"No one has the right not to be offended. And don’t forget, just because you’re offended, it doesn’t mean you’re in the right. A lot of people are offended by mixed marriage. It doesn’t mean they’re right."

Ricky Gervais

(Source: eltigrechico)

(Source: cannibalbastard, via tablefor2wo)

starlingswarm:

found this gem earlier today

Mmm no, libertarians are opposed to oppression and argue that the state constitutes and exacerbates oppression. See here and here for example.

Presumption of Guilt Lays Foundation for U.S. Citizen Tax and Travel Laws

vulgartrader:

From Activist Post:

In what appears to be a growing movement in the United States Congress, at least two different pieces of legislation have been introduced during the course of this year that would involve the stripping of travel rights and the possession of passports for a variety of reasons.

The more draconian of the two bills, The Moving Ahead For Progress Act (MAP-21) S. 1813, actually allows for the “revocation or denial” of a passport for anyone who has delinquent or unpaid taxes. This is why Eric Blair of Activist Post has labeled it the “Keeping the Slaves on the Plantation Act.”

Section 40304 of the bill states in clear language, “that any individual has a seriously delinquent tax debt in an amount in excess of $50,000, the Secretary shall transmit such certification to the Secretary of State for action with respect to denial, revocation, or limitation of a passport.”

Read the rest here. 

Depressing.

(Source: patakk)

(Source: patakk)

writingcapital:

vulgartrader:

“Wealth” by Stanley Donwood

You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to find art pertaining to economics and/or the economy; the only other good specimen I’ve found (where the connection isn’t too abstract) is Robert Rauschenberg’s Estate (1963).

Well there are artists producing more hamfisted stuff pertaining to economics, like Justine Smith, and there was an interesting art project at the Cornell econ department which produced this:

hookersorcake:

Writing advice from a terrible writer

You know the old axiom, “Write about what you know.” Its splendidly stupid advice. First off, most of us don’t know a goddamn thing. We look stuff up on the internet and pretend to be cool. Second, writing about what our reducing valve (the brain) has figured out about the wild infinite cosmos is like watching a monkey sort rocks that are all exactly the same.

So my advice is, “Write about what you don’t know.” Allow yourself for once to be totally open and clueless. Ask impossible questions of the heavens. Find the strangest curiosity you have and listen to it. Follow it into the woods like a starving hunter follows game. Let it lead you into the murky waters of the unknown. Then sing the tale like a drunken whore in church. If details give you the fits, be simple and vague. You’ve got a bus full of clowns that need an a********g. No one cares about the year make or model of the bus. Get to it!

Ohh and keep yourself out of it. No one cares about you, the bus has caught fire and the air is filled with a**l sex and burning polyester. Get out of the way! We need to see how this ends.

Design & Compromise

mills:

A real effect of compromise is that it prevents intact ideas from being tested and falsified. Instead, ideas are blended with their antitheses into policies that are “no one’s idea of what will work,” allowing the perpetual political regurgitation, reinterpretation, and relational stasis that defines the governance of the United States. 

…

As a simple matter of epistemology, there is no reason why the blending of competing ideas would produce a better idea. Imagine if someone had proposed to Galileo and the Catholic Church that they compromise and agree that neither the sun nor the earth revolve, or that they somehow revolve around each other!

This seems obvious enough in science and other fields whose ideas we regard as being predictive, or isomorphic to physical reality in some quantifiable way. But it is no less the case in artistic and creative endeavors.

This is because creative ideas are types of explanations, and every explanation involves whole constellations of interdependent notions, speculations, assertions; a well-developed creative idea -a design, a song, a poem- is not an assembly of fungible units. It is a complete hypothesis unto itself about what will work for a given human purpose.

So while it seems perfectly natural, even morally preferable, to involve many voices and subject creative ideas to the scrutiny of “committees”, the result tends to be disastrous: the writer knows that his diction depends in part for its effect on his syntax, his punctuation on the typography in which it is rendered; the photographer knows that the same scene shot in a more commercially-appealing way is no longer beautiful but is now banal; the designer knows that the entire premise of his layout is undone by the substitution of a compromised header; etcetera.

That is: creative ideas embody whole explanatory and speculative matrices, even in their minor details. Compromises dilute the implicit, interdependent elements which account for the form and content of creative ideas, introducing new elements (from others, from committees) which derive from wholly different notions about the problems being solved, the relations between the elements involved, the speculations which are justified by experience and evidence, and so on.

Worse: compromise makes it impossible to sort out precisely which elements, or which implicit premises, were responsible for the success or failure of any given creative idea.

The Fault

When people discuss why small companies are more innovative than large companies, or why dictatorial creative thinkers -who are often terribly unpleasant people- produce better work than assemblies of talent, they often talk about speed, about “nimbleness,” and about bureaucracy.

But the essential problem is philosophical: creative ideas must be understood as hypotheses about certain sorts of problems. For the writer, the painter, the designer are all trying to solve a specific problem, and their hypotheses cannot be averaged anymore than Galileo’s could. While persuasion and collaboration are perfectly sensible, the real advantage the best innovators and creators have is that they understand that compromise is epistemologically invalid and procedurally fatal.

So why does compromise have its “undeservedly high reputation”? I believe it is because we are discomfited by the philosophical implications of the fact that some ideas are objectively better. We exempt science from our contemporary anxieties because its benefits are too explicit to deny, but in most creative fields we are no longer capable of accepting the superiority of some solutions to others; unable to sustain confidence in the soundness of the artistic problem-solving process, we will not provoke interpersonal or organizational conflict for the sake of mere ideas.

This sad, mistaken epistemological cowardice turns competing hypotheses into groundless, subjective opinions, and the reasonable course of action when managing conflicting, groundless opinions (about, say, what to order at a restaurant) is to compromise, because there is no better answer.

But the creative arts are not so subjective as we tend to think, which is why a talented, dictatorial auteur will produce better work than polls, focus groups, or hundreds of compromising committees.

Very well-written explanation of inter alia why societal constructivst projects like socialism or council communism or fascism or even vanilla “democratic” statism are problematic.

"Criticism is often productive, and if we want to, we may call certain contradictions productive. But they are productive because we try to avoid them, improve on them,to supersede them. If we did not trv to avoid contradictions, then we should have no reason whatsoever to describe the relation between a thesis and its antithesis as something which has to be superseded-which has to be settled by establishing a synthesis. Then we should have no reason whatsoever to say that there is something like a struggle between thesis and antithesis, or like a tension which is a productive force in the development."

Karl Popper, What is Dialectic

(Source: logicallypositive)

(Source: dailydoseofstuf, via celestial-confusion)

(Source: dashingdollsintothewoods, via thecriticlaughs)

War Economies: Why They Don't Help →

roxygen:

Whenever people say that a war will at least create new jobs and wealth, this is the point where I blink - I mean I blink hard. Especially whenever it comes from the “fiscally conservative” camp that is trying to sell a war at the same time…

(Source: tetradia, via goldofcortes)

goldofcortes:

I have to see this. 

imax 3d in 5 days.