Freddie deBoer on what he regards as the greatest tension within 21st century progressivism, carceral feminism vs defund the police ... but a version of it certainly seems to exist on the right, too

I suppose at this point I can't help but feel that it's important to consider that liberals, progressives and leftists are not necessarily the same thing in much the same way that social conservatives, libertarians and anti-communist/anti-Marxist types have not been the same thing.  deBoer "may" be conflating people across groups.  But the general point is clear enough:

two haiku on paradoxes in arts appreciation and men of culture

2-7-2026

the best of the best,

i ate and savored it all

and made crap from it

2-7-2026

men of culture are

so busy appraising they

skimp on creating

Alan Jacobs inches toward a proposal: The creepy output of LLM/AI art has depended on the bad modeling of generations of identikit scholarly “input” in reducing the arts to a set of easily replicable schemas

 https://www.honest-broker.com/p/my-warning-about-ai-music-from-1988

Ted Gioia has stuck by the conviction that the flubs and gaffes in art are how you know the art is made by a human. I recall reading an author who mentioned that if you heard Dave Brubeck perform live that some nights he was on fire and other nights he played badly and that’s precisely how you know he was improvising.  Frank Zappa answered the question of how and why some nights he sounded bad by saying that that’s how improvisation is.