Wiki"gottabetrue"pedia is a hydra-headed entity. Understanding this creature means having a working grasp of certain conflicting wikipedia philosophies.
Hat tip to Discogs staffer Diognes_the_Fox, who is grappling with similar issues on that hydra-headed monster.
Cory Doctorow writes about evictions and skewers a right-wing talking point about "people who don't want to work" (quoted at length to get the whole crux of the argument):
When it comes to delivering aid to the wealthy, conservatives hate red-tape. When it comes to preventing working people from starving or becoming homeless, conservatives put on a paperwork parade that outshine the pettiest Soviet commissar.
This contradiction arises from a cornerstone of conservative ideology -- the idea of "learned helplessness." Learned helplessness is a real thing that psychologists can induce in lab animals, discouraging them to the point of fatal listlessness.
But that's not what conservatives mean by learned helplessness. For them, learned helplessness is the evidence-free conviction that if you give a person a "handout," they will lose interest in "hard work."
Think of all the fast-food "entrepreneurs" whose signage proclaims "no one wants to work anymore" because of "government handouts," conspicuously failing to mention sub-starvation wages, irregular shifts, and abusive working conditions.
In conservativism, wealth is providential. Markets reward virtue, so the wealthy are inherently virtuous. They know the value of "hard work" and aren't at risk of "learned helplessness" so they can get "bailouts" (not "handouts") without risk of "perverse incentives."
But conservativism contains a contradiction: because capital -- by definition -- earns its returns from someone else's labor, any bailout is also a potential handout. If you save a locked down "heroic small business" with payroll support, you also "pay workers to stay home."
And if you bail out landlords by making up their tenants' missed rental payments, you also let the tenants "live for free" (ignoring for the moment that landlords whose mortgages and living expenses derive from tenant payments are literally "living for free").
So here we are, about to endure a gaping, generations-long self-inflicted wound [mass evictions due to covid -- tm]. We're about to cost millions of renters their homes and potentially put their landlords in default because evicting a tenant doesn't get you a nickel in back-rent.
You couldn't ask for a neater demonstration of the extent to which "conservative business acumen" is a LARP -- a set of culture-war performances rather than any kind of meaningful attention to profit and loss.
Because saving millions of your fellow Americans from destitution and homelessness isn't merely the right (and, you know, Christian) thing to do -- it's also the smart business move. Homelessness is infinitely more expensive than rental assistance.[1]
State conservatives are refusing to hand out $41.3b in order to create a decades-long cycle of public liabilities that will easily cost a hundred times that amount, and they're not just hurting poor people -- they're euthanizing a whole shit-ton of rentiers[2]!
As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, it's the kind of thing you'd expect from a party[3] with "two primary core talents: selling quack supplements and lowering taxes."
After all, if you campaign on eliminating government due to its incompetence, then governing incompetently is a feature, not a bug. But for the nation (and the world) which needs its government to manage climate, pandemic, etc, this is a serious bug.
Meanwhile, Dayen has a great suggestion for how to dispense with all the red tape and save landlords and tenants.
Just station a federal official with a "big bag of money" in every eviction court.[4] Every time a judge hears evidence that a tenant is behind in the rent, the official makes them whole out of the big bag of money, and the eviction is cancelled.
This is literally the worst way of doing it, a monumental waste of court resources and an inhumane way to treat tenants (and landlords, too). The only thing worse would be to allow that wave of looming evictions to wash millions of our neighbors onto the streets.
1. Note what Doctorow is doing here: switching from talk of a business budget to a government budget. The cost of homelessness doesn't affect an individual business' bottom line, except perhaps in raised taxes. As for the mega-corporations, Amazon showed great opportunism in subsidizing trailer parks for its homeless workers.
2. Rent-seekers, an increasingly common species of capitalist that adds nothing to the economy and lives off a stream of payments --tm
3. Both parties --tm
4. For budget-balancers: The bag of money could come from, say, closing several hundred military bases we don't need, especially ones in Syria. -- tm
Thanks to artist and musician Pierre-Luc Verville for including me as a topic on his website Le Parergon. The writing is in French; below is a machine-translated version. I added the hyperlinks for additional background.
Tom Moody
Tom Moody is an American musician, visual artist, and art critic. His work is characterized by the détournement [diversion, hijacking] of digital means of expression in order to subvert or sublimate their contradictions.
Biography
...Moody studied literature and art in Charlottesville [VA] and then in Washington, D.C., before moving to New York City...
Course of work
Banality and technical obsolescence are two important leitmotifs in Moody's work. Both embracing the limitations of the tools he uses and developing his art within the corporate world he infiltrates, he creates a body of work that can be said to explore the aesthetic and social ramifications of postmodern computing. His music explores the sonic aesthetics of the computer retroactively, as well as the aesthetic peculiarities of telecommunications and computer technologies and the social fantasies attached to them (Generic PC, 2017; Hypercylinder, 2019). In the visual arts, he is interested in optical effects, the dialectic between economy of means and maximalist aesthetics, and the changes brought about by new techniques in pictorial production (Kevin, Les, Steve, Kerry, oil on canvas, 1979-80; Advil Box, 1994, acrylic on promotional display box).
An aesthetic of the shift
From a technical point of view, Moody's art exploits the extreme limits, even paradoxes, of digital forms of expression. The audiovisual and minimal computer environment of the late 1990s (Microsoft Paintbrush and Paint, Windows 95 and 98, Sound Blaster, etc.) is reused by the artist in a way that subverts the corporate logic of the computer.
What is contradictory in the computer aesthetic is between what we expect from computer tools and what they do. Moody exploits this paradox by turning the fundamental elements of the perceptual system of computer environments into expressive elements that refer directly to the history of art. By exaggerating what the computer may or may not be expected to produce aesthetically, Moody reveals a world whose conditions of aesthetic possibility are constantly being transformed by the machine.
The appropriation of obsolete devices is thus the occasion for a critique of the obsolescence of the various aesthetic stages of the computer, for a re-reading of the horizon of expectation which frames the experience of it. In other words, his appropriation of computing is an art of the shift, which consists in shaping the contradictions of the aesthetic language of the cybersphere in order to question them [1].
References
1. Marc Augé, L'art du décalage, Multitudes, vol. 25, no 2, 2006, p. 139-147.
For those still shocked and traumatized by the 2016 election it's pure heresy to suggest anything good came out of it. But some antiwar people are doing that. Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a left/right/antiwar think tank, notes that the Republican electorate has shifted away from Dick Cheney and his ideas of aggressive intervention:
In 2014, Republican Congressm[e]n Justin Amash and Thomas Massie fought for non-interventionism in their party but knew its leaders were eager to revert to a permanent war stance asap. Little did they know at the time that Trump, however imperfect, would soon bulldoze the GOP elite, neuter their power over the party’s base, and make peace more of a conservative value than war for a majority of Republican voters. Dick Cheney wishes he had a smidgen of the influence over conservatives that Trump does today.
More heresy:
Trump [has] called Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal a “wonderful and positive thing to do.” Trump’s primary beef with Biden is that he is taking too long to pull troops out, surpassing the Trump administration’s original May 1 deadline.
In other words, if Biden is doing something antiwar, Trump’s impulse is not to be reflexively pro-war like Cheney and [Lindsay] Graham, but to remind Americans that he’s even more antiwar than the current Democratic president. Not surprisingly, a majority of Republican voters are also on board with ending America’s longest war.
Meanwhile Biden openly calls Putin a "killer," meddles in Ukraine, stalls on rejoining JPCOA, etc. Might as well be Cheney's man but his election gave some 2016 traumatees personal closure so it's OK. (Of course those traumatees will claim that Trump's antiwar stance is all an act -- one acquaintance of mine believes if it weren't for covid, we would be at war with Iran right now. People believe what they want to believe.)
As previously noted, the record-collecting website Discogs uses volunteer labor for much of its thankless editing chores. These laborers attempt to make sure the database conforms to the site's Guidelines, which require, among other things, no hype in artist biographies. The list below appeared on a forum thread about hype-containing artist pages that still need to be edited down to a few neutral, informative sentences.
I am reproducing the links here purely for humor and bathos. In theory, all these bios will be made less fabulous, but it's hard to imagine any of the authors going down without a fight, no matter how experienced or adept the editing.
Update: I parked this ridiculously long list here so I could chuckle at these at my leisure. I've noticed a few that actually don't contain hype; I'll remove ones that seem normal to me.
Tom Reich
Tom Jones
Alan Bell (3)
Brian Keane
JoBoxers
Eddie Giles
Anders Lundqvist
Fluid (28)
Joey Argiro
John Paul Musser
Maurizio Cerantola
Ray Wilson
The 49 Americans
Bob Stubbs
Yahel
Michael Siegl (2)
Andrea Gabriele
Richard Blohm
Mick Karn
Kim Larsen
Combichrist
Bass Bastards
DJ Patife
The Ritchie Family
Noro Morales
Alceu Valença
The Accents (5)
José Melis
Brian West
Ali Chant
Gareth Jones
Social Club (3)
Adiel
Suv
Bobby Emmons
The Balladurians
Steven Frederick Cook
Tommy Scott (7)
Kasey Taylor & Chris Meehan
Chris Hill
Peppe Voltarelli
Nathaniel Glover
The Malta Bums
The Gerogerigegege
Harris Chalkitis
Nox Arcana
5D Psychic Systems
Carla Magnan
Xenophobia
The Persuasions
Miguel Valbuena
Buck Ram
Mhax Montes
Fashion 6
Stan Lokhin
Charly Lownoise
DJ Alex Cervera
Eddie Cochran
Wild Turkey
Grendel
Antonio Conte (3)
French Fries
Desakato Dada
Pat Reedy & The Longtime Goners
Lou Bonnevie
Sakai (8)
Benedetti & Svoboda
Tammy (17)
Hittar Cuesta
Malopoets
Lord Of The Lost
ОУ74
Animalis
Atomic Simao
AGSO Quartet
Chumbawamba
Eyre Llew
La Vierge Du Chancelier Rolin
DJ Sarasa
Ronnie Dove
Morgan Visconti
Jørgen Teller & The Empty Stairs
Victor Castro (Pt)
Hornsman Coyote
Timo Manson
Aztec Sun
Damian Kozub
Rafael Kozub
Treat (2)
BK Duke
Cecil Washington
Taleesa
Serial Cut™
The Bo-Keys
6Two
Semargl
The Cedars (2)
Christine Ott
Anfisa Letyago
Léon Destroismaisons
Ryan Carter
José Luis Feliciano Vega
Raavni
Azam Ali
E.L. Me
Johnny Favourite
God's Grandparents
Peter Caelen
Freddy K
Mako Sugita
Andrea Celeste
Norma Ray
Danny Eaton
Zé Ramalho
Professor Trance
Ace Frehley
Angry5JaR
Artefactos de Dolor
Svenson
Klaus Munzert
Phat Fred
Kunt And The Gang
Enrico Rava
Eric Cody
Raphael
Edward Buadee
Taggy Tones
Véronique Labbé
FEARvLOATHINC
Lil Knock (2)
Brian Harris (8)
William Oscar Smith
