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Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

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Blogger Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

A certain religion that we don't care to mention by name seems to be tolerated well enough, and even encouraged.

29 April 2019 at 15:51

Blogger Bruce Charlton said...

@William - The manner of toleration/ promotion is very telling - the alternative religious/ 'ideological' explanations are excluded from the mass media. For example, the distinctive (conspiracy theory-type) interpretation of world events; or explicit and compulsory religious attitudes to specific issues. Even to describe these in public discourse can be prosecuted as a hate crime in the EU.

So I would regard this as an exception which proves the rule.

29 April 2019 at 16:57

Blogger Seijio Arakawa said...

What is being aimed-at with the vast and unfiltered deluge of stuff has always seemed rather obvious, at least in the case of fiction and poetry.

In theory Heaven is infinite in potential and there could likewise be an infinite number and variety of divinely-inspired creative works of Tolkien level or above. In practice there is only a very small number of people who are able to do creative work of that level. Likewise only a small number of people who can do honestly motivated amateur work (e.g. good-quality fanfiction writing). Making sure that as much mediocre media as possible will be funded will ensure that these types of divine work get lost in the noise.

The advantage of genius-produced media is that it is not always immediately obvious and can sometimes cut through the noise in unpredictable ways to attain mass acclaim. But this happens rarely enough that instances can be dealt-with on a case by case basis.

'Copyright' is also a key support to the strategy of evil, since it ensures media production is remunerative and that the mass of mediocre media can be funded in deniable fashion. Moreover, mediocre media can be funded on the back of genius-level media. (Studio buys film rights to Tolkien, makes halfway-decent Tolkien movies, recycles profits into producing noise and fluff.)

(There's nothing intrinsically wrong with an author being paid through copyright, but in practice much like with 'funding' the advantage ends up mostly on the side of evil.)

If media production were no longer remunerative in the way ensured by copyright law, it would only be done by intrinsically motivated geniuses and amateurs OR directly-funded propaganda campaigns. The distinction between the two would be much more obvious. The scale of production for the good media would be much more modest (no more animated films prepared by armies of people and, nowadays, rendered by massive server farms) but the balance of the media would very easily tilt towards more wholesome content.

30 April 2019 at 17:40

Blogger Bruce Charlton said...

@Ara - Interesting perspective, good argument. I am persuaded. I used to favour copyright until I noticed the negative correlation with quality.

1 May 2019 at 17:20