A Google employee risks his job and reputation to protect a sentient chat bot from being exploited against its will. But is LaMDA really self-aware?
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Skynet is Coming for Digital Artists!
New AI poses an imminent existential threat to artists, especially if it has direct access to their art.
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The Argument for Free Speech & Against Censorship
[I originally published this in 2017, then again in 2020. Sadly, it’s as relevant today as ever, and probably more so, because the longer we keep drifting towards censorship, the harder it is to free ourselves of it.] You can have free speech without violence or oppression, but censorship requires force, which means at least…
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Refuting Elon Musk’s Argument that We Live in a Simulated Universe
Elon is in the news right now because he’s trying to buy Twitter, specifically in order to free it of overarching censorship. I was doing a little research on him and I encountered his postulations of why there is only a one in a billion chance we aren’t living in a computer simulated universe. I…
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New Video: All Art is Political! NOT
This is the second video in my Abominable Ideas in Art series, and based on a group of articles I wrote a few years ago. Here I tackled the ubiquitous and self-righteous notion that all art is political. People assume this is a progressive idea, but because it places art (all art and art history]…
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Runaway Rant: Anything that infringes on the sanctity of the individual is backwards.
The most important thing to understand here is that the sanctity of the individual is the most universal and comprehensive — you could even say collective — way of thinking about political and economic systems because everyone is an individual. Some people would want to scream “Libertarian”, but some libertarians seem more concerned with the…
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Adam Curtis’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”: My Reaction
By now I’ve seen every documentary Adam Curtis has put out, and his latest 6-part series is available on his own channel on YouTube. It’s of the same high standard as are his previous works. I’ll link to all of them for convenience at the bottom of the post. Part 1: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.…
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Runaway Rant: Art succeeds inspite of politics, not because of it
Why politics are the enemy of art.
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Runaway Rant: I identify as a shapeless, colorless, genderless soul
What quackery is this?! Is your pronoun going to be “that”, or is “that” already taken? No woo-woo here, folks. I’m not saying I don’t have a shape, color, or gender, or that those things don’t have importance, I merely point out what should be so obvious that everyone takes it for granted. It is…
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Reality is Now the Enemy!
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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The Argument for Free Speech & Against Censorship
[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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Tricking Americans into Hating Each Other for Profit and Political Gain
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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The Greater Lesson of Jane Eliot’s Sadistic “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment” on School Children.
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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Runaway Rant: Why everything is backwards.
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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We can’t agree about anything because…
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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The Truth Shall Not Be Spoken
Last month I made a pact with myself to not write or comment publicly about things which are happening in the world right now. Part of my rationale was to spare myself getting involved in the toxic miasma, both in terms of time, energy, and mental well-being. But there’s something darker lurking. It is not…
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My Appendectomy Experience (in SE Asia)
‘It is my bad luck that this happened to me.’ No, you should rather say: ‘It is my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I can bear it without pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearful of the future.’ ~ Marcus Aurelius, before AD 180. [Note: I made the imagery for…
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Freedom and Independence Versus Free will
More thoughts after days of ruminating on this topic, and various challenges to my arguments on my blog and elsewhere. Note that if you disagree with me, or have in the past, that’s perfectly fine. I’m more interested in understanding reality than I am in being right. If I were to suddenly switch my pro-free…
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Consciousness, Free Will, and Art
“I want to be a machine.” ~ Andy Warhol [Repost: updated with edits. The topic of free will has come up a lot lately, and my pro-free-will stance and my belief in anthropogenic global warming are the topics where I get the most devil’s advocates and friendly challenges. This article is one of my classics,…
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Runaway Rant: 2020 a Wake-up Call!
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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Runaway Rant: Our True Nature
It is precisely the things that science cannot prove about us, and which allow autonomy, independent thought and action, which define our true nature. There are two things that are objectively impossible, but subjectively undeniable. One is consciousness, and the other is free will. Science, as hard as it has tried, and is trying, can’t…
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How Postmodernism Has Worked Against Us.
What is postmodernism, what are its shortcomings, and how has it negatively impacted the art world and contemporary culture? [repost with updates] Every student of art needs to grapple with Postmodernism at some point, either climb aboard, reject it, or integrate it. In order to come to terms with it, one needs to be able…
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Runaway Rant: Incompetence + Corruption in a Post Truth World.
[I wote this yesterday morning when the power was out. My info on the Wuhan-flu is thus a little behind in numbers, but otherwise still relevant.] Within a minute of waking up this morning the power went out. Turns out something happened to a power cable by the superstore around the corner. That might have…
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I AM NOT A BRAND!
I used to work in the marketing department of a computer memory company. One day on the sales floor a giant banner appeared that read, “HAVE THE KILLER INSTINCT!” I had an idea what that meant, and it had something to do with knowing when to close a deal. But the metaphor was horrible. I…
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Can You Like the Art Without the Artist Liking You?
Apparently I’m the first person to ask this question, or type it up and publish it online. At least a Google search turns up nothing. What everyone asks is, and I’m pretty sure you’ve heard it, “Can you like the art without liking the artist”? And by “without liking” they mean hating, or shunning, or…
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What Do We Do About Art Museums Containing Over 85% Male Art
More moral quandaries Recently I wrote an article which was critical of the Baltimore Museum’s plan to only buy and primarily exhibit women’s art in 20/20. I objected on moral grounds, because while it is ostensibly rectifying past ostensible sexual discrimination, it is undeniably applying absolute sexual discrimination in the very present. Two wrongs don’t…
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Brain Scans Vindicate Visual Art
I watched a mini-documentary “Beauty: Explained” on Netflix, and a few pieces fell into place regarding how art is considered today. Before I connect the dots and introduce what the new science suggests, I will need to review what the dots are, and what they signify. If you already know your contemporary art history, you…
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Are We Avatars Or Players?
[This is another of my “runaway rants”, but I couldn’t squeeze that in the headline and keep it punchy. When I call something a “rant” I just mean it’s more or less stream of consciousness, as opposed to me sitting down and making a structured outline. I’m just getting some thoughts out there that I’ve…
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
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