"Displayed at an angle and out of its normal context, it was oddly beautiful"
I disagree, the toilet was not "oddly beautiful" and displaying it at an angle and out of its normal context didn't make it any more "oddly beautiful."
It was a sort-of clever "troll" mocking the pretentiousness of the "art crowd" and it's significant because 100 years later the "art crowd" is still, how to put it? "Butthurt" over Duchamp's mockery of them.
The "troll" stung so bad that 100 years later they are still embarrassed, even humiliated, by it. 100 years of terrible nonsense and thousand-word essays of bullshit and they still haven't gotten over it.
Which I guess means that Duchamp made a piece of very significant art.
I also get an emotional response to Pollack, similar to the emotional response I get to the painting of a colored square done on the TV show "House Refabbers" where they take a canvas, paint a background in one color and then a square on the background in another color.
It's not a deep emotion, of course, it's a fleeting sensation, really, like smelling a flower or listening to a "boop boop" sound effect on the tram. It's a trite emotion, which is the best way to describe the reaction I get to Pollock - trite.
I think that particular Pollock piece would make for a great panel or wallpaper in a basement. There's a certain movement and a not-unpleasant interplay with the colors - again, similar to the "boop, boop" on various public transportation system sound effects.
You can call it "art" sure, I think "craft" would be better, or perhaps "decorative arts" is probably the best way to describe Pollock. I recall a youtube video of the painting of a countertop in a kind of "hip, modern" kitchen that had a similar aesthetic.
Of course those Soviet paintings of WWI are far more meaningful than Pollack's visually not-unpleasant background color mix.
Obviously, no one said anything about "assassination" by Mossad. Your attempted use of reductio ad absurdum was in bad faith.
One would likely be more concerned with being accused of "anti-semitism" and having your name google-bombed by a Zionist smear campaign like Canary Mission. [0] Imagine having a potential client or employer finding your name on a list of "anti-semite Israel haters" for doing nothing more that suggesting Palestinians have human rights or that Israel engages in an aggressive espionage campaign against the United States?
Anyone who dissents from neo-liberalism. In the West today, you're allowed to be anywhere from "socialist" to center-right on economics, and center-left to far-left on social issues.
So, for instance, if you believe that "a woman is an adult human female" you are a "right wing extremist" because that is transphobic. Even if you are a left-wing, Marxist feminist, if you do not accept the assertion "trans-women are women" you are a "far right extremist."
On economics you have a little bit more freedom, because the West is a mercantile civilization and multi-national corporations are the nexus of power. But even the most "far left" Bernie Sanders-style "Democratic Socialists" aren't even actually socialist. They typically are not proposing the government own and control the means of production, they just want more generous welfare programs - which is not just compatible with neo-liberal capitalism, it's actually quite supportive of neo-liberal capitalism.
In 2019, the Emmanuel Goldsteins are "populists" and "nationalists." "Populism" really means "popular with disorganized masses, unpopular with organized elites." "Nationalism" is anything that interferes with the free flow of capital and labor in Western nations.
Even as recently as the 1990s, a far left figure like Noam Chomsky could point out that many of the "communist" movements in Latin America and Asia were not Marxist in any real sense, merely nationalist movements that wanted independence from Western colonialism.
Today, those assertions by Noam Chomsky would be considered "right wing populist nationalism" if they were applied to European nations, the USA and Canada, and Australia and New Zealand.
>That doesn't mean everything is a government conspiracy to spy on people.
No one suggested that "everything is a government conspiracy to spy on people."
The job of the NSA is to "spy on people." It's America's top funded intelligence agency. It's full of extermely competent and very intelligent people and their employer, the United States of America, is the world's sole superpower, the world's largest economy, and likely the most technologically sophisticated nation of earth.
The NSA is one of the reasons for America's preeminent place in the world.
>The Tor Foundation itself could also have been founded by Mork from Ork to hide his pornographic consumption from Orson.
No, "Mork from Ork" is a fictional character, while the people who started the Tor project and the Tor foundation are real people, and were funded, since the beginning, by the Office of Naval Research and the NSA. In fact, the article goes into this extensively, and these facts are not in question:
>The technology was funded by the Office of Naval Research and DARPA. Early development was spearheaded by Paul Syverson, Michael Reed and David Goldschlag — all military mathematicians and computer systems researchers working for the Naval Research Laboratory, sitting inside the massive Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling military base in Southeast Washington, D.C.
>But in 2002, seven years after it began, the project moved into a different and more active phase. Paul Syverson from the Naval Research Laboratory stayed on the project, but two new guys fresh outta MIT grad school came on board: Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson. They were not formally employed by Naval Labs, but were on contract from DARPA and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Center for High Assurance Computer Systems.
>At the very end of 2004, with Tor technology finally ready for deployment, the US Navy cut most of its Tor funding, released it under an open source license and, oddly, the project was handed over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
So creating bizarre strawmen about "Mork from Ork" and using weasel-words like "conspiracy theory" doesn't add anything to the discussion.
>I imagine the bulk of Tor traffic is DNM trade which intelligence agencies just aren't going to care about some 17 year old ordering MDMA for his friends with bitcoin.
This is also a strawman, no one (except for you) was talking about "17 year old ordering MDMA for his friends with bitcoin."
It's interesting that there is so much ostensible "faith" in the Tor Foundation and a seeming emotional reaction to questions about it. I say "ostensible" because my suspicion is those reactions are feigned.
The job of the NSA is signals intelligence; the Tor network is a juicy target for signals intelligence; NSA has been involved in not just the foundational technology of Tor, but the various Tor research projects.
If the NSA does NOT have "back doors" into the Tor network, they aren't doing their job.
>who would benefit from not having this conversation?
The companies that have a vested financial interest in mass surveillance, their technical employees, the public communication platform for the investment funds that fund startups in this space (cough) and the intelligence agencies that work directly with, and are sometimes embedded in, those technology companies.
Imagine if someone did find some exploit in Tor code, it would go over the head of 99% of coders anyway, and the accusations of "Russian hacking" would drown out most sensible discussion anyway.
Consider that the Tor Foundation itself may have been started by NSA agents and collaborators. Tor was originally invented for the US Navy, after all. There's a foundation that provides legal representation to "average people" who want to run Tor exit nodes. I read a study of Tor exit nodes in Germany and they are all financed and legally represented by a foundation that, to my eyes at least, is obviously a CIA front.
The CIA has been doing things like this since forever. Many of the "storied journalists" of the late 20th century were CIA propagandists. It would be trivially easy for the CIA to turn one of their own assets into a "privacy celebrity." They would go around giving conferences to "privacy advocates" and techies, spinning yarns about their "dedication to user privacy" and the average person would believe it. In fact, the CIA, in the 1950s, used a personality test heuristic that could identify narcissists and liars and would recruit these people to insert into various "movements."
I actually do find it rather amusing when I read comments from seemingly well meaning techies praising some celebrity "privacy activist" that travels around the country giving TED talks and the like, promoting various privacy technology initiatives, never once even considering that it's quite likely that celebrity is working for the NSA and simply mouths all the "progressive" and "cyber-libertarian" talking points that sell the idea to idealists. Idealists are easily manipulated because they "want to believe."
The Three Letter Agencies are "people hackers" more than "technology hackers" and the average techie-type doesn't have a clue.
tl;dr the entire "electronic privacy movement" is likely astroturf run by the intelligence community.