I take issue with the narrative I’ve heard some friends repeat that throwing soup at a painting is at least “courageous”. I think the left is sometimes too quick to bestow that accolade on people who do sort of shocking but low personal risk stuff (she’s a trust fund baby who might spend a night in the clink at worse but probably not). It makes progressives look deeply unserious.
Another thought that comes to my mind about this is that I often think that amateur hour civil disobedience protestors learn the wrong lesson from the Civil Rights Movement. One reason those protests were so effective is that they were doing illegal things that they wanted to demonstrate should be legal. No one serious thinks that throwing soup at a Van Gogh should be legal.
Let me add that there were plenty of downright silly civil rights protests. In Oakland, and perhaps other cities, protesters filled up and then abandoned grocery carts with random food, all to protest employment discrimination.
Coming up with artfully compelling protest schemes is genuinely really hard. Sitting in at a segregated lunch counter? Forceful message. Die-in to protest cyclist deaths? Makes sense to me.
Smearing soup on a painting? Because "What is more important? Art or life?" These two things are not in tension. They are both important. Conceptually, it's muddled and bad.
I was told by someone who was in Berkeley in the 70s that to protest the opening of a new 7-11 they were going to have a “barf-in” where they would take an emetic and throw up on the floor. If I recall the story correctly it didn’t actually happen, though.
"Quayle came to Portland for a $2,500-per-person Republican fundraiser at the downtown Hilton on Monday, Sept. 24. While the vice president was raising money and support for Republican representative Denny Smith (not re-elected) inside the hotel, 300 protesters gathered outside. Flags were burned. A man took a shit on a photo of Quayle.
Suit-wearing Reed students swallowed colored food dye and vomited red, white and, unintentionally, green."
All they did was make a big mess at Safeway and that’s a shame. The world could definitely use protest ideas that draw more attention to the object of the protest than too the protest itself
Like, how is it possible that people are so disconnected from others that this sort of navel-gazing, lotus-eating, bullshit enters into their minds?
Is it reflexive contrarianism? The desire to feel superior to the sheeple who instinctively recoil from this behavior? I just don’t get what the writer, her boss, and her editor were thinking when they decided to authorize, write, and publish this?
This is one of those things where the people who -care- about their little stunt (art/history lovers) are also the ones that are probably more likely to be liberal and generally opposed to oil.
The more low-brow conservatives who like rolling coal and will want to keep using oil even when there is a better alternative...generally don't care about some froo-froo art getting vandalized.
I think that’s pretty uncharitable towards “low-brow” conservatives.
I’ve seen plenty of people in Philly’s art museum standing reverently in front of a piece of art, and when they snap out of it and talk to the folks they’re with, it’s with a southern twang or a deliberate rural Pennsylvanian accent.
“They did what? Aw hell naw! Throwing tomato soup at Van Goghs Sunflowers? What’s next? Throwing lobster bisque at Klimpts The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I? Randy, get in the goddamn truck!”
Didn’t bother to read the vox piece. I’m sure you’ve been to art museums plenty of times, but I encourage you to go again soon and observe the crowds more closely. In the big museums they’re huge, diverse, very international. This new stunt is literally an outrage for all humanity. The people against it would easily outnumber its supporters a thousand to one.
Also, I wonder when is the last time you actually spoke to an art historian? Why on earth do you think most people who devote their life to the study of art would support this? That’s pretty ridiculous libel there, my friend. I’m sure there are some Twitter freaks who match such perverse views but they are no different from anti vax doctors. They don’t teach you anything about the profession as a whole.
Based on your response and David R's, I think that I must have communicated my point very poorly.
I'm aware that there are plenty of solid conservatives who can and do appreciate art. Even Trump conservatives and some 'low brow' types.
But I think that it is fair and correct to say that, in general, the people who care about art and art history tend to be the left side of the political spectrum.
Which means that they are probably sympathetic to their cause already.(albeit probably not as extreme)
Which means that the vandals' tactics are particularly counterproductive. Alienating allies and eliciting a shrug from many of their enemies.
I'd guess (and it's strictly a guess; I'm not overly familiar with Romano's work) they write for a narrow audience (of like-minded persons) instead of a wider, more general audience.
I'll say this about Vox. I really feel that their target audience isn't me, so I don't read it. It's like when it became clear I wasn't in the target audience for Salon.
Stop ranting. The article was just fine. Before I read it, I had no idea the painting was undamaged. That’s an important, under-reported fact which makes me much more sympathetic to the activists.
I would have preferred a different tack in the article, focusing on why throwing soup on glass ever got so much attention. Because it’s rather strange that throwing soup on glass got so much attention, its also worth asking whether the activists might have better achieved their goals by smashing through the glass and destroying the painting.
In any event, your post is a dreary slew of pejoratives lacking analytical rigor, which is very much your mettier.
Speak of the devil, it’s Reflexive Contrarianism, his very own self!
You get triggered every time someone proposes mass transit investments, but you expect me to believe you’re fine with attempted vandalism in the name of climate activism?
Your reading comprehension needs work. I never said I was fine with what the activists did. I said the linked article was “just fine” because it centered an important, under-reported fact, then explained in general terms how I might improve it.
I’m perfectly capable of empathizing with activists whose goals I don’t share. Perhaps lack of empathy is your disconnect?
He’s apparently even more bored than I am at work, because he’s been following me around like a lost puppy nipping at my heels for weeks, spending disproportionate amounts of time and effort responding to my comments.
With an unending stream of mild, whiny ad hominem attacks, nitpicking, and general irritation.
If there were some “there” there I would be less annoyed, but Jesus Christ…
The other funny part for me here is that I know plenty of artists who think Van Gogh is overrated and a drama queen and that’s why his artwork is so ubiquitous. They’re gnashing their teeth now because his art has now been elevated again.
I think someone could write a long article contrasting contemporary attitudes on the relationship of politics to aesthetics with those of the mid-20th-century. Nowadays, it seems like people use politics to justify attitudes that are fundamentally aesthetic – the politics of "anti-cringe". But in the 1950s people like Clement Greenberg in his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" were arguing that bad aesthetics *create* bad politics – that art that's "lowbrow" is a strategy to keep people complacent subjects of totalitarianism. So past generations of soup-throwers might have claimed even more ridiculously that Sunflowers is harmful in itself, who knows.
These people would never want to throw soup at Van Gogh. That just draws attention to the artwork. They want it pulled out of rotation more often and left in the back room to gather dust and taken off postcards and shopping bags.
Not everything has to be for or against a given rhetorical position. Sometimes we can just make comments about interesting things. I think it’s funny that there are a lot of people who don’t like Van Gogh who are now forced to publicly say how terrible it is that the painting was attacked when they’ve disliked it their whole lives.
They knew it was under glass and wouldn’t be harmed. They took a risk, but a small one. There has been an increasing trend of attacking paintings and art objects recently, which it would be good to understand.
What we need is for both a left wing activist and a right wing activist to do the same freakout stunt back to back, and watch everyone's heads explode as they try to defend the one they agree with and condemn the one they disagree with.
I'm imagining one of those charts where you pick things out of a list based on your birth month, date, and the first letter of your name or something. Birth month is a verb – "throw", "destroy", "deface", "glue" etc.; birth date is an object – "red paint", "glitter", "garbage" etc.; first letter of name is the target – "onto a painting", "at a politician's house", "into the river", "blocking the highway" and so on
For a less freakish but real world example, when lefties were so outraged over the Republican Senate blocking Merrick Garland's example, angry that he didn't even get a hearing, I kept telling them that if John Paul Stevens or Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in February 2008, Senate Democrats would (and should!) have done the exact same thing.
Ehhh, I think I disagree. Harry Reid would've wanted to, but the Dem base back then was pretty blase about the SC, especially compared to the GOP base. I don't know he would've had the support for a move that bold.
I would be more inclined to agree if the entire ideological balance of SCOTUS wouldn't have been on the line. But in this case I think Reid would have found a way.
You're being too kind here. Not only do these "progressive activists look "deeply unserious" they appear to be over-privileged lunatic idiots. I mean let's all find more creative ways to alienate pretty much everyone who might be sympathetic to their pet causes.
I'm a life-long Dem/liberal/sorta progressive and my first reaction to this story was to fantasize that I was there when it happened so I could kick the living shit out of these dummies. (I'm not kidding; I had a gut-level feeling of wanting to do violence. And I'm not a violent person.) And it's a good thing I wasn't because I'm the one who would land in the clink.
I have slowly come to despise the "cultural Left" and their activists due to these kinds of antics.
I do hope the people doing that will be prosecuted and spend some serious prison time. The potential damage from these stunts is incalculable. If current laws don’t offer sufficient deterrence they should be amended asap. Also, update security protocol in these museums for heaven’s sake. Museums literally have only two jobs: protect the art for posterity and display it for the public, in this order. They’re kind of failing it right now.
I recall that concentrated sulphuric acid (96%) is not very corrosive. It can be stored in steel containers. So probably wouldn’t be the ideal pipeline protest fluid. Somewhat diluted sulphuric is very corrosive.
It's not courageous to deface another person's property for a cause that will be celebrated by your peers. Defacing your own property or challenging your peers, knowing that you will lose social status are courageous.
Thank you so much on noting that we should have encouraged more outdoor activity. This in my mind was overwhelmingly the biggest failure of pandemic policy, and I was seeing it as early as near the beginning when we were doing insane things like closing off playgrounds. It was so critical to run a cost/benefit analysis to demonstrate that getting more people outdoors would in turn keep them away from far more dangerous behavior indoors.
But we didn't. And my guess as to why is that we ceded too much authority to the public health crowd, who through this experience I've noted are some of the most neurotic people on the face of the earth. That's understandable given what they study. But it shouldn't have meant turning the keys entirely over to them on societywide policy, since most people are nowhere near as neurotic as them. That should have been strictly within the realm of elected executives to decide in a more holistic manner, who have a better read on how important socialization is to most people.
Someone from local government in my town went around and zip tied all the basketball hoops together when Covid hit to prevent people from using them. They also closed all the playing fields. Luckily, some enterprising soul eventually got a ladder and cut the ties so we could play again. Then they zip tied them again. Then they were cut again, and the town gave up. I was happy.
Generally speaking all of these problems came with the weird usurpation of power by the public health experts, who as you mention are extremely neurotic, but who are also just deeply ignorant of tons of stuff. In particular they seem to have very poor instincts on human behavior, as you mention, but also very poor instincts on social dynamics, economics, and really just every dimension of policy besides public health.
The way this is SUPPOSED to work is that we let them be ultra-neurotic worriers, they advise the government, and the government is the central nervous system that factors in that advice as well as the advice of many other groups to then conduct policy. This is why it doesn't matter that the CDC has absolutely absurd advice about alcohol consumption, sexual behavior, and all kinds of other random stuff -- because no one actually thinks that the CDC's advice is governing policy.
I also think there’s a huge class element. Pretty much all public health people talk about the importance of making sure public health efforts help people with lower incomes. Our pandemic response was very much driven by people who were not very familiar with the lives of people who were not upper middle class.
This was the key error IMO - the Covid Czar should have been in charge of policy and recommendations. It should be a political appointee who, for example, balanced the science against the interests is political groups like teachers unions. Instead this was foisted in CDC officials and put them in a position of trying to do two incompatible things at once - offer the best science-based advice while adjusting that to political reality.
The media’s celebration of that guy who dresses up as the grim reaper and wandered around Florida’s beaches telling people to go home was one of the low points.
What’s really sad is that I saw at least one “how risky is this activity?” Chart from a state medical association that claimed going to a museum was medium risk and going to a beach was medium high risk. I can also remember multiple healthcare workers claim that we absolutely knew that beaches were a major source of spread.
So did I. I think my blood pressure spiked at least 20 points every time someone told me "we have to close the beaches and parks because if we let people got to the parks and beaches, people will think it's okay to do stuff inside. Not everyone understands this like us" Seriously? Mice understand the difference between indoors and outdoors. I'm pretty sure that the number of Americans who do not understand the difference between inside and outside is infinitesimally small.
The best part is the photos were always taken with a depth of field that made it look like they were all sitting on top of each other, when in reality they were probably 20 yards apart.
The media celebration of that guy wasn't due to COVID. They saw the potential future for Governor DeSantis and ran story after story if there was an anti-DeSantis angle to it.
I kind of wonder how much of the COVID hawks are just like >80th percentile introverts for whom stay inside and read books and play video games only ever rose to mildly annoying at worst. I’m very much in this group though I’m vaxxed and relaxed but it all seems strange how much of a fuss it caused.
So I've generally agreed on this line of thinking all through the pandemic and I don't disagree with it now. It seemed crazy to me to close playgrounds and beaches even in Spring 2020.
That said - one thought that's entered my brain is, if outside is so much safer, how did respiratory diseases spread throughout history among rural people and animals? Cave bats are one thing, but if covid came from civets, for example, aren't they basically outside "at the playground" all day? Ditto for pigs, cows and birds that were the originators of most other communicable diseases in human. Bird flu must be spreading mostly outdoors, right?
I'm still "team outside" if there's another pandemic, but something here doesn't quite compute for me.
The important thing is (as MY noted in "The Myth of the Urban Plague", https://www.slowboring.com/p/urban-plague) rural doesn’t mean outdoors all the time. What matters is being within four walls with other people, whether that’s in a city of 100,000 houses or a village of just 10. Even a nomad's encampment can do it—a fully enclosed tent is just as bad for air circulation as any skyscraper. (Probably worse, actually, since once the doorflap is closed the only HVAC is a hole in the roof.)
Throughout history, people in rural communities have lived communally and indoors. Whole families in one room, and big extended ones too. All together, doing the literal domestic stuff of life—cooking, eating, cleaning, making and fixing things to use, socializing, sleeping. And they tended to bring their animals inside as well. Herders and farmers could and did spend time with their cows and sheep and pigs and chickens indoors—sometimes in dedicated barns, but sometimes they brought the animals into the home.
And so it’s no mystery how respiratory diseases spread in the premodern world—same as they do in the modern world, by people spending time with each other indoors. The main difference these days is that they usually don’t have a cow in the living room.
I mean, on one level, there's always going to be some risk. But I think it's a bit simpler than that; even when they can't build shelters, many animals tend to pack together in herds. The animals we domesticated--cows, sheep, pigs, even chickens to some degree--in particular tend to have a strong herding instinct; that's part of why we domesticated them!
As many researchers noted, the benefits of being outdoors are substantially reduced when you're outdoors and packed together like sardines. And which animals tend to be packed together like sardines, even in the wild? Ones that herd. (Or flock, if they're birds, or sheep for some reason.) Combine that with the longer timescales we're talking about when we talk about premodern and prehistoric disease spread (decades or centuries or millennia, not weeks and months and years) and you roughly have a picture of how this worked ages ago.
I can't speak for civets, but for a typical peasant family with one pig, that pig would absolutely be inside in the same space as the people in many places and times, at least in the winter.
Very good point. I'm not sure if this works for cattle, though, which seems to be enemy #1. It's maybe worth mentioning that the little evidence we have often suggests the general area of Egypt / Sudan as the place where the virus made the jump.
Also, I was just looking up TB and the genetic evidence seems to suggest it was circulating in both humans and bovines 17,000 years ago. Maybe there were cave cows at that time but I just don't see that as the likely explanation.
I can’t speak to the TB cave cow thing, but I can say the evidence suggests that the Ancient Egyptians spent a lot of time with their cows indoors (in houses and in barns/sheds). Certainly rural modern Egyptians have no qualms letting barnyard animals into their houses. I remember seeing goats wandering pretty freely in the non-touristic neighborhoods of Luxor, which isn’t even particularly rural, and my grandfather said something like that about his childhood in the Delta.
Lol, thanks! I also just remembered (and how could I forget) that even in the cities, modern Egypt is still overrun by animals, or was very recently. Rag-and-bone men in Cairo and Alexandria still use donkey-pulled carts (or they did when I was there 10 years ago), and the chicken butchers on every street keep live chickens in cages. And at Eid, you see lines and even temporary pens of live sheep, goats, and cows lined outside butcher's shops to be slaughtered for at least a week ahead of the holiday.
I take issue with the narrative I’ve heard some friends repeat that throwing soup at a painting is at least “courageous”. I think the left is sometimes too quick to bestow that accolade on people who do sort of shocking but low personal risk stuff (she’s a trust fund baby who might spend a night in the clink at worse but probably not). It makes progressives look deeply unserious.
Another thought that comes to my mind about this is that I often think that amateur hour civil disobedience protestors learn the wrong lesson from the Civil Rights Movement. One reason those protests were so effective is that they were doing illegal things that they wanted to demonstrate should be legal. No one serious thinks that throwing soup at a Van Gogh should be legal.
Let me add that there were plenty of downright silly civil rights protests. In Oakland, and perhaps other cities, protesters filled up and then abandoned grocery carts with random food, all to protest employment discrimination.
Coming up with artfully compelling protest schemes is genuinely really hard. Sitting in at a segregated lunch counter? Forceful message. Die-in to protest cyclist deaths? Makes sense to me.
Smearing soup on a painting? Because "What is more important? Art or life?" These two things are not in tension. They are both important. Conceptually, it's muddled and bad.
I was told by someone who was in Berkeley in the 70s that to protest the opening of a new 7-11 they were going to have a “barf-in” where they would take an emetic and throw up on the floor. If I recall the story correctly it didn’t actually happen, though.
https://www.wweek.com/culture/2016/05/04/big-trouble-in-little-beirut/
This happened to Dan Quayle in the 1990s.
"Quayle came to Portland for a $2,500-per-person Republican fundraiser at the downtown Hilton on Monday, Sept. 24. While the vice president was raising money and support for Republican representative Denny Smith (not re-elected) inside the hotel, 300 protesters gathered outside. Flags were burned. A man took a shit on a photo of Quayle.
Suit-wearing Reed students swallowed colored food dye and vomited red, white and, unintentionally, green."
"...it didn’t actually happen, though"
More's the pity: a bunch of dirty hippies with upset tummies is a pretty funny picture.
All they did was make a big mess at Safeway and that’s a shame. The world could definitely use protest ideas that draw more attention to the object of the protest than too the protest itself
The Vox article the other day made me want to punch someone…
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/culture/23414590/just-stop-oil-van-gogh-sunflowers-protest-climate-change
Like, how is it possible that people are so disconnected from others that this sort of navel-gazing, lotus-eating, bullshit enters into their minds?
Is it reflexive contrarianism? The desire to feel superior to the sheeple who instinctively recoil from this behavior? I just don’t get what the writer, her boss, and her editor were thinking when they decided to authorize, write, and publish this?
Hey, that would be an A paper at Vassar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-0oKpA6A8
Me: [please be the Simpsons clip]
Me: woo hoo!
I almost thought of prefacing that with a Simpsons Did It, but given the nice anticipation it gave you, I’m glad I didn’t.
Someday, Milan is going to get teased very friendly with the Boorish Manners Of A Yalie line when the appropriate time comes.
This is one of those things where the people who -care- about their little stunt (art/history lovers) are also the ones that are probably more likely to be liberal and generally opposed to oil.
The more low-brow conservatives who like rolling coal and will want to keep using oil even when there is a better alternative...generally don't care about some froo-froo art getting vandalized.
I think that’s pretty uncharitable towards “low-brow” conservatives.
I’ve seen plenty of people in Philly’s art museum standing reverently in front of a piece of art, and when they snap out of it and talk to the folks they’re with, it’s with a southern twang or a deliberate rural Pennsylvanian accent.
Not to mention the occasional Amish attire.
“They did what? Aw hell naw! Throwing tomato soup at Van Goghs Sunflowers? What’s next? Throwing lobster bisque at Klimpts The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I? Randy, get in the goddamn truck!”
Didn’t bother to read the vox piece. I’m sure you’ve been to art museums plenty of times, but I encourage you to go again soon and observe the crowds more closely. In the big museums they’re huge, diverse, very international. This new stunt is literally an outrage for all humanity. The people against it would easily outnumber its supporters a thousand to one.
Also, I wonder when is the last time you actually spoke to an art historian? Why on earth do you think most people who devote their life to the study of art would support this? That’s pretty ridiculous libel there, my friend. I’m sure there are some Twitter freaks who match such perverse views but they are no different from anti vax doctors. They don’t teach you anything about the profession as a whole.
Based on your response and David R's, I think that I must have communicated my point very poorly.
I'm aware that there are plenty of solid conservatives who can and do appreciate art. Even Trump conservatives and some 'low brow' types.
But I think that it is fair and correct to say that, in general, the people who care about art and art history tend to be the left side of the political spectrum.
Which means that they are probably sympathetic to their cause already.(albeit probably not as extreme)
Which means that the vandals' tactics are particularly counterproductive. Alienating allies and eliciting a shrug from many of their enemies.
Alienating people from being "against oil" (production and transportation) is a step forward for effectively addressing climate change. :)
>>Is it reflexive contrarianism?<<
I'd guess (and it's strictly a guess; I'm not overly familiar with Romano's work) they write for a narrow audience (of like-minded persons) instead of a wider, more general audience.
I don't read it becasue it does not let me talk back. It's even worse than the NYT
I'll say this about Vox. I really feel that their target audience isn't me, so I don't read it. It's like when it became clear I wasn't in the target audience for Salon.
Stop ranting. The article was just fine. Before I read it, I had no idea the painting was undamaged. That’s an important, under-reported fact which makes me much more sympathetic to the activists.
I would have preferred a different tack in the article, focusing on why throwing soup on glass ever got so much attention. Because it’s rather strange that throwing soup on glass got so much attention, its also worth asking whether the activists might have better achieved their goals by smashing through the glass and destroying the painting.
In any event, your post is a dreary slew of pejoratives lacking analytical rigor, which is very much your mettier.
Speak of the devil, it’s Reflexive Contrarianism, his very own self!
You get triggered every time someone proposes mass transit investments, but you expect me to believe you’re fine with attempted vandalism in the name of climate activism?
Laughable.
Please just leave me *be*.
Your reading comprehension needs work. I never said I was fine with what the activists did. I said the linked article was “just fine” because it centered an important, under-reported fact, then explained in general terms how I might improve it.
I’m perfectly capable of empathizing with activists whose goals I don’t share. Perhaps lack of empathy is your disconnect?
To the David's. I believe both of you should consider trying to have fewer enemies.
He’s apparently even more bored than I am at work, because he’s been following me around like a lost puppy nipping at my heels for weeks, spending disproportionate amounts of time and effort responding to my comments.
With an unending stream of mild, whiny ad hominem attacks, nitpicking, and general irritation.
If there were some “there” there I would be less annoyed, but Jesus Christ…
I don’t know where I first heard the story but I knew from the beginning the painting was undamaged. Do people think it was damaged?
Aaaaand this is why Matt left Vox. Also Aja is the worst of the worst.
The other funny part for me here is that I know plenty of artists who think Van Gogh is overrated and a drama queen and that’s why his artwork is so ubiquitous. They’re gnashing their teeth now because his art has now been elevated again.
“It’s ok to do this because Van Gogh is overrated anyway” is… it’s an argument that someone could make, I guess.
Lol.
I think someone could write a long article contrasting contemporary attitudes on the relationship of politics to aesthetics with those of the mid-20th-century. Nowadays, it seems like people use politics to justify attitudes that are fundamentally aesthetic – the politics of "anti-cringe". But in the 1950s people like Clement Greenberg in his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" were arguing that bad aesthetics *create* bad politics – that art that's "lowbrow" is a strategy to keep people complacent subjects of totalitarianism. So past generations of soup-throwers might have claimed even more ridiculously that Sunflowers is harmful in itself, who knows.
Maybe combine this with article on the political aims of Socialist Realism.
These people would never want to throw soup at Van Gogh. That just draws attention to the artwork. They want it pulled out of rotation more often and left in the back room to gather dust and taken off postcards and shopping bags.
Fine, but surely you must admit that this is a complete irrelevancy?
Not everything has to be for or against a given rhetorical position. Sometimes we can just make comments about interesting things. I think it’s funny that there are a lot of people who don’t like Van Gogh who are now forced to publicly say how terrible it is that the painting was attacked when they’ve disliked it their whole lives.
I know everyone says this now, but legit that piece could be satire. Thornily brilliant satire.
I’m confused here. The painting was unharmed. I don’t think it was a courageous act, but why did it make you want to punch someone?
“Oh, your dog is fine, they missed when they tried to run it over, why are you still mad?”
They knew it was under glass and wouldn’t be harmed. They took a risk, but a small one. There has been an increasing trend of attacking paintings and art objects recently, which it would be good to understand.
Did they know that? Nothing I’ve seen suggests they did, and the one without glass was also subject to a similar stunt.
Reflexively defend it all you want, you’re wrong in the eyes of probably 90% of the public and that alone makes it a bad idea.
I’m not defending it and think it is counterproductive. I’m trying to understand your visceral reaction.
"There has been an increasing trend of attacking paintings and art objects recently, which it would be good to understand."
I think it is understood, but the explanation is unspeakable in 21st Century discourse.
You willing to venture it here?
To be fair, Vox has a pretty deep bench of writers who could have produced this take.
Slow Boring needs to do a hostile takeover of Vox and then immediately engage in Elon Musk-style mass layoffs.
Yeah, imagine a Vox with Matt Yglesias in charge! 😉
I'm not a big fan of mass layoffs in general. It's disruptive and may not actually solve the problem.
You forgot the /s tag.
I seriously guessed before I even clicked.
What we need is for both a left wing activist and a right wing activist to do the same freakout stunt back to back, and watch everyone's heads explode as they try to defend the one they agree with and condemn the one they disagree with.
“Throw a _____ at _______ “ to achieve your political objectives today!
I'm imagining one of those charts where you pick things out of a list based on your birth month, date, and the first letter of your name or something. Birth month is a verb – "throw", "destroy", "deface", "glue" etc.; birth date is an object – "red paint", "glitter", "garbage" etc.; first letter of name is the target – "onto a painting", "at a politician's house", "into the river", "blocking the highway" and so on
Stop imagining and start pitching to McSweeney’s!
For a less freakish but real world example, when lefties were so outraged over the Republican Senate blocking Merrick Garland's example, angry that he didn't even get a hearing, I kept telling them that if John Paul Stevens or Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in February 2008, Senate Democrats would (and should!) have done the exact same thing.
Ehhh, I think I disagree. Harry Reid would've wanted to, but the Dem base back then was pretty blase about the SC, especially compared to the GOP base. I don't know he would've had the support for a move that bold.
I would be more inclined to agree if the entire ideological balance of SCOTUS wouldn't have been on the line. But in this case I think Reid would have found a way.
...shoe...President Bush...
My prediction for how this would play out is everyone would shift seamlessly to arguing over which activist was being treated worse in the aftermath.
"It makes progressives look deeply unserious."
You're being too kind here. Not only do these "progressive activists look "deeply unserious" they appear to be over-privileged lunatic idiots. I mean let's all find more creative ways to alienate pretty much everyone who might be sympathetic to their pet causes.
I'm a life-long Dem/liberal/sorta progressive and my first reaction to this story was to fantasize that I was there when it happened so I could kick the living shit out of these dummies. (I'm not kidding; I had a gut-level feeling of wanting to do violence. And I'm not a violent person.) And it's a good thing I wasn't because I'm the one who would land in the clink.
I have slowly come to despise the "cultural Left" and their activists due to these kinds of antics.
Amen! I too had the violence fantasies.
Guarantee you these loons are on the Haliburton's payroll.
I do hope the people doing that will be prosecuted and spend some serious prison time. The potential damage from these stunts is incalculable. If current laws don’t offer sufficient deterrence they should be amended asap. Also, update security protocol in these museums for heaven’s sake. Museums literally have only two jobs: protect the art for posterity and display it for the public, in this order. They’re kind of failing it right now.
What do you throw on what to protest lack of permitting reform and a net tax on CO2 emissions? :)
Concentrated sulphuric acid on a natural gas pipeline!
Makes only marginally less sense than soup on a priceless work of art…
I recall that concentrated sulphuric acid (96%) is not very corrosive. It can be stored in steel containers. So probably wouldn’t be the ideal pipeline protest fluid. Somewhat diluted sulphuric is very corrosive.
Been a decade and a half since my last chemistry class but that rings a bell; without water there’s really not much to allow any sort of reactivity.
Just to clarify, I did mean “concentrated” in the colloquial sense of “strong” rather than “the maximum concentration achievable by dehydrating.”
It's not courageous to deface another person's property for a cause that will be celebrated by your peers. Defacing your own property or challenging your peers, knowing that you will lose social status are courageous.
Thank you so much on noting that we should have encouraged more outdoor activity. This in my mind was overwhelmingly the biggest failure of pandemic policy, and I was seeing it as early as near the beginning when we were doing insane things like closing off playgrounds. It was so critical to run a cost/benefit analysis to demonstrate that getting more people outdoors would in turn keep them away from far more dangerous behavior indoors.
But we didn't. And my guess as to why is that we ceded too much authority to the public health crowd, who through this experience I've noted are some of the most neurotic people on the face of the earth. That's understandable given what they study. But it shouldn't have meant turning the keys entirely over to them on societywide policy, since most people are nowhere near as neurotic as them. That should have been strictly within the realm of elected executives to decide in a more holistic manner, who have a better read on how important socialization is to most people.
Someone from local government in my town went around and zip tied all the basketball hoops together when Covid hit to prevent people from using them. They also closed all the playing fields. Luckily, some enterprising soul eventually got a ladder and cut the ties so we could play again. Then they zip tied them again. Then they were cut again, and the town gave up. I was happy.
Philly removed the hoops from our park. Someone put up bucket rims. Those got removed and someone put more up.
In the meantime I was cutting ropes off the playground equipment so the little kids had something to do.
Never again.
*so the little lower-income kids had something to do
City Councilperson, Jr. just had mommy and daddy buy something for the backyard.
Generally speaking all of these problems came with the weird usurpation of power by the public health experts, who as you mention are extremely neurotic, but who are also just deeply ignorant of tons of stuff. In particular they seem to have very poor instincts on human behavior, as you mention, but also very poor instincts on social dynamics, economics, and really just every dimension of policy besides public health.
The way this is SUPPOSED to work is that we let them be ultra-neurotic worriers, they advise the government, and the government is the central nervous system that factors in that advice as well as the advice of many other groups to then conduct policy. This is why it doesn't matter that the CDC has absolutely absurd advice about alcohol consumption, sexual behavior, and all kinds of other random stuff -- because no one actually thinks that the CDC's advice is governing policy.
I also think there’s a huge class element. Pretty much all public health people talk about the importance of making sure public health efforts help people with lower incomes. Our pandemic response was very much driven by people who were not very familiar with the lives of people who were not upper middle class.
This was the key error IMO - the Covid Czar should have been in charge of policy and recommendations. It should be a political appointee who, for example, balanced the science against the interests is political groups like teachers unions. Instead this was foisted in CDC officials and put them in a position of trying to do two incompatible things at once - offer the best science-based advice while adjusting that to political reality.
The media’s celebration of that guy who dresses up as the grim reaper and wandered around Florida’s beaches telling people to go home was one of the low points.
What’s really sad is that I saw at least one “how risky is this activity?” Chart from a state medical association that claimed going to a museum was medium risk and going to a beach was medium high risk. I can also remember multiple healthcare workers claim that we absolutely knew that beaches were a major source of spread.
I wanted to punch my screen every time I saw a news agency use a picture of people on the beach as the featured image of reckless behavior.
So did I. I think my blood pressure spiked at least 20 points every time someone told me "we have to close the beaches and parks because if we let people got to the parks and beaches, people will think it's okay to do stuff inside. Not everyone understands this like us" Seriously? Mice understand the difference between indoors and outdoors. I'm pretty sure that the number of Americans who do not understand the difference between inside and outside is infinitesimally small.
The best part is the photos were always taken with a depth of field that made it look like they were all sitting on top of each other, when in reality they were probably 20 yards apart.
I have to admit that this was one where I reflexively bought the party line. Never again, he said with total confidence!
The media celebration of that guy wasn't due to COVID. They saw the potential future for Governor DeSantis and ran story after story if there was an anti-DeSantis angle to it.
I kind of wonder how much of the COVID hawks are just like >80th percentile introverts for whom stay inside and read books and play video games only ever rose to mildly annoying at worst. I’m very much in this group though I’m vaxxed and relaxed but it all seems strange how much of a fuss it caused.
This!
So I've generally agreed on this line of thinking all through the pandemic and I don't disagree with it now. It seemed crazy to me to close playgrounds and beaches even in Spring 2020.
That said - one thought that's entered my brain is, if outside is so much safer, how did respiratory diseases spread throughout history among rural people and animals? Cave bats are one thing, but if covid came from civets, for example, aren't they basically outside "at the playground" all day? Ditto for pigs, cows and birds that were the originators of most other communicable diseases in human. Bird flu must be spreading mostly outdoors, right?
I'm still "team outside" if there's another pandemic, but something here doesn't quite compute for me.
The important thing is (as MY noted in "The Myth of the Urban Plague", https://www.slowboring.com/p/urban-plague) rural doesn’t mean outdoors all the time. What matters is being within four walls with other people, whether that’s in a city of 100,000 houses or a village of just 10. Even a nomad's encampment can do it—a fully enclosed tent is just as bad for air circulation as any skyscraper. (Probably worse, actually, since once the doorflap is closed the only HVAC is a hole in the roof.)
Throughout history, people in rural communities have lived communally and indoors. Whole families in one room, and big extended ones too. All together, doing the literal domestic stuff of life—cooking, eating, cleaning, making and fixing things to use, socializing, sleeping. And they tended to bring their animals inside as well. Herders and farmers could and did spend time with their cows and sheep and pigs and chickens indoors—sometimes in dedicated barns, but sometimes they brought the animals into the home.
And so it’s no mystery how respiratory diseases spread in the premodern world—same as they do in the modern world, by people spending time with each other indoors. The main difference these days is that they usually don’t have a cow in the living room.
That's a good answer and maybe that's most of what I'm missing.
Would you say that could explain how such diseases spread among cattle though? Some of the diseases seem to go back to pre-domestication times.
I mean, on one level, there's always going to be some risk. But I think it's a bit simpler than that; even when they can't build shelters, many animals tend to pack together in herds. The animals we domesticated--cows, sheep, pigs, even chickens to some degree--in particular tend to have a strong herding instinct; that's part of why we domesticated them!
As many researchers noted, the benefits of being outdoors are substantially reduced when you're outdoors and packed together like sardines. And which animals tend to be packed together like sardines, even in the wild? Ones that herd. (Or flock, if they're birds, or sheep for some reason.) Combine that with the longer timescales we're talking about when we talk about premodern and prehistoric disease spread (decades or centuries or millennia, not weeks and months and years) and you roughly have a picture of how this worked ages ago.
I can't speak for civets, but for a typical peasant family with one pig, that pig would absolutely be inside in the same space as the people in many places and times, at least in the winter.
Very good point. I'm not sure if this works for cattle, though, which seems to be enemy #1. It's maybe worth mentioning that the little evidence we have often suggests the general area of Egypt / Sudan as the place where the virus made the jump.
Also, I was just looking up TB and the genetic evidence seems to suggest it was circulating in both humans and bovines 17,000 years ago. Maybe there were cave cows at that time but I just don't see that as the likely explanation.
I can’t speak to the TB cave cow thing, but I can say the evidence suggests that the Ancient Egyptians spent a lot of time with their cows indoors (in houses and in barns/sheds). Certainly rural modern Egyptians have no qualms letting barnyard animals into their houses. I remember seeing goats wandering pretty freely in the non-touristic neighborhoods of Luxor, which isn’t even particularly rural, and my grandfather said something like that about his childhood in the Delta.
You've convinced me.
Lol, thanks! I also just remembered (and how could I forget) that even in the cities, modern Egypt is still overrun by animals, or was very recently. Rag-and-bone men in Cairo and Alexandria still use donkey-pulled carts (or they did when I was there 10 years ago), and the chicken butchers on every street keep live chickens in cages. And at Eid, you see lines and even temporary pens of live sheep, goats, and cows lined outside butcher's shops to be slaughtered for at least a week ahead of the holiday.
What fraction of an average person’s infections before the 20th century would have been respiratory viruses? How often would people have “a cold”?