The "assumptions" you've presented here are examples of these. You claim I assume that the only way of manifesting value is longevity, and that I assume that all art is propaganda. These are not assumptions I'd ever make because that's not how I think.
Let's look at the sort of way I do think.
The fact that Athenian Democracy lasted less than 200 years doesn't mean that it's not valuable, but it does mean that it wasn't something robust enough to last a long time.
Rather than viewing Athenian democracy as a pure ideological invention, it makes more sense to see it as a waveform: the product of interacting forces, values, myths, and strategic advantages.The waveform of Athenian democracy then was a combination of things, including success at navy combat, the democratizing influence of the iron age, Helenic culture such as the Greek Gods, the Illiad and the Odyssey, even the failure of kings in prior ages. Athena, goddess of strategic war and civic order, stood in contrast to Ares, the embodiment of raw violence and chaos.
If we assume that a modernist liberal democrat would want their democracy to endure, then Athens — which collapsed into oligarchy and was absorbed into Rome's empire — should be cause for reflection.
A modernist might assume that I'm trying to optimize solely for longevity and they'd be wrong. Obviously a form of government must be many things: Just, stable, consistent, effective, and many more things. Longevity is an important part, since if your form of government goes away, its virtues are meaningless.
Although we'd both agree that ancient Athens and ancient Athenian Democracy had some very positive aspects, we must also admit that it also had a lot of horrible things going for it. It was a slave state, and in historical terms, their behaviour was often duplicitous, especially in how they used the Delian League as a pretext for empire. The story of the Delian League is the epitome of bad behaviour -- they got all the surrounding city-states to contribute to this "league", then ultimately used the money to enrich and empower themselves. Of course they would, one of the dangers of democracy is that people will vote to enrich themselves at the expense of others. A lot of those beautiful stone structures were built with money that was essentially extorted from a fund intended for collective defence. The Parthenon, that mighty symbol of Athenian democracy, was built using funds embezzled from the Delian league.
So in my worldview, it's something we should hold, and something we should learn from, but not something we should hold as sacred so we can use it as evidence a thing is perfect and should not be questioned.
To make your original argument in a different method: Zeppelins were one of the first forms of commercial flight. Commercial flight is a net good for society. Zeppelins used hydrogen, so we should be OK with using hydrogen for commercial flight. Of course, this is an absurd and broken piece of logic -- the hydrogen in zeppelins caused the Hindenburg to burst into flames, ending the age of zeppelins. Today we use other forms of commercial flight. Then you can go "Well just because zeppelins blew up doesn't mean commercial flight is bad" but that's not what I was saying, it was that just because an early form of commercial flight used it doesn't mean it's something we should continue to use.
As for your second point, it seems uncharitable -- even insulting -- for you to think I'm assuming all art is propaganda. I used art as propaganda as evidence that we need to be careful about making mass media into something considered sacred and ineffable. As someone who has spent months working on one book and I'm on track to have my next one published within 30 weeks, I'm not (at least not intentionally) producing propaganda, but I do have to accept the reality of creating art is multi-faceted.
It's true that art changes the viewer if it's effective. It's also true that you can be changed in ways that are either good or bad. It's also true that some of the ways art changes you is through pre-epistemic means such as through emotion and gut feeling and instinct. Those are meaningful ways of knowing something, but they're also not perfect which is why we ultimately developed different methods of knowing. It's true that if everyone is seeing the same message, and that message is flawed, then everyone will be exposed to the same flaw and potentially be similarly flawed. All these things and more are true, and they must all be considered at once because none of them stop being true just because they contradict one another.
Some of the truths about art come from postmodernism, which shows that while it's flawed and modernist when used as a totalizing ideology, it is nonetheless a useful tool to understand the world.
Even when art is not created as propaganda, well-produced and ethically intended media can nonetheless act like it in function if it acts to change people's minds en masse in the same way at the same time, and so while I'm not arguing we should get rid of mass media, I'm arguing we have to treat it with care.
Previously I wrote about Fight Club, and pointed out that many people's understanding of the movie ends with Act 1, the creation of fight club and the deconstruction of consumerist culture. In spite of the fact that it's a 3-act story, many people created fight clubs, but forget the middle where project mayham turns into a modernist postmodernism -- deconstruction systematized, industrialized, totalized, with people working shifts, people being interchangable cogs in a machine intended to deconstruct society's grand narratives or objective truths -- or the third act where the main character fights to return to more traditional structures of morality, meaning, and value.
My ultimate assumption isn't anything that you said, and instead that people ought to think for themselves and not allow themselves to become mindless by allowing themselves to be captured by mass media. Even if you do engage with it, you must engage with it carefully and critically, and not assume that just because it was important in Athenian democracy that it's automatically good -- or even that it's automatically bad.
I understand now why these misunderstandings persist. It isn't because people in modern frameworks aren't intelligent or because they're not trying their best, it's because their framework is primitive. The very same simplicity is one of its superpowers, letting groups hyper-focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else, but the modernist hunger for systematized truth and ideological purity, when pushed to extremes, produced totalizing regimes like fascism and communism — and ultimately enabled the mechanized horrors of the Holocaust. (only to have postmodernism become a modernist ideology in turn, totalizing a totally different set of specific points)
If plays are enough to change the vote of the people, then those in power aren't the people at all -- it's the people funding the plays or writing the plays. This is a problem we see today, and it's still a risk to democracy. Even as a writer writing books I hope to change the world someday, but I recognize this risk myself -- just writing a compelling book or a compelling play doesn't make your ideas correct or wise or just.
A proper Democrat doing his duty would be an independent thinker, balancing different options and making decisions based on their own train of thought rather than media provided by someone else.
This whole with thinking it's important because in the modern age and onwards, mass media has become a tool where bad narratives can infect the populace. One of the most important tools of the fascists in Italy and the national socialists in Germany was the unified power of the media. People outsource their thinking to compelling rhetoric and support genocidal ideologies they'd never consider on their own.
In my case, every book that I put out is structured in such a way to demand the reader come to decisions on their own. For example, in the one I'm working on right now I'm trying to train the reader in the mindset of post metamodern superpositional thinking, which is fundamentally different than the modernist method of trying to sway my readers to a very specific outcome, and instead is about accepting and balancing many true but contradictory things. If we use that method of thinking, then necessarily decision-making is local and I can't tell you what decisions to make because I'm not you and I don't live where you live.
Take Lord of the rings: One ring and he didn't even extract the heavenly essence from it to elevate frodo from the heavenly wankers cramp level to the base golden alley behind a 7/11 level!
I'll make a post before I start, but it won't be for a few hours, closer to the evening.
Person is in the country on an expired visa, they don't have a new Visa for 5 years, so eventually she gets picked up for not having a Visa.
Really, the exact same thing could have happened under any president. It is a major risk of walking around without doing the right things.
If you had been driving your car without insurance or a license for 5 years, and then the police found you and you got in lots of trouble for driving with a license or insurance, are you going to blame whoever your president or Governor is at the time, or are you going to accept the fact that you were driving around with a license?
I'm sure she's a nice girl, but actions have consequences.
Only under the postmodern framework would there be rules that you just completely ignore and think it's justified.
On a pre epistemological basis, you feel the stress of knowing that you're breaking the rules. Of course, the whole story that's also based on a couple of other I'm gut reactions such as "that's a pretty girl" and "what if it was your newlywed wife?"
On a pre-modern basis, it is just expected that you're going to follow the rules, because truth comes from the rulemakers. There is actually a direct premodern parallel to this, and that is in the word villain. You see, the word villain didn't always mean generic bad guy. It referred to the "people of the land" under feudalism who escaped and moved to a village. In England at least, if you manage to stay in the village for a certain period of time then you would be released from being a person of the land. Although you can empathize with people who are tied to the land under feudalism, there's a reason why the word villain means what it means today.
My understanding of the system might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure being married to a US citizen actually further privileges her in terms of making it easier to do the right thing and get a Visa.
You can make an argument in the postmodern framework to say that the rules were really difficult to follow so you didn't follow them, but the reality is once your Visa has expired it's on you to either get it renewed immediately or leave the country that you are no longer entitled to be in.
And even through a postmodern lens, somebody who comes to America on an education Visa isn't someone with no power. Most people in the west can't afford an American education, so if you come in to have an American education in Wisconsin, you're probably someone of some means, and thus are going to have less excuses for not following the rules.
I will give a little bit of grace to the fact that her visa expired during the covid-19 pandemic, since the entire world got screwed up around that time. Covid did eventually end, and in the same way that I eventually had to go and get a passport in spite of the fact that I couldn't during covid, eventually it becomes someone's duty who is still in the country to either get the documentation in order or leave.
I have to give credit to the man for accepting that while the laws have negatively impacted him here, they do have a good reason to exist and they still apply to him.
#TexasInstruments just released a #microcontroller so small you could lose it in your pocket. The #MSPM0C1104 is only 1.38 mm², smaller than a grain of rice, but still acts as a tiny computer. It has a 32-bit processor running at 24 MHz, with 1KB of memory and 16KB of storage. It can even sense things like temperature or movement. Power use is minimal, running on just 87μA per MHz and dropping to 5μA in standby. This makes it ideal for tiny devices that need to last a long time on small batteries. It is also built to handle extreme conditions, working in temperatures from –40°C to 125°C. https://www.ti.com/product/MSPM0C1104
Pretty sure SOAD is cringe and gay now just like anyone who used to be cool in the earlier era, but the fact they openly say it in the song still fits.
120 years ago, the government made up a single digit percent of GDP. In many countries today, that number is 30, 40, 50%.
If your government makes up half of the economy, you're in an era of functional fascism. The government becomes totalizing, it controls way more than 30, 40, 50% of the economy at that point because when you're in bed with an elephant you lay where it lets you, not where you want to lay.
Next, there's the fact that people who want to keep all the government we have don't want to pay for all the government we have. If you take out huge amounts of debt you never intend to pay back so you can hand yourself money, that's morally bankrupt -- selling kids into slavery is morally wrong, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on.
Not that it's necessarily the relevant discussion anyway. From a class standpoint, government is filled with the bougoisie, people whose job is to sit at a desk extracting value from the working class to fund their lifestyles. As we're learning more and more, the government gets captured by corruption, and so you end up giving government money to rich people, who then use that money to give to government officials in legal or illegal ways. The powerful help the powerful. The fact that they're powerful through the market or powerful through the state becomes irrelevant. The postmodern "city people" (the etymological basis of the phrase "Bougoisie") is
In this way, austerity becomes a red herring -- the government in most countries has virtually never meaningfully shrunk. The only thing is they stop giving tax money to needy people and reroute it to the powerful. Same amount of money spent, but homeless camps spring up everywhere because the common man is drained, their kids are drained, and get nothing meaningful in return.
When governments claim they're going to spend more money, what it really means is, they're going to spend more money on themselves and their buddies. The United States spends as much public money on healthcare as Canada (actually much more at the moment), but Canada has single payer healthcare, the United States basically requires everyone to buy private health insurance because there is no universal healthcare for people, just for the rich and their bank accounts.
It's just not possible.
There's always scarcity, even in a world that has a lot.
There's going to be land, where there are more attractive and less attractive places to live. There's people, where only so many people can ask of certain individual's time. There's skill, where many people don't want an automatically produced thing, they want something created just for them by a human being with skill.
There's also the fact that human desire is unlimited. Aluminum was once the world's most valuable precious metal. The top of the washington monument was made with aluminium. One of the kings of france had a set of aluminum plates they only brought out for important state guests. Once more became available, we started making everything from vehicles to drink cans out of the stuff. The same would likely prove true if unlimited gold was available, but the likelihood of building matter subatomic particle by subatomic particle and successfully doing that at scale cheaply is near zero.
Even stuff that's effectively unlimited is limited by time, location, and package. Earth is essentially a water world, but we want water on land where we live when we need it that's clean and desalinated and often packaged up for us.
Of course, the fact that material desires are unlimited doesn't mean we need to indulge those desires -- there is a moral virtue in humility and thriftiness -- but societies don't typically ignore fundamental physical laws or human nature for long and remain a going concern. It also doesn't mean that there won't be things that are abundant -- Most people can buy more salt than they have anything to do with, for example -- but the fact that you can have enough salt doesn't mean other forms of scarcity won't exist.