chuckroast
Established
Fixed that for you. She never could write a coherent sentence to save her life and that's why she ended up taking all that Government support she railed against all her life in the endI'll spare you the John Roger's quote
The only eroding is that which we ourselves allow to happen. So if you think things are going to hell, that's on you.
I rather think if you actually went back and reread that book, you'd discover that it is a pitch perfect example of current culture. No, she wasn't a superb writer, and she was a flawed philosopher, but she was a keen observer of the ills of the modern mind, and for that she deserves credit.
The erosion is "allowed" to happen because the elites have poisoned the university system with their drooling lunacy, political hackery, and endless idiotic critical theories. This means that the academy is pumping out graduates with six figure loans who know nothing real but believe that "toaster oven" is a gender. that "intersectionalism" is an important idea, and that anything traiditonal or Western is evil.
The graduates are thus fundamentally incapable of critical thinking as a group and thus lap up the bottom of the sewer whether it's in the arts, in politics, or in culture. It's not their fault. They were miseducated by monsters who rejected the Western canon and replaced it with hallucinations.
You cannot know what art is good if you haven't studied good art standing on it's own merits. You cannot make good art - at least art that is durable - if everything must be first filtered to modern pieties about equality, gender, racism, politics, structuralism, blah, blah, blah. I highly commend Roger Kimball's book "The Rape Of Masters" if you want just a little peek into the complete freight train of stupidity that is the modern university arts program. And it's well out of date now. Things are much worse. The woken-puken are running things ... into the ground.
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wlewisiii
Just another hotel clerk
"Woke" is bad? Ok that explains a lot of the victimhood. Let us simply say I disagree.
chuckroast
Established
Art does not need to be filtered through the theories of the woken-puken to be understood. Art can be understood on it's own merits and - no - I don't need to hear someone droning on about their "personal truth" in an artist's statement. It's the most self-involved, narcissistic drivel I've ever heard.
So, "woke" isn't just bad, it's profoundly evil because its based on lies that peddle fantasy in place of observable reality. But that's OK, because it's already imploding as a social, cultural, and artistic movement. Note the many entertainers and comics, for example, that are refusing to play along. Like all cultural insanity, it will inevitably die - just much faster than previous ones because of the internet speed of commentary.
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AndyCapp
Guest
Just finished a half-moon of Réunion fromagerie white cheese (a bit like like Camembert but with a sordino) so no, thank you.Would you like some cheese and crackers to go with your whine?
Less sarcastically, just go shoot.
That's all that matters in the end: the image. IDGAF if anyone else really likes mine or not beyond, perhaps a handful of friends and my GF. It's nice EgoBo when they do, sure. But not necessary.
Hey maybe I'll be the next Vivian Meyer? Fat chance!
But I'll have fun anyway. I'll keep shooting and posting no matter what others think.
Let's all shut up and shoot. I am all for it, except when it gets too dark.
chuckroast
Established
What happened? 20th Century critical schools - like Deconstructionism and Postmodernism - that's what happened. They decided that the entirety of the human experience like beauty, truth, ethical norms, etc. were entirely personal. So-called "personal truth" replaced the search for Truth. Beauty became the handmaiden of politics. Ethics is now the slave of desired social outcomes even if the actual behavior is destructive.
This has now reached its fullness in the university system and has produced several generations of graduates who pretty much know nothing but the importance of their own their feelings and how they align with contemporary socio-political pieties. (Try telling one of these young photographers that Salgado was a talented propagandist, not necessarily an important artist and watch their heads explode.)
This, in some degree, is what Kimball's book "Rape Of The Masters" is all about.
Godfrey
somewhat colored
When I hang out with us old guys, the world is always going to pot and everything was always better 30 years ago.
When I hang out with the young guys, the world is challenging and they're working their butts off learning, trying to figure everything out, and growing up.
I much prefer hanging out with the young guys. And sometimes they grace an old man with a compliment by trying to make photos the way I do, and by listening when I explain something that they'd never been taught before. And other times, I'm delighted to see the fresh new ideas they come up with, the ways they understand all the new junk and bend it to making photographs that I would never have thought to make.
And we all laugh at our follies and denseness together. And make our photographs with whatever equipment we individually like or can afford. And no one thinks either way about whether the world is really going to pot or is just being the world as usual, and carrying on.
G
"The price of Life is that we must suffer Death. The price of Love is that we must suffer Loss."
When I hang out with the young guys, the world is challenging and they're working their butts off learning, trying to figure everything out, and growing up.
I much prefer hanging out with the young guys. And sometimes they grace an old man with a compliment by trying to make photos the way I do, and by listening when I explain something that they'd never been taught before. And other times, I'm delighted to see the fresh new ideas they come up with, the ways they understand all the new junk and bend it to making photographs that I would never have thought to make.
And we all laugh at our follies and denseness together. And make our photographs with whatever equipment we individually like or can afford. And no one thinks either way about whether the world is really going to pot or is just being the world as usual, and carrying on.
G
"The price of Life is that we must suffer Death. The price of Love is that we must suffer Loss."
chuckroast
Established
I do think it's kind of an elder myth that "Everything used to be better". Human virtues and vices don't really change all that much over time.
But the High School and university system have so miseducated the youngsters that they literally know less than any generation before them about pretty much everything except technology. They've been deprived of the Western canon, of a serious discussion of ethics, aesthetics, and the search for truth. Their "teachers" - in the main, there are exceptions - have turned the schools into socio-political madrassas to dunk these kids into an ideological sewer of sorts rather than actually teaching them to think for themselves and have minds of inquiry.
As just one example - I have watched young people really struggle when I tell them "Beauty isn't just about what you like. It has some basis in objective measures that have nothing to do with your experience of art." Once you deny the idea that all truth is "personal truth", their worldview collapses.
I am in the acquaintance of a good many of these younger people and most of them are pretty terrific. They're just kind of unanchored and desperate to find meaning, beauty, truth and all the other stuff their education denied them.
True. They aren't learning much of real value at Indoctrination U. And the examples that are being set aren't helping - the president of Harvard exposed for plagiarism??
Not to mention woke infecting AI. People make fun of Google Gemini but at the same time aren't aware that every search result has also been infected...
Not to mention woke infecting AI. People make fun of Google Gemini but at the same time aren't aware that every search result has also been infected...
chuckroast
Established
My "real" job is designing modern, high complexity computer systems and platforms (that's what funds my Leica addiction and all my other GAS). AI terrifies me. Not the tech, which is a potentially useful tool to enrich human experience. What terrifies me is that he who controls the large language models controls the outputs of the AI. It is entirely possible - and probably likely - that some wide eyed ideologue will shove content into those LLMs to make them produce outputs that suits his or her politics, social ideals, and so forth.
What is pernicious about this is the disconnectedness of contemporary society. This is the consequence of how very specialized we've all become. Each of us does a very narrow range of things (hopefully well). But finding people who see the whole "arc" of a process or a system is rare. Have you ever tried to get a problem fixed with medical billing that spans multiple providers? Even if everyone is trying their best to help, no one biller understands the end-to-end process to help fix things.
This disconnectedness will enable a level of AI terrorism that is almost unimaginable. Not only are the LLM authors not deeply connected to the AI outputs, the AIs themselves do not have a predicable, measurable way to be checked. Each actor in the AI universe operates on its own with little cross correlation. Add to that to a younger generation of consumers that are have lousy educations and thus have a hard time spotting nonsense, and you'll see generations of people blindly following the AIs over time. It's the next frontier of totalitarianism.
Oh, and this isn't just paranoid guessing. We've already seen exactly that behavior - steering news stories, biasing reporting, misreporting facts in favor of socio-political agenda, etc. - among the most popular major platforms like pre-Musk Twitter and current Google. Add the hissing cauldron of evil that is social media to this, coupled with the "all truth is just my own truth" crowd and you have a perfect recipe for the enslavement of mankind.
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AndyCapp
Guest
What I see is the rise of mediocrity. Once upon a time, it was an accepted fact that people were rich and poor, smart and stupid, gifted and dull.
With the delusionary and unnatural ideology of equality, we are forced to think that these differences are a result of oppression. We cannot change the situation, but we talk and act as if the reality (that we can see with our eyes) does not exist, and if it does, we can override it with legislation and propaganda.
Mediocrity, incompetence, jealousy, fabricated fame.
Too many incapable people are in positions where they do not belong.
The modern propaganda machinery supports them with never-ending drumfire that impairs our sense of reality.
Humanity has never seen anything like it before.
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AndyCapp
Guest
A relevant post. Lack of courage is an important factor in this equation. Another important factor is the mental sloth. The two are interrelated.
My son, an IT specialist without a due diploma, spends a lot of his time reading aloud manuals to The Qualified, who do not bother. An important point Elon Musk made is that your argument is no good if your rocket explodes before it gets off the ground. "That argument does not stand!"
This is basically why STEM arguments live longer than humanist ones. They are established on a durable basis –and tested.
I have been playing around with Grammarly. It is dangerous if left without keen surveillance.
It changes the meaning of statements 180° and fills up the space with unconnected nonwords that sound legit.
Am I wrong when I put a big part of the blame for the Brain Rot epidemic in the American Academy on Grammarly?
(It tried to mess up this posting that goes against its narrative –"Dismiss!"!)
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chuckroast
Established
The Western Academy has been committing seppuku for years. The mind numbing double speak and blithering in the humanities alone is guaranteed to drain all meaning out of words. Consider just this very fine example:
When you write a satirical article to mock their babbling, entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity AND it makes it past peer review AND it's further defended even when exposed as satire/hoax, you know the Inhumanities departments are filled with the stuff that comes from the south end of a cow. (And this isn't remotely the only example.)
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chuckroast
Established
It is my sincere hope that the people pimping these DIE programs all have pilots selected because of skin tone, not skill, and surgeons whose primary qualifications involved identifying as a fine surgeon. It would really thin the herd.
(God says I am supposed to love everyone, but nowhere does it say I have to like them.)
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AndyCapp
Guest
In Finland, one nasty guy attacked the grants given to DEI HUM departments to carry out their "research."The Western Academy has been committing seppuku for years. The mind numbing double speak and blithering in the humanities alone is guaranteed to drain all meaning out of words. Consider just this very fine example:
When you write a satirical article to mock their babbling, entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity AND it makes it past peer review AND it's further defended even when exposed as satire/hoax, you know the Inhumanities departments are filled with the stuff that comes from the south end of a cow. (And this isn't remotely the only example.)
The articles (which resembled Sokal and Boghossian greatly) did not astonish me, nor did the fact that these mediocre people perform as their capacity allows. That the Finnish Ministry of Culture gives them money –they have infiltrated the deciding bodies with like-minded people using Salinsky's book as their roadmap.
What astonished me was the reaction from the Academy.
Their main worry was the threat that reviewing the quality of this "scientific" work somehow threatened the independence of scientific research!
Articles supported by the Ministry grants are beyond criticism. We do not have the qualifications or the knowledge to say anything about the machine-made babble some people do for money and fun.
A similar reaction was noticed at Harvard when the DEI-nominated president proved to be a copy-and-paste researcher with questionable merits outside of her DEI activity, where she shone. Her skin color was also right, though ethnicity was not so.
The rot is deep. Some active individuals of Millennials seem to be doing something about it. My heart is with them.
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zane0777
Established
What I see is long-overdue pushback against mediocrity and unearned privilege. If you think that "once upon a time" the US, or anywhere for that matter, was a meritocracy, then I don't know where to even begin to discuss the current zeitgeist.
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AndyCapp
Guest
Then don't. Easy.
chuckroast
Established
Results were always rewarded. That's how competitive economies work. In actual fact, that had more to do with making progress in race relations that all the legislation ever did. You cannot ignore greatness whether it was Jackie Robinson or George Washington Carver.
For the record , all privilege is "unearned" whether it inheriting wealth or getting a job you don't deserve because you fill a quota. Goose, gander.
DownUnder
Nikon Nomad
Mediocrity has always been the guiding standard in the world. How many geniuses can any rational society deal with?
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Retro-Grouch
Well-known
Hah! This is one of RFF's best ideological slugfests in a long time. Ayn Rand vs. the "Woken-Puken" is much more entertaining than that tired old film vs. digital or Nikon vs. Canon nonsense. I'm tempted to join the brawl, but experience (here and elsewhere) counsels me to abstain. Nevertheless, may the best man (oops, person) win, and may the loser enjoy his (their?) all-expense-paid lifetime vacation in a gulag of the winner's choice!
I'm surprised this hasn't gone off the rails yet.