BF2S Forums Where are all the whiny peaceful "Enlightened" European now?

art and criticism have a mutual relation with one another.

do you think artists create in a void? with no sense of their field or subject! no sense of history? inspirations, antecedents, movements?

artists go through formal training. there is an academic and theoretical as well as a practical element. all invention is based on imitation and on incorporating a body of knowledge into your work.

you, of all people, defending arts when you don’t give a wank about artists. any artist will tell you that art criticism and theorising is critical to their work.

Dilbert, you've been "blustering" through stuff for years on this forum. It's hilarious to hear you characterize entire fields of study that you've personally avoided and abhor like you know what you're talking about. Cherry picking stuff to bolster when it suits your own ends, then dropping it like a rock when the topic has moved on.

When people are talking speaking mockingly of engineers snobbing it up about the humanities, the boss music comes on when you, the ultimate engineering snob, walk into the room.

Yes, actually. Especially developing artists, and artists who rely on commissioned work as a means of income. A small amount, like writers, might be egotistical enough to not care, but unless they've got superhuman talent they're not doing themselves any favors.

Fantastic dead end we've reached, then. Can't wait to see when you next start this argument over from scratch again.

Yeah pretty much what I expected. One of your great fallbacks, timeless classic.

re: maleficent, etc.

this genre seems played out. black hat villains aren't very interesting to begin with. turning already disneyfied villains into sympathetic villains i think is a detriment to what little fun a character had going for it. now i'm supposed to sympathize with a person who sews puppies into fur coats. at least start me with jafar.

My art classes with few exceptions were very hands on and friendly. Still srs beans, but professors would offer suggestions and critiques, and classmates were encouraged to comment on one another's work. A much nicer learning environment than the one Dilbert posted maybe proudly of in the college enrollment thread, where the professors would tell off any questions and then lock themselves away in their offices. Between the two I would rather have one of the art professors in a position where they has to deal with people than whatever the heck Rainman nonsense Dilbert's program staff had going on. (By comparison, my computer electronics class was mainly stern about being on time. People were expected to ask questions. If we didn't, it would be assumed that nobody was listening.)

The friendly and collaborative art experience is largely extended past my college experience with correspondence between myself and former classmates, digital creatives online (art, modeling, video, game mods, in one case game music), and people who do commissioned work. It can be seen for yourself if you just look, Dilbert.

i have told you repeatedly that the current crop of right-wing toffs have little to do with the field of classics or the faculty of humanities.

they are an expensively educated de facto ruling class who take their privileges as their birthright. their education has nothing to do with it beyond being a basic 'finishing school' and a three-year networking opportunity. everyone who aims, for example, to go to balliol to do PPE doesn't do so because they want to become star academics. they go to balliol for the clubs and connections, and they do PPE because it's the quickest route to power.

the same thing happens at harvard or yale, or even princeton or stanford. the ruling elite send their children there for the greek life, the private societies, the silicon valley connections, as much as they send them there to be earnest students of any field or discipline.

that this has to be explained to you, over and over, is mindnumbing. nobody, in any context, is considered to be a 'classicist' or a 'physicist' after completing only 3 years of salutary undergraduate study in the subject. it's in the very name of UNDER-graduate, i.e. not yet at the basic level. that you insist on defining these people by what they read (or more likely did not read, but swanned through) for 3 years between the ages of 18-21, is risible.

they do all have something in common, which does explain their role and influence in british society, but their ability to misquote virgil or livy is not it. the major public schools like eton or harrow don't even smile very widely on humanities and 'arts hipsters'. what classics know-how they do have is mostly strictly from the martial-military or sporting traditions which those schools uphold.

the whole country can evidently look at a rees-mogg or a johnson and see that they are self-evidently foolish people and popinjays. only you somehow take them to be emblematic of 'humanities students' or 'classicists', as if professional classicists have any relation to a vain and conceited twerp like rees-mogg, learning quotations by rote from a fucking oxford anthology for dumbies. the country knows these people are posers and that's why they are called out on their inane nonsense live on radio. only you seem to think they represent an entire type, which is stupid beyond belief. these people represent 0.5% of graduates from these disciplines and have nothing to do with the actual knowledge or work being done there.

Last edited by uziq (2021-08-05 22:44:35)

it's a dumb idea and pretty much every educationalist in the country has made this point -- for some time now.

michael gove wanted to return the british curriculum to 'patriotic values' and 'old-school grammar testing'. read: making children memorize the dates of important british victories and endless reams of royal names and places. pointless.

doesn't have much to do with classics/classicists or the humanities, though. this is pure tory ideology trying to change the education system to whatever their misguided 'value system' is. it is totally untethered from serious academic study and even from all good educational principles. no modern educator would advocate for this type of learning again. it's a total step backwards -- which seems to be rather the point of much conservative politics (as well as your own, natch).

https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n16/sophie-smith/diary

pretty lolworthy stuff about the contortions of the UK's latest 'independent, free-thinking, freedom-loving' TV channel. which lasted about 5 weeks. a presenter 'took the knee' after the england football team suffered horrible racism in the euro finals. this was beyond the pale of the 'free-thinking' new organization, which promptly fired him. protection of free speech ... rallying against censorship and cancel-culture ... errrr.

Those who portray themselves as beleaguered defenders of academic freedom also enjoy less tangible benefits: it’s possible for them to configure good faith criticism – the substance of academic life – as ad hominem attack. A couple of years ago, when I was still in my probationary period (and so easier to fire), a senior academic used the n-word in a seminar I run. His paper was a defence of academic free speech and he did not agree that this word shouldn’t be said by white people (like him), so he said it, twice. I felt sick. In the questions, I asked him to reflect on the political implications of my reaction. Could we read it as an example of a certain kind of successful linguistic activism, whereby the use of a word by a particular group is not only thought to be unacceptable but is experienced with revulsion? If this were the case, I wondered, might it also be correct to say that while he should not (and would not) suffer any professional consequences for saying the word in the seminar, we could nonetheless see his choice as having its own political effects, weakening the emotional valence given to the word by the people it is meant to degrade? Might this be a reason to avoid saying it, even if, as a matter of academic freedom, we can? He could have answered my questions without conceding to my analysis. Instead he lost his temper. ‘You are trying to censor me!’ he bellowed. I later learned that he had contacted three senior members of my department to tell them I was responsible for the ‘worst seminar experience of his entire career’.

the right are snowflakes. who knew?

Last edited by uziq (2021-08-13 20:53:36)

increasing national insurance. yes it's a big ask. but the debts from the last crisis are immense.

i would love to see a single government on this planet tax the (super) rich proportionately. but to do that implies a world government and a world tax authority. otherwise every rich fucker will leapfrog to the next haven or preferential domain. what can one do?

i have been a steadfast believer in dirigisme my whole life. i think the state should be more powerful than the market – even if it's a global market. at some point we need to coordinate a global tax on the rich/the multinationals. all the labour and value filters upwards. this is what makes a mockery of increasing taxes on the (already) very poor.

so many people got very rich from covid. whether it's the dodgy awarding of contracts and government funding to mates in an 'emergency' or whether it's huge stimulus checks for corporations. it has been exceedingly good business for the 0.1%. like the financial crash of 2008, the people behind it seem to skip away, scot free. it's wrong. we all know it's wrong.

in the short term i'd rather save the NHS and deal with the fucking capitalists after.

essentially, if you were lucky enough to get on the housing market before ca. 1960 or 1970, when an average first home cost you £1000, then your social care costs as you slide into tapioca-slurping retirement and dementia are going to be covered by several generations of the young and gainfully employed who can’t even afford their own first home due to house prices becoming radically decoupled from average income since ca. 2000.

put another way, the comfortably well off are going to retire into old age with more money in their back pocket and preferential tax cuts/inheritance nudges from the tory party (geriatrics being one of their main voter blocs). the majority of working people in this country have accepted a tax hike and an increased cost so that the rich can prepare a better inheritance for their grandchildren’s children. perhaps setting up the next four generations of landlordism?

it would be churlish to point out, i suppose, that a major campaign point for brexit was that it would add an ‘extra £350 million per week for the NHS’.

or to mention the fact that the test-and-trace system, a huge debacle with a bloated budget nearing £40 billion, and which was given to a senior tory MP’s wife and baroness, dido harding (previous work experience: ruining a major telecoms company), was confirmed as having had ‘no measurable effect in mitigating the spread of covid-19’.  so, er, we just spaffed £40 billion up the wall on a nepotist’s vanity project, and meanwhile have to accept years of tax increases to the tune of a …£32 billion funding shortfall?

we’re ‘all in it together’ in these crises … remember the war … the blitz spirit. especially the rich, and the banks, the top 5 of which are still putting aside 12-17% of their annual revenues in offshore tax havens, and the top 25 of which are still not meeting basic green energy drives/fossil energy divestments with regards to the climate crisis.

the pandemic, like the financial crisis or any other large macroeconomic ‘disruption’ event, has essentially been a wholesale transfer of public wealth and resources to a private elite. stories abound of conservative MP’s mates rushing to company house to file new businesses for pandemic supply procurement. businesses registered in a living room in buckinghamshire with no provable income being awarded £250 million contracts to source vials or syringes, etc. meanwhile the working stiff and the majority of businesses who have to get on with the humdrum slog of real economic recovery are being taxed more.

you can’t make it up.

Last edited by uziq (2021-09-08 02:40:41)

I don't have any stake in the German election. Interesting results so far?