2022 Midterm Elections (Abandon hope all ye who enter here) butnahhh. or maybe?

It wouldn’t ever do any good.

Do they? I think this was more true of the Greeks than it was for us.

Seems like there was a tradeoff in Western history where obscenely wealthy gangsters like the Medicis used some of their money to fund the arts, now we just have techbros who post cryptocurrency memes.

I can mostly get on board with this, but I’m having trouble with “the arts” part. Painting and learning to play the clarinet is nice, but I don’t see it as the same kind of value add as general humanities education. So lumping them together seems odd to me.

image

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Painting and playing the clarinet is the entire point of life.

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I didn’t say it was without value. I just don’t understand how it helps with this:

Those things (i.e., painting and clarinet) do have value. Just not the same kind of value.

absolutely nothing has changed on that front except this is more dangerous

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This is more standard than any poker hand I’ve ever seen.

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Also I believe that active participation in “the arts” generally leads to increased empathy. Our society’s deficit of empathy is as meaningful as our deficit of scientific knowledge.

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Seriously though dude was trying to just sit around and talk

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i would say that practicing art in school teaches empathy, tolerance, and perspectives. some people love listen or read their content. others are more visual. similarly it’s individual to everyone which art form expresses their point of view the best. some play instruments or sing, others might draw or need the convenience of photography over paper and brushes. since i am not an artist, i feel like i’m not qualified to take away art from middle/high schools because i would be depriving them something which i don’t understand.

art also teaches critical analysis. it’s important to reflect on your work, and the projects like painting and sculpture are just a convenient form to try something with a degree of freedom, re-assess the result, and try again.

but in the end, all art is allegorical and helps humans impose a meaning over stuff that happens in their lives. it’s a huge part of mental health.

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Latina trucker wants to be bigoted, hateful and ignorant.

It’s the American Dream.

Bigger fall from grace: Durr or durrr?

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yeah, conservatives want a gullible populace, and cutting the arts works to make everyone dumber. but in order to justify it, they claim “liberal bias”, which is just a dogwhistle. there was an enormous amount of art produced in support of the civil arts movement, and its success clearly bothered many.

it’s all “educational value”

That’s fine and I don’t disagree. I still don’t think you can draw a line between clarinet and this:

Obviously education has goals besides above.

I think perhaps the most underrated aspect that playing an instrument teaches you is how much practice and dedication is required to be merely proficient at something. Feels like we’re missing a lot of that intuition today because we have so many morons constantly refreshing smartphones and believing they are experts on every topic. All of this tech gives you the instant (positive) feedback and confirmation bias by design, whereas fretting a steel-string guitar or holding a violin properly for the first time kind of hurts, and it can be difficult just producing a clean sound from most instruments.

I was watching a vlog by a professional musician recently who told of a former student who thought he would rapidly become a guitar wizard based on being a top scorer in Guitar Hero. Surprised Pikachu warning: he did not. By extension, it would be weird from someone with a learned perspective like that to believe, for example, that some horse-pasting dumbass cartoonist knows a thing about infectious disease that the top virologists in the world couldn’t figure out.

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This isn’t really related to anything, but think about how many hobbies in the olden days took skill, practice, patience, and active engagement (for example, reading, singing, playing an instrument, knitting, writing, etc) compared to today (watching tv, playing video games, scrolling a timeline). It’s kind of wild.

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It seems like “scrolling a timeline” is the worst of all possible things people could be doing with their time, or basically anything that feeds you adaptive content based on some for-profit algorithm that hacks your brain, because it’s now become very clear what the outcome of such algorithms are.

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