Interesting Links for 28-05-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Ginni and Clarence Thomas are telling us exactly how they'll steal the 2024 election.

(tags:politics elections usa corruption )

2. How political parties rise and fall

(tags:politics )

3. What the numbers show on Americans' opinions of gun control measures

(tags:USA guns law polls )

4. Lots of security advice is completely unworkable because big companies violate it to save money

(tags:security advice epicfail )

5. Elon Musk: When I saw the Tesla CEO for who he really is.

(tags:ElonMusk Tesla viaPatrickHadfield )

6. What is the most alpha male of all diets?

(tags:video funny diet spiders )

7. Fascinating discussion of great artists who are bad influences

(tags:art society )

Comments

[dewline]

1. Telegraphing the confession...and it worries me how the reaction to this is so "all over the bloody place".

2. I wish my party to have all those things at the same time. Right bloody now, because of the provincial election still underway.

4. Some things to keep in mind there, yes.

5. Good to see Musk investigated.

[calimac]

Suspicion that many of the people who responded to "Who do you think is a genuinely great artist whose influence has been largely for the worse?" with "Warhol" didn't notice the "genuinely great artist" part. It's not whether Warhol is a genuinely great artist or not, but that they don't seem to think he is. Same goes for the person who named Kerouac.

My own theory of Warhol is that his work is primarily goofy: it's intended to be fun, to arouse laughter. That may or may not be great, but if you don't get the point, then attempts to do the same thing will come out horribly wrong, so yes, his influence is entirely bad.

[channelpenguin]

I wish the people saying "Monet" explained why...

[bens_dad]

https://twitter.com/corneliusbeers
did explain, with this image:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FTw_t7KWYAAJQBx?format=jpg&name=240x240

[channelpenguin]

😮

[simont]

That seems like a pretty common pattern in general. You see it in SF, as well: some of the most influential SF works were influential because they were groundbreaking, innovative, totally different from what came before. And what did a lot of people do in response to their popularity? Imitate them closely, i.e., miss the entire point.

[calimac]

Indeed, which is why there's a whole subgenre of fantasy known to connoisseurs as Tolclones. I was directed to some of these when first looking for other fiction that struck me as The Lord of the Rings did, and found these failed utterly; the resemblance was only superficial, in the trappings. It was only when I discovered authors whose surface was different but whose core had the same originality, like Le Guin or Diana Wynne Jones, that I found post-Tolkien authors who satisfied me the same way.

[andrewducker]

I definitely agree that there is a lot of playfulness in Warhol's work. If you don't have a sense of humour about it then you're definitely not going to appreciate it at all.

[skington]

"The only way you become a big enough party to be the obvious choice is by having an energised activist base" needs to explain Emmanuel Macron.

[andrewducker]

Fair point. I suspect that they would say that they're talking about FPTP, and that things are quite different under a system that doesn't push people towards the big parties. And that a system where you elect the president *first* is one that will operate quite differently to one where you elect representatives who then elect a leader.

[calimac]

Certainly the dynamics of the party system are entirely different in the US, where we elect a President and where that officer has no institutional control over the legislators of the same party. The UK does have rebels in Parliament, but they tend to be on particular issues only and jump back into the fold at the crunch: I suspect that by UK standards the actions of the likes of Joe Manchin must seem very strange.