I’m retiring from politics. I’d managed to avoid engaging in the political quagmire for months on end, largely because I publicly pledged to do so after the media and politicians created an extremely volatile, self-fulfilling prophecy of racial discord, hatred, distrust, and violence, all in the name of advertising clicks and other ulterior motives. I…
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I’ve railed against conservatives on this blog. When authors of a study dared suggest that political affiliation was dependent on “predispositions” rather than choice, I fumed: That kind of milquetoast thinking is just finding excuses for social cowardice. We know that social change has demanded great sacrifice, because those who have power, whether they are…
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I’m old school on reality. Well, technically, I’m kinda’ old period. And white. And male. You could say I am a remnant of a bygone era. I still believe that reality should be sought, and accepted, and that to do so is healthy and necessary. We should defer to the greater argument. There are a…
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[This is a re-post of an article I wrote 3 years ago, and which sadly has become increasingly relevant, so much so that one can’t even articulate why it is relevant today without risking being censored for doing so. Censorship is no longer the bad word it used to be, or something liberals oppose on…
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I vowed on September 26th not to say anything on my blog about politics until the election was over. I succeeded, and it’s a lot harder to NOT speak out than it is to vent. The election lingers, but the voting is over. I just have a small observation or two. The vast majority of…
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At least until after the election, folks. The political atmosphere has been in the red for months, and as election time gets closer, it’s likely to spill over into an eruption of anger and lashing out. Well, that’s if the last election is anything to go by. And there are still people I’ve had no…
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Russel called me names, and I hit him. Hit him in the gut. What did he call you? Brown eyes. I’m sure you’ve heard about Jane Eliot’s infamous Blue eyes/Brown eyes Experiment, hearkening back to a time when we were permitted as a society to conduct social experiments on students for the greater good of…
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Everything I was taught as a child was good is now bad.
America is bad. The pilgrims are bad. The founding fathers are bad. Cowboys are bad. Christianity is bad. Christopher Columbus is bad. The police are bad. The free market is bad. White people are bad. Men are bad. The nuclear family is bad. Heterosexuality is bad. Individuality is bad. Independence is bad. Rational thought is bad.
In the art world painting is bad. Originality is bad. The old masters are bad. Skill is bad. Beauty is bad.
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These days everything is controversial and there’s little certainty about anything. Take for example the endless battles over what constitutes a healthy diet [consider Jordan Peterson and his daughter only consume beef, salt, and water]. A big part of this is, I suspect, because somewhere along the line people stopped believing that it is essential…
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Museum Curator forced to resign
over “toxic white supremacist beliefs”!
We humans are really flubbing this new decade. It’s moving a little beyond just being insulting and enervating. Now it’s starting to hurt. Above you can see the prognosis for the next 5 days in terms of pollution where I live, juxtaposed with a close-up of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease. The…
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“We’re in contact with aliens… It was the Germans who first got in touch… The aliens would mind meld and give them the technology… They’re bad aliens… Are you surprised the Nazis were influence by demons?… SS castles where they go, where the aliens want blood, so they’d kill like 20 kids and everything… it…
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A radical new approach to chess. Deciding winners by jury instead of by checkmate? I’d probably stick with the old version. The new variety, outlined in the blog-post I’m sharing below, seems be a bit nebulous for this old dog. Somehow this reminded me of the art world, but don’t mind me. I shall shuffle…
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What makes my runaway rants rants is that I write them in one go, initially without editing. I will go back and fix my more egregious typos, misspellings, and so on, but not change the flow. The ideas come one after the other, without an outline. It’s a way to keep it simple, but also…
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Anything that opposes art is probably immoral, even or especially when it wraps itself in the cloak of morality. The least we can ask of moral crusaders is that they are fighting for the highest good, and not merely advocating for their own special interests and personal benefit in and through alienating and disenfranchising others.…
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I’d sooner get my news from The Onion or The Weekly World News than from Alex Jones, but his sudden disappearance is cause for alarm. The underlying and inescapable message is that anyone can be scrubbed from social media without accountability. Your on-line existence can be ERASED, and we must simply have blind faith that…
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There are 2 inconclusive conclusions I’ve recently come to appreciate. One is that nobody’s perfect. Two is that nobody lives in reality. These aren’t grand new observations, but just the kind of thing one grows to understand more over time. It helps me deal with other people and with my relationship to them. We’re all…
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I like to stick to talking mostly about matters of art, but politics has so infiltrated the art world that you can’t be an artist without being clobbered over the head with certain ideas; and your work and career are evaluated, bolstered, or derailed in accordance with them. One of the biggest, most contentious and…
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How serious of a crime is a foul tweet, and what should the punishment be? The Crime Roseanne tweeted something stupid and offensive. Agreed. She said someone who is part black looks like a cross between the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes. It’s not just sophomoric, it’s elementary school recess time bullying —…
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Almost every day I am disgusted by politics and ideology. Recently I wrote about how you can never have all the answers, or most of them, because your relation to those answers is perpetually in flux. No hard fact has any import except in relation to a subjective, vulnerable consciousness. We can all agree on…
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Matt Damon suggested that the punishment should fit the crime, and for this thought-crime the public deemed the fitting punishment to be the end of his career. This is the sad story in which an actor is forced to apologize for reminding us that we shouldn’t exact extreme punishment for minor transgressions. The irony being…
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[RANT ALERT!] It would be more accurate to say, “get art the F out of politics”, because politics has engulfed art and not the other way around, but then it sounds more like art is meddling in politics, which it is, but that’s a lesser problem for me. I want to free art from the…
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The Claims Against Chuck: Chuck Close is now believed to be a terrible person who has committed sexual harassment, in which case people further believe that his art should not be viewed. Allegedly, he uttered words like “pussy” and made lewd comments to females who he paid to pose for nude photos. He told one…
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You can have free speech without violence or oppression, but censorship requires force, which means at least oppression, and violence if necessary to enforce it. [Note: Here I am talking about ideas or arguments as free speech, not slander, malicious gossip, or plans to commit a crime, and not actual crimes such as snuff films,…
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I’ve been trying to not talk about politics. Both the ideologues on the right and the left drive me nuts, in which case there’s barely any wiggle room for sanity between those bookends. But Donald just took the cake, and I’d rather America were overrun with screeching SJW ideologues than Donald irradiate a population of…
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Secretary of State John Kerry has been talking tough, standing firm, strutting and posturing, swollen with pride in American military power. And he makes me sick. On September 9th he accused Assad, “He sends airplanes to napalm children,” as if America hadn’t killed an estimated 200,000 Vietnamese, including children, with napalm. Later in his press…
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