Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "Gather 'Round, Kids. Sam Seder Has A Nick Di Paolo Story..." video.

  1. There were a few continuity errors.
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  2.  @JohnnySplendid  You forgot Dave Rubin!
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  3. You know what's funny? Being verbally abusive.
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  4. "the best creative people are and have always been leftists" I mean, yeah, there's a trend, but it's not absolute. Just off the top of my head, John Milton, Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Naipaul, J.S Bach, T.S. Eliot, Carl Ruggles, Edward Elgar—all were various shades of conservative or reactionary and yet each made significant contributions to their art form.
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  5.  @IronJohn755  I'm not sure why you seemed to think that because I made a contrary point I must be a right-winger myself (I'm not). I'm just stating what I think is pretty obvious given a wide enough survey of evidence: great art is not the exclusive domain of leftists (which I tend to think of as anti-capitalist).  These terms, right and left, get really messy fast, especially when we're trying to treat them ahistorically. The right-left dichotomy emerges during the French Revolution, so perhaps it's not fair or accurate to apply those labels to people who lived before then. I think the notion of "progress" is just as fraught and subject to revision. Would Shakespeare have anything today with Trump? It's a pointless question. I mean, would Proudhon and Bakunin make it very far among the modern intersectional left? Probably not, at least not as they were. There's also a lot of artists—like Wagner, Wilde, Berlioz, etc.—who are generally left (the first two being avowed socialists) but who envision politics primarily through its usefulness to art. They're sort of aesthetically political; and I bring that up because there were also quite a few artists who were willing to support reactionary and outright fascist governments (Stravinsky, Strauss, Mompou, Rodrigo) because it was expedient for their artistic vision. I've never seen anything to suggest that Bach was an anti-monarchist or sought socio-political progress in his time. He was religiously devout. On the other hand, Elliot Gardner, quite strangely in my opinion, chides Bach for a certain contempt for authority. Like I said, it's not always easy to determine exactly where a historical figure should fall in today's political categories precisely because they had no experience with them. But in relation to his own time, I'm not aware of anything particularly progressive about Bach's political views or activities. If you are, I'd be interested to know. Rachmaninov is another who was conservative not only politically but artistically, eschewing the avant-garde, jazz, and atonalism of his day. That's not a value judgement: it's a fact. Tolstoy's kind of interesting because as a Christian Anarchist he was both incredibly conservative, as required by his personal (and idiosyncratic) religious beliefs, and he was repulsed by the rise of modern industrial society and could only find escape in the simplified past; and yet he was also probably one of the most progressive people of his time and place, an early supporter of the Ferrer School, a vegetarian, an opponent of private property and government rule. We also have to acknowledge that to a certain degree we (posterity) may have a tendency to seek out art, or those things within art, of the past that reflect our own situation as it has progressed through history, so that it's not so much a question of social progressives being more inclined to produce better art as it is a function of the dominant culture flattering itself with artifacts that legitimize its ascendency. I'm not saying that's the whole truth, but I think that does play a role. Obviously the kind of art a society culls will reflect both its progressive history (its ascendency above barbarism) as well as those things it hardcodes as natural, conservative, and permanent. Maybe I've clarified myself a little. Or made it worse.
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