The Mission of Art

Playing fast and loose with the truth

Let's get faster!

Let's get looser!

Fast! Loose! Fast! Loose!

Let's get faster!

Let's get looser!

Fast! Loose! Fast! Loose!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Towards a Goth Politics

Image
    Against Utilitarianism, Against the Happiness Agenda I was having an online argument with a right-wing, Mises-type ultracapitalist, on the topic of Marxism.  In the course of the conversation, he opined that the problem with Marx's economics was that Marx wrote about maximizing "utils" or "utilons" - that Marx did not realize that human utility cannot be so easily quantitatively measured, since different people subjectively desire different things in different ways.  I almost tore my hair out in frustration.  How do you respond to this kind of ignorance?  How can we have any kind of discussion about economics when people are carrying around these bizarrely inane strawmen? Anyone who was the least bit familiar with Marx's writing would know that Marx would never use such ridiculous terms as "utils" and "utilons".  Having done a little digging, the earliest references to these kinds of ideas I can find come not from Marx but from...
Read more

A Defense of the Ego

Image
I love egos.  I love big egos and small egos and purple egos and polka-dot egos. It's astonishing, when you bring up the word "ego" how people will immediately begin to snarl, their lips curling in aggression and disgust.  But ego is simply the Greek word for "I".  It represents the self, or more often, the self-concept.  If you say, "I hate the ego," this is not too far from saying, "I hate I" or "I hate myself" or "I hate the very concept of myself." When I use the term "ego," I am thinking of the mental construct that you create, to some degree consciously and mostly unconsciously, on the basis of your social and cultural context, to represent yourself to yourself as a distinct individual being, with your own desires, attributes, personality, and so on. There are some people out there who think that egos are bad, and that they should be annihilated - that if we could attain permanent egolessness, we
Read more

The One, True, Correct Interpretation of Nietzsche (Aesthetic Materialism V)

Image
On Nietzsche's Perspectivism [SPOILER ALERT] "There are no facts, only interpretations." This is has become the Nietzsche quote, even more than "God is dead," which has become a bit passe (and of course Nietzsche didn't come up with that one).  Liquefactionists , especially, tend to love this quote.  "There are no facts, only interpretations" would seem to be the rallying cry of what is sometimes called postmodernism , if such a thing as a postmodernist rallying cry could exist.  Perhaps postmodernism could be renamed The Great Unrallying.  Postmodernism is the name we give for what happened when the wind gave out from modernism's sails: the doldrums.  It's an understandable sentiment, and there is a strange kind of dignity to it.  Similarly and perhaps relatedly, William S. Burroughs used to complain about most Americans being Christians or similarly religious in one way or another, and then most of the rest of us being rationa
Read more