I had no idea.

Capitalist ideologues, for one. I remember in Macroeconomics class that wealth desparity will destroy your economy and then your civilization if you let it get out of hand.

So when (for example) we have eight guys that own more than the poorer half of the world population, that’s a bad sign for every economy on the planet, and is going to cause way more problems than merely discontent and social unrest.

I’m reminded of Christopher Lee, who’s awesomeness on the silver screen (and in Metal) was only the tip of his iceberg of accomplishments.

Which is why our governments are trying to kill US Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that platforms cannot be held responsible for their content. (Although, if you want advertisers, it needs to be brand safe, and its this that does most of the censorship) – there are still some limits. You have to take down CSAM when someone posts it, and it’s generally a good idea to moderate spam and hate speech. And when dealing with billions of posts or comments per hour, it’s really hard to moderate at that scale.

Social media allows us to see the truth of what’s going on, e.g. what it’s really like on the Gaza Strip and what’s really being done by the IDF. Police shootings and unnecessary SWAT and DEA raids were a problem before the internet got going, but now when someone dies, BLM and ACLU get videos of the incident, and that fuels discontent and unrest, and to our elites, that’s a problem.

This is the very point of the Freedom of the Press in the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to let people know when institutions aren’t serving the public, rather are serving something else, usually plutocratic interests.

All the disinformation, the enshittification of big social media platforms, and heck, Musk’s direct purchase of X are about neutering the power of the internet, which is how I ended up on Lemmy.

Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.

Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.

Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.

If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed

From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius

The art we get from pre-made frameworks emerged because people figured out they like art, and then someone capitalized on that. Or in cases of monarchs and governments, they created a fund to allow artists to do their thing instead of waiting tables.

There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results.

For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.

Nope. People will still make content. It’ll be on far less of a budget, but that didn’t stop the Film School generation of independent films in the 1970s (before which you had to sell your life and soul and beating heart to a studio). In between all the schlock were the occasional arty films we consider classics today.

And then there’s government subsidization of art projects, as per the National Endowment of the Arts.

I think the MCU movies, the DC movies, the many studio iterations of Spiderman have shown us what capitalism eventually churns out. Sony actually chose this path content as product the same resort to formula that plagued the music industry in the 1980s (and drove the Hip Hop Independent movement of the next half-century).

We just need to empower artists. Make sure they don’t have to moonlight as restaurant wait staff in order to eat and pay rent while they create, and make sure they have access to half-decent (not necessarily high end) hardware with which to do their thing. And yes, as Sturgeon observes, most of it will be schlock, but through sheer quantity of content we’ll get more gems than Hollywood is putting out.

It is absolutely AI generated. I plucked it from one of the AI artist feeds, thinking it might have applicability.

The wikipedia article on Hulme is in shambles. What exactly happened to him?

Jesus is a failed apocalyptic prophet from the iron age. He wasn’t resurrected, and the narratives written by the biblical authors had their own agendas. The scholarly consensus remains that the OT and NT are not univocal, not divinely inspired and not inerrant. It’s a historic work, but is not a strong chronicle of history but of mythology, like The Illiad.

But ministries are always going to take advantage of common mythologies and ideologies to manipulate the people. They are, after all, for-profit institutions in a capitalist market, or before were a nexus of political power. They remain places that serve themselves, not the people.

We can even note that the message of Christianity has changed with time to serve the ministries, to reflect the mores of the culture at the time, though in the 20th century, there was an active effort to shift Protestant Evangelical Christianity in the United States towards American Exceptionalism, far-right conservatism, anti-communism, pro-patriarchy and pro-hierarchy, resulting in the Christian nationalist movement we are facing today. The movement that wants to purge LGBT+ and non-Christians, and force women to become breeding mares is the product of decades of willful manipulation. As some sociologists and historians who are Evangelist, themselves have observed, this may well kill Christianity as we know it today, making it the de-facto bad-guy the way Nazis (the old German Reich ones) have been for the last century.

In the meantime, the poet is doing something different. In this case, it serves the same role as other internal mentors and heroes. In Dialectical Behavior Training (DBT, related to CBT – the other CBT) imagining what Wonder Woman, or Captain America, or Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Jesus Christ might say to you taps into that part of you that loves you unconditionally, beyond the fear that you don’t fit into mainstream society. Jay Hulme is seeing within himself someone that loves and regards him and accepts him for who he is, which is a critical step for all of us, especially those of us who didn’t have others to do the job.

(This can also be applied to other media that celebrates the love of Jesus or the love of a mentor, such as I Don’t Deserve You by Plumb or The Wind Beneath My Wings by… two songwriters – Jeff Silbar and Larry Henley – and performed a whole lot of artists)

Jinn traditionally are magical beings (beings of essential fire) from the Dusky Lands. We assume they’re stuck in jars because Solomon vacuumed a bunch up (angels too) and stuffed them into objects, sometimes geasing them so they are bound to serve.

This is how King Soli got his civil works projects done.

There are tens of thousands of Solomon’s captured Jinns, spread asunder and lost to time. But beware opening a vessel with Solomon’s seal. Some are untamed and with just kill you, while others are tricky and will spoil any requests.

Those that are bound usually are limited only.by their own endurance and patience. It’s fairies who like to number their boons.

• Sorcerers and Witches, those who practice magic without a license from the religious establishment, often consulted by the poor and underprivileged since the undesirables can’t simply walk into Oz without the right fancy dress.

• Thieves, shunned by all since stealing is a greater sin than murder or human sacrifice (mostly because it’s a lower-class crime), but are clever enough to activate wands, identity herbs and potions and use practical household magic, just from ad-hoc experience and fiddling around.

The tail end of a selective breeding program, but yes. The Bene Gesserit were (according to some internal hypotheses) belived to have been manipulated to expect the outcome later down the line, featuring an Atraides–Harkonnen child. But they were wrong.

In the fanfic sequel the poo people are kept addicted on magic-suppressing opioids and mind-dulling cigarettes provided by the Special owned industrial pharmaceutical companies. It’s been this way so long

Eveyone knows people who don’t smoke can’t be trusted. The temple priests say so every Sunday service.

On occasion we have that story, where just some basic high school algebra and chemistry levels up the tech of the good guys enough to turn the tide of war.

We’ve had this conversation before, most famously regarding Jive (see the movie Airplane ) which had regional variations (e.g. Brooklyn vs. New Orleans) that were incomprehensible to each other.

And there are ongoing regional comprehension problems with general regional and ethnic dialects, hence the whole ebonics controversy of the 1990s.

So this ain’t our first rodeo. Totally.

As per Das Kapital our industrialists always move to capture regulation and seek to eliminate competition, which are the two aspects that can make capitalism work for the public. Then you have what we have today, late stage capitalism which is about tiers of rent, so everything is both shoddy and expensive.

That’s how Disney and Warner Brothers (Warner Sister too!) end up owning all the franchises. It’s how Sony owns all the music and sues to take down dancing baby videos.

The EU and California have both made in-roads to slowing down the steady takeover of regulatory bodies and the mulching and mass merging of megacorps into monolithic monopolies, but they can’t stop it, and both are seeing the bend into precarity that is symptomatic of late stage capitalism.

That said, true post scarcity communism is realistically a pipe dream well beyond a few great filters we’ve yet to navigate, but we will see small victories, of which piracy – what is essentially crime against ill-gotten gains – offers more than a few.

The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.

As the COVID-19 Lockdown furloughs demonstrated to us, art manifests so long as people are fed and need something to do. Healthy humans can’t couch-potato for two weeks without fidgeting and whittling wood into bears. And the great resignation that followed showed that enough people were able to make it lucrative (that is, work out marketing and fulfillment enough to make it profitable enough to quit their prior job) that it lowered worker supply that we were able to contest the shit treatment, low pay and toxic work environments that were normal before the epidemic.

It gets worse in other industries like big pharma in which the state provides vast grants for R&D of drugs and treatments, but the company keeps all the proceeds. Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.