Retro-Grouch
Well-known
I thought it already had, but perhaps you have more stringent standards. But patience, sir; good things come to those who wait!I'm surprised this hasn't gone off the rails yet.
did I miss fisticuffs?
raydm6
Yay! Cameras! 🙈🙉🙊┌( ಠ_ಠ)┘ [◉"]
A
AndyCapp
Guest
You are a wise man, Mr. Retro-Grouch (my excuse for assuming your gender). One can easily be banned from discussion sites for problematic opinions. I am subscribed to RFF, and I'd really hate to have it happen again.
–About mediocrity: of course, it has always existed, but now we have entered an era that celebrates it.
DownUnder
Nikon Nomad
Obviously the rails aren't what they used to be.
That, or we are now all old and tired...
(Disclaimer - or whatever - to the last paragraph) I know I am.
That, or we are now all old and tired...
(Disclaimer - or whatever - to the last paragraph) I know I am.
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chuckroast
Established
I am deeply offended that you assumed my gender and tried to hide this incredible breach of my personhood with a private apology here. I demand you perform public mea culpa on all major media outlets, socialist media, and with a placard in front of your home, acknowledging your privilege, insensitivity, bigotry, and hatefulness. However, if you want to skip all that, just send a substantial check to my foundation, "Roast Lives Matter". If you don't we're gonna have a peaceful riot, m'kay?
chuckroast
Established
Wait! What? There are opposing points of view?
I am doomed forever as I have long enjoyed a vigorous game of chess.
There are only two colors and white has the privilege of moving first.
How do you know if you are a privileged white straight male?
A feminist will tell you.
What’s the difference between a gun and the woken-puken?
Guns only have one trigger.
In California, people are flocking to the gender neutral mine.
There’s gold in them/their hills.
Dogman
Mentor
I'm so confused....
Dervla
Established
I'm so confused....
me too
Retro-Grouch
Well-known
You and Dogman should just pour yourselves a stiff drink, pull up the lawn chairs, and enjoy the circus!
Retro-Grouch
Well-known
Just so you know, you're talking to a hardcore queer anarchist redneck Buddhist (How's that for identity politics?). But I do have an unshakeable sense of humor, and appreciate anyone, regardless of political persuasion, who can deliver a good rant. And damn, you can!
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AndyCapp
Guest
Anybody who has read "Atlas Shrugged" deserves my respect. My thoughts went to Richard Feynman and Ayn Rand when the bridge collapsed in Baltimore. It should not have collapsed but it did.
chuckroast
Established
The government regulated the construction of this bridge. Now that it broke, the government's answer will be more regulation.
chuckroast
Established
I only wish I knew what my political "persuasion" was these days ...
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AndyCapp
Guest
"They" define it for you.
Can a man be a woman? Is it OK to groom children for sex? Do people who never were slaves deserve to be compensated by people who never had slaves? Should people be punished for being White? Is it OK to steal and rob and take over somebody's house because you are oppressed? Should the police force enforce the law? Should laws be put in practice? Should judges have their character assessed before being nominated? Should women compete against women in sports or should men be allowed in also if they wear lipstick?
The best choice is to turn off the TV and read a book.
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Retro-Grouch
Well-known
Yes, but which book? Do we read a book that confirms what we think we know, or do we read a book that challenges it? The "echo chamber" isn't just on the internet; it's always been an understandable but unfortunate impulse for people to want their biases confirmed. The first necessity is to step away from our self-definitions that we so desperately cling to, and the second necessity is to refrain from the categories that we think we need to place others in. I jokingly referred to myself with a laundry list of "identities" in my earlier post; they're all true, but none of them, nor all of them together, is "me". Let's recognize that we all contain multitudes, and celebrate our endless complexity and diversity, and skip the name calling. Life might be so much richer, and the world better.
chuckroast
Established
@Retro-Grouch - You wanted a rant? Here you go ...
We should be studying the "book" that explains which human behaviors have been historically successful and which ones have not. The greatest vanity of modernity is the assumption that tradition is awful/bigoted/exclusive and thus needs to be replaced by entirely untried social fantasies foisted upon society by government force.
The real irony of all this is that it is primarily because of religious conscience that slavery was abandoned in the West after 300 years when it had previously existed for tens of thousands of years across nearly every human society.
The real irony of this is that the only reason people of variant sexualities enjoy freedom today is because of the philosophical structures put in place by Locke and others during the Enlightenment.
But Locke and his buddies, in turn, depended on the Reformation thinking that placed the power of conscience on the individual and took it away from large ecclesiastical-government structures. There is a direct line from the Renaissance, to Luther, to Locke, to the modern liberal state that affirms individual liberty. (N.B. The worst butchers of history were all either areligious, occultists, or atheists. The worst abuses of the Roman church in total pale by comparison to an afternoon in Stalin's gulags.)
The real irony here is that - after tens of thousands of years of economic disparity and oppression - Capitalism and Markets became the instruments that produced so much wealth for so many people, we today have the money to pick up the tab for the economic underclass, even the ones who jolly well just don't feel like working.
The real irony here is that the modern liberal nation-state (with secure and defined borders) that emerged from these movements is the only thing that has ever been powerful enough to be effective in curbing human rights abuses and genocides, interdicting in famines and large scale human tragedies, and bringing some measure of stability to high tension areas of the world.
But the Modern Mind (tm) is waaaaay too smart for all that. Faith, family, capital formation, markets, and national integrity are to be discarded in favor of the drug induced hallucinations of the We're So Smart Crowd. And the resutls are everwhere. We have people who "know' there are 80 genders but can't do elementary arithmetic. We have people who've read Zinn's execrable history of the US but don't know any actual US history and why it's so remarkable. The same people who marched against nuclear power, are now squealling about the coming bad weather. We see "Transexuals For Palestine" unironically marching when they really should call themselves "Chickens For KFC". We are truly living in an Idiocracy.
You can have the Modern Mind (tm). It's full of fools, charlatans, idiots, and cause pimps. No thanks. You cannot screw around what took thousands of years to figure out, and replace with stoned masturbatory fantasies and expect good outcomes.
P.S., I have lived in three countries, am a citizen of several, and have traveled and worked in probably a dozen more. I've see the alternatives to those traditional systems of living and they are awful. If you don't think so, walk through the ashes of Dachau or Treblinka. The Modern Mind (tm) is setting us up for the next mass genocide.
P.P.S. We've become so unmoored intellectually, socially, and spiritually, that even hardcode atheists like Camille Paglia are admitting that letting the 60s counterculture (aka "The Smelliest Generation") throw out all of those traditions including religion, was a really bad idea.
P.P.P.S. Veering every so slightly back onto topic. The popular photography of the 1960s largely sucked and continued to thereafter. When Annie Liebovitz is the the apigee of a photographic generation, we'lve lost all touch with real art. When Mapplethrope is taken seriously as an artist instead of what he was - an agent provocateur - you get some insight into just how screwed up you become dumping all traditional structures,. Your worldview dictates your art. If your worldview is a sewer, your art will smell like ... well, you know...
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Retro-Grouch
Well-known
Well, not bad as rants go! And you'd be surprised, probably, by how much I agree with you on many points. Particularly regarding Leibovitz and Mapplethorpe; I detest their work.
But on to bigger fish. While I'm in agreement about the sorry state of our present culture, and the looney excesses of both the Left and Right, I can't help but think you're missing (or obscuring) the direct connection between the evolution of the modern liberal Capitalist nation-state and the plethora of ills you've lumped under "The Modern Mind". Could we have modern corporate Capitalism without its inevitable outcome, a culture of mindless consumption, dumbed-down spectacle, epidemic Narcissism, and rapacious, all-consuming greed? The past three centuries of exponentially growing Industrial Capitalism could not have come about without a population of mass consumers who were and are kept deliberately poorly educated, increasingly unable to engage in critical thought, and tempted by the siren song of More Stuff, a song that told them that what matters, the only thing that matters, is being the one with the most toys.
Look, I live in this society, I enjoy its many benefits, but I'm not blind to its ugliness. And I suspect that the ugliness may, ironically, be an inevitable consequence of the noble ideas that gave birth to the modern world. Could we have made other choices? Did we know there were other choices to be made? What should be our path in the future, assuming there will be one? I'm afraid we Moderns made a Faustian bargain, and now it seems we have to pay up.
I think I'm going to sign off on this thread, since I can't imagine having more to add, and since I've pretty much dispensed with the history of the Western World in one quick RFF post. But chuckroast, I sense your idealism, and your rage at it being thwarted by the realities of this life. Please, in all sincerity, be careful of rage. It can be the enemy of compassion.
But on to bigger fish. While I'm in agreement about the sorry state of our present culture, and the looney excesses of both the Left and Right, I can't help but think you're missing (or obscuring) the direct connection between the evolution of the modern liberal Capitalist nation-state and the plethora of ills you've lumped under "The Modern Mind". Could we have modern corporate Capitalism without its inevitable outcome, a culture of mindless consumption, dumbed-down spectacle, epidemic Narcissism, and rapacious, all-consuming greed? The past three centuries of exponentially growing Industrial Capitalism could not have come about without a population of mass consumers who were and are kept deliberately poorly educated, increasingly unable to engage in critical thought, and tempted by the siren song of More Stuff, a song that told them that what matters, the only thing that matters, is being the one with the most toys.
Look, I live in this society, I enjoy its many benefits, but I'm not blind to its ugliness. And I suspect that the ugliness may, ironically, be an inevitable consequence of the noble ideas that gave birth to the modern world. Could we have made other choices? Did we know there were other choices to be made? What should be our path in the future, assuming there will be one? I'm afraid we Moderns made a Faustian bargain, and now it seems we have to pay up.
I think I'm going to sign off on this thread, since I can't imagine having more to add, and since I've pretty much dispensed with the history of the Western World in one quick RFF post. But chuckroast, I sense your idealism, and your rage at it being thwarted by the realities of this life. Please, in all sincerity, be careful of rage. It can be the enemy of compassion.
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chuckroast
Established
I am not enraged, I am saddened to see all that has worked so well squandered by wild eyed ideologues and cause pimps. The youngsters are going backwards and will never know the joys we did, warts and all.
I rather think that you add I would have amazing conversations in person, should that ever transpire.
DownUnder
Nikon Nomad
Gentleman (or other), off your soap boxes, please. Enough is enough. Arguments about photo matters, yes. Endlessly so if need be. But Identity and sexual politics, no thanks.
Can we not go back to just good-naturedly chaffing one another about matters photographic? That is after all what RFF is all about, and what it does best.
I get enough political and sociological rants from the mainstream media.
Respectfully suggesting you/we all agree to disagree and call a truce...
Can we not go back to just good-naturedly chaffing one another about matters photographic? That is after all what RFF is all about, and what it does best.
I get enough political and sociological rants from the mainstream media.
Respectfully suggesting you/we all agree to disagree and call a truce...
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