Items of Interest, Popper's Revenge Edition
"Man would rather will nothingness than not will."
Jonathan Turley, A Harris-Walz administration would be a nightmare for free speech. “For over three years, the Biden-Harris administration has sustained an unrelenting attack on the freedom of speech, from supporting a massive censorship system (described by a federal court as an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth”) to funding blacklisting operations targeting groups and individuals with opposing views…. As vice president, Harris has long supported these anti-free speech policies. The addition of Walz completes a perfect nightmare for free speech advocates. Walz has shown not only a shocking disregard for free speech values but an equally shocking lack of understanding of the First Amendment.”
Dana Gordon, New abstraction or old genre. “Color Field painting has retained a varying vitality for over sixty years and, in the hands of certain artists, thrives today. By now, owing to its longevity and identifying qualities, it perhaps can be considered a genre of its own. But for the artists pursuing it, it is hardly that—it is the center of art, based on the belief that abstraction underlies all art and that Color Field painting, as a result, is an abstract art both refined and fundamental.”
Wilfred Reilly, Racism Is No Longer America's Biggest Problem. “For one, as he notes as early as page six and then throughout the book, the ‘Kendi’ argument that some subtle form of racism causes all group performance gaps is simply idiotic…. Carl (I write here as an occasional boss, and by training a lawyer) is also correct that there exist many exotic varieties of anti-majority discrimination in modern America, many of them almost unknown to casual observers of the passing scene.”
, Yes, You Do Have to Tolerate the Intolerant. “According to Popper, the fashionable ‘historicists’ of his day, who drew from their reading of the supposed laws of history predictions about the imminent doom of democracy, overlooked the strength of liberal institutions: ‘Only democracy allows an institutional framework that permits reform without violence, and so the use of reason in political matters,’ he argued in Open Society. To keep totalitarian systems like fascism or communism at bay, we need to sustain institutions that allow for open inquiry and grant all citizens extensive rights against their governments.”Douglass Mackey, The Right to Bear Memes. “You may wonder, why is the Biden regime prosecuting people posting election jokes, singing songs of protest at abortion clinics, and even Donald Trump under a federal felony intended to stop the KKK from physically intimidating, or even lynching, black voters at polling stations? As Reason magazine recently outlined, the Biden administration’s use of 18 USC 241 is not an isolated anomaly but part of a strategy to manipulate the law against its political opponents. The DOJ performed a similar stretch when it deployed an Enron-era statute against evidence and document manipulation against people who protested at the US Capitol on January 6.”
, The Way of Cain (Part 1): Vengeance vs. Nonviolence. “When my son graduated from Recon training, I posted about it on Instagram. Almost everyone was very ‘Abel’ about it, congratulating him, thanking him for his service, etc. But in comes Cain, in the form of a two-bit amateur artist-cum-activist, and accuses my son of being part of the ‘Genocide Machine That is Killing Palestinian Children.’ She then proceeded to comment on an earlier post I had made about my commitment to Dr. King’s Principles of Nonviolence in the same manner. So I told her in no uncertain terms to fuck off.”Yael Levin Hungerford, Wokeness and the “Sick Animal.” “The self-abasement inherent in wokeness is a contemporary example of the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche describes in his Genealogy of Morals. As he explains, man is a sick animal; he alone among the animals needs a goal in order to live. Ascetic or otherwise self-denying belief systems provide that goal. ‘Man would rather will nothingness than not will,’ Nietzsche explains.”
Michael Shellenberger, They Create Anarchy To Impose Tyranny. “Liberal politicians like Walz, Newsom, Trudeau, and Starmer are simultaneously creating greater authoritarianism and greater anarchy. This is in stark contrast to liberals in the past who fought authoritarianism and demanded greater free speech, personal freedom, and privacy. What exactly happened? How did liberals become advocates of anarcho-tyranny?”
Chevy Ray, How I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust. “Starting with the glyph’s image, we first need to separate out all the pixels of the bitmap, because that's all we’ll really be operating on. Rather than working with the image directly, I found it easier to write the algorithms by working with collections of Point structs which look like this.”
John G. Geer and Jacob Mchangama, Americans love free speech, survey finds − until they realize everyone else has it, too. “History reveals that censorship of hateful ideas is often a cure that is worse than the disease, deepening social divides. James Madison, a key drafter of both the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment, wrote in 1800: ‘Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing … it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches, to their luxuriant growth, than by pruning them away, to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits.’”
Zachary Small and Julia Halperin, Young Artists Rode a $712 Million Boom. Then Came the Bust. “But when the original painting re-emerged at auction in June and its price plunged to $10,080 — losing 90 percent of its value — the party was over. By then, Lewis had stopped renting a $7,000-a-month luxury apartment in Miami and temporarily moved in with their brother.”1
Closing soon: “Filippo de Pisis and Robert Mapplethorpe: A Distant Conversation” at the Currier through September 2.
Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.
Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style by Wilhelm Worringer. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
“Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia” is an online exhibition representing the physical one in New York in June 2024.
Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.
Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.
This piece is worth your time as an unintended display of aesthetic and economic cluelessness.
It's true that little recommends the human species. We murder each other by the tens and tens of millions. But, besides the survival instinct, our admiration of and delight in individuals have required the perpetuation of it.