The Transformed Wife is a blogger and a minor Twitter celebrity. In her profile she describes herself as
A wife, a mother, a grandma, and a keeper at home. Loves Jesus and is not afraid to speak Truth because it sets you free!
But I think she’s selling herself short here, because she seems to have forgotten that she is also a bold crusader against the evils of our age: feminism, witchcraft, and grouchiness.
Let’s roll the tape, or rather the tweets:
It’s just too bad God designed women to be so gullible.
Remember: Marriage and babies, good. Putting a hex on the Transformed Wife, very bad.
Apparently witchcraft and feminism are pretty much the same thing.
Uh oh, now she’s naming names!
Whatever you do, don’t dress like a slut, because that too is a sort of witchcraft.
This lady is doing it all wrong:
This tweet sounds a bit like a pitch for a fun rom-com — that is, if your version of fun involves burning in hell for all eternity:
And while you’re going about your non-witchy life, don’t be a grouch! Remember to smile or God will smite you or burn you in hell for all eternity or something.
And don’t worry about the end, which is near!
SMILE DAMMIT.
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As to art, even Neanderthals had it. It is to express feelings that can’t be conveyed completely by words, and to cause them. Like Alan said, it’s to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Fascists and other dictators are very quick to ban art. Look at the declaration of “degenerate art” in Germany, along with music. Or “Soviet Realism”. Or Tr*mp signing that useless order about what style post offices should be built in.
@Howard:
And he outs himself as a conservative. Though we already suspected.
@talacaris:
The block has a patterned surface and a circular hole in one side. And perhaps additional features we can’t see on the three sides not facing the camera.
@miscellaneous:
@ gss ex noob
That gives me an excuse to post this barely tangentially related image. I know it’s not really relevant; but I just love how committed that cat is.
That cave painting image I posted was done by Neanderthals*. It’s currently the oldest artwork we know of. It’s one of my favourites. Not just because of all the mind boggling implications about what it is to be human; I also like it aesthetically. Cave paintings really speak to me; especially the abstract ones. Maybe there’s some part of our brains where we understand all this on a collective level. Like it’s a universal human experience?
(*Insert compulsory “Technically they’re only Neanderthals if they’re from the Neanderthal Valley in Germany; otherwise they’re just sparkling hominids” joke here)
@Alan Robertshaw:
Have you read about this?
https://wondergressive.com/30000-year-old-cave-paintings-are-actually-animations/
(and various more — google “cave art flickering light movies”, without quotation marks, for more coverage of this).
Since troll-boy doesn’t see any value in art, I guess he never watches TV or movies, or reads or plays video games.
That might be true; I bet he spends all his time doing nothing but reading miggie message boards and whining.
@Alan
You know that whole “we only use 10% of our brains” bit? Came from a comedian misremembering a poorly written science news article. He wrote the foreword to How to Win Friends and Influence People, which was vastly more widely read than an article in a psychology journal.
Generally speaking, anything that’s described as a “Native American” belief, either it’s complete bullshit or the person talking about it badly misunderstands it. If they can’t or don’t specify a nation or at least linguistic/cultural grouping, you can safely dismiss whatever you were told out of hand.
@Alan
One of the Brother Cadfael mysteries hinges on whether an English or a Welsh court would hear a particular case
@GSS : also notably, if neanderthals had inferior ability to sapiens on any axis is currently quite unclear. Or rather, it’s likely there’s domain where they were better and other where they were worse, but fossil don’t imprint language or social structure very well. In any case, the reason of their disappearence isn’t clear and is probably sheer lack of luck.
(species very often disappear by lack of luck)
@Surplus : I do think removing copyright need a lot of preconditions. For example in pharmaceutic stuff, you’d need to be sure to have a decent number of big public structures to pick up the pace.
For arts, as an example, older french-belgian comics were often not copyright corrected (by lack of correct administrative declaration I mean). That have lead to several rather abusive things happens, so corporations seem just as likely to screw over artists without than with.
It’s more, in art specifically you probably should have copyright and author right, but not being able to sell it to a corporation, and the author alway being the person(s) doing it as a start.
(or something more involved, but you see the general drift of “the problem is letting corporation copyright too much stuff, and also letting theses same bully other corporations on refusing fair use via lawyering)
@Ohlmann:
That’s already happened. Universities and other non-pharmacorp entities already do most drug innovation:
https://www.statnews.com/2019/12/10/large-pharma-companies-provide-little-new-drug-development-innovation/
And as for the arts, a big part of the problem with retaining any kind of copyright-like system at all there is that it makes it illegal to send certain numbers over an internet connection. Worse, it does so in a way that computers themselves cannot tell whether it’s illegal, as it may be an authorized copy being distributed, or fair use, or etc.; so enforcement more or less requires mass surveillance. The end result is the kind of mess Youtube copyright enforcement has become, with random false positives and assorted other bad outcomes, and also dirty tricks performed in other areas, such as a cop, wishing to avoid accountability, playing copyrighted music while perpetrating police brutality in the hope that attempts to upload any recordings of their misconduct would be blocked by automated copyright-policing filters. There’s also everything already mentioned, such as limiting access to arts and culture by the working class, not to mention limiting the ability to build on preexisting works like humans tended to do for tens of millennia, and weakening people’s device security by increasing attack surface to facilitate the needed surveillance.
I would suggest that the only thing remotely copyright-like that’s needed is a civil tort for plagiarism: passing off someone else’s work as your own, or stealing the credit for a collaborative work by failing to credit some of the other contributors.
As for funding production? There are other ways to monetize art than “make copies artificially scarce and monopoly-price them”; there are already national endowments and grants and the like to goose domestic production in most nations; and of course a basic income guarantee, or similar improvement in the lot of the general population, would allow more people to devote more time to pursuing art for their own reasons.
Finally, which art tends to be better? Art motivated by whatever it is that motivates creative pursuits in people who don’t expect to gain financially by it, or art motivated by visions of dollar signs? The latter tends to be highly derivative kitsch purpose-made to appeal to some focus group in some corporation’s marketing division, does it not? The possibility of copyright revenues likely doesn’t motivate the production of anything we’d miss overmuch; and as for merely enabling someone to pursue art full-time who otherwise would be time-constrained by their day-job, almost nobody makes enough money from copyright royalties to live off it without another income source, so the only people copyright enables to go full-time with their art are the big famous names, which means copyright here too harms diversity and promotes more of a monoculture. A basic income would be a far better way of letting those who wish to be full-time artists than copyright.
OK, end of rant. For now. 🙂
@Howard
she’s allowed to like men for their bodies and turn them down if they don’t turn her on physically.
@stacy
Don’t let this jackass get you down or make you feel bad about your choices. I love my husband but his muscles, tan skin and uniform are what made me notice him first right. in all honesty if my husband didn’t look like the way he did when I met him, I probably wouldn’t have noticed him. he was everything I find sexy in a man and I didn’t settle for less then someone who completely turned me on. he’s the only man I would ever allow to dominate me sexually like he does because I can trust him and he’s strong enough to do the things I like.
@surplus
Not really quite like what you were talking about but it reminded me of something that happened. I bought this canvas art work of a vampire woman on amazon like maybe 4 months ago to hang up by my bed, I thought it looked cool and it just said purple vampire woman. then like 2 months after have bought it, the same picture showed up on my Pinterest but it was linked to a deviantart blog, so I went there and it was an art work someone had done and put up on the deviantart blog for others to look at. I left them a message asking if they were selling this art work because…. well it’s on amazon and I bought it form someone and they appeared to be no where mentioned on it and the response I got a week later was like “…no I’ve never sold any of my art…what do you mean you bought it off amazon?”
For pharmaceutical company, I doubt very much that it’s already happened. I see what you shown as mostly a proof that it’s possible if we funded the universtities correctly ; while there’s plenty of public money for random project, there’s also not quite enough money for that. From what I have seen from the research world, the big pharma provide a lot of useful support function, while universities do the pure research stuff. That being said, the correct model is to ditch the big pharma, for a lot of reason including that they are quite out of bound from where capitalism is supposed to work. (the answer of liberalism to that problem is “well, capitalism is magic anyway”)
For arts, I don’t believe there is a system where you have no copyright but correct plagiarism protection ; in the end, if you want to avoid plagiarism you have to have a right holder who can enforce his rule for redistribution or modification. You need artistic right protection, and both anti-plagiarism and copyright come from it.
You also forget a very important things : most laws are only appliable because people respect them. You cannot enforce copyright purely mechanically without a science fiction apparel that might not even be physically possible ; but you cannot enforce red light without science fiction tech either. I don’t see the need for a mass surveillance of the web for that anymore than I feel a need to install a AI on every cars that make sure you cannot run over a crowd with it.
Lastly, your judgement value on “commercial” art is probably from a good heart, but really re-read it again and remember you talk of art who is genuinely appreciated by millions of people. I don’t care about implicite moral judgement about being “kitchy” or “commercial” or whatnot. You can deducte bad thing in the culture that came from it, but art itself is art. Big groups can only efficiently produce a restricted subcategory of art, but that subcategory is overwhelmingly popular, and frankly a lot more polished than a lot of smaller artistic category.
(then again, not all art need to be polished)
(in other words, Bollywood is Art with a capital A, as is the small print indie tabletop RPG I personally crave, and neither have any kind of superiority over the other. Even if Bollywood is almost entirely the kind of “kitsch, made to please a focus group chosen by the marketing department” art you decry)
@ surplus
Oh yes; I found it fascinating. But not surprising. I can watch flames for hours. I love the flickering of the fire itself; but also all the shadows they cast. That’s especially evocative when we’re outside. But I can really see how that would work with the pictures. Flame makes everything seem to come alive.
I can well imagine people looking at their cave walls like a night out at the Imax. And telling that Plato bloke he’s a few thousand years too early.
There’s also the thing that a lot of figurative cave art; featuring animals and the like, have been overscored with later additions adding extra characters. There was probably some Thag Lucas type and his special features editions.
@ surplus and olhmann
Well of course, this debate has been raging for a while. 🙂
“Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.” ~ Jeremey Bentham (1830)
@Ohlmann:
Oh, that part is easy. You just have a narrow law specifically about plagiarism, and rely on complaints — it would be like any of a number of things, where unless there’s a complaining witness there’s no legal matter, and in particular no requirements anywhere for proactive monitoring.
The person whose DeviantArt work is being sold by Amazon unattributed would have a strong case if they complained.
Maybe it depends some on what you mean by “avoid plagiarism”. If you mean “have a recourse if you find someone’s plagiarized your work”, my suggestion works. If you mean “make sure it never happens ever”, then you’re asking the impossible. But that tends to apply to most things people seek to criminalize, up to and including murder, doesn’t it?
Amazon is full of shifty third-party sellers. A friend of mine made a very nice plushie of Bulbasaur with a rose on its back. Photos of it ended up on Amazon, put up by a third-party seller. People that ordered it from Amazon would receive just a regular Bulbasaur, poorly made. Amazon, Facebook ads, eBay, Etsy, Wish–it’s all the same bunch of scammers these days.
@ Howard
What the actual fuck? I, a woman, can with 100% certainty say that I am more intelligent, knowledgeable, and capable of reasoning than you, a man. I am also more highly educated than the vast majority of men. So don’t go spewing this shit about men “giving” women intelligence and knowledge.
What exactly do you mean by this? Why should Stacey give anyone she’s not into a “chance”? And what is a “chance”? And why is hot, tall, and muscular mutually exclusive with decent?
People aren’t shallow or wrong for having standards. Forcing people (but really it’s always women) to go on dates or interact intimately and sexually with someone they are not attracted to is really rapey. Sex and intimacy are so personal and need enthusiastic consent from both parties. If one person finds the other unattractive then they are not enthusiastic about it and forcing them would be wrong.
Also, when was the last time you gave a woman you are not attracted to a chance? And by that I don’t mean you cat-called her. I mean actually asked her on a date to see if you two meshed and maybe your attraction to her would grow because she’s a good person. I doubt you had. People date others they are attracted to. They may date someone who is not conventionally attractive because that is not a limiting factor in their own attraction. But they don’t date people they find repulsive. Your appearance (and your personality) are repulsive to Stacey, so she isn’t going to give you a chance. Get over it.
Alan – There’s a wonderful YouTube channel called Ask a Mortician and she did a video on the very interesting “life” of Jeremy Bentham’s remains. Particularly his head.
Unfortunately, her postings of late have been rather sparse due to Covid and she’s done a couple of videos about that, too.
@ hambeast
Oh I loooooove Caitlin! She’s definitely on my ‘who would you invite to a dinner party’ list. She’s just so knowledgeable and interesting; and she really helps demystify a bit of a taboo topic.
I’m also a fan of Bentham. He was of course big on animal rights. In fact I quoted him in a matter just last week.
Funnily enough, to tie in with Bentham again, Caitlin is also an influence on the topic of how I want to be disposed of after I shuffle off this mortal coil. I am thinking about a body farm; I do like forensics after all. (But my number one choice is still just leave me for the badgers.)
@Ohlmann
A society which builds and lives in cities, that is to say communities in a fixed location containing a dense population principally occupied with specialist tasks not directly related to primary food production. Humans are unquestionably the only species on earth which does this.
@ dali
Sorry, I mean to respond to your point about purported Native American heritage. Have you ever seen Inventing the Indian? That’s a documentary with Rich Hall and Dallas Goldtooth. I think you might like it. But Dallas makes the point that that generic mish-mash of disparate Native American traditions and products that’s sold to tourists etc is what real Native Americans call Generikee.
Also, ants have civilisations. Fight me.
@Alan
I have not, but I know Dallas and am quite familiar with his work. See also Imagining Indians and the book The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King.
Ants and other eusocial insects fail on the “most residents aren’t directly engaged in primary food production” point.
Oh I love this discussion about the nature of art! For me it is do deeply emotional. It is hard to put in words.
Art is life, it’s the goddess, it’s the universe, it’s resistance to injustice, it’s my soul, it’s the first boy I ever desired, it’s being wet, it’s the sun and the sky and the trees and the wind. I know that’s nonsense to some and sometimes nonsense is art.
My art is my claim, it’s my presence and my insistence and my infinity.
My art is my play, my work and my joy.
It is my dance and my body.
It is definitely my freedom.
None of that is as meaningful, at least not in the same way, as all the insightful ideas about art and civilization. I loved reading that and it will inspire me. Thank you all for that.
Intellectual property rights are tough in performance art. I do have a good lawyer, and she set me up pretty well. Honestly privacy and security are a bigger legal issue for me than intellectual property rights but I do remember a key point that a performance doesn’t get protected the way a recording or image or my blog posts or journal entries do. So I do record ideas and write outlines of training regimens for my guys and so on