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37 minutes ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

well I guess I’m just naive in thinking publishes, making editorial decisions to try and maximise profit isn’t that big a deal. Maybe I should stick to the three subjects I know anything about: metal, food, and whiskey…

Problem is everything is viewed from perspective of maximising profit.  I work in healthcare and even not for profits work as hard at maximising profit at the expense of patients (though executive salaries always grow).

And everything else is sold for maximising profits - even human rights  (eg every time we buy that item made in China or Bangladesh) and especially the environment.

I am a socialist though (not one of these modern airy-fairy progressives who is all for neoliberal capitalism).

I am Ok with a little bit of capitalism but it does have to have a big boot of government regulation on its throat to ensure it does the right thing.  

 

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Maximising profit is rule 1 of business. Sure in some cases it's going to annoy some people but that's life, if you can afford to buy the rights to something why shouldn't you get to control that something?

There is cases like Gull records owning the first Judas Priest album and not selling the rights back to the band because Gull know it's worth more money to them if they hold on to it. Instead of a one off payment they can re-release it every few years, or even change the name of it and try to convince people it's a new album, as they have already done once in the albums life. There is heaps of stories where Hollywood buy something and change it. Disney buy all sorts of stuff from movie ideas to movie scripts and nearly every one of them undergoes some change, the most successful ones go through many changes and often get re-released. Manufacturers are always buying patents of unknown inventors and then changing the design to suit their own things.

A publisher is no different, they'll change a thousand books a year but one particular book gets changed and the media kick up a stink about it and suddenly the rest of the world should care as well. Obviously humans take more interest in a change when it means something to them on a personal level but change to maximise profit is happening in every industry on a daily basis and no one's worried until a few kids books that are dwindling in sales get changed.

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But these aren't just any books - they're culturally significant ones* (well Roald Dahl at least).

 

As I mentioned it'd be like putting a 500 bedroom hotel on top of the Eiffel Tower or painting pink eyebrows on the Mona Lisa or insert whatever piece of human achievement you want to defile for dollar purposes.

 

*Though to be honest I've always found Australians don't really care about cultural significance.  Compared to Europe, art of any sort doesn't matter much here unless it's some sort of shock value bullshit.

And everything is so commercialised, probably on par with USA.  Eg when I was in Europe for Easter it's still a religious thing .  In Australia it's just about selling and consuming as much chocolate and they don't even mention some guy called Jesus.

Even the universities here are commercialised because in the eyes of Australians, education is something you should be able to make money off. 

 

(The great irony is Australians also like to have government take all the risk through middle class welfare and government guarantees for large business).

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1 minute ago, Dead1 said:

But these aren't just any books - they're culturally significant ones* (well Roald Dahl at least).

That's a personal opinion. To many people in the world they mean less than nothing. Just like the Judas Priest case means nothing to many, many people, but its culturally significant to JP and its members.

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14 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

Maximising profit is rule 1 of business. Sure in some cases it's going to annoy some people but that's life, if you can afford to buy the rights to something why shouldn't you get to control that something?

You cough up your money for the rights, you do get to control it. No one's disputing that. And we get to bitch about what you do with it. Makes sense to me. This is no different then when people bitched about Sharon Osbourne having certain Ozzy albums re-recorded to screw those guys out of their royalties. She had the legal right to do it, and the people who were offended by it were within their rights to bitch about it. 

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6 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

That's a personal opinion. To many people in the world they mean less than nothing. Just like the Judas Priest case means nothing to many, many people, but its culturally significant to JP and its members.

There's generally acceptable things in society that are culturally significant.  The Mona Lisa is generally acknowledged by a large chunk of people as culturally significant.  It doesn't matter whether you like it or not.

Same with Judas Priest - that band has cultural significance with the metal community.

 

If we go it's dependent on personal opinion, then nothing has any value and you can pretty much prostitute and defile every part of human existence for a dollar.

 

Access to public healthcare - well shit it's only personal opinion that people need access to affordable healthcare .  Shut down those unprofitable hospitals and put some more apartments built to third rate standards (because building standards are also really personal opinion).

Drugs are bad - personal opinion.  Allow sales of crack and heroin in school canteens.  Actually shut the schools down if they're not profitable.

 

National parks - value of environment is personal opinion.  Best to level it and make a dollar from timber and minerals (and this is what environmentalists have been fighting since 1970s).

 

That's the essence of modern neoliberal libertarianism.  And I'm not exaggerating - it's literally the increasing basis of  existence in the English speaking world since 1960s - everything from access to public services to environmental protection to things like pushes for drug legalisation.

 

To steal from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#:~:text=Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy,trade%2C freedom of expression%2C freedom

 

Quote

Critics have accused libertarianism of promoting "atomistic" individualism that ignores the role of groups and communities in shaping an individual's identity.

Quote

Conservative philosopher Russell Kirk argued that libertarians "bear no authority, temporal or spiritual" and do not "venerate ancient beliefs and customs, or the natural world, or [their] country, or the immortal spark in [their] fellow men."

 

Modern progressives and post modernist types are essentially as libertarians as the most ardent right wing neoliberal - devalue everything and put the individual and their personal whims at the height of human existence.

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20 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

That's a personal opinion. To many people in the world they mean less than nothing. Just like the Judas Priest case means nothing to many, many people, but its culturally significant to JP and its members.

Well Rocka Rolla was such a complete piece of shit, no matter who owns the rights they should really just stop reissuing that one. For the sake of music lovers everywhere.

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17 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

You cough up your money for the rights, you do get to control it. No one's disputing that. And we get to bitch about what you do with it. Makes sense to me. This is no different then when people bitched about Sharon Osbourne having certain Ozzy albums re-recorded to screw those guys out of their royalties. She had the legal right to do it, and the people who were offended by it were within their rights to bitch about it. 

 

And there in lies some of the problems - both the legal system and the cultural value set is built around protecting those with power (what we once called the propertied class).

 

Hyper consumerist hyper individualism assists this process greatly as the the mass of English speaking humanity are now just inward looking with no sense of community and no concept how by shared values and actions, they could work to a better future for themselves or their children.

 

Personally I might be ranting about this but I have tried to engage people (including politicians) and have failed.  It's amazing how people are just concerned with their own consumption and even bizarrely defend the rights of the rich to oppress, bully and harrass - even the poorest most abused workers will rally against unions and will decry bullied coworkers as "not being able to hack it" (had this conversation with friends just two weeks ago!).

 

I am now convinced the mass of people deserve everything they get. 

 

I only care cause I have a daughter.  And as I realised the world will not change for the better, I have started teaching her to be assertive, take what she wants and not be guilty  because that's the only way she's going to thrive in our increasingly shitty dog eat dog world.

 

 

 

8 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Well Rocka Rolla was such a complete piece of shit, no matter who owns the rights they should really just stop reissuing that one. For the sake of music lovers everywhere.

Agreed 100%.  Amazing they managed to have a career after that one!

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12 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Well Rocka Rolla was such a complete piece of shit, no matter who owns the rights they should really just stop reissuing that one. For the sake of music lovers everywhere.

See that's the thing. There are people who like it and consider it worth saving, Rob Halford for one (he wants to remaster it and make more money from it). But that goes for everything, there is always going to be someone who likes the item being changed and will therefore want it saved. That's their choice, but we don't all get our choices.

If I could afford the Mona Lisa and I bought it as an investment then obviously I'd keep it in original condition. But if I thought it would look better if she had a huge cock and balls tattoo on her forehead then as owner I should be able to do that no matter what art lovers think. If I bought Ford Motor Company and mandated that all cars would from that point on only have three wheels and sunroofs people would just think I was silly and it would probably make news but they wouldn't try to stop me.

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6 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

See that's the thing. There are people who like it and consider it worth saving, Rob Halford for one (he wants to remaster it and make more money from it). But that goes for everything, there is always going to be someone who likes the item being changed and will therefore want it saved. That's their choice, but we don't all get our choices.

If I could afford the Mona Lisa and I bought it as an investment then obviously I'd keep it in original condition. But if I thought it would look better if she had a huge cock and balls tattoo on her forehead then as owner I should be able to do that no matter what art lovers think. If I bought Ford Motor Company and mandated that all cars would from that point on only have three wheels and sunroofs people would just think I was silly and it would probably make news but they wouldn't try to stop me.

 

See I don't believe in that.

Eg if you are Rio Tinto and you have mineral extraction rights for a land with ancient indigenous artefacts and heritage sites, should you have the right to blow it up?

And this isn't a hypothetical - it actually happened.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-26/rio-tinto-blast-destroys-area-with-ancient-aboriginal-heritage/12286652

 

Or if you are BHP, should you have the right to build tailing dams so poorly that they crack and wash away towns and kill people just because the local regulations are lax?

 

Again not a hypothetical.

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5 minutes ago, Dead1 said:

And there in lies some of the problems - both the legal system and the cultural value set is built around protecting those with power (what we once called the propertied class).

Hyper consumerist hyper individualism assists this process greatly as the the mass of English speaking humanity are now just inward looking with no sense of community and no concept how by shared values and actions, they could work to a better future for themselves or their children.

Personally I might be ranting about this but I have tried to engage people (including politicians) and have failed.  It's amazing how people are just concerned with their own consumption and even bizarrely defend the rights of the rich to oppress, bully and harrass - even the poorest most abused workers will rally against unions and will decry bullied coworkers as "not being able to hack it" (had this conversation with friends just two weeks ago!).

I am now convinced the mass of people deserve everything they get. 

I only care cause I have a daughter.  And as I realised the world will not change for the better, I have started teaching her to be assertive, take what she wants and not care about impact on the world because that's the only way she's going to thrive in our shitty dog eat dog world.

Well it's not just about protecting those with power, and the powerful endlessly screwing over the powerless. It is about that, but it's also about rights to personal property. If we don't as a society subscribe to the concept of the rights to own personal property, then what do we have? Complete chaos. If defending the rights to personal property means sometimes defending the powerful and inadvertently enabling them to abuse the powerless, then maybe that's the price we have to pay. We need to find a way to disabuse the powerful from abusing the powerless in some other way without blatantly disregarding their property rights. This is what separates Libertarians from Anarchists. Libertarians are in favor of some limited form of government if only so they can be assured their own rights to personal property will be enforced.

Personally I've always been quite conflicted. I can agree that some things are culturaly significant, but I also feel that exactly what these things might be is totally subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What's culturally significant to me, might not be to you. I do agree wholeheartedly with the overarching concept of the greater good, and all of us working together even including making personal sacrifices to make society a better place for everyone, and maybe more importantly for our kids and grandkids. But then I also agree with a lot of what you call these post-modernist or libertarian ideals, like that Kirk Russell quote you posted: "Libertarians "bear no authority, temporal or spiritual" and do not "venerate ancient beliefs and customs, or the natural world, or [their] country, or the immortal spark in [their] fellow men." Yeah maybe not every last word of it (I'm not condoning murder, but yet I don't personally believe that life is sacred or that anyone's right to life is necessarily sacrosanct) but a good portion of that quote I'd have to agree with. As well as a good bit of that hyper-individualistic stuff you're always ranting & raving about. I know you don't actually know me irl, but I can assure you I've always been a hyper-individualist ever since I was old enough to tie my own shoelaces and wipe my own ass. Obviously I am a metalhead and I once had long hair, but beyond what I once considered those two integral parts of my identity, I didn't ever feel the need to display my hyper-individuality by being a freak with purple hair or face tattoos/piercings or whatever, screaming for attention "look at me I'm so fucking different!" But rather I nurtured my individuality by always thinking my own thoughts and sticking to my convictions and not letting others influence me with bullshit I don't agree with just because they might happen to be in positions of authority. Yes I'm absolutely an atomistic individual (or maybe I'm just insane) but yet I don't discount the importance of groups and communities and the roles they played in shaping my identity. Truth be known I've never been sure how to balance and reconcile all these disparate ideas that would seem to be contradictory.

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2 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Well it's not just about protecting those with power, and the powerful endlessly screwing over the powerless. It is about that, but it's also about rights to personal property. If we don't as a society subscribe to the concept of the rights to own personal property, then what do we have? Complete chaos. If defending the rights to personal property means sometimes defending the powerful and inadvertently enabling them to abuse the powerless, then maybe that's the price we have to pay. We need to find a way to disabuse the powerful from abusing the powerless in some other way without blatantly disregarding their property rights. This is what separates Libertarians from Anarchists. Libertarians are in favor of some limited form of government if only so they can be assured their own rights to personal property will be enforced.

 

Problem is property rights are so definitive that they create chaos for themselves.  I mentioned the Brazil dam disaster but I could also talk about 45,000 dead in Turkey many due to shoddily built buildings that weren't up to standard but that the government kept endorsing through "amnesties" because heavens forbid a property owner should have to pay for remedial works for not building up to code.

 

Then there's other things eg a company has a right to take its property (ie capital) to China and use virtual slave labour and pollute the environment.

We have these things to some degrees in the west as well and they are growing (eg exploitation of workers or destruction of environment).

The funny thing about current extreme property rights is that it is society that pays for all the failures and fuck ups of those with lots of property rights.

 

 

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2 hours ago, Dead1 said:

 

See I don't believe in that.

Eg if you are Rio Tinto and you have mineral extraction rights for a land with ancient indigenous artefacts and heritage sites, should you have the right to blow it up?

And this isn't a hypothetical - it actually happened.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-26/rio-tinto-blast-destroys-area-with-ancient-aboriginal-heritage/12286652

 

Or if you are BHP, should you have the right to build tailing dams so poorly that they crack and wash away towns and kill people just because the local regulations are lax?

 

Again not a hypothetical.

That's a stupid connection. Of course Rio Tinto shouldn't have done what they did, not because there was aboriginal art there but because they don't own the land. I can't blow up my backyard because despite paying for it, using it purely to make a profit and having a Land Title that says it's mine I don't actually own it and never will. None of us will ever actually own the dirt we live on. Rio Tinto, BHP are the same, they don't own the land, they can't own the land and therefore shouldn't be blowing it up.

In my stupid hypothetical I was buying a physical item, something that can be owned. If I own it I should be able to do with it as I please no matter what that item is. If purists want the Mona Lisa cock free then they should outbid me or buy it before I get a chance.

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You saying "you can't own land" is a pure legalese.  BHP and Rio had property rights and were acting according to them.  In fact that's what every mine does - blow and digs things up in a certain place with government authority to do so despite not owning the land.

In fact people buy land and try to do whatever they like (within confines of legal restrictions) as much as they can.  How else would all those shitty poorly planned housing subdivisions be springing up around the place?

 

Essentially that is land ownership despite the legal nuance that we do not own land.  In fact property owners get compensated if the government confiscates it under compulsory acquisition even if they're not using the land for anything.

 

So you can't own the land but you have inalienable property rights associated with them.

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Property rights is not owning the land.

I "own" my property, all 227 acres of it, the Titles office says so. It's not mortgaged, it's not controlled by a bank or other lender and it's not crown land. However I can't insure the dirt and I can't claim against it. I can grow things on it or in it and those things can be insured but I can not insure the land as I don't own it and it can't be replaced. I also don't have unlimited use of it.

What Rio Tinto and BHP did was wrong, but they never owned the land or had the right to do with it as they pleased

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On 2/27/2023 at 11:11 PM, Dead1 said:

He was also alive in a different era with different cultural values.

As a student of history, I don't think we can judge people in the past behaving in ways we view badly.   We can learn from them and try not to repeat the same be it racism or slavery or building pyramids of skulls of slaughtered people like Mongols did.

Depends. Not everyone named their cat Ni**erman. That's a choice! 😁🤪There were tons of people who were not racist, misogynistic or antisemites in the 18-1900's, where did they get their damn humanistic ideas from? I think that somewhere people just felt good about treating other groups like shit, not from a lack of "knowledge" but from a source of superiority.

I mean, Lovecraft is also kind of a special case as well because as Jon said, he was the equivilent of an incel or hikikomore, and was mentally abused by his unstable mother. Not the best circumnstances for wide personal growth. So there's tons of explanations for a guy like Lovecraft, but that doesn't mean they are excuses.

So I guess it'd be unfair to judge people historically but you can definitely criticqe them and point out their flaws.

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1 hour ago, Sheol said:

Depends. Not everyone named their cat Ni**erman. That's a choice! 😁🤪There were tons of people who were not racist, misogynistic or antisemites in the 18-1900's, where did they get their damn humanistic ideas from? I think that somewhere people just felt good about treating other groups like shit, not from a lack of "knowledge" but from a source of superiority.

I mean, Lovecraft is also kind of a special case as well because as Jon said, he was the equivilent of an incel or hikikomore, and was mentally abused by his unstable mother. Not the best circumnstances for wide personal growth. So there's tons of explanations for a guy like Lovecraft, but that doesn't mean they are excuses.

So I guess it'd be unfair to judge people historically but you can definitely criticqe them and point out their flaws.

You are totally correct in that we can analyse them as an individual in the context of their time.

 

The N word wasn't viewed as in politically incorrct even in 1950s and 1960s compared to now.  Indeed in the famous 1955 war movie Dambuster, the dog's name was also the N word (because it historically was called that).

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger_(dog)

Anthrax even used the word in Keep It In The Family (1990), a song about racists and rednecks.  Now we don't dare write it!

People don't realise how much stuff has changed over last 40 years.  And rapid too.   

 

IMO a big part of the culture war is due to the clash of these rapid changes.

 

The views of say Trump voters in red states are probably far closer to mainstream USA up to 1960s.  But the coasts changed in their values to reflect their new demographic realities as well as  technological and overall social change .

 

I mean you read the stuff people like Jon Schaffer out of Iced Earth believed in and it is straight out of pre 1970 USA and in some cases goes back to the 1770s (eg small powerless government, right to bear arms, white/Anglo-European dominance etc).

 

 

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2 hours ago, Sheol said:

Depends. Not everyone named their cat Ni**erman. That's a choice! 😁🤪There were tons of people who were not racist, misogynistic or antisemites in the 18-1900's, where did they get their damn humanistic ideas from? I think that somewhere people just felt good about treating other groups like shit, not from a lack of "knowledge" but from a source of superiority.

I mean, Lovecraft is also kind of a special case as well because as Jon said, he was the equivilent of an incel or hikikomore, and was mentally abused by his unstable mother. Not the best circumnstances for wide personal growth. So there's tons of explanations for a guy like Lovecraft, but that doesn't mean they are excuses.

So I guess it'd be unfair to judge people historically but you can definitely criticqe them and point out their flaws.

But that's the whole point Johan. In any century including this one we're all living in right now, there have always been people somewhere who can't seem to help themselves from wanting to treat other groups like shit. Now I'm not an educated psychology guy like you are, or even a college graduate, so keep in mind I'm just some guy talking out of his ass. But from a layman's perspective, it does seem to be the default human condition for people to want to feel connected to others along tribal lines, either racial, or ethnic, or geographical, or religious, or by gender, or by levels of education attained, or along socio-economic lines or what have you, and then to want to look down upon and feel superior to all the other tribes. And sometimes even to treat members of the other tribes like shit. Why is this?

I think it's clear that up until the mid 20th century it was normal and totally expected that people would indoctrinate their kids into whatever they had been indoctrinated into as kids, i.e. religion, ethnic culture, gender roles, food, tribal superiority, political ideology, racism, misogyny...the whole package, all of it, whatever that might include. It wasn't until about 80 years ago circa WWII where we start to see fairly large numbers of people rebelling against their elders, and against tradition, and rejecting much of this indoctrination in favor of thinking for themselves and going their own ways. Not everyone, I know there are still plenty of "sheeple" who willingly accept their indoctrination, but yet nowadays you'll even see some parents actually encouraging their kids to be different and to do their own things. So what's changed?

Because today in modern society I feel there is a climate, or a zeitgeist where we all feel encouraged or even obligated to be tolerant and accepting of other tribes, at least publicly, and also to be individuals, to "do your own thing." Whereas 100 or 200 or 300 years ago it seems the zeitgeist was that people were strongly encouraged to be traditional, and to mind their elders, and to mind their indoctrination, and to stick to their tribe, and not to question things, and to go along, and to keep their heads down, and to repress their individuality, and to do what was expected of them in order to fit in. Fitting in, and going with the flow, and doing what was expected of you seems like it was viewed as incredibly important to people in centuries past, whereas today certain individuals are actually celebrated for daring to be different and for not fitting in.

I personally think it's still basic human nature or instinct to want to fit in, as you'll generally see with school kids, especially adolescents who can often appear desperate not to stick out or be different from their peers in any way lest they be singled out or get ridiculed or picked on for any deviation from the norm. But for grown adults this idea of hyper-individuality as something to be aspired to has been totally normalized and as I've said, in many cases even celebrated. Why is all this going against the grain, and eschewing tradition and indoctrination ok and socially acceptable now when it wasn't ever socially acceptable before for thousands of years?

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4 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

From a layman's perspective, it does seem to be the default human condition for people to want to feel connected to others along tribal lines, either racial, or ethnic, or geographical, or religious, or by gender, or by levels of education attained, or along socio-economic lines or what have you, and then to want to look down upon and feel superior to all the other tribes. And sometimes even to treat members of the other tribes like shit. Why is this?

The trick is to feel superior to all the other tribes (including your own) and feel genuinely sorry for everyone else, while treating them with respect, despite their lameness. It's not that hard to do when all your basic needs are met. 

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