Tune in, turn off

Posting from the humid zones some strange trends by the PC totalitariat:

Here’s a clue for you kids who have never studied history: Whenever someone uses “bourgeois” and “traditional” as epithets, you need to stay the hell away from whatever utopian scam that person is trying to put over on you. Hostility to private property and contempt for sexual morality are anti-social attitudes betokening the kind of dangerous radicalism that has only ever led to anarchy and totalitarianism (first one, then the other).[…] This “descent into madness” was the logical destination of the Friedrichshof for pretty much the same reason that sexual assault plagued the encampments of Occupy Wall Street. The alleged high-minded idealism of radical leaders is always exposed as a hypocritical mask for selfishness, and the idiots who are attracted to radical movements never have the kind of common-sense scepticism that would cause them to examine the leader’s altruistic pose and ask, “What’s in it for him? What’s his cut of the action?”

Of past and future.

More from the erudite pen of Theodore Dalrymple, this time on post-modern art and its soul destroying philosophies.

"It has always been the job of artists to conquer territory that has been taboo," writes Norman Rosenthal in his grossly disingenuous essay, ambiguously entitled "The Blood Must Continue to Flow," which introduces the catalogue. It would be difficult to formulate a less truthful, more wilfully distorted summary of art history, of which a small part—and by no means the most glorious—is mistaken for the whole, that the unjustifiable may be justified.

"Artists must continue the conquest of new territory and new taboos," Rosenthal continues, in prescriptivist mood. He admits no other purpose of art: to break taboos is thus not a possible function of art but its only function. Small wonder, then, that if all art is the breaking of taboos, all breaking of taboos soon comes to be regarded as art.

Of course, he doesn't really mean what he says; but then, for intellectuals like him, words are not to express propositions or truth but to distinguish the writer socially from the common herd, too artistically unenlightened and unsophisticated to advocate the abandonment of all restraint and standards. It is unlikely, however, that even Rosenthal would find, say, a video of young hooligans raping his sister (to invoke Oscar Wilde again) to be merely the conquest of new territory and taboo. Thus, while he may not actually mean what he says, his promotion of this idea in the current exhibition will return to haunt not only him but the rest of society. For why should artists alone be permitted to break taboos? Why not the rest of us? A taboo exists only if it is a taboo for everyone: and what is broken symbolically in art will soon enough be broken in reality.

That civilized life cannot be lived without taboos—that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished—is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism. How ironic that a high official of the Royal Academy should have espoused this destructive doctrine, when the academy's first president, a greater and better man by far, wrote in his Seventh Discourse on Art: "A man who thinks he is guarding himself against prejudices [by which he means inherited moral standards and taboos] by resisting the authority of others, leaves open every avenue to singularity, vanity, self-conceit, obstinacy, and many other vices, all tending to warp the judgment." As Sir Joshua also pointed out—in urbane, witty, and civilized prose, of a kind impossible to imagine Norman Rosenthal writing—the intelligent and wise man examines his prejudices, not to reject them all because they are prejudices but to see which should be retained and which not.
 

 The full article is found here and for anyone interested in art it makes for an interesting if somewhat depressing (my opinion) read. It encapsulates for me some of the reasons why I have experienced so much trouble with making art over the past few years.    
http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_urbanities-trash.html

 

Do what I say not what I do!

This is aptly illustrative of the 'seeming rather than doing' philosophy behind so many moral poseurs.

Fitzroy is a “progressive” area, filled with people with a “social conscience” particularly when it comes to the environment. Its council reflects this, comprising three Greens, one socialist, three Labor members and two independents. Fitzroy’s federal member is Adam Bandt, the sole Green in the House of Representatives.

And when 15,000 people in one of the country’s most progressive and green areas hold a party in the local Edinburgh Gardens, they naturally leave the park looking like this:

         

Rubbish is for Big Government to pick up.

The death throes of Warmism

Arthur Schopenhauer in the Art of Rhetoric describes the kind of abuse that fact-deprived eco-fascists employ as a last ditch defence against the mounting climate evidence. In Schopenhauer's world this tactic is the last of 38 ways to win an argument when the facts are against you:

A last trick is to become personal, insulting, rude, as soon as you perceive that your opponent has the upper hand, and that you are going to come off worst. It consists in passing from the subject of dispute, as from a lost game, to the disputant himself, and in some way attacking his person… But in becoming personal you leave the subject altogether, and turn your attack to his person, by remarks of an offensive and spiteful character. It is an appeal from the virtues of the intellect to the virtues of the body, or to mere animalism. This is a very popular trick, because every one is able to carry it into effect; and so it is of frequent application…

As a sharpening of wits, controversy is often, indeed, of mutual advantage, in order to correct one’s thoughts and awaken new views. But in learning and in mental power both disputants must be tolerably equal. If one of them lacks learning, he will fail to understand the other, as he is not on the same level with his antagonist. If he lacks mental power, he will be embittered, and led into dishonest tricks, and end by being rude.