the most ridiculous political statement I've ever seen on slashdot, and that includes people defending the intellect of George W Bush.
Huge armies slaughtering each other in the name of patriotism but for no real purpose in WW1 (in particular) are about as far from anarchism as it's possible to get.
And I know how common here it is to equate anarchy with libertarian, and libertarian is a form of conservatism, but look it up. Anarchy is considered an extreme leftist view, not an extreme rightist view. Conservatives wants to keep things the way they were, and completely eliminating government is hardly a conservative view. Keeping it small is.
The philosophical basis of anarchism is the abolition of ALL forms of power or control by one human being over another, whether it's political, religious, social or economic. The problem with modern day US "libertarians" is that they don't agree with the last of these, and won't acknowledge that as long as you have a system with some people much richer and more powerful than others, you can never have equality, fraternity or true liberty.
you appear to be an uninformed armchair analyst who has never set foot in Tehran nor spoken a word of Farsi
I tell you what, I've never set foot in Mecca nor spoken a word of Arabic, same with Beijing and Chinese or New Delhi and Hindi. So I suppose I have no right to read about these countries in English and form opinions based on varying (translated) sources?
Being a player in geopolitics does, as it did the Soviet Union at the time. You have to remember during the Shah the US was embroiled in a deadly cold war with the SU. Every move in that war, including Iran, was a counter to some move the SU made. You can't look at the US as some lone power-hungry king maker in a vacuum, at least at that time.
It was only a deadly cold war in the eyes of the paranoid retard leaders in the US and USSR. In reality, it was all a load of bollocks. Neither country could ever have invaded or destroyed the other. It was the worst sort of hysterical political theatre, and it lasted for forty five years. In the meantime, people in other countries were dragged into the stupidity when they should have been getting on with running their own countries.
I know the USSR was far from faultless, but when you read about the US deliberately overthrowing democratic regimes that they believed might be "communist" it makes very unpleasant reading indeed.
Actually, one of the main factors causing the USSR to collapse was that we forced them to spend too much of their GDP on defense.
That's a bullshit propaganda talking point that contradicts pretty much everything known about USSR GDP, defense, or economic significance (or, to be precisely, lack of one) of USSR dissolution.
No, you're not really correct, as both the USSR and US spent far too much on unnecessarily paranoid defence, the US just had a much stronger economy at the time and could also borrow money more easily when needed to fund it. Oh no, that's now isn't it when The Great Satan doesn't really exist any more.
So she's railing against over-praise by... over-praising something. Maybe there's genius in that, but I think she believes she is being deep, which is ironic
It's a rhetorical device. She's a professional academic, and her strength has always been in stirring people up, or what in slashdot terms would be called trolling. It is telling that she deliberately chose what is widely regarded as the worst of the Star Wars films to make her point. Using the original Star Wars (episode IV) wouldn't have been as effective, because a lot of people do actually love that film.
Personally, I can come up with a list of potential "Best artist of our generation" candidates that is longer than the credits for all 3 Star Wars prequels put together and which would not contain the name "George Lucas", but that is going to be my opinion, which is no more valid than Ms Paglia's effort.
No, I disagree. Although art criticism is never going to be black and white in the same way that a mathematical proof is, you can always aggregate the opinions of many critics together, and in general you'll get a good idea of what is good or bad.
For example, the annual Sight and Sound poll of film critics, directors, academics and so on gets the opinions of about a thousand people for the best film ever made and films like Citizen Kane or Tokyo Story regularly appear in most people's Top 10, so it is reasonable to say that they are great films.
From the blurb, it doesn't sound like she's talking about him as a screenwriter or director, but rather as a visual artist and mythmaker. There's an argument for him being a great artist there, I think. Greatest living, perhaps not.
The base mythology of Star Wars is an almost comically simplistic Good v. Evil conflict. It's Paradise Lost without the psychological complexities or poetry but with added laser beams.
TV shows like The Sopranos or The Simpsons are far more profound and artistic than anything in Star Wars.
My definition of how "arty" something is, to counteract all the shite that I see pushed as art, is thus:
"The amount of skill needed to reproduce the piece given the same time, materials and techniques."
That is too simplistic, otherwise anyone who ever managed to write a long, complex symphony would reach the same artistic level as Mozart or Beethoven, and anyone who wrote a 900 page novel would be as great a writer as Dickens or Tolstoy.
My ex and I used to argue over this point constantly. She was a "fine arts" major. What you and I call art, she claimed we confused with craftmanship. If it "evoked a feeling or response", it was art in her book.
Some of the junk she thought was art, created a "feeling" in me. I "felt" it was crap.
Someone who makes a perfect table is a craftsman. When he makes the next identical table he is still a craftsman. An artist makes something new each time.
Actually, you can know how good a work of art is in objective terms. Just look at how many people copy it. Take a painting from 1700's. The ones that were most heavily copied in their day were the most influential. The ones that were still being copied in the 1800's could be seen as great art.
No, you can never simply equate popularity with a work of art's quality. Otherwise Justin Bieber would be one of the greatest singer/songwriter of this generation, Titanic one of the greatest films, and the Fifty Shades of Grey woman the best writer since Shakespeare.
She's doing the intellectual equivalent of the would-be trendy dad who grows a goatee and listens to Justin Bieber in the belief that he's staying in touch with the young generation.
Incidentally, it's perfectly fucking obvious why videogames are doing much better artistically: it's because the previous generation's masterpieces were things like Tetris and Pacman, which are fun games but with limited artistic depth.
Camille Paglia has always been good at generating publicity. Think about it, an Humanities Professor has got a mention on slashdot. That's like having Linus Torvalds guest starring on Dancing on Ice.
Slashdot Mirror
I have quite a bit of land, actually.
You city folks are screwed, however.
Why do you think you have a magic entitlement to that land if the cities are full of starving "screwed" people? If things are that bad you'll end up with some version of a Stalinist revolution, ther land will be taken into collective ownership, and the landowners who sat there feeding their faces while the masses died of hunger will not be regarded or treated well.
Once you get to the point where people are literally starving, all bets are off. Things like property rights and the rest go out the window. When push comes to shove, you can't kill all the malnourished mob before they get you.
I'm pretty sure that every last line of code imported from India needs to be burned with fire.
I'm pretty sure that companies might have noticed this by now.
I am not interested in associating myself with you or anybody else for that matter. If i wanted to be partners with somebody, I would start a corporation or another type of business where success would depend on both of us, but I don't trust people to do the work even then, that is why I am not in a partnership like that and no way in hell I want to be in a union with anybody. I will take my failures but also my successes on my own terms and merits, I want to have nothing incommon with you, with your failures or successes I don't like you or anybody for that matter.
Also much good are unions if companies can just fold and open somewhere else.
tl;dr version: I am a psychopath.
Because like communism, the concept is vastly different from the implementation. Around here, unions are just as corrupt as capitalists. But at least the capitalists, in some small cases do actually create jobs.
It is not the job of unions to create new employment. They are there to protect existing workers. Why is that a difficult concept?
The idea that anything or anyone that doesn't directly create wealth is a bad thing is pure free market ideology that ignores reality. Society is about more than just making money. Yes, that's socialism, and that is why Americans generally don't like unions, any more than they do government laws to protect workers' rights, levy progressive taxes, get rid of discrimination, and so on
I'm curious, what do your unions do?
Look after the interests of workers who individually have little or no power compared to their employers?
Just a wild, crazy thought.
A week or two ago there was a discussion about software engineer unions, and from my perspective it seemed that more comments were against unionizing than were for it.
Unions are socialist or collectivist and America doesn't really do socialism or collectivism. Then individual Americans wonder why they get shafted by their employers in the name of free market efficiency.
I have never really understood why many Americans are so hostile to unionization. There appears to be decades of brainwashing in action and mythos regarding correlation between hardwork and financial success.
Americans generally seem to believe that they live in a classless society, and unions are a reminder that they don't.
If the free market worked as "anarcho-capitalists"/libertarians ideologues seem to think it should, there would be no need for unions, because everyone would be on a free and equal footing to negotiate their own wages and conditions.
The fact that this is laughably far from reality disturbs their world-view, so they like to blame the unions for not fitting in with their laissez faire dreams.
Why must everything be right wing? You realize WWI, and then indirectly, WWII were caused by left wing extremists called anarchists
That is by far the most ridiculous political statement I've ever seen on slashdot, and that includes people defending the intellect of George W Bush.
Huge armies slaughtering each other in the name of patriotism but for no real purpose in WW1 (in particular) are about as far from anarchism as it's possible to get.
And I know how common here it is to equate anarchy with libertarian, and libertarian is a form of conservatism, but look it up. Anarchy is considered an extreme leftist view, not an extreme rightist view. Conservatives wants to keep things the way they were, and completely eliminating government is hardly a conservative view. Keeping it small is.
The philosophical basis of anarchism is the abolition of ALL forms of power or control by one human being over another, whether it's political, religious, social or economic. The problem with modern day US "libertarians" is that they don't agree with the last of these, and won't acknowledge that as long as you have a system with some people much richer and more powerful than others, you can never have equality, fraternity or true liberty.
Do you have any citations or proof that Iran isn't looking to attack?
Hard to prove a negative. Do you have any proof that the US isn't run by alien lizard overlords?
Are you even aware of their financial crisis? Sounds like they need a war ...
What, so they can be bombed back into the Stone Age by the US, then get gloriously lifted up again by some Marshall Plan style charity?
you appear to be an uninformed armchair analyst who has never set foot in Tehran nor spoken a word of Farsi
I tell you what, I've never set foot in Mecca nor spoken a word of Arabic, same with Beijing and Chinese or New Delhi and Hindi. So I suppose I have no right to read about these countries in English and form opinions based on varying (translated) sources?
The argument could be made that by supporting the Shah we were saving them from themselves. A look at where they are now supports this argument.
Yeah, that's the White Man's Burden. Gotta protect those folks with brown skin from their own childish inability to see what's best for them.
Being a player in geopolitics does, as it did the Soviet Union at the time. You have to remember during the Shah the US was embroiled in a deadly cold war with the SU. Every move in that war, including Iran, was a counter to some move the SU made. You can't look at the US as some lone power-hungry king maker in a vacuum, at least at that time.
It was only a deadly cold war in the eyes of the paranoid retard leaders in the US and USSR. In reality, it was all a load of bollocks. Neither country could ever have invaded or destroyed the other. It was the worst sort of hysterical political theatre, and it lasted for forty five years. In the meantime, people in other countries were dragged into the stupidity when they should have been getting on with running their own countries.
I know the USSR was far from faultless, but when you read about the US deliberately overthrowing democratic regimes that they believed might be "communist" it makes very unpleasant reading indeed.
Actually, one of the main factors causing the USSR to collapse was that we forced them to spend too much of their GDP on defense.
That's a bullshit propaganda talking point that contradicts pretty much everything known about USSR GDP, defense, or economic significance (or, to be precisely, lack of one) of USSR dissolution.
No, you're not really correct, as both the USSR and US spent far too much on unnecessarily paranoid defence, the US just had a much stronger economy at the time and could also borrow money more easily when needed to fund it. Oh no, that's now isn't it when The Great Satan doesn't really exist any more.
So she's railing against over-praise by... over-praising something. Maybe there's genius in that, but I think she believes she is being deep, which is ironic
It's a rhetorical device. She's a professional academic, and her strength has always been in stirring people up, or what in slashdot terms would be called trolling. It is telling that she deliberately chose what is widely regarded as the worst of the Star Wars films to make her point. Using the original Star Wars (episode IV) wouldn't have been as effective, because a lot of people do actually love that film.
Personally, I can come up with a list of potential "Best artist of our generation" candidates that is longer than the credits for all 3 Star Wars prequels put together and which would not contain the name "George Lucas", but that is going to be my opinion, which is no more valid than Ms Paglia's effort.
No, I disagree. Although art criticism is never going to be black and white in the same way that a mathematical proof is, you can always aggregate the opinions of many critics together, and in general you'll get a good idea of what is good or bad.
For example, the annual Sight and Sound poll of film critics, directors, academics and so on gets the opinions of about a thousand people for the best film ever made and films like Citizen Kane or Tokyo Story regularly appear in most people's Top 10, so it is reasonable to say that they are great films.
From the blurb, it doesn't sound like she's talking about him as a screenwriter or director, but rather as a visual artist and mythmaker. There's an argument for him being a great artist there, I think. Greatest living, perhaps not.
The base mythology of Star Wars is an almost comically simplistic Good v. Evil conflict. It's Paradise Lost without the psychological complexities or poetry but with added laser beams.
TV shows like The Sopranos or The Simpsons are far more profound and artistic than anything in Star Wars.
My definition of how "arty" something is, to counteract all the shite that I see pushed as art, is thus:
"The amount of skill needed to reproduce the piece given the same time, materials and techniques."
That is too simplistic, otherwise anyone who ever managed to write a long, complex symphony would reach the same artistic level as Mozart or Beethoven, and anyone who wrote a 900 page novel would be as great a writer as Dickens or Tolstoy.
My ex and I used to argue over this point constantly. She was a "fine arts" major. What you and I call art, she claimed we confused with craftmanship. If it "evoked a feeling or response", it was art in her book. Some of the junk she thought was art, created a "feeling" in me. I "felt" it was crap.
Someone who makes a perfect table is a craftsman. When he makes the next identical table he is still a craftsman. An artist makes something new each time.
Actually, you can know how good a work of art is in objective terms. Just look at how many people copy it. Take a painting from 1700's. The ones that were most heavily copied in their day were the most influential. The ones that were still being copied in the 1800's could be seen as great art.
No, you can never simply equate popularity with a work of art's quality. Otherwise Justin Bieber would be one of the greatest singer/songwriter of this generation, Titanic one of the greatest films, and the Fifty Shades of Grey woman the best writer since Shakespeare.
This man Camille Paglia is a moron.
Nice counter-troll, well played.
Same with Picasso... I'd much rather look at a peaceful picture of mountains than his morbid creations. It takes a critic to like it.
No, it doesn't. Art isn't just "hello clouds, hello sky".
The video for Gangnam Style has more visual wit and originality than all of Lucas's films put together.
Incidentally, it's perfectly fucking obvious why videogames are doing much better artistically: it's because the previous generation's masterpieces were things like Tetris and Pacman, which are fun games but with limited artistic depth.
The scene from Kung Fu Panda where Grand Master Oogway ascends is one of the prettiest things I've ever seen, and is quite moving too.
If she hasn't found good art in this generation, she's simply not looking hard enough.
If I turn on the Disney Channel and watch some random teenage sitcom it's greater fucking art than anything George Lucas ever made. And I hate Disney.
Camille Paglia has always been good at generating publicity. Think about it, an Humanities Professor has got a mention on slashdot. That's like having Linus Torvalds guest starring on Dancing on Ice.