In the comment thread following Kevin MacDonald’s recent blog post “Hollywood and the Left, Again,” one of the commenters, Caleb, wrote “It’s not just Hollywood. Creative people in all fields tend to be tolerant and politically liberal. Show me an artist who’s also a country club Republican.” In effect, several of those who replied seemed to think, as do I, that generalizing about creativity and creative people should be approached with caution. After I tried teasing out the implications of this concise sentiment, however, concision soon got consigned to oblivion. The paragraphs that follow are what replaced it.
The truism that “creative people” tend to manifest the “values”—tolerance and liberalism, for two—of this society’s masters is as uninformative as every other truism (“a proposition that states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms”). Unsurprisingly, the people who have successfully peddled this bill of goods, even to some TOO commenters, fail to reveal that the definers of creativity are the same people that run the communication, information, and entertainment industries and much else besides.
Anyone who has had his young world turned upside down by a chance encounter with a poem, a painting, or a piece of real music understands the explosive force of true creativity. In five-plus decades of working out the consequences of the explosion I myself experienced, the familiarity I have acquired with the materials and makers of art—a familiarity sometimes exhausting but by no means exhaustive—has taught me that the one sure thing to be said about genuinely creative people is that, except in the precise area or areas where they tend to manifest creativity, little is fixed, little is predictable, and most of all, little about them is necessarily even relevant to the wider sphere. That is to say, generalizing about the larger societal consequences of art and, a fortiori, artists is a waste of time, a fool’s errand. Yet it is a rare pundit and an even rarer “creative person” who will have the honesty, the self-awareness, or the modesty to say what Kirsten Flagstad said to a shy young woman who, encountering Flagstad on the street, stumblingly told the soprano that she was a great artist. After thanking the woman, Flagstad replied kindly, “My dear, I am an artist only when I sing.”
The West has an artistic heritage of staggering dimensions and of a richness that—sadly, humans being what they are—only a scattered few now or ever living will understand or truly experience in their innermost being (i.e., in the place where art ultimately matters). Yet living as we all are in an age when culture, both popular and high, is undergoing desertification at a rate to turn the Sahara green with envy and when creativity is equated with full-frontal nudity, with hatred of the Cross and those who follow it, and with the disordered exaltation of the ugly and the evil as the beautiful and the good, we ought to be shocked, not merely left suspicious and skeptical, by our masters’ ever louder insistence that we recognize and honor the “creative” and the “cultured” in our midst—especially since these people who, whatever they may be, seldom if ever seem to be intelligent, virtuous, White, Christian, or heterosexual. Nor are more than a few, if indeed any, of them creative in any sense not coined the day before yesterday.
In writing of Franz Boas, among others, Professor MacDonald has demonstrated convincingly that there has been a century-long Jewish-led and -orchestrated war on the content of the word culture. The words creative and creator have been cheapened to an equal or a greater extent. Fifty years ago, my parents and my teachers knew and understood relatively little about Bach, Giotto and Virgil, let alone such wildly abstruse disciplines as particle physics and French film. Yet because they trusted their Guardians (to use Plato’s term), they were, to a surprisingly large extent, confident that what Bach and Giotto and Virgil had been about was deeply significant. They were confident, too, that there was something laudable about people who valued Bach and Giotto and Virgil and who either tried to emulate their accomplishments or (since, alas, precious few of us can emulate them) tried simply to profit to the full from exposure to their work. (The fact that many such people saw the life of the “creator” as being of dubious desirability for their kids had more to do with lifestyle and ancillary concerns than with artistic activity sensu stricto and hence is beside the main point. Of course, the verdict of history, sad to say, is largely on the side of the worried parent.)
Even by the early seventies, however, our enemies’ cause was so far advanced that the next batch of people like my parents—middle-class folks of second- or third-generation Celtic and northern European stock—had largely ceased looking up to their own illustrious heritage and to those who stood for it (already then a dwindling number) and were instead looking “down”—that is, at the growing Black and Hispanic segments of the population, people whose conduct, frequently quite frightening and usually criminal and immoral, their government and its designated tastemakers seemed to be rewarding, financially and otherwise. Nor did that new batch of White parents fail to notice that, a generation earlier, the selfsame conduct had been roundly condemned in White Christians by White Christians. Yet the fact that American Protestant and Catholic religious leaders were lined up alongside and behind the secular masters of society virtually to a man (if such a word can nonrisibly be used of what was, as is now known, an overwhelmingly homosexualized subset of the churches’ members) clearly left the weak-willed majority of the successors to my parents and teachers with the distinct feeling that fighting for their own heritage—which in fact they little understood—had nothing to offer them or their offspring compared with the potential rewards that “going along” could bring them.
With regard to the redefinition of creator and creativity, the importance of the successful corruption of Christianity from within can hardly be overstated. As the end-product of many centuries of subversion, it is well documented in learned books, monographs, and journals that are now largely sequestered from all but a handful of researchers. Curiously, they have been replaced by tales, written by Jewish scholars and popularizers, celebrating Marranos and other counterfeit converts.
It is no coincidence that in this new world of Judaic triumphalism the word artist has come to be the top choice on the word-association charts. It is flogged night and day for everyone from sex-and-drug-obsessed hip-hop rabble to feces-fondling “entertainers” who make . . . stuff . . . for the performance space, the gallery, or the once-sacrosanct museum. (How seldom one now hears artist employed to describe the very people to whom the term was formerly and exclusively applied!) This arena of cultural and moral transformation is one where exaggerated description is simply impossible, where banal and often disgusting reality dwarfs even the most imaginative man’s capacity to satirize it.
The point here is a larger one. This abuse of language and the concomitant abuse of the vast cultural iceberg beneath it are not merely what we, the members of what was once the majority culture, have been force-fed, what we have been sold. Sadly it is clear that this is what has been bought, even by a good many of the very White people who damn well ought to know better (not excluding some commenters on various TOO threads). Notwithstanding that in this virtually art-free wasteland that the United States has become, one hears the word ‘artist’ used more every day than, say, Bach or Giotto or Virgil heard it used in his lifetime. Yet obeisance rather than scorn has become the default response. Neither Plato nor Aquinas conceded that appearance and reality were the same thing; so why should we?
When in his great biography Boswell records Samuel Johnson famously telling him, “My dear friend, clear your mind of cant,” the point of the italics becomes clear in the next sentences. “You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, ‘Sir, I am your most humble servant.’ You are not his most humble servant. . . . You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don’t think foolishly.” Likewise, in order to endure the tedium and the misery of life in an unfriendly and unforgiving society whose alien rulers are close to their goal of complete dispossession of the descendants of its founding populations, it is inevitable that people watch and listen and even take cheer from things that would have surprised or even appalled their grandparents. Since, as Johnson also said, on the whole life is more to be endured than enjoyed, availing oneself of what options there are is the understandable response to the modern world, if not necessarily the best one. But once a man allows himself to believe, to truly believe, that Stephen Spielberg or Andres Serrano or Annie Sprinkle or Jerry Seinfeld or Lucian Freud or Beyoncé is an artist, not only has he succumbed to foolish thinking, but he has crossed a line that he may find it difficult or even impossible to recross before his inner life gets utterly Stepfordized.
In closing, full disclosure requires me to say that while I can truly claim that for decades I have shunned all Spielberg movies, irrespective of the size of the screen exhibiting them, I have many more times than once wasted precious hours watching explosions and car chases and preachy futuristic fantasies where everyone anachronistically swears by and worships the Establishment “values” of today. Put otherwise, I may never have breakfasted on Cap’n Crunch, but I have certainly eaten a lot of tortilla chips. To continue the metaphor, however, the critical point is never to assert that tortilla chips equate to real food. Whatever corners I may have or may still cut, that assertion is one I have never made. I hope I never shall.
Under another name, Pierre de Craon was for several decades an editor of academic and scholastic reference books. Perhaps he will be again.
Facing the Future as a Minority
Was the Immigration Act of 1924 Illiberal?
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Under the Fascists, Italy built Cinecittà
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinecitta
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When someone uses Jewish propaganda Wikipedia as a ‘source’ – it reminds me of skunk.
The Genges Khan built pyramids of human heads – and Israelis perfected their nukes by experimenting radiation effects on Arab Jews, killing 100,000 of them.
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The grand opening of Cinema City:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncjCNwQQBy4#t=04m34s
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There are indeed some people, who lives were turned for worse by evildoers but they refused to hate the evildoers. And I am talking about Jesus, because according to the New Testament, he cursed the Hebrew people more than 100 times.
Dr. Izseldin Abuelaish, a Hebrew-speaking Gaza-born Israeli Muslim doctor whose three daughters were killed by the trigger-happy Israeli Jewish F16 rocket while sleeping in their Gaza home – has written a book in memory of her three daughters – “I Shall Not Hate”.
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/in-memory-of-my-three-daughters/
Excellent thought-provoking article. This issue of whether artistic people tend to more liberal and tolerant could also be approached another way: In the modern world, most people who claim to be creative artists are Leftist in orientation, and perhaps the majority of artists and musicians in last few centuries have been more liberal or divergent in their thinking.
But does that mean most high quality artwork was done by the bohemian types? In other words, while there is an ocean of middling content out there, most of it copied from masters, what about the true masters themselves?
I don’t have an answer, but Dostoevsky certainly doesn’t seem to be a man of the Left! Kipling seems a pretty conservative soul. Would Shakespeare be a man of the Left? In some ways yes but in others, I would say no. What about Beethoven or Bach? It seems to me that a fair number of great artists have been rather nationalistic in their thinking.
So while most who pose as “artists” today (in an age when there is no art) are bohemian “tolerant” types, are they truly representative of the truly creative masters?
I understand what you are saying – but let’s not exaggerate. There is no “age when there is no art”. Art exists today and in every era. (and yes, I’m talking about good art)
Yes it was an exaggeration, but the quantity of “high art” today appears tiny compared banquet that was served up in previous periods. Of course, I am sure there is great art out there that doesn’t get the attention it deserves in this atmosphere.
There are thousands, tens of thousands doing hyper realism today.
Is there any connection between hyper realism and traditional or conservative values—I haven’t seen it!
Here’s a shock for you: Jack Kerouac was the last really big name “conservative” or traditional artist.
Wagner hated the Jews. Beethoven hated Napoleon when the shrimp gave himself the title ‘Emperor’… not liberal manifestations. Hollywood talks of the blackballing in the 1950s when a few Hews had to change their names to work in the movies. We have almost a total blackballing of anyone not kooky liberal in Jewish Hollywood now and obviously in the music business where the Jews own ALL of the major record labels. Even the Christian record labels are owned by Jews!!!!!!!!!!
Our people have been cast aside in our own country, and our people have been so mis-educated they see nothing wrong with that.
if we put together a list of relatively agreed “artists,” say in literature and then ranked them on their liberalism or conservatism, it would be an interesting endeavor. My limited but still useful knowledge of literature (and what I like) contains mostly very conservative writers. However, there are effective writers who realize “art” like Tolstoy, who are more or less “liberal.”
Think Dostoyevski, and Solzhenitsyn, Gunther Grass, or that Norwegian writer just recently dragged into s public dust-up, Faulkner, especially Hawthorne who stood against the Unitarian Universalist Transcendentalist John Brown
lovers, Melville, Conrad, Flannery O’Connnor, and one could go on and on.
(I would have to do some study but those come immediatley to mind.) Now there is Cormac McCarthy…a definite conserevative. J.M. Coetzee, the S. African writer. He writes marvelous novels imho but is probably still something of a liberal, but his stories that can only be seen as conservative…Disgrace, which I reviewed on TOO.
Then there are liberal writers like the Indian gal Arundati Roy and her Children of a lesser God, which is good art, but a social lie. There are the idiot left writers like Tony Morrison and Alice Walker with their Black Art. The Bronte sisters were probably very conservative. I recall the red writer, LIllian Hellman, of whom Mary McCarthy stated that “everything she wrote was a lie.” Then all those jew writers lilke Sontag… and her “whites are the cancer of the planet.” Remember Jean Raspail. Is Nadine Gornick an artist
or just a commie and lover of Blacks?
You can get into the earlier writers in 20th C. America, like Dos Passos, Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, many of whom I guess were muckrakers and “liberal” in that sense, but probably do not qualify as liberals. There were plenty of communist writers who churned out socialist realism, but does any of that survive? The New York Jew writers are plentyful, but will that stuff survive? That was mostly liberal stuff I guess.
My sense is that we have come thru a period of terrible Jewish distortion and destruction of art and popular culture has been boiling itself down , distilling its essence, and giving us non-stop porn and jungle music. This is the Mass Age.
I offer you a thinking and feeling experiment, an experiment of judging a current TV series on its artworthyness. View and study Breaking Bad, on AMC. I submit that this is very good cinematic art. What is great art? What gets to the truths of human personality with no “Telling”, just “Showing.”
Back to Cormac McCarthy and his The Road. Chilling and uplifiting at the same time… a testament to the power of (White) love of the child.
Tragedy is probably the highest kind of art because it reaches a kind of awe and resignation to “bad” results. However, it does not negate our possibilities for a restored White World.
Propaganda Art cannot be true, either from the wooden Left, or an equally wooden Right. Take Hawthorne, of whom Melville was in awe. I am still looking for Hester Prynne. In short, great art is always conservative, but with a celebration of personality, like Hester’s, an affirmation of greatness, even in relative failure.
It’s hardly surprising in a Jewish dominated culture that the artistic figures most idealised are the rootless, convention-breaking bohemians – whose mentality is so akin to that of the diasporic Jew. The cliche of the artist as alienated rebel bucking the conventions of his own society is a twentieth century invention – and an invention which coincides with the Jewish seizure of the commanding heights of Western culture. Inevitably gentile ‘artists’ are only lauded by the liberal intelligentsia to the extent that their art takes a ‘rejectionist’ stance toward the traditional artistic canon of the West.
Fine article.
“Caleb, wrote ‘It’s not just Hollywood. Creative people in all fields tend to be tolerant and politically liberal.’”
“Tolerant” in the sense of tolerating that with which they agree.
Without getting into the true “artist”, arts types tend to self-select early, quickly learning that almost all societal rewards are on the side of affecting a sophisticated tolerant courageous rebellious individualistic open-to-change semi-bohemianism, noted for its pseudo-sophisticated intolerant cowardly cookie-cutter slavish unchanging conformity to the anti-West establishment.
tma_sierrahills: I got a real kick out of your long strings of adjectives, especially because they remind me of the style of Tom Wolfe, one of my favorite writers. I think specifically of two short, wonderful books he wrote on, respectively, modern art and modern architecture: The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House. As is his wont, Wolfe in these books never uses the J-word nor rudely points a finger, but he names names and connects dots and in so doing reveals how little of the enterprise of artistic modernity has to do with beauty and merit.
One doesn’t have to be the sort of reader who searches assiduously for clues between the lines to see, moreover, that, however severe his strictures anent the phonies of the art world, there are more than a few examples of twentieth-century painting that Wolfe really likes. Since there are quite a few that I like, too, the book appeals to me all the more.
The situation is quite different when one arrives at From Bauhaus to Our House. Aside from some of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and much of the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (whom Wolfe describes as a man who is virtually impossible to dislike), Wolfe finds even less to admire in twentieth-century architecture’s actual structures than he does in its politics, ethos, and marketing.
I highly recommend both books to you and to all frequenters of this site.
Well argued. It is, however, simply to de-program: turn off the Jewtube, stop going to movies, block out most of the MSM…except, of course, for research purposes. I did these things over a decade ago, and revel in the resultant mental clarity.
I wished I had done the same as CompassionateFascist … over a decade ago.
I finally made the break only 3 years ago, although I was (fortunately) already underexposed to the NWO TV channels due to my earlier years spent overseas, and well away from Western TV.
Currently, I am getting my television news updates (usually consumed whilst eating) from CCTV-9 (China Central TeleVision, English language news channel) via an Internet streaming link, with my laptop connected to my flatscreen TV using a HDMI cable.
The connection is not always good, with some data drop-outs, but I am still managing to receive more honest reporting (and with decent visuals taken on the ground by their international correspondents) than I would ever hope to receive from the BBC, CNN, et al.
Furthermore, I do not pay a penny / cent for this, other than what I already pay for my broadband link. An additional benefit is that the female news presenters employed by CCTV are exceedingly more attractive than the Judaic scrags armed with Degrees in Womyn’s Studies that are favoured by BBC-World and CNN.
P.S. I can also recommend Russia Today, which can be watched via their website: http://rt.com/
Better still … RT also has its own streaming channel over at YouTube, which means you can watch RT live, and in good quality, on your PC (and therefore on your LCD TV using a HDMI link):
http://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday
Act now, take the initiative, and by your actions tell CNN and the BBC to f*ck off and die off.
@ Compassionate Fascist 11;38 am. and @ Anglo Saxon, 11:38 am.
["Turn off the MSM for alternative sources on the Web"]
Besides CCTV-9 and RT.com you could also try Press-TV(on line),which is Iranian and at least as good as Russia Today. I still do watch MSM occasionally and I am every time annoyed by the superficiality,stupidity and mendacity of it all.Since I know from the Internet how the world really works,every time I watch a news broadcast on the MSM I discover at least one Big Lie.Most annoying is that everybody seems to believe it (especially the “experts”).
Think for example of the “killing of Bin Laden”(who really died in december 2001). All those comments of “terrorism-experts” and expressions of joy by our “World Leaders”, it is both saddening and hilarious!
Anglo Saxon,
I totally agree except for the RT…
I too thought it was non-Judaized until I watched 2 or 3 blatantly pro-Judaic / anti-White articles and interviews…
watch out for them, I think they are a trap.
@ R Rud …
Yes, you are right to raise this concern. Russia itself is an enigma, never mind RT TV. I have noticed the same phenomenon as you. Thank you for notifying other readers. Difficult to judge what percentage the Askenazi-friendly programming is running at, but it is certainly visible.
You might appreciate being reminded that Russia is (as we write) currently hankering to join the WTO (after about 10 years of waiting and being rebuffed) and this might partially explain their fawning willingness to fall into line with the limp-wristed, Zionised ‘Western’ World and their 666 masters.
I used to naively believe the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite news channel offered independent view-points, free of Judaic interference, but recent years have shown this is not necessarily the case. This makes sense when you understand that the original, core Al-Jazeera staff were trained by the BBC (or BBC-World) and that the state religion — Wahhabiism — was actually originated by crypto-Jews migrating south from Iraq: who eventually established the House of Saud in Qatar’s neighbouring territory (Saudi Arabia) after they murdered their rivals (men, women, and children) who saw right thru their hoax.
The much maligned yet thoughtful commenter, Rehmat (who is Muslim), might have some detailed knowledge to offer us about the true (Jewish) history of the Sauds.
So, as regards state TV instruments, it would seem there is no escaping this universal vein of sympathy running for ‘Jewish’ interests.
I think Franklin Ryckaert had the right idea when he pointed us to Iran’s Press-TV. I have watched several hours of its programming and I would definitely recommend this channel to all. Very worthwhile.
The major lesson to be drawn from this is that we shall ALL have to learn to be more sophisticated, more discriminating, wiser, more worldly, less trusting of mass news services, and more prepared to do a greater share of the donkey work (information gathering) ourselves.
Monsieur de Crayon:
Merci and bien fait!
I am fascinated by this topic and, worthy though articles like this one and others on this site notwithstanding, have not been able to find a comprehensive scholarly treatment of it. The leftist infiltration of the arts must have institutional underpinnings, especially when you consider that the work of most “experimental” or “avant garde” artists and writers is largely non-representational and therefore, one would have thought, apolitical. We could talk about how the abstract expressionists were promoted by Jews in the Partisan Review, or how LANGUAGE poetry is an almost entirely jewish movement; but the question remains how it has happened that artists of all kinds seem nowadays to be rampant liberals.
In the 20th Century pre-WW1 modernism was proto-Fascist; thanks to Kerry Bolton we hereabouts have read sympathetic depictions of Marinetti, Lewis et al from a political viewpoint; but after this period the leftward shift seems to have set in, until now the experimental wing of all the arts seems to be on the left.
Institutionally this is no doubt a consequence of cultural Marxism and the university culture, with more people going to university than ever before and many of these taking creative writing and visual art courses. These are middle-class kids who previously wouldn’t have made the grade academically and who lack the critical intelligence to make an independent stand. Even those with talent and intelligence will tow the line in the same way as aspiring humanities academics, for the sake of jobs and funding. The fine arts are now state subsidised and closely bound to the educational system.
And then, even in the 20th century it seems that, while there were right wing radicals among writers, in the visual arts there were few of note. Why? I suspect this might have something to do with the National Socialist position regarding “degenerate art”, which would have prevented first-rate artists among the German expressionist painters, in particular, from developing much sympathy with the movement (notwithstanding which there is Emil Nolde).
There are exemplars in modernist literature such as Pound and Celine; but what about in the visual arts? I’m looking and I’d appreciate it if anyone could point me in the right direction.
And
Mr. Nicholl: Given the vast number of books that are or have been at one time in print, I am sure that the specific kind of “comprehensive scholarly treatment” you seek is out there, somewhere. I wish that I were the man to point you to it, but alas I’m not. My strong suspicion is that one or more of the great Italian Renaissance humanist scholars (or one of the Greek-speaking scholars who fled to the West after the disaster of 1453)—men such as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and Budé and Chrysoloras, whose every work Milton, for example, knew practically by heart—either wrote in depth on this topic or translated a classical treatise examining it. Indeed, it’s only a little more than a hundred years since this material ceased being part of an English public school education. Now it might as well not exist for all the awareness there is of it or all the influence it has.
Modern works on the nature, meaning, significance, and limitations of beauty, of the arts, and of aesthetic formation to which I myself am deeply indebted are these three books (not necessarily in order of my private esteem): Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty and Étienne Gilson’s The Arts of the Beautiful and Forms and Substances in the Arts. Each book has insights on every page.
The idea of the rebel artist isn’t a totally Jewish creation. Mozart for example was apparently a piece of work in real life. Caravaggio spent a lot of time around the dregs of society. Mikhail Lermontov was twice exiled by the Tsar for his poetry.
That being said, Jews definitely do latch on to the rebel artist stereotype and promote it, and the underlying implication is that to go against the “establishment” is good. What’s ironic is that, today, liberals ARE the establishment, and the reason why this is so is because liberalism is promoted as the exact opposite.
Another bit of irony is that all of this was tackled in The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, who was not only Jewish, but homosexual as well. Imagine that. Bloom ruthlessly attacked modern music, films, art, and creativity in general, essentially calling it rotten to the core.
Thanks for the recommendations of the Tom Woolf books. For me the key point here is the devaluation of the word – indeed standing it on its head – of the word ‘artist’. Rather than being something that distinguished someone from the herd, it now includes any talentless self-publicist so long as they go along with the prevailing othordoxy. The same goes for the rebel and behemian stereotype: yes once upon a time they really existed and did have stand against societal norms, but now the garbage peddlers celebrated as ‘artists’ are in some ways as indistinguishable from each other as men in bowler hats once were in the City of London. Of course, there are still true artists working without Big Brother’s approval, and many of these may hold very different political views to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy, but they live in a totalitarian society – all the more dangerous because it pretends to be otherwise – and must at least seem to conform, while leaving small clues that they don’t. One day hopefully those clues will be celebrated if we regain our freesdom.
For those who haven’t already seen it, below is a link to Scuton’s documentary on the philosophy of beauty. As with most of his work, his analysis is sound, and yet he refuses to draw the obvious conclusion regarding the ethnic origins of the assault on the tradition Western conception of beauty.
I suppose the fear of being cast onto the academic scrap heap is sufficient to keep his analysis within ideologically acceptable bounds. Nevertheless well worth watching – his take on modernist architecture is priceless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjhVaLbBglQ&feature=related
Brenton, Thank you so much for the link. It should be widely shared.
I would like to echo Alice’s comment. An excellent and inspirational video link Brenton! Well done.
Roger Scruton’s BBC-2 documentary — The Philosophy of Beauty — is surely essential viewing for all TOO readers. As is much of his elegant writing (IMHO).
Many of you will ALSO enjoy this excellent online article — Beauty, Art, and Race — from 2008 (since translated into the German language) by Kevin Alfred Strom. That article is based upon an American Dissident Voices broadcast from October 2, 2004.
http://www.kevinalfredstrom.com/2008/10/beauty-art-and-race/
I might add that the efforts and personal sacrifices of Kevin Alfred Strom also deserves our wider respect, appreciation, and support generally. His personal story offers us a salutary lesson on the dangers to be found on the road to regaining self-respect both for oneself, and on behalf of one’s fellow tribesmen.
Correction – Mr. Scruton’s documentary was in fact produced by BBC–Scotland. I should have known better to accept any suggestion of association with BBC-2, which I believe operates out of London and Manchester, England: both of which are morally polluted cities in terminal decline.
“…creative people” tend to manifest the “values”—tolerance and liberalism, for two—of this society’s masters is as uninformative as every other truism (“a proposition that states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms”)…”
I do not think this is a truism in the logical (tautological) sense. It is simply a statement that may or may not be true, but one that could be verified somehow, I suppose. Unless, of course, one conflates creativity with liberalism and tolerance, which is what the author likely has in mind. But, then, the words lose their specific meanings.
Whatever the case, there are many examples of creative folks who are not tolerant, but perhaps less who are not liberal in the usual (modern) sense of the word.
m: You chide me justly. I meant and should have said that the statement in question was constructed in such a way as to have many of the formal hallmarks of a truism, a form that for many people (wrongly) carries the weight of an axiom or an aphorism. And I did indeed mean to imply that for many people (not necessarily the gentleman I was quoting, however) the conflation of “creativity with liberalism and tolerance” is virtually axiomatic.
Thank you.
This is seriously good stuff and reminds me of the writing by Wintermute which so influenced my political thinking. Thank you Pierre de Craon. More please.
Thank you, Mr. Ross. I shall try to oblige your request for more.
Would you take a moment to tell me something of Wintermute? I regret to say that he is someone I haven’t heard of.
site:majorityrights.com wintermute
This Zionist-dominated world, the ‘art’ too has lost its freedom of expression if it’s against the rules set by the Jewish Lobby. The recent example is the ‘Foreskin Man’ comic book….
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/adl-foreskin-man-comic-book-is-anti-semitic/
Serious question here: What is the state of modern Islamic art, in terms of painting, sculpture and literature. I know there has been great Islamic art in the past, but what about in the last century or so?
“Under another name, Pierre de Craon was for several decades an editor of academic and scholastic reference books”, and under his other name I would have delighted in listening to several semesters of lectures from him as well. This was a well-constructed and finely considered effort.
@ Rehmat with no malice intended – Jesus did not curse the Hebrew people as the collective “we” have been programmed to believe. At the time of Christ, Judea was a cosmopolitan hell-hole populated peoples from all over the Middle East as well as Greeks and Romans. The latter ruled its far-flung provinces by either appointing or allowing locals to “rule” as long as such rule followed the general demands of Rome (somewhat like the American Empire today).
In the case of Judea, one should note that King Herod was an Edomite, as were the members of the dominant religious sect, the Pharisees. “Judaisms” roots, as they themselves admit, emanate from Babylon, not from Israelite traditions. As Christ so said to them – “Ye are of your father the devil, and of the Synagogue of Satan.” Biblical Israelites, i.e. “Hebrews”, they were not. What true Hebrew residents that lived there in Christ’s time were the Essenes, not Edomite Pharisees. Given its history and unfortunate geographical location, the demographics of Judea were about as homogeneous as New York City, which means “not at all.”
It is because we have been so thoroughly programmed with falsehoods that Christendom (and apparently some Muslims as well) pay little attention to the removal of 10 of the 12 tribes by the Assyrians in 750 B.C. and the following removal of the two southern tribes by the Babylonians in 550 B.C. We pay no attention to the exploits of Alexander the Great and the movement of Greeks into the area and the fact that many remained. Judea was not some Cecil B. DeMille fantasy set-aside for “Hebrews” in Christ’s time. If anything, by then the Hebrew Israelites were a distinct minority in an area ethnically dominated by Talmudic Judaists. Read the works of Flavius Josephus for some “real time” clarification.
Both deliberately and accidentally, we have been taught grand lies about the stories in the Bible. The more Judaized (Esau -Edom) that Christianity has become, the more deeply ingrained in the western conscience the lies have become, now to the point that questioning obvious falsehoods has become the new heresy. As with western art from more genial times, truth as well has become a bloodied casualty.
Fiction has somehow become fact no differently than the imaginings of “Shindlers List” has been accepted as reality, “The Diary of Anne Frank” (with half of it being penned by a man in the early 50′s with a ball point pen who had to sue Otto Frank to receive payment for his forgery) is considered “truth”, as well as the HolyHoax in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Yes ,
I have often thought that the world has been so very badly corrupted that even the most basics are now just subjective .
Like ..
what is art ?
what is beauty ?
what is truth ?
what is good ?
what is just ?
what is right ?
what is wrong ?
what is wisdom ?
what is development ?
what the heck is that gawd awful noise on my radio ? !
Wonderful piece – more please.
“Creative people in all fields tend to be tolerant and politically liberal. “
Many starving artists are just looking for a hand-out from socialists and communists, since they are too lazy to work and use their ‘art’ as an excuse to be slothful.
On June 20, 2005, paintings drawn by a Chimpanzee named “Congo” were included in an auction at Bonhams alongside works by Renoir and Warhol—they sold for more than expected, while Renoir’s and Warhol’s did not sell.
American collector Howard Hong purchased three of Congo’s works for over US$26,000. It is not clear whether he found out later these were chimp works of art, or whether he consciously purchased ape art.
Here is a fine example from modest Congo’s portfolio of 400 drawings and paintings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chimpanzee_congo_painting.jpg
You might (rightly) say a life of promiscuous tolerance and liberalism is far closer to that of an ape, than that of a bone fide, homo-sapien-sapien.
Footnote to my previous comment about Congo:
The said artwork was sold to Howard Hong by the London auction house, Bonham, under the supervision of its director of “modern and contemporary art”.
Andy Warhol’s unsold work was one of his infamous “Piss Paintings”. To create them, he spread copper paint onto canvas, before placing them on the floor and then inviting his friends and colleagues to urinate on them.
Dated 1979, Bonham’s gave Warhol’s “Piss Painting”, a reserve price of between £35,000-£45,000.
Seems we’ve come a long way since the heady days of a Jewish controlled Weimar-Berlin of the 1920s!*?£?
Brenton Sanderson what a great analysis.
Also, I had a hardy-har-har at our jewish friend Jewson Squeaks trying to derail the convesation towards anti-Islam sentiment. When you realize their tactics, you must laugh at their predictability. I will ridicule you now though;
Uh, how about this; It’s the fault of the zionists coming into the middle east practicing colonialism, such that the arabs would be so much further advanced in art by now if the zionists weren’t there.
You like it? I learned it from watching je… I mean you, ok?!? I learned it from you!!!
LOL
And BTW …
What we know as ” Liberals” are not tolerant . They are the most intolerant brood of totalitarians that ever walked the face of this earth !
correction … I should have typed ” liberals “
Pierre, Pierre. Shame, shame. This long article for nothing. Didn’t you realize that creativity is defined by our response to Jewish comedians such as Jon Stewart? An Israeli study assures us that it’s true!
http://tinyurl.com/3gu93je
`The exact opposite of what we are being told is the truth.´ Jean de la Bruyère, 18th.Century French social critic. Creative people who were NOT liberal, but rather Racial/National-centric: Alfred Cortot, Alexis Carrell, Sven Hedin, Gerhard Hauptmann, Dostojewski, Tschaikovsky, Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound, Thomas Carlyle, Emmanuel Kant, Herbert von Karajahn, Wm.Furtwängler, Walter Gieseking, Marshall Petain, Sir Oswald Moseley, Coco Chanel, etc., etc., etc. Gerry Frederics
Gerhard Hauptmann whom Goebbels called a “unionized Goethe” was a great writer and socialist who late in life swallowed Nazi propaganda wholecloth, believing Hitler was a revolutionary.
Just what was creative about Marshal (note correct spelling) Petain or Oswald Mosley? Their fantasies about who was going win World War II, maybe?
Bingo! Creativity isn’t leftist, but those who control jobs in the arts are…
That’s the downside of the arts, you have to deal with Jews, the sexually confused, and other types of very odd characters & cons. And it’s damn hard, if not impossible to avoid them.
Below are a couple of links to Wintermute’s writing, P de C.
The first comment on link number one is by Wintermute and constitutes a blitzkrieg on traditional conservatives represented, in this case, by the blog owner, a thoroughly decent English specimen of that group.
Link number two is self – explanatory, if ungrammatically titled.
Link number three is also interesting.
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/the_law_and_the_conservative_party_is_gay/
http://thewisdomofwintermute.blogspot.com/
http://fallenfreedom.blogspot.com/2006/07/unavoidability-of-jewish-question.html
Thank you for including a mention of your book editorial background which, coincidentally, is similar to that of Wintermute.
The book industry is also my area, albeit at the lower level of consumer publishing.
Many thanks for the links, Al. I know now how I’ll be spending some time tomorrow.
Très bon, Pierre! Je viens de revenir de la France, où j’ai vu la gloire de ce qui a été, dans un autre temps.
Yes, I have noticed the same thing–many, many artistes are of some variety of conservative or Christian, as am I.
The pity of it is that the people in charge of the organisations–and I am not talking about Jews–are suspicious of us. I have seen it in their faces. If we present a new way of looking at something, a way that has not been approved, we are looked at as if we had just suggested that everyone go about naked. And I am talking about traditional views, presented in a new way, a lively, life-affirming way.
The beourgeoise is just a much an enemy of true art as those on the left. Their stale conceptions clog the senses, stifle the creative–and their organisations become more important than the thing that they were organized for in the beginning, whether it be for religion, art, or culture.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right of me.
Thundertoad said: “The bourgeoisie is just a much an enemy of true art as those on the left. Their stale conceptions clog the senses; stifle the creative – and their organizations become more important than the thing that they were organized for in the beginning, whether it be for religion, art, or culture.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right of me.”
Finally!!! Someone who gets it!!! There are no ‘left’ or ‘right’ artists, only ‘Authentic Artists’ on the one side and ‘Poseurs’ (or Fakes) on the other.
Art’s Enemies fill the horizon. From Left to Right as far as we can see or hear, taste or smell!
It’s no accident my online name is arthurdecco: Art Deco was the culmination and celebration of Humanity as THE victor over the Machine, struggling to humanize the barren tools of the industrial revolution through the judicious use of Art as a defence of humanity against the approaching battering rams of commerce and industry. I have a lot personally invested in the struggle for Art to prevail over crass commercialism and mindless industrialization.
Artists are by definition OBSERVERS and ultimately, if concerned enough, they become Commentators on the lives and dramas they can’t help but see and hear being lived around them. Up and down stories. Backwards/forwards. Right /Left. I don’t think there’s ever been an artist worth their salt who obsessed about labels and dogmas as much as the non-stop contributors here do. In my experience it has never been a priority. Artists have always been more concerned with finding something that could solve their up close and personal Art-related dilemmas than solving the immediate problems of the world.
Which half of that nonsensical left/right label would you flaccid WN complainers assign to Shakespeare? Or to Beethoven? To Mark Twain or John Steinbeck? Or to Michelangelo? …Cat Stevens? …Based on their work, I mean? And not on your personal prejudices of them as people? …and your media-manufactured irrational fears of ‘foreigners’, I might add?
Not many of us think our artistic judgments suffer because of our prejudices – but they do, they do.
Whether we’re ‘Artists’ or not, we all are brought up with values imprinted on us by someone somewhere sometime. True Artists, blessed with this early indoctrination, and the intelligence to respect it, notice life happening in real time better than most of us and so are able to communicate their observations to us in a way that forces us to pay attention even when they don’t consciously know what they’re doing. (eg: “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” e. m. forster) But like most of us they need to see the evidence of their work complete to know what it was they were trying to accomplish. To be an artist only occasionally results in genius but that shouldn’t suggest that Art you can’t understand or cannot identify is not Art or deserves to be dismissed out of hand as “garbage”.
Art can be grand and glorious, state-sponsored even. And in the same breath Art can be an exclusive, quiet, never-to-be-experienced-by-anyone-other-than-its-creator-at-this-moment-in-time. ART can rival a military parade in bombast and spectacle and it can eviscerate identical pomp and majesty and do so without a whiff of irony or hypocrisy but instead with only with a lit flare held up to Truth.
Neither approach is wrong and both are ART, the opinions of some of the commentators here notwithstanding.
Because that is what real ART is – ART is Fundamental TRUTH cloaked in trench coats or petticoats, drenched in honey or vinegar, whispered and/or shouted, painted brightly or monochromatically. Sung, shouted, painted and printed without concern for profit.
Art isn’t “left” or “right” and neither are artists. To ascribe such things to our finest observers of the natural and unnatural world we inhabit is ludicrous. True Artists pay attention and record what they experience through whatever medium they feel most comfortable using and their political prejudices are only a small part of their Art.
And let’s not confuse Propaganda with Art because much of what we are told these days is Art is actually propaganda – propaganda as blatant as anything that issues forth from the mouths of senior AIPAC officials, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Scientologists, old-school Communist apparatchiks… Or Punk Rock fanzine editors for that matter…
The problem doesn’t lie with Art or Artists – the problem lies, as is usual, with those who are the gatekeepers of our culture. Who are these people who cause us problems with what Art is being defined as? Several of the comments on this thread have brought this concern up. And others have tried to answer it…
Our collective problems lie with our publishers, record company executives, art dealers, buyers for corporate collections and with the staff of our government-funded cultural agencies, along with those in self-interested positions of power in our Westernized, not-remotely, religion industry.
These are the people with outdated political agendas and dangerous (for us) prejudices who deliberately blockade the free flow of information and funds to those groups who could better serve the interests of our communities.
(I wonder how many people reading this would be fooled into thinking helping your neighbour was akin to socialism because of the nonsense they had been fed since birth through their media…)
These are the people who are “left” and “right” – not the artists they control through their abuse of the system they have assembled to profit from other people’s talent.
Let’s face it, there is valuable Art being created in every corner of every settlement on the planet. Start looking for it if you’re truly interested in Art instead of preferring to complain about what isn’t featured on your MSM. Get off your asses and go looking On-Line! And then support the artists you discover instead of constantly whining about how ART TODAY IS EVIL! ART TODAY IS PERVERSE! ART IS CONTROLLED BY ALIENS FROM OTHER PLANETS! HA HA!!
We have the power to make what WE want to be ART, ART. It’s not like there isn’t 200 Million PLUS of us, fer crissakes!
SMARTEN UP AND STOP WHINING!!!!!!!
Start making choices and stop acting like rape victims! Choose your OWN Artists instead of waiting for them to be handed to you on some stupid and propagandized “Awards” show!
@arthurdecco
You got it. Realism & hyper realism are not necessarily good art, or good politics.
As I mentioned above Jack Kerouac, the “beat” poet & artist is the last big name White artist who had traditional or conservative political-racial values.
My “couple of links” became three. I find that this also happens with my “couple of drinks”.
@…. ” with more people going to university than ever before and many of these taking creative writing and visual art courses…”
The advent of advanced degrees in arts, especially painting and writing, and the elevation of photography should be mentioned. The “MFA” programs frame debates on what art is, the role of arts, etc., and work to redefine them as propaganda.
Liberalism (in an old school sense) can be utterly necessary for the creation of art— in the sense that “understanding the other as the self,” engaging in the process of depth understanding of others, being able to perceive from various angles (related to the imperative given many now, especially ppl most focussed on in propaganda (germans, southerners, etc.) who are forced to answer questions in regard to how their –supposed– victims have experienced them, in other words, not to express their own point of view, but to intake how others have experienced them— and that is part of “liberalism.” Without it, you can’t make a very good novel.
Ironically, in this supposed “age of liberalism” few real novels exist. Few writers have the depth of Dostoyevski, the capacity to enter into various realities. The “liberalism” is not really experienced in the lives of those writing “Victim Narratives” for the mainstream press. The people are often “one story wonders” (their biography), or tell only slender victim tales. They exhibit no depth imagination.
The internet and growing white movement, however, shows signs of genuine creativity. The other problem is atheism. Without God, “art” is no longer a matter of inspiration, in the same sense. Propaganda is agenda oriented and that’s all. The spark resides in people struggling for the Beyondism, a transcendence of thought and feeling, and many writers and artists actaully have been extremely conservative. The list if very long. Also, they have changed in their lives.
Everyone not taught in the colleges —the list is longer than what is taught– is probably a conservative, lol. Many MFA candidates have never heard of T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound.
Thanks for your post, anne. Smart and provocative.
Gorgeous! If there’s ever a contest for pseud, go for it.
If by Art we mean plays, movies and popular music then it is now very often little more than an opportunity to drive an agenda which is inevitably philosemtic and just as often anti White agenda. It is subversive, disruptive and complete rejects the European past. Very seldom does it touch the soul of person in a truely whole and healing way. We can not expect jewish script writers to produce art that is healing or affirming towards Whites; even if not consciosly malevolent their obsessions are pushing their own ethnic agendas or making money. I think that is why so much art leaves one feeling empty. I suspect that this is so in architecture as well. Goldfinger’s architercural work in Britain or Harry Seidlers in Australia leaves one feeling alienated.
Filmmaker David Lynch was a staunch republican (and Eagle Scout) in his youth. His films exist in an ethereal, apolitical universe. Ferdinand Celine, the great writer and the man who more than anyone else revolutionized the modern novel as we know it, was a Nazi-sympathizer, as was Nobel prize winner Knut Hamsun.
To be honest, some people who are considered either far-right or far-leftwing are really just insane. Oliver Stone (supposedly left) and John Milius (self-avowed righty) come to mind.
Stanley Kubrick, probably the most important filmmaker to ever live, is on record as saying “Hitler was right about almost everything.” After he made “Clockwork Orange,” he laughed off Rosseau’s relativist “noble savage” concept, saying that man was instead just a savage.
I could continue ennumerating (John Dos Passos, Tom Wolfe, etc.) but you get the idea. If you want a sitcom that mocks conservatives and celebrates lesbian weddings, get a liberal. If you want something really profound, find someone who alienates and angers elements of both the left and the right, from time to time.
Ayn Rand certainly doesn’t represent libertarianism to me, and her fellow-cultists are often worse. Peikoff is a case in point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoAWCwm-UXw
Besides, Rand was a hypocrite on discrimination (anathema, supposedly, except when one race was concerned):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU
This is an excellent and challenging article. When reading the piece, it reminded me of several observations and experiences from my college years.
I had the privilege of going to a university that is widely considered to be a very good one. While there, I took many art courses and womens’ studies courses.
I pursued the art courses because of a genuine interest that had been with me for a long time. I took classes in art history, contemporay criticism, modern media and studio art. There was much about those studies that I found strange and off-putting. However, the ones that stumped me the most were those dealing with contemporary criticism and modern media.
We were made to read essay after essay, and article after article, by critics and commentators, like bell hooks. So much of it was pretentious, ugly, self-absorbed, self-righteous and snobbish arguing over perspectives on art that itself was pretentious, ugly, self-absorbed, self-righteous and snobbish. It was sh*t about sh*t– sometimes, literally.
On one occassion, a class was presented with a piece by a much heralded female artist. Essentially, she had someone film her while having sex. During the “discussion” that followed, I made the rather less than brilliant observation that the footage looked like softcore porn, and that most viewers would see it as such. Even though I had prefaced my remarks by expressing my sincere belief that it is a good and reasonable thing to develope healthier, less shameful views on sex and the human body, I received a disappointed and disapproving response from my professor, and curious looks from my fellow classmates.
Throughout those courses, I often thought of an old man who lived not too far from my hometown. He was a smart, kind and successful small businessman, who pursued his interest in art as a serious hobby, making money from it. His watercolors and acrylics were of the local countryside, farms, barns, homes, and the downtowns and side streets of villages. Most of these paintings were executed with a great amount of skill– the guy obviously had a lot of talent. When viewing his work, a person would see something pleasant and beautiful. Not only that, a person could clearly see that these paintings were made with care by someone who was celebrating his love for the area. I do not have to take a wild guess as to how those critics we studied so seriously would see his work, if they condescended to look at it.
I took many womens’ studies courses out of a genuine interest, as well– not because I had to, not because I wanted to earn Brownie Points, and not because I wanted to get laid. I am not exactly sure where this interest came from, but I have some ideas. My parents, whose political views I would describe as “non-reactionary conservative,” taught me by word and example to treat women with respect and courtesy. I tried from an early age to do just that; so, when in high school, when my male peers in the sports teams and other groups would start their “conversations” about the girls they would like to f**k and how hard, about who had the biggest t*ts, about who was the biggest b*tch, about who was a sl*t and who was not, etc., I would not participate. It was not that I was a prude. That kind of talk was just too ugly and degrading. Well, nothing will win you the labels of “f*g” and “h*mo” in an American high school quicker than refusing to say ugly and demeaning things about females and their body parts, and not reflexively expressing a pathological hatred for all homosexuals. That always bewildered me. Also, throughout grade school, I noticed that the students who were the most serious, studious and smartest, and who were the most likely to participate in important discussions, tended to be female. Of course, this honest observation totally contradicts one of the doctrines of the bizarre kind of feminism that apparently dominates our colleges and universities.
In one of those courses, at one point, we focused on a sigificant movement amoung American males when the country was still very young. Basically, men were being encouraged (by other men, primarily) to become more loving, affectionate and helpful husbands and fathers. I thought this was pretty remarkable and, well… nice. The young women in the class, as well as the female professor, were very critical and hostile towards this movement, seeing it as degrading and insulting. For the life of me, I cannot remember why, especially when thinking of the period of time we were looking at. Anyway, during one “discussion,” I made some comments about how this push for greater sensitivity in males was a step in the right direction, and how these views probably had something to do with Enlightenment Thought and Christianity. I also mentioned that, when reading the correspondences between husbands and wives from that period (from across a fairly wide economic spectrum), one is not only impressed with how articulate, intelligent, complex and thoughtful those letters were; one also comes away from reading them with the sense that each member of those married couples viewed and treated the other as an equal.
After making those remarks, which were not meant to be provocative, let alone confrontational, I was looked at as if I had soiled myself. In particular, two Jewish women glared at me with daggers in their eyes. At the time, their Jewishness meant next to nothing to me. I have never forgotten it, as it was so uncalled for and just plain weird. I still do not understand what I said to invite such a response.
Anyway, thank you for the excellent essay. It certainly made me think of a lot of things.
I call Toronto singer and songwriter David Hein’s play “My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding“ as ‘creative’. The play searches answers to the key debate within Jewish communities in the West and Israel about what makes one Jewish – born to a Jewish mother or practicing Jewish religion…..
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/my-mothers-lesbian-jewish-wiccan-wedding/
Steve Sailer points out, that, up until recently the exact opposite was true. Marxists- and activist Jews politicized the arts – if you were not left, you were not a good artist.. its a self-affirming bias.
Dickens, in many ways was paleo conservative. Shakespear was nationalist, Dali supported Franco, Gaudi, Wagner, Sir Walter Scott… Kipling, of course,
The problem was never a lack of conservative/right creatives- the problem was the marxist left saw it as a problem.
I would say that legend, myth, folklore are inherently conservative – the left hates it but they HAVE to use our imagery ect- they lure people in with beauty, say british in colonial india, or the knights in armor (kingdom of heaven) only then can they slip in a message that otherwise people would not be interested in.
sometimes they have flip reality star wars, for example – a multi-species coalition opposing the empire- hah. when has that happened? EMPIRES have always been multiculti, whilst the opposition has almost always been nationalist.
“with more people going to university than ever before and many of these taking creative writing and visual art courses”
I doubt these courses do much good. in the past, most writers never went to ‘writing school’.
This article is so well written that I cannot summon the words of praise to do it justice. I thank you Mr. Pierre de Craon for this line of thinking and the ammunition it provides as I too “endure the tedium and the misery of life in an unfriendly and unforgiving society”.
I also wish to thank this site for featuring such fine quality intellectual material from excellent writers who set a high standard indeed.
You want to de-fang Hollywood and open up art to the forces of competition? Abolish “intellectual property”! Much harder for Spielberg to get a blockbuster financed when there’s no policeman to chase down a copier. Film projects would likely become smaller, more numerous (the demand side of the entertainment equation doesn’t necessarily change) and more tailored to micro-audiences, opening up the field even to directors like Craig Bodeker.
Great art has flourished in the past with no intellectual property laws, ditto for great science. Who’s going to be remembered two centuries hence, Shakespeare or J.K. Rowling?
Michele Boldrin is great on this.
http://www.againstmonopoly.org/
@ Trenchant …
You might enjoy this recent edition of the Max Keiser Report: GIABO! (E154)
Amongst other good stuff, you will find a discussion in the 2nd half of the programme (starts at 13:00 mins) with a Swedish online activist — Rick Falkvinge — on the topic of Intellectual Property Rights … new thinking!!
Personally, I think 12 years (copyright / patent) would be a fair and workable limit.
You can find the RT sponsored programme at the YouTube site, but here is an alternative viewing address:
http://www.darkpolitricks.com/2011/06/keiser-report-giabo-e154/
Agreed, without reservation. “Intellectual property” is a repellent notion. It is yet another Talmudic parlor trick.
I am reminded of something a dear friend said back in the seventies after we heard someone summarize the New Left philosophy of property and ownership as “Everything should be free!” My friend said, sotto voce, “Yeah, sure. What he really means is, everything should be free—except for what I’m selling.”
“Who’s going to be remembered two centuries hence, Shakespeare or J. K. Rowling?” Given the present state of the world, friend Trenchant, the fact that you consider this a rhetorical question, as you seem to, suggests that you might profitably consider changing your moniker to Cockeyed Optimist. (I hope I needn’t add that I hope you’re right to consider the question rhetorical.)
Pierre de Craon: “‘Intellectual property’ is a repellent notion. It is yet another Talmudic parlor trick.”
I strongly disagree.
I have had two main sources of income throughout my life – writing songs and music with the one hand, and building beautiful wooden things for wealthy people with the other.
I can unequivocally state that the effort and time required to create a 4 minute piece of original and listenable music far outweighs that required to bring a rich person’s remodeled bath or even estate to fruition.
Explain to me again why I shouldn’t be paid for what I Created at the same or even better rate that I have been recompensed for my Physical Efforts in bringing bathrooms into being?
Why should the results of my Creativity be worth less than my skills as a Craftsman -especially when the effect of my music is felt by thousands more than my building skills?
No disrespect intended but you make no sense on this point, M. de Craon.
I don’t have to be a Jew to want to be paid for my well-constructed intellectual efforts by those who like to listen to it.
I cannot believe I’m here voting for arthurdecco against a favorite writer and commentator on this site, but I have to agree that intellectual property should be protected. I extend every courtesy and respect to Mr Pierre de Craon, as well as all my goodwill.
Perhaps Pierre de Craon meant jews abuse the intellectual property for their benefit to the detriment of society, find ways to perpetuate their franchise for an overextended length of time by abusing the rules, and essentially take another concept that is meant to balance the interests of the individual versus society, and twist it for their benefit.
Additionally, the white man is far more creative and has invented or created most things of value in this society and the world, and needs a defense against intellectual property theft, but perhaps the methodology needs updated.
Perhaps the jews also abuse intellectual property rights by also copyrighting and patenting so much sub par material they overwhelm the system, as well as possibly sneaking in and copyrighting the material of others after the usefulness and time period of the copyright has run out, and free use is to society’s favor.
I too intend no disrespect, and if you are able to find time to address the topic, I’m sure I will find a new way of looking at the subject and expanding my thinking.
Scooter: No need to apologize, my friend. Reasonable men disagree all the time.
I didn’t answer arthurdecco’s post (and a thoughtful and civil post it was, too) for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that a response wouldn’t have been brief (alas). Since I consider you a friend and not simply a respected antagonist in a polite debate, I shall try to concisely summarize my objections to intellectual property legislation.
Trenchant has, I think, very clearly expressed the reasoned paleolibertarian position on the topic. It is a position I have no principled objection to—indeed, in intellectual terms I am glad to embrace it (put otherwise, I have no dispute whatsoever with Trenchant). Its great virtue is that, unlike the views expressed by arthurdecco and others, it doesn’t rely at all on special pleading or self-interest—irrespective, I hasten to add, of whether that self-interest is real or advanced impartially (i.e., simply for argument’s sake).
Yet the plain truth is that the libertarian position gives me very little sense of moral satisfaction or ease. In my heart and conscience I keep returning to the classic Catholic notions of proportionality and subsidarity, concepts utterly lost in modern law and society and shelved as well by the postconciliar church. I think that you will agree with me when I say that there is no need to submit a 250-page brief in evidentiary support of the assertion that one of the great Tribal successes attendant upon the fragmentation of American society has been the replacement of a sense of common decency and fair play by an ever-growing body of virtually incomprehensible law, the primary purposes of whose enactment are (1) the enrichment of those who make and profit by it, (2) the severing of even white Christians from the fraternal feelings that bound their parents, grandparents, and ancestors into cohesive communities, and (3) the instilling into both old and new Americans of the sense that no societal bonds truly matter aside from the juridico-political ones that our masters are enchaining us in.
Before I get carried away (in either sense!), let me bring this rambling comment back to earth by asking you a question with an illustrative point. Have you ever seen a copy of the first authorized Ballantine Books paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings? (You may or may not know that the first paperback edition, although wildly successful in sales terms, was pirated. For whatever reason, however, it sparked the LotR craze that the initial hardcover publication of almost fifteen years earlier had failed to.) My own copy (1st edition, 6th printing, August 1966) of the BB edition is typical of the entire press run in that it has a signed message from JRRT on the back cover. It reads as follows: “This paperback edition, and no other, has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it, and no others.”
Scooter, if I had my way, “courtesy (at least) to living authors” would be the morally binding foundation of whatever strictly limited copyright law an imperfect and lawyer-ridden society would enact. I frankly cannot and will not be convinced, however, that present-day American copyright law, even were it to be overspread with the contents of a hundred thousand rotten eggs, would fall within sniffing distance of that standard. That is why I believe that acceptance of the claim that today’s law protects the legitimate interests of authors and other “creators,” rather than those of corporate entities whose very existence gives aid to the forces fragmenting white Christian society, is an act bordering on willful blindness.
In a way, then, one might, with justice, charge me with siding with Trenchant and the libertarian position on emotional rather than intellectual grounds. It is not, as I say, that the intellectual grounds are weak or in some sense lacking—though, of course, as other commenters have shown, the libertarian position can easily be howled down as heartless and divisive—but that, for better or worse (and in common with too much else about libertarianism as a “philosophy”), they are synthetic; that is, they are not the product of Western Christian men’s experience living generation after generation in a Christian society. But whatever the position’s failings, it is coherent; and even if it is not Christian in its birth and development (as it certainly isn’t!), it is at the very least not inherently unbaptizable. On the other hand, the positivistic legal farrago of present-day American copyright law, which serves Tribal interests far more effectively than a libertarian alternative (aka the Impossible Dream [perhaps just as well]) ever could, is something that, I sincerely believe, ought to repel every Christian. To paraphrase certain things I wrote in the article, our legal structure nourishes those who have given us Beyoncé, Amy Winehouse (no longer, thank the Lord), and Stephen Spielberg. A return to a civil polity where another Tolkien’s call for courtesy could cut a pirated edition’s sales by 80 percent in a matter of months is a goal worth fighting for, even with swords stamped Made in Libertaria.
There is perhaps more omitted than said in what I have written above, but this much will have to suffice for now. I hope you will consider it at least a partially sufficient response, Scooter.
Scooter: An addendum. My long comment neglected to say what it should have begun with—namely, that I agree with every word in paragraphs 2, 3, and 4 of your comment. Indeed, those paragraphs probably say better what truly needed saying than my own endless comment did.
Pierre De Craon:
Thanks for your well thought out response to the questions I asked. I’ve now had my interest in the subject raised considerably, and I am going to give it further study.
Once again, please keep commenting and writing on this site, your contributions are excellent.
Whatever the case, there are many examples of creative folks who are not tolerant, but perhaps less who are not liberal in the usual (modern) sense of the word…”
What I was trying to say is that part of the current “liberalism” involves intaking another’s reality (for instance, the way we are taught endless ‘victim narratives’ of other races— to think like them, experience like them, consider an event from their point of view, and so on, AND YET we, of course are not them.”
In my opinion, this exercise can be connected to creativity—in the sense that, unless you have genuine sophistication and a real flexibility with multiple points of view, you could hardly write a decent novel. This does not mean that you “tolerate” anything, in the work or in real life. One can know many points of view, and still remain very true to oneself. That’s just sophistication. Sometimes wn seem to want to throw out this sophistication that is connected to creative work (one needs it to create complex realities s/a in the instance of creating fake worlds in games or gaming or novels or whatever.
Creativity frequently, too, is connected to empathy, a feeling for, and this is true in art even before things s/a christianity, so it’s not that. Cognitive empathy is, again, related to this capacity to take in other realities.
For the creative euopean spirit, this seems to be part of a SURVIVAL strategy also. Knowing the enemy, so to speak. The novel, for instance, is —in a sense— just an exercise in imagination, in anticipating others’ realities, in knowing your enemy.
Other groups do not seem to produce the Dostoyevskian depth in novel writing, that capacity to go deeply into anothers’ experience, and arrive on the other side, as oneself, unscathed by the taking in of the reality of the others.
The current era —with its imperative that whites live in accordance with others’ paradigms– will probably be ended, just as one finishes a novel, as an in-depth view of how others are, how they think, how they feel, what they think about us, etc.
It is ‘know thy enemy’ at its best.
“…Whatever the case, there are many examples of creative folks who are not tolerant, but perhaps less who are not liberal in the usual (modern) sense of the word…”
that was the point— but even moreso, this was openly devised in order to indoctrinate the idea of art as propaganda, and a marxist sense of what art should be produced. The system of codifying, rewards (of tenure and so on) created an era of anti-art.
Brilliant, anne. Type more.
Anne, I very much enjoyed reading your comments on the above article. Some of it went a little over my head. Do you believe that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have much real meaning anymore? Often, I believe that they do not. I use those terms because I do not yet know what to replace them with.
Anyway, would you mind reading my lengthy response to this article? Admittedly, it does not deal too directly with Pierre de Craon’s piece. I would appreciate getting some critical feedback from you on my response.
Thank you.
First, I’m all for absolute rights over real property. Not what’s happening between my ears, which belongs exclusively to me and to no one else. We’re totally brainwashed into thinking that “intellectual property” is both necessary and beneficial to our standard of living.
I’d recommend people consider the shabby origins of copyright. The Statute of Anne was a cozy deal between the Crown and the Printers’ Guild – can’t have the yokels just reading anything, can we? Seditious thoughts might come to them!
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html
To the present: think who owns the publishing houses – and who are the real winners – are they the creators themselves, or the intermediaries? “Intellectual property” adds vast costs into the structure and raises the barriers to entry (look at the price of Penguin Classics to get an idea what the physical costs are). To publish, artists must go cap in hand to the publisher.
“Intellectual property” is the fence that blocks our ideas from enjoying the wide circulation they deserve, and we’ve got a mighty unfriendly gatekeeper. The fence needs to come down, don’t try and reform the gatekeeper.
By the way, The Culture of Critique is on the torrents (I didn’t put it there). Every opportunity I get, I recommend it. Many of those who read it free and are influenced by it would never have paid real coin, but some will come back as donours to this site, or allies to our moral and intellectual cause. I have no qualms in promoting this freeware. Far from doing Kevin Macdonald a disservice, I feel the higher profile he enjoys, the safer he is. I don’t think he’s going to stop writing because of some ethereal lost opportunity costs.
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6350185
@ Tranchant [June 10, 2011 - 9:12 pm] …
Those who make donations (in lieu of proper purchases) to properly honour the efforts and sacrifices made by Independent Bloggers, Political Pundits, and Authors are sadly few and far between.
You should study the experience of the brave blogger named Brother Nathanael Kapner (http://www.realzionistnews.com/) whose energy and honesty alone qualifies him for generous donations … his articles and (lately) his videos are of exceptionally high quality and accuracy … but such donations rarely materialize.
This is sadly, a fact of life. Too many of us have already been conditioned to use (abuse) the Internet (World Wide Web) as a flea market, or a place from where one can literally steal without getting caught.
You indicate, in so many words, that you are opposed to Copyright protection of original work (as well as Patents). Presumably then, Trenchant, you are not nor have ever been an author? You have never (yet) created anything one could describe as original in your life?
I wonder if you have any idea of the deleterious effects the presence of Indians and the Chinese have had upon the writing + authoring fields and the computer industry (in the case of India) and upon the manufacturing industry (in the case of China) throughout the Western World? Have you any idea how many Westerners are now bankrupt or destitute because of the lack of both national and international protection offered to them from oft-times flagrant Indian and Chinese piracy?
As you see it … how might a western song writer (whose brief inspirations may bring joy to millions for decades) or a book author (whose work of dedication and sacrifice spanning many months or even years at great personal cost because he/she still has to eat and have somewhere safe to sleep and write throughout that long creative period) receive just and fair reward (compensation) from the “free-for-all” market you espouse?
Without copyright enforcement, how can authors continue to write?
Without patent protection, how can inventors recoup their costs and losses, never mind purchase that well-earned bottle of champagne?
Intermediaries are necessary because they are experts in production, distribution, marketing, and promotions. The best of whom can turn a struggling writer into a household name within a few years; enabling he/she to write more.
Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Idealistic.
So, your brief answers, explanations, and justifications please.
Typo! That should be Trenchant opening my above comment, not Tranchant. My apologies.
This debunking of “intellectual property” is also excellent.
http://is.gd/1Z8qr0
Ayn Rand was unwavering in her support for “intellectual property”. Cynics like myself see this as arrant hypocrisy – compare Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We with Rand’s Anthem. At least Orwell acknowledged his influence in shaping 1984.
One big potential difference: Anthem showed that it was impossible to maintain a highly advanced technological society while remaining collectivist – that was the premise. Most other dystopian novels assumed that communism would allow for a highly advanced civilization to continue. One of the themes of Anthem was that civilization would regress under prolonged collectivism.
Note that even the invention of the lightbulb had been lost in Anthem, whereas in most other dystopian novels, including We, a high state of technology was assumed to be possible.
Other authors had not thought through the role of individualism and freedom to scientific advancement, so they rather stupidly assumed nothing would be lost in a totalitarian society.
I do think that it is obvious that “art” of all mediums is now firmly in the grips of the left .
I also think that art tends to attract the contrarian type of personality .
I would think that at some point there is going to be much rebellion in the arts community . Simply because it is becoming painfully obvious that leftism is the status quo .
( I find it pathetic how some artists still think they are
” rebels” when they engage in some sort of act of ” counter -culture ” that is really just all too typical mainstream leftist subversion )
I often run in to leftists who really think they are rebellious . They pride themselves as being free thinkers . ha ha !
If they were not so annoying they would be comical . Since they are the most conformist in their usual subversion of everything conservative . It is just the usual anti-white anti-male anti-tradition that drives these people and it is oh so passe .
They are simply conforming . Being a leftist is about as rebellious as wearing flared pants .
On the other hand , presently , being race conscious is probably as truly rebellious as it can get .
This is just another example of how we really do live in Orwellian times . Since to rebel has become to conform .
Being leftist is about as rebellious as wearing denim jeans .
Ok , one more …
Being a leftist is about as rebellious as getting a tattoo . lol
“Joe Webb”, great art **looks** conservative–as long as you’re looking two centuries back!
When Bernini represented St. Theresa of Avila in orgasmic ecstasy on being penetrated by the angel’s “long spear of gold”, that wasn’t exactly in keeping with conservative tradition…
I’ll say it again. Many creative types or people who fancy themselves creative will out in the open claim to be liberal etc. in order to have a better chance at selling their work, working in certain fields, etc. Yes, a decent percentage are brainwashed, but a lot of them also fall in line just to try and “make it”. Another thing to note is that almost every jew considers themselves super-creative, and will be the first to tell you so, yet most of the jews tossed in our faces as being the epitome of creativity (no matter the field) are overwhelmingly a bunch of hacks or people who have stolen ideas or the works of others.
I regularly copy my comments into specific file folders on my hard drives dependent upon Subject. While I was re-reading this particular comment before saving it to my hard drive I started editing it until it bore but scant relationship to the original…so I thought it best to re-post it with its altered emphasis…
Pierre de Craon: “‘Intellectual property’ is a repellent notion. It is yet another Talmudic parlor trick.”
M. de Craon, I disagree! Passionately!!!!!!
I have had two main sources of income throughout my life – writing songs and music with the one hand while building edifices for wealthy people with the other. (You don’t need to know how that came about…LOL)
I can unequivocally state that the effort and time required to create a 4 minute piece of original and listenable, arranged music far outweighs the effort required to bring a rich person’s remodeled home or even new estate to fruition.
Explain to me again why I shouldn’t be paid for what I create at the same or even better rate than I’ve already been recompensed for my efforts in bringing bathrooms into being – dependent of course on what I’ve created being worthy of reward?
Why should the results of my Creativity be worth less than my skills as a Craftsman and Construction Manager – especially when my music is experienced, (and presumably enjoyed), by thousands and thousands more people than the products of my building skills?
No disrespect intended but you make no sense on this particular point, M. de Craon.
I don’t have to be a Jew to want to be paid for my intellectual efforts by people who like to listen to the results of my compulsive inspirations. What they’re choosing to listen to when they listen to my music belongs to me because I made it up. I play the same bar over and over for weeks until the sequence of notes is molded into what my imagination insists I hear. I stutter and stumble about for hours some days not knowing why I need to insert a discordant note until I realize it perfectly matches the sentiment expressed by the lyrics. No one else could ever write the music that my listeners are listening to composed by ME.
So why that isn’t an obvious defense of “intellectual property” mystifies me. And why otherwise sensible people like you can think what I create is worth nothing mystifies me just as much.
@ arthurdecco …
I share your concerns and your dismay at those comments posted by Commenters who I feel should know better; expressing their irrational (i.e., not fully thought through) hostility towards “Intellectual Property Rights”.
Please scroll up and read my response to our friend, Trenchant.
YES – Some “creative people” tend to manifest the “values”—tolerance and liberalism – one of such European was German poet, novelist, playwright and natural philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. While born, raised and lived as a Christian, he studied Holy Qur’an first in German translation and then in original Arabic. His poetry on Islamic concept of One Creator (Allah) is thought provoking.
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/goethe-on-islam-and-christianity/
That’s interesting. I heard that John the Revelator read the Alcoran and was inspired to write the Revelation.
What’s better surprise for idiots – Both John the Baptist and Napoleon studied Holy Qur’an while spitted on your hateful Talmooood!
And Schopenhauer said that he never found single worthwhile thought in the Koran.
I note that the Jewish definition of art/artist does not include artisans. Originally, artisans were craft based and made useful things, like furniture, into things of beauty. Could that be because Jews are, as Wagner suggested, technically good but lacking in originality?
European cathedrals are chock full of ornate carved stonework and woodwork. I certainly find it artistic. Difficult to believe that only liberal artisans were allowed too work on these cathedrals.
Rehmat: “…Both John the Baptist and Napoleon studied Holy Qur’an…”
Does that make John the Baptist a Muslim? Was John the Baptist’s work plagiarized? Was John the Baptist re-incarnated 700+ years after his death and invited to critique the the Qua’an? Were Napoleon and John the Baptist contemporaries?
Explain yourself please.
Article from the Forward, a Jewish weekly that confirms the above essay:
http://www.forward.com/articles/134295/
Excerpt:
A remarkable number of the people responsible for these films happen to be Jewish. The extent to which their religion plays a role in their interest in filmmaking and social justice varies as much as the subjects and styles of their movies.
Jews creating accessible, meaningful art is neither a new trend nor a random coincidence, according to Caroline Libresco, a senior programmer at the Sundance Film Festival. In our interview, she said, “I don’t think it’s an accident that progressive Jews want to make a difference. Social change documentaries are an expression of tikkun olam.” Libresco has worked in documentary films for 15 years and is herself Jewish. She also said, “There has always been a strong wave of Jewish activist documentarians.”
Peace.
Michael Santomauro
ReporterNotebook@gmail.com
Thank you Pierre de Craon for this important article. I’d like to inform TOO readers of American Arts Quarterly, a publication that promotes traditionalism in the visual arts. Subscriptions are free and available at http://www.nccsc.net/american_arts_quartlerly/subscribe. An article in the Spring 2011 issue, The College Art Association and Parnassus, by James F. Cooper, is relevant to Pierre de Craon’s essay. In it Cooper decries the banalities of contemporary conceptual art, but is also aware that a mere turning back of the clock to academic realism would be just as empty. He describes the current revival of the atelier as resulting in not much more than rehearsed academicism, and he recognizes that meaningful art must be more than form, it must also have content.
Here is where he stalls, however. My own study of form and content in art finally led me to understand that meaning is grounded in culture, and culture has a biological basis. It was Kevin MacDonald and J. Philippe Rushton in particular (thanks to the internet) that led me to this understanding. Cooper and so many other conservatives need to understand that getting back to what was great about the west will require getting back to the homogeneous people who created that greatness in the first place.
I don’t know quite how we might do this, and that is why I find TOO so stimulating. Creatively speaking, I think we will need an imagination of nerve and a sobriety to go with it. I believe it is Nietzsche’s chasm before us, and to cross it we must learn just what to let go of and just what to hold on to.
To Jason Speaks:
Good point on Anthem. I do think, however, that there’s a reasonable case to be made that she drew heavily from We, without acknowledging this.
To arthurdecco & Anglosaxon:
There is nothing to stop inventors and artists from flourishing without I.P.
Sure, the structure of the creative industries would change markedly. Boldrin and Levine’s book, below, argues from a utilitarian perspective (they’re neoclassical economists), not from a moral one. I’d argue both from a moral point of view as well as utilitarian that things would be much better without the army of lawyers and thoughtpolice.
I acknowledge that most things I say and write aren’t original, I’ve tapped countless sources; attribution would be impossible.
:
http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=354
and the work itself:
http://search.4shared.com/q/1/michele%20boldrin
I stick by my assertion: if you want to dis-empower Hollywood, then I.P. is the soft underbelly.
On a separate note, I blame outsourcing to a dysfunctional, paper-money system, which tends to negate Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage. (China’s mercantilism and undervalued Yuan + overvalued USD due to Fed’s disastrous monetary policy = hollowing out of American industry). On the old, gold standard, this did not occur. I do not believe there is any solution to the outsourcing problem until sound money regimes are restored worldwide. This sums it up:
http://brookesnews.com/unemployment/american-jobs-factories-and-investment-the-picture-is-grim/
Dear Trenchant …
My instincts tell me you are trying to swat a fly with a bazooka.
I of course share some of your concerns regarding the domination of creative work by big business, but let us not “throw the baby out with the bathwater”.
I prefer a regime whereby the actual creators of the “Intellectual Property” needing protection and distribution are facilitated with the means to determine how consumers can utilize the created works.
Creative Commons allow a case-by-case copyright designation to be awarded. Understand that one cannot realistically or easily compare the needs of a book author with those of, say, a song writer, or dance choreographer, or product designer.
Take a look at these Creative Commons licences, and try to understand the new and evolving ways of controlling fair or commercial use of copyrighted work in more intelligent and honest ways:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Note: You will need to scroll down the page that opens to view the actual licences.
The Amen Break shows how the creative process is one long story of looking, listening, learning, and building on others’ efforts. Then the lawyers arrive…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac
Nine-inch nails shows it’s perfectly possible to make a buck allowing free downloading (merchandising, concerts, etc.)
http://www.nin.com/
The Rolling Stones make more from touring than recording these days.
Simon and Schuster and Time Warner are no friends to this site. Copyright is their vital lymph.
Plagiarism is more detectable than ever before. People can make up their own mind whether the original or the imitation is the better article. Less lawyers, more artists (even if they are part-timers like arthurdecco)!
To Anglo Saxon:
I’m very familiar with the I.P. regime. It is flawed both morally and from a utilitarian perspective (think about the great growth of software innovation, before it became subject to I.P. strictures, Boldrin and Levine are great on this).
Absent I.P., artists and creators would have to employ a different strategy to get paid. It might be via patronage, via a sinking fund, serialization or simply by concentrating on live presentation. But art existed and flourished long before copyright, and technology before patents.
In the meantime, consumers all pay for the regulatory framework (everything has to go by the lawyer), and the rest is picked up by the taxpayer. Not fair and not efficient.
@ Dear Trenchant …
I do not believe you could make a convincing case for proving the present Intellectual Property ‘regime’ (as you put it) is morally flawed.
As regards Microsoft, the empire built by the notorious I.P. thief Bill Gates would have gone the way of the Dodo already had it not been for the Corporate world standardizing on his overblown cr*p (“vapourware” as Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation once described it).
The Linux system (which as you know is free) is now superior to Microsoft in many important ways, while the Apple proprietary software has always been superior.
I began writing documents on PC’s using WordPerfect … do you remember that? Microsoft Word was years behind, until they stole many ideas from it and then used dirty tactics to take over the Office application market. The Netscape Browser is another example, where the best was destroyed by the mass marketing of bug-ridden junk, in the form of Internet Explorer.
I think one of the most damning pieces of evidence to undermine your argument is that of the development of spreadsheet software. As you know, the world has since standardized on Microsoft’s Excel application. But the spreadsheet concept began with VisiCalc, which was invented/created by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. They then started their own company called Software Arts Incorporated. In the fall (autumn) of 1979 an Apple II version of VisiCalc was available to consumers. By early October, VisiCalc had become a fast selling product, selling for $100 throughout the United States. By 1983, VisiCalc had been transformed into the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet for the PC, from which Microsoft stole ideas and methods freely.
Unfortunately, VisiCalc was never patented. Why? Because it was not until 1981 that software programs were legally eligible for patents.
According to Dan Bricklin, he never got rich with VisiCalc; however, he does believe he changed the world somewhat through his invention. So, due to the lack of I.P. protection, backed up by lawyers, Mssrs Bricklin and Frankston never enjoyed the financial benefit they deserved from one of the most important software developments in the history of the computer, if not of mankind. Yet, we see human crud like Bill Gates taking cynical advantage and getting immensely rich on the backs of their creativity; so rich in fact that he has now founded (and funded) pseudo ‘charities’ for the purposes of injecting mercury into children’s bodies world wide under the guise of inoculation programmes.
Sure, art existed before copyright protection, and a great many authors and artists died in penury as a result.
Sounds great on paper but I doubt it would work in reality with 10,000 or so souls all trying to do the same thing, at about the same time, in the same places, while all chasing the same increasingly ‘god-like’ benefactors. The crescendo would be deafening.
What I think you are proposing is to replace the existing ‘regime’ as you call it with one where creators spend the bulk of their lives, not actually creating, but watching their backs while frantically running around (in its many and varied hi-tech forms) with a begging bowl; both literal and CG.
And as regards the regulatory framework that so displeases you, let me put this to you. Would you be willing to purchase a house from someone without legal assistance?
The tax payer is NOT funding the existing Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) system. Rather they are funding the international banks, funding usury, and subsidizing fiat money. That is what Income Tax was created for! Your government taxes your income so it can pay the interest charged on the loans it was obliged to take from the fiat bankers. If you are unaware of this basic truth, then I would politely suggest you sit down and urgently do the research this weekend, otherwise you will understand little else of worth.
In recent years, taxes have also been used to fund illegal military adventures, and also a casino mentality on Wall Street (and in London).
I would suggest you concentrate on correcting all those criminal issues before trying to destroy the present mechanisms that (imperfectly) offer IPP to honest and law-abiding people, else you might inadvertently end up helping to destroy the lives of many good, talented, and dedicated men and women!
Don’t expect fairness and efficiency in this world … you’ll never get it, except that fairness and efficiency which YOU personally create and supervise.
To be clear, I’m not against trade secrets, contractual protection, etc.
To Anglo Saxon:
First, thanks for the pondered response. Yes, I’m aware of the architecture of the current monetary edifice, and to be cheeky, here’s a great book on the same:
http://www.4shared.com/document/eaKW_Wdh/Creature_From_Jekyll_Island_by.htm
Gates indeed hasn’t brought much more than commercialization to the market. I don’t knock that per se, but Microsoft would long since have been eaten were it not for the copyright protection that now exists, but didn’t then.
Artists starving in garrets doesn’t move me any more than cleaners starving in garrets. Nobody has a right to a subsidized lunch in my book. And yes, the IP structure involves laws, courts, etc., that otherwise would be free to deal with tangible property.
The logical outcome of an ill-conceived concept, IP:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/13/microsoft-google-patent-fight/
“Artists starving in garrets doesn’t move me any more than cleaners starving in garrets. Nobody has a right to a subsidized lunch in my book.”
Ahhhh, first an non-sequitur and then a slur on creative people. And both in the same paragraph too!
Are you involved in an exchange of ideas or simply stomping on anyone who disagrees with your point of view, Trenchant?
For the record, I’m not looking for a “free lunch” but I do insist on being reasonably compensated for my creative work, even it is dismissively described as “part time work” by you. (For your information, it is hardly “part time work” except in the strictest definition of “part time”. I’m thinking: “pound of flesh” from the “The Merchant of Venice” as I type this.) Writing music is my SECOND OCCUPATION. Is that clear enough for you?
I’m hoping it is the limitations and built in weaknesses of our present method of communication, and not callous arrogance, that is leading me to think that your ideas on this subject are crying out for a reassessment, Trenchant.
Anglo Saxon, we appear to agree. On many fronts. Thank you for making it possible for me to sit back and nod approvingly at the points you eloquently and convincingly made on behalf of creative people instead of grinding my teeth while typing chapter and verse to those who think creative work should be made freely available to whomever wants to steal it without compensation.
To arthurdecco:
I’m not out to disparage you or your work. No one has any right to your artistic output, either. By “free lunch”, I mean that the State has erected a costly legal framework (socializing said costs) to enable you to potentially extract monopoly rents from thoughts you apparently “own”.
I find it amusing that some who would curse Hollywood and the RIAA would uphold the very framework that enables them to extract vast economic rents, and makes them custodians of the nation’s popular culture.
It’s fascinating to look at the origins of the Hollywood. The studios, from being IP renegades and subversives, are now its most vociferous defendants.
Drain the swamp. Pursuing alligators is a losing game.
http://is.gd/eK9uSW
Trenchant said: “I find it amusing that some who would curse Hollywood and the RIAA would uphold the very framework that enables them to extract vast economic rents, and makes them custodians of the nation’s popular culture.”
What an insufferable boor you are, Trenchant! To think your opinions are the be all and end all!
I’d bet billions you’re a fraud! lol
@ Dear Trenchant …
I was wondering if your sudden and impassioned call for root & branch overhaul of Intellectual Property legislation (“regime change”) had anything to do with recent goings on over in the USA? Capitol Hill to be exact.
Furthermore, I always assumed those finding themselves sympathetic to the London / Rothschild mindset preferred their regime changes played out to the sound of Apache attack helicopters whirring blades, and the distant whisper of Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles. ‘Tis true I am being sarcastic … but we of good intent ALL have to tread very carefully lest we allow ourselves to be misled by the evil scum up top. Remember to ask always … Cue bono?
This extract has been taken from a recent (13 June 2011) Breitbart article, entitled: Mr. Speaker, Stop the Sham Patent ‘Reform’ (by Capitol Confidential).
http://biggovernment.com/capitolconfidential/2011/06/13/mr-speaker-stop-the-sham-patent-reform/#more-283776
It would appear Europeans have had far the worst of it when it comes to filing patents and other intellectual property registrations. I am guessing, but this difference could be reflecting the far longer dominance International Fiat Bankers have enjoyed over Europe compared to their 20th century initiated dominance over those pledging allegiance to “the Constitution”.
I have gone through the Patent Filing process in the U.K. myself, so I have experienced first-hand the tiresome bureaucracy, cost, and interventions of Patent Lawyers. It becomes even more hopeless when you know that even when armed with a properly filed and paid for patent, you will not be able to defend it against abuses originating in China or especially India.
Certainly, the current system in the USA is what all creators / inventors would like to see. It would appear Trenchant, that you have focused only on the flawed British/European “first to file” system, and have forgotten (or have hitherto been ignorant of) America’s superior, “first to invent” patent registration system.
To arthurdecco:
Better a boor than a bore! Relax, the IP laws are here to stay, my views notwithstanding.
To Anglo Saxon:
No, I am aware of the different system (unlike Ayn Rand). And no, I don’t advocate reform, I advocate abolition (not the Rothschilders’ prescription, for what it’s worth).
“10-4″
Ego intellego.
The Great Inventors – often not inventors, often not great, invariably with great legal counsel.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071227/010830.shtml#comments
Good link Trenchant. Everyone should read it.
Thank you.
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Angelsachse
“….generalizing about the larger societal consequences of art and, a fortiori, artists is a waste of time, a fool’s errand. Yet it is a rare pundit and an even rarer ‘creative person’ who will have the honesty, the self-awareness, or the modesty to say what Kirsten Flagstad said to a shy young woman who, encountering Flagstad on the street, stumblingly told the soprano that she was a great artist. After thanking the woman, Flagstad replied kindly, ‘My dear, I am an artist only when I sing.’”
Excellent point and quote. In the absence of significant art, the art “community” must define itself collectively by a look, an attitude, a style, or a political ideology so that we can tell they are artists. You certainly can’t tell by looking at their work.
Goethe had interesting words to say on culture, and decentralization.
http://gaplauche.com/blog/2005/08/08/goethe-on-real-unification/
I can’t help think that were it not for the fact that virtually all “culture” comes from but a few nodes, that both the variety and quality would be superior. Centralization is inimical to personal liberty, why should this not be so for culture?
To Pierre de Craon:
Were you expunged on account of your non p.c. views?
Expunged? Do you mean from the publishing racket? If that is indeed what you mean, the answer is no. I lost my job several years ago because of illness, illness that still keeps me virtually housebound and frequently limits my ability to keep up with, for example, happenings at TOO.
Your suspicion is not baseless, however. While I worked, I had to be studiously careful to avoid revealing the full extent of my disdain and revulsion for the masters of my industry and those of the larger society whose agenda the industry serves. Still, even though I was no hero, you might be surprised what stealth in service to truth can accomplish, however straitened one’s circumstances.
I hope your health mends. And yes, it is a racket.
Attacking copyright will hurt Hollywood, but not creativity. Let’s get some competition in media.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wq5D43qAsVg#at=218
I support copyright, although 75 years after a person’s death may be too much. But there is zero chance of copyright or patent law being significantly changed and less than zero chance of them being repealed.
To Jason Speaks:
I agree on the chances of repeal – zero. The whole economic system will fail and with it copyright and patents, too. I’m not going to put a time-frame on systemic collapse, but we’re already seeing the beginnings.
In the right-Wing periodical, Instauration Vol. 16, No.8 July 1991, there is an article about Shakespeare and his negative views of blacks and Jews, and there was another issue that talked about some of the great American and English authors. It demonstrated their racism, xenophobia and sense of superiority. They were all very creative people, so I imagine that the “artists” of today that promote race-mixing and mass immigration and all those evil, genocidal concepts are just Jews or morons that most likely have no talent anyway.
Miss Universe Australia experiences Muslim life