Since art hasn't yet been defined, to talk about good/bad art is to put the cart before the horse. — Agent Smith

We may not agree on the definition, but art has been defined and we have a working definition of it in our heads. Defining art again is a pleasant enough pass time, but it is not a requisite for most purposes. It might seem like a necessity to define the term before we can begin sorting out good from bad, but sortition (sorting out) contributes to the definition.

A lot of the ink spilled on the definition of art is actually in support of what we like and do not like, and why. THAT is what we quite properly care about.

The difference is that Taylor and The Rolling Stones are decent examples of pop music, whereas Godmack is not. — Noble Dust

I sampled the codsmacked video. The visuals supported some sort of story, apparently. The instrumental part didn't interest me much, but it seemed competently performed, such as it is. The vocal parts were more often screamed than sung --presumably screaming is not singing, There were passages where the vocal parts were actually sung, and for this genre, sung well enough.

This isn't my cup of tea at all but I'd allow that it qualifies as "musical art"; probably not good--and certainly not great--musical art. What keeps it fro being "good"? extended effort, maybe. Pieces like this seem slapped together and the many edits make it more difficult to judge the visual part. In addition to being screamed, the text was inarticulate. I googled the text and decided that I hadn't missed anything; it doesn't add up to much,

Now I've told you this once before
You can't control me
If you try to take me down you're gonna break
I feel your every nothing that you're doing for me
I'm picking you out of me
You run away
I stand alone
Inside
I stand alone

There are so many good, very good, and great pieces of music art, all genres. What are some commonalities?

Performers are sufficiently articulate that they an be understood, (except in 'high art' opera or oratorio pieces where a vowel may be carried for sever bars up and down the scales)
Musicians perform professionally (high quality)
The content is complex, complete, adult (it's not bubblegum, like the Ohio Express's repulsive 1969 horror Yummy Yummy Yummy I got love in my tummy)

Quality and effort shows whether it's Mozart's Requiem or the latest chart topper, and so do a lack of quality.

(Lack of quality wouldn't prevent a piece from being popular among some group. The Ballad of Ethel Pump is disgraceful, but some people like it. Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the buying public.

In general I don't think it is useful to ask if something qualifies as art. — Tom Storm

Hrrumph. It would make some people unhappy when the answer is "No! Now go to your room and practice perspective drawing."

I am in favor of a free and open society where people have a right to do what they want to do as long as it doesn't interfere with the rights of other people, and if it hasn't been explicitly forbidden for the good of all (like drunk driving).

Raising the bar for what constitutes art, and what constitutes decoration (and they are both valuable) doesn't infringe on anybody's creative activity or enjoyment there of. The bar should be raised and artists should try harder to meet it. If they don't meet a higher bar, it isn't like they are going to be hanged till dead. Except Thomas Kinkaid: His gooey, treacly, cloying sentimental village scenes are a criminal aggravation of the diabetes epidemic.

BTW, @Jorndoe, @Tom Storm, and @T Clark Cosmic Latte starts out as a tiresome shade of pale and goes downhill from there. Yet another way the universe sucks.

The occupying allied army in Iraq was probably as nice as the Babylonian occupying army was.

I've had the opportunity to insult you not once, but twice — T Clark

Duly noted. At least you haven't slung any more dang ding walla walla I Ching at me.

Also - I like it. — T Clark

Actually, I find the image pleasant enough to look at. There are many a dismal hallway and dreary tunnel that would benefit from the application of this sort of content. Decoration, however, isn't art, in my opinion.

Decoration - wall paint, wall paper, plaster moldings, wood, miscellaneous objects, floor coverings ceiling treatment, lighting fixtures and light color, furniture fabrics and shapes, murals such as this, and so on contribute to the comfort or discomfort we experience within inhabited spaces. They require craft to create and their use involves careful aesthetic judgement, but the elements are not "art works" in themselves.

Painting a wall color #F0EAD6, otherwise known as eggshell (type of bird not defined) is not art in any way, shape, manner or form. Putting navy blue carpet on the floor is not art. Furnishing the room with goods from IKEA (or Ethan Allen) is not art. The room may be splendid: attractive, comfortable, relaxing, etc. but it isn't art.

Hotels, hospitals, and clinics buy cheap reproductions of recognized art work to hang on the wall. They also buy framed photographs of trees and flowers, hills and mountains, water etc; truckloads of occasional furniture of various styles, even manufactured assemblages of bits and pieces that have a Duchampian 'found art' appearance, but are not. The overall effect is kind of neutral, not bothersome, sort of pleasant. Just not art. Interior designers (not artists) have found that guests, clinic and hospital patients and visitors find the stuff on the walls usefully distracting.

Someone stuck in an exam room will look at the bland photo or painting on the wall because that is the least anxiety-producing thing in the room. "Guernica" would not be good. Bosch either.

Well, it is art by the praxis criteria - It is presented with the intention that it be judged on an aesthetic basis. — T Clark

It also conforms to Duchamp's criteria: If the brush holder calls it art, then it IS art. That leads to this:



Or, your crooked snowman is art if you so designate it. (You are required to publish the announcement in the official Art Register, however.) Without proper documentation, millions of snow art pieces are lost forever. Just fucking tragic.

It clearly represents the journey and return of a soul - that orange blob in the middle - to a spiritual realm and then back. — T Clark

No,no -- you totally missed the point of the piece: the green splotches represent the sacredness of commercial activity in capitalist economies, threatened by the insidious creep of socialism--performed by the red blotches. I don't know how you could have missed that -- it is so obvious.

Tao Te Ching — T Clark

How long is this Ching thing you've got going to last?

They should probably supply champaign by the truck load for disasters, when fast effective relief is really needed.

right — Agent Smith

Right. Time machine?

@L'éléphant You're Screwed If You're Low Income

Yes, of course. The screwedness of the poor is what keeps those who are not low income YET working, striving, and persevering. It's essential to have some unemployed and low-income workers in the economy to serve as a reserve and a warning, A reserve in that the non-employed can start working when there is a big demand for unskilled labor (not so much these days). As a warning for compliant unorganized workers to stay that way. Step too far out of line and you'll end up being one of the poor scum we all know and loathe. You can be replaced, if not by an unemployed person, then a robot. So just shut up and get back to work!

It's helpful to have a few homeless, hungry, and addicted people living in misery on the streets as a further reminder of how arbeit macht frei, or at least keeps workers out of the gutter. The working poor have lives that are better than the broke homeless.

Lots of people are devoted to upward mobility. So focused on that as they are, they have not noticed that downward mobility is a real possibility, even a likelihood in some situations. "So you think you've reached bottom? Oh no, there's a bottom below! There's a low below the low you know, you can't imagine how far you can go


DOWN..."

By means of inflation and stagnant wages over several decades, American workers have experienced downward mobility. Generally they don't want to acknowledge it.

Go ahead and acknowledge it. Admit it: you've been had by your capitalist employers. The sons of bitches ripped you off. They don't care about you. You are free insofar as you are profitable.

I'm still amazed that the delivery vehicle was able to descend into the Martian atmosphere, brake close to the surface, hold the position while it lowered the latest Mars Rover to the ground by cable, disconnect itself from the rover, and then crash landed at a safe distance. The rover didn't get tangled up in the cable, remarkably. The delivery vehicle didn't crash land on top of the rover.

An alternate method of landing is also impressive: the delivery vehicle descended towards the Martian surface, ejected the rover package which consisted of the rover surrounded by large balloons which inflated before the package reached the surface. The balloons bounced a few times before settling. Then they deflated and detached and somehow did not get tangled up in the Rover's wheels, camera, etc.

It would make an engineer ill if the whole mission was successful up to the point where the rover couldn't drive off because a balloon had jammed its wheels.

Same thing for James Webb: How nauseating it would be if everything worked perfectly up until the last preliminary step, and then the ignition switch was jammed (using "ignition switch" as a figure of speech here). I don't see how they stand the tension and the disappointment when things do fail, as they sometimes do.

Get on the design team and next time we'll do it your way,

I'm not enthusiastic about people declaring this or that actual, material location as "sacred" let alone web sites. So the intersection where George Floyd died has been declared "sacred space". Nonsense to me. It's just the seedy intersection of Chicago Avenue and 38th Street. George wasn't/isn't a saint. What happened is unfortunate, one more misfortune among thousands that happen everyday.

Martin Luther King's motel in Memphis or the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C., aren't sacred--in my mind, at least.

Stonehenge, the Wailing Wall, the Kaaba, the Golden Temple, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and so on are all sacred spaces by virtue of time and emotional investment. Stonehenge is becoming "re-enchanted" I suppose, but not so enchanted that the English wouldn't like to put a road through it (really stupid, even if nobody thinks it is sacred),

What works against cyber space, or particular web sites, being sacred are:

a) they are too new (at the present time)
b) they are not sufficiently static--that is, they can too easily be changed, erased, moved, etc.
c) they are ruled by technology's values

Web sites just haven't been around long enough. Sacred status takes time and emotional investment to accumulate spiritual weight. Just guessing, but Jesus' tomb probably wasn't sacred space upon the alleged events 3 days after his crucifixion. Locations associated with Jesus probably became 'sacred' by the action of the religion founded upon Jesus. That took centuries, not years. (I'm making assumptions here -- where is The Philosophy Forum's time machine?)

An aside: the compilers of the New Testament did not live in the Roman province of Judea; like as not, they had never been there. 99.9% of the New Testament readers (in the first couple of centuries after it was finished) hadn't been there. Places like Bethlehem and Golgotha became sacred to most people at a distance, over time. But those place were still real, and the people on site took care of them, and in time they were memorialized with large worship buildings.

What happened to Bethlehem can't happen to Tumblr or YouTube.

What you see when you sign on to Tumblr or YouTube is likely to be altogether different than what I see, or anyone else sees. So, what part of these sites would be sacred? The pictures of Egyptology or the gay porn? The zillions of cat and dog videos or the videos of railroad switching yards? The discussions of atomic fusion? WWII films? Right wing political ranting? Leftwing political nattering?

Even Bible or other religious text sites are not sacred, in my opinion. Religious texts can be sacred, but when served up digitally, by the verse, along with advertisements, I don't think they have the same emotional value--as web sites.

Cyber space locations might become sacred at some point in the future, provided a given site remain the same for a long time (a couple of centuries maybe). Provided that people invest emotionally in the site. Provided it shifts from being "a technological artifact" to a "spiritual artifact".

I'm hoping for wonderful results from James Webb. At the same time, we have great examples of things that should have worked out well that just didn't. For instance, there is Millennium Towers in San Francisco, a 58 story up-market residential tower. It's now leaning 22 inches out of plumb, and the various fixes (mostly more piles next to and sort of under the building) haven't stopped the gradual tilting.

Bridges sometimes fall; big passenger planes crash--even if only once, it's a big deal; rockets occasionally miss the planet. Very sad engineers

So much the better if this very complicated piece of machinery unfolds itself, powers up, and does everything it is designed to do.

and Adding a camera to take selfies would provide one more thing to go haywire. You are right, Wayfarer: the designers/operators of this machine know it, through and through, better than they know the backs of their own hands (which are valued at considerably less than $10,000,000,000 apiece). Little sensors register when shaft #52 is fully extended, when wheel #8 has turned 2.88 times, when the temperature at location #22 is within the specified range, etc. tell them exactly what is happening.

Their sensors are more informative than the "engine" light on our old VW's dashboard which could mean anything from "the engine will explode in 10 seconds to a sensor is sending a meaningless warning, or maybe both. You can interpret it however you like."

You are correct. It's picking up photons, or something, not signals. What James Webb sends to earth are signals.

Don't look at me, I was just cutting and pasting.

But sure, other galaxies have much higher rates of violence--murders, gun shots, axes sunk in skulls, beheadings, disembowelments, victims blown to smithereens, arson, rape, sudden planet extinctions, etc. Makes Chicago look like a day care play room.

What you will see depends on how the infra-red image is processed. The same goes for a print from your point and shoot camera. Processing can make a huge difference. The Hubble had infra-red capability for quite some time. It doesn't now (maybe it ran out of coolant, or something--I didn't get the memo on that).

Here's a picture of the central area of the Milky Whey. The objects that James Webb will be imaging are of course very, very far away, and they might or might not have the visually appealing features that makes a galaxy something you would want to hang on your wall. Hubble's star nursery pictures, for instance, set a very high bar of visual interest.



This composite color infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy reveals a new population of massive stars and new details in complex structures in the hot ionized gas swirling around the central 300 light-years. This sweeping panorama is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the Galactic core and offers a laboratory for how massive stars form and influence their environment in the often violent nuclear regions of other galaxies.

In an unalienated world, the worker would produce the beautiful cabinetry work, would receive full credit as the creator. He might work primarily as a custom producer, making cabinets and furniture to fit specific homes. (Independent cabinetmakers do a lot of custom work). Since he is working in a group rather than in his own little workshop, his and others' work would be fully credited. The consumer (another worker) would obtain something needed, and designed to fit and be attractive. (From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs).

Ideally, there would be no exchange of cash between the worker and the consumer for the cabinet.

Why wouldn't the cabinet maker and consumer both starver? You can't eat woodworking. No, and you can't grow a nice chair, either. Farmers produce food; shoemakers produce shoes. One needs a pair of shoes, the other one needs bread. It's obvious how they might exchange goods.

Realistically, a large economy can't work well on barter (as far as I know). Some sort of accounting system for production and consumption would have to be created (not difficult).

Having them labor at some project for the "communist collective" doesn't seem like enough of a motivator for most people. — schopenhauer1

Why not? Laboring in the communist collective provides them with what they need, and gives them a fair value from what they produce.

So the sour skeptic steps in and raises all sorts of objects here. Well, some people want a macmansion. If they don't get it, they will turn to theft, murder, cannibalism ... whatever it takes to get what they want. Or, people are lazy and they won't work, so everyone will starve, and so on and so forth.

People vary in how sick, psychopathic, and sociopathic they think other people are. (Of course, people vary in how crazy they actually are, too.). If your opinion of other people's sanity is low, you will tend to expect highly disruptive reactions to any significant social change. if your expectation is that people are flexible and adaptable, you will tend to expect willing cooperation for significant social change.

Remember, a collective communist system isn't going to be built next next to, or on top of this capitalist system. It will be built AFTER capitalism. The revolution will happen before collective communism can be built (and, remember, the USSR is in no way, shape, or manner or form an example of what we are talking about).

Some people are crazy -- between 5% and 10% of the population is holding on to reality by their fingernails. If their candidate for POTUS doesn't win they can't accept that reality. They deny it. They attempt to destroy democracy (such as it is). Some crazy people will decide that COVID-19 is a hoax; others think that the Covid vaccination is another hoax, or worse. Ditto for mask mandates. (This isn't just in the USA; crazy people are everywhere. THORAZINE FOR ALL!)

There are some very large conditions to be met here.

1) a classless society

Not since we were hunter-gatherers, traveling in small bands--probably family groups--have we seen a classless society. Once agriculture was organized, and ever since, there have been classes distinguished by restrictive roles and coercive power. It is difficult to even imagine being "classless".

2) collective management

A classless society MUST be collectively managed, or once again divisive categories of standing would be brought back in. We have some but not much experience with collective management, just as we have fleeting (generally pleasant) experiences of classlessness.

These two elements will be quite difficult to achieve. That is not to say they are impossible, only that it will be difficult -- hard work, ingenuity, persistence, self-discipline, and more will all be needed.

The direct distribution of the fruits of the labour of each worker to fulfill the interests of the working class—and thus to an individuals own interest and benefit—will constitute an un-alienated state of labour conditions, which restores to the worker the fullest exercise and determination of their human nature

"Alienation" is a term of art: It means severing the relationship between the worker and what he makes. Take this as an example: A skilled cabinet maker works for a large furniture company. The individual pieces of cabinetry and furniture he makes are really masterworks. He pours his heart into the beautiful pieces.

When they are finished, they are picked up, hauled away, and sold under the companies premium brand name. People pay a lot of money for these pieces. The worker who made them receive a fixed wage, no share of the selling price, and no recognition as the producer. He is alienated from his work (think of the term, "alienation of affections" when an outsider interferes with the stability of a marriage.

We use "alienation" to reference a state of anomie, feeling cut off, friendless, etc. That isn't what the 'term of art' means.

Here's an interesting situation: Before WWII began, the British were making plans for war--as were everybody else. The airplane people in the military thought that the highest and best use of air power was bombing. Fine, so what should the Air Force bomb? Should they support ground troops? Should they attack shipping at sea? Should they bomb railroads? Should they bomb factories? Should they bomb housing? What?

It seemed obvious to some planners that bombing factories, oil refineries, mills, and the like would be most productive. Other planners felt that bombing factories, refineries, mills... would kill too many people. The British government officially decided that they would not et out to kill people. Property yes, people no.

Despiser what the government officially decided, once WWII started, it became obvious that deliberately killing people made sound military sense--in the context of "total war" and in the context of (possible) existential threats. So they soon starting bombing factories and, significantly, neighborhoods. (So did the Germans.). The British were very careful to maintain the PR fiction that they only bombed "military targets" even if the "military target was a neighborhood where ordinary workers lived.

all this was complicated by the fact that a bomb intended to hit a railroad might instead hit a house or a school. Bombs aimed at a factory might end up hitting the surrounding workers' homes.

Is violence ethical, and if so, when and where? — john27

I don't know; I believe just about any violence will be declared "ethical" IF and WHENEVER large nation interests are at stake. This goes for pretty much any country. "War is diplomacy conducted by other methods." Violence is not always useful, it doesn't always achieve what is desired; but it works often enough that it is high on the list of options.

Ethics applied to individual cases are much easier.

We don't need the humanity guy pondering life on mars, Bitter.. — schopenhauer1

Oh, yes -- we need this guy very much. Big picture people are needed to decide whether it is WORTH going to Mars. I have decided it is nit economically worthwhile, so fuck all the engineers working on it.

What matters is the techne. Everything else becomes irrelevant and dissolves away. — schopenhauer1

Technology in all its forms is a human invention, remember. The design of little screws is a human activity. The engineers, technologists, lathe operators--even the fucking captains of industry--are all humans, like you, like me. They can escape being guano ["guano" is an example of bad techne -- automatic-spelling-correction guessing that my mistyped "human" should be "guano"] no better than I can.

Your line of rhetoric here (Everything else becomes irrelevant and dissolves away.) reflects the dehumanizing effect of remorseless capital. (I'm distinguishing you from your rhetoric.)

Yes, we absolutely need detail people, and we've needed detail people from the get go, along with big picture people. Knapping stone tools is detail work; determining when it is time to move to a different cave is a pig picture work. Individuals can be both. Some of my personal research has been big picture, and some of it has been minutiae. World War II history is pretty much big-picture. The outcome of particular bombing operations is pretty much minutiae. How many bombs, what size, what composition, from what altitude were they dropped? What was the ratio of explosive and incendiary bombs by weight and by number. How many buildings were partially, largely, or totally destroyed? How many people were killed, how many injured and how badly? How many planes were lost; how much production was disrupted or destroyed in the bombing operation? Think large tables of statistics... details, details details.

minutia-mongerers — schopenhauer1

How I hate having to deal with minutia and minutia mongers. I am strictly a big picture man. "Don't ask me where that little screw went --the question is, "Will we make it all the way to Mars and back?"

Meanwhile, the little screw gets sucked into the ventilation duct and causes the life support system to fail. We make it Mars, but we are all dead.

Sometimes the lords hold the knowledge (like the precise formula of Coca Cola or the 'kernel" of programs that run computers. Much of what goes into products is information shared by workers -- not out of some urge to be "transparent" but. because the workers have to know in order to produce goods and services.

The lords hold the power to produce by means of law, coercion, secrecy, deceit, et cetera -- not because they know how to manipulate magic. The economic arrangement can be changed, if the workers decide to collectively act to change it (e.g., revolution).

Don't underestimate the power of consumers. IF even half the recommended health habits were to sweep the nation, some companies would go broke overnight. People didn't like the Edsel. Ford lost money on it. People didn't like the Newton personal assistant (1995, +/-). I thought it was pretty cool, but not enough others did. It used handwriting as the input format -- it could read clear handwriting. (Attractove as t was, I didn't by one --yet another reason for it's failure.). Thousands of retail products are rejected by consumers every year and disappear, a heart break for a company or an executive (que the violins).

I see it as a major problem that most of us have minimal understanding of how and what produced the items we use to live (survive, find comfort in, and entertain). — schopenhauer1

I see no major problem in not knowing how my cell phone, computer, remote, etc. works. Personally, I find the technology interesting and have limited knowledge about the machinery, What is much more dangerous is not understanding how social media (which we access through the hardware) is designed, programmed, and operated.

The owners and operators of Google, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, pinterest, Twitter, game producers, et al understand how our brains' reward systems work better than we do. They know how important it is to elicit a little dopamine out of every interaction. Every successful search on Google, amazon, or YouTube makes us feel a little bit of pleasure. It's not an orgasm-level pleasure, but it counts just enough to make us come back for a little more.

On-line advertising uses the same approach -- clicking on an ad opens a new page with bright shiny pictures, interesting objects, etc. You don't need to know whether the software uses a "mouse-up" or a "mouse-down" click; all you need to know is "click", and voila --more stuff.

Clicks and tiny dopamine pleasures enable media and online corporations to lead us around by the nose, because it isn't obvious to us how this stuff works, or what the consequences are. One consequence is that we spend way to much time messing around, clicking here, clicking there, and before we knowing a couple of hours has disappeared.

Now, sadly, knowing how on-line and social media works doesn't lessen its pleasures. I know, but I still like it. What to do, what to do, what to do?

As with any habituated behavior (smoking, drinking, eating potato chips, mindlessly switching channels, endlessly surfing the net) we have to make a decision to do it less or stop doing it at all. I'm not suggesting people should stop using their phones and computers to access social media and on-line companies, but one can and should reduce the frequency of use.

Why? Your autonomy is at stake. People who are practically addicted to social media (continuously watching their phones whatever else they are doing or spending hours surfing on their computers) have ceded a degree of control to companies that do not have your best interests at heart (they have no hearts, btw).

had he stayed cold and dead in his sepulchre... — Agent Smith

"Isn't that what happened?" he said, provoking a ZAP from on high.

If it produces structured radiation it should be observable. — Raymond

What about...

Yep, I believe the signal weakens as the square of the distance. We'd need a humongous dish to collect every available ounce of any ET transmission out there in the great void. — Agent Smith

Thanks Raymond. Welcome.

SETI is one of those organizations that'll never show results. — Agent Smith

Likely because a coherent signal from very, very far away is unlikely to reach us, and b, such signals may never have been sent in the first place.

BTW, what radio telescope is SETI using, these days? Arecibo collapsed into rubble a while back, so that one is out (if they used it at all).

We should stop worrying about intelligent life elsewhere. Either we are alone -- and that is amazing, or we are not alone, and that is amazing. Let's leave it there. WE are certainly fucked up, so THEY would be well advised to avoid us, and it's possible (hard to imagine) that they are even more screwed up than us, and we would want to avoid them.

It's been decades since I read it, but didn't a few intrepid astronauts land on the nose of the ship and get admitted inside? (I don't remember their blasting their way in.) There were at least 2 books, maybe 3 in the Rama series. Later much more was revealed about the ship and its source civilization. Alien, yes; monstrous, no. Good book.

Ever noticed that folk who trot out the enlightened self-interest argument tend not to be nurses, teachers, paramedics, firemen... — Banno

"Enlightened self-interest" hasn't bulked large in my life as I've lived it, and it isn't something I usually argue for. Individuals, families, communities, and societies work well to the extent that self-interest--blind or enlightened--isn't the primary modus operandi.

On the other hand, individuals do have real self-interests--even nurses, teachers, paramedics, firemen... Within limits there is nothing faulty about self-interests. Voting or acting against your own self-interest may be collectively harmful. Working class people without a pot to piss in are often swayed by propaganda to vote like Republican bankers. They rant and vote against unions, social welfare programs, more lenient prison sentences for minor property crimes, etc. etc. etc. They are, literally, voting against their self-interest and against everyone else's (except the Republican banker's).

For the sake of others. — Banno

I suppose I am diluting the meaning of 'self interest' when I define it to include acting on the interests of others, at least to some degree. Feeding the birds is at once for the sake of birds, but also for my own sake, so there will be birds to see and hear. Feeding the poor is for the sake of the poor, but also for my own sake, so that the fabric of society is maintained--something I depend on, just like the poor depend on it.

What goes around comes around, as the cliche says. A narrowly focused pursuit of self-interest will likely have both benefits and deficiencies, neither guaranteed. Acting on behalf of others, for their sake, also has benefits and deficiencies, and they are not guaranteed in this case, either. In general, though, whatever we do to reduce brutality is worth doing, worth it to me, worth it to you.

Why would parents vote against a school levy when their own children needed the school? Likely because they believed lies and bad faith information. Why would childless people vote for the school? Because educated people (tend toward) more stability, more prosperity, better outcomes all round.

What makes you say that voting should be based off of self-interest? — Shawn

Why would anyone knowingly vote against their self interest? Self-interest can be define extremely narrowly, like Ebenezer Scrooge, or more broadly. I define it broadly. It's in my best interests, broadly defined, to have programs for released offenders, alcoholics, drug addicts, etc. I don't have children, but it's in my broader self-interest to have children well educated. I don't drive, but it's in my broader self-interest to have safe roads and less traffic. And so on.

Spanish-speakers may want their state to make Spanish an official language, so it would be easier for them to deal with the state. I don't believe that is in my broader self-interest, so I wouldn't vote for that. I might prefer that everyone speak English in public.

So, what gives? Is this about dominating interests or political forces coercing people to vote in a certain way? — Shawn

Well, sometimes dominating interests and political forces do attempt to coerce people to voter in a certain way. For example, in my home town, the school board wanted to build a new elementary school on land that some developers were "donating" (to improve their real estate project). The citizens of the town (pop. 2300) voted the proposal down three times in three years, but the school board kept bringing it back for a vote. In the fourth year they achieved their aim.

Major league team owners beg for a new stadium (paid for by taxpayers) while promising wonderful results and threatening dire outcomes if the damned thing isn't built. Or, maybe, they will move the team somewhere else.

Still, citizens quite often resist attempts to bend the will of the people. Minneapolis voters soundly defeated a demand by the Vikings for a new stadium. The owners went to the state legislature which forced Minneapolis to pay.

So, would you agree with the notion that voting is altruistic, or in the least that voting should be altruistic? Why or why not? — Shawn

I would vote in favor of altruism, but I haven't seen it on the ballot. People vote in favor of their own interests (as they should) and they vote in favor of others' interests to the extent that they can relate to them.

An altruistic heterosexual voter may vote for a gay rights fair housing law because they can relate to gay people needing housing. The vote isn't going to cost them anything, financially or psychologically.

That same voter may vote against a tax proposal to build affordable housing in their city because they do not want poor people to move there (or blacks, hispanics, or asians). They don't wish homelessness on minorities, they just want them to be decently housed somewhere else. This bill will cost them something psychologically or financially, or both,

Otherwise altruistic people can organize in a flash if a non-profit wants to open a group home in their neighborhood for released offenders, recovering drug addicts, sex offenders, or former mafioso. No, no, no! We need to protect women and children from these menaces! Keep the sons of bitches in prison!

Americans, on a broad average, tend to be more liberal than their elected representatives. (Note, this is a very qualified generalization.). When voting, they tend to accept liberal (generous) spending programs. Yes, there are exceptions and there are regional differences. The degree to which voters in Massachusetts and Minnesota support liberal spending will be much higher than what voters in Mississippi or Alabama will support.

A factor in whether voters here or there support spending is whether they view the State as an appropriate tool with which to fashion a good society. Northern voters, following the lead of the New England Puritans who strongly believed in the utility of the State. (New Englanders moved westward and influenced the politics of the states they helped create and populate.). The South followed the opposite tendency, and tend to view the State as an unfriendly burden.

One could say Northern voters tend to be more altruistic than Southern voters, or one could say that Northern voters prefer a more secular and well organized society than Southern voters.

There are limits of course. Northern voters usually support generous spending on education, but if the school board asks for too much too often, they will vote down levy proposals.

Paradoxically conservative southern states that are opposed to government spending tend to receive more from the federal budget (and give less) than liberal states that receive less and give more. They tend to have more military bases than northern states, and they tend to have more needs that federal programs address than northern states.

inter-stellar conquest is a substitution — Wayfarer

And, to quote Dostoyevski, "If god is dead, everything is permitted."

I've followed the controversy around Avi Loeb — Wayfarer

I read about his theory, haven't read the book. Thanks for the link to the New Yorker article, Did Arthur C. Clark's Rendezvous With Rama inadvertently influence Loeb's interpretation of the brief sighting? We have not been watching the skies with such good telescopes for that long. Probably objects have been crossing our solar path periodically, sight unseen.

That said, reports of unusual "objects" in space are highly arousing -- they arouse me, certainly. But evidence of intelligence (besides ours, such as it is) would be ambiguous. Would the intelligence be cold and dry, or would it be warm and humane? Would the intelligent beings wish to become our partners or overlords, benevolent or otherwise? Based on past performance, any intelligent, humane beings would be well advised to keep us at a long distance, if they value their lives.