Bring back your Ethics in Open Source Software division. Lower the pay for your CEO. Secure funding from other entities so that you are no longer dependent on Google. Focus more on implementing better security measures on Linux and Android, specifically within the domain of sandboxing your open processes. Keep about:config and manifest v2 options available.

Fair enough. To be clear, I am saying I would not like any of these aspects of humankind, not that they are necessarily in any way equivalent. Nor am I trying to necessarily relate them to each other. On their own, I dislike them.

Lol. Wow. I hnwstly don’t know how I could have made that many mistakes. My apologies, I am quite sleep deprived. But you can think I’m an AI if you’d like. People confuse my propensity towards overly verbose replies as being AI. Or, yknow, just don’t like it. I edit a lot because I make a lot of typos and catch them later. Thanks for pointing that out. Edited and done.

Rockefeller did make attempts to make political work towards the latter part of his career. The hard part about being an artist/celebrity of any renown is that your audience becomes sort of like your golden fetters. You can’t change the content of your work less you alienate your fans. I admire Rockefeller to some degree for taking a chance to address civil rights in some of his works, but theres a lot of reasons why ultimately throse pieces fell short. Rockefeller’s audience at the time didn’t want him to step outside of his folksy genre he had pigeonholed himself into. Its the equivalent to “I just wanted to watch my football and drink my beer man, why you’d have to bring up politics. I get enough of that elsewhere.”

Additionally, in the case of illustration, sometimes your art style just limits the kinds of messages you can say effectively. Rockefeller was an illustrator whose style emphasized and romanticized sweet scenes like from a movie. There’s a reason Disney’s artists take so much inspiration from specific artists and illustrators with a certain romantic flair. Take a look at the sickeningly sweet pastel portrayals of the Victorian bourgeoisie from Fragonard, and imagine that style attempting to address political injustices at that time. It just doesn’t work. Not unless you completely overhaul your style and the way you communicate visually can you convey the message effectively.

Rockefeller tried to use his talents to address the civil injustices of his time, but due to the preconceptions he had built up over he years around the kinds of messages that work could convey, he ultimately was unable to convey it as effectively as other artists at the time would be able to.

It may not be a fair comparison to make, but the works of [Barbara Jones-Hogu](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Barbara+Jones-Hogu&iax=images&ia=images] were far more effective illustrative pieces that conveyed the sociopolitical sentiments of the time, partially because she was not pinned down by the limitations of what her previous works conveyed.

Yes. Sorry. Late night posting 😪

Yeah. Please keep in mind I mean no shade at Rockwell himself. I just think he had an unintended negative consequence on American culture.

The video in question was part one of a Behind The Bustards Two Parter. Here are the raw links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFBQMEn_0rw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2Jx5WDtzts

I have been struggling with this lately. I am staunchly anti violence and anti war, and yet, I am conflicted on how far I truly would be willing to go to cull classism, fascism, racism, transphobia , homophobia, misogyny, and pedophilia from the world.

These things are abhorrent to me, and I wonder how much of my humanity I’d be willing to sacrifice in exchange for even one of these to no longer being in existence amongst the ranks of humanity.

How much good does pacifism give to the world in promoting the better angels of our nature? How much harm does it do when those same principles allow the worst among us to march down our roads and drag away our loved ones in the night?

Two scenes from media I consume have lately continually resurfaced in my mind. One is this scene from Vinland Saga, where the main character’s father confronts him when he finds his sword. The father is about to go off to war, and somberly asks his son who he wants to kill with his father’s sword. This culminates with the father, who again, is about to go off to war, emphatically declaring to his son that he has no enemies, that there is no such thing as enemies.

The other is this scene from Star Wars Andor, in which a high level spy of a burgeoning Rebellion is asked by a compatriot (who wishes to quit fighting the Empire due to possibly being found out), asks what he sacrifices for the fight against the Empire. The monologue he delivers is chilling, acknowledging he sacrifices all things that make him human, he becomes like his enemy in order to defeat them. When he reflects on the question, and asks, “So what do I sacrifice? Everything!”

That…is what I believe I will have to give up in order for there to be a sunrise for the people I love tomorrow. I’ll have to give up my humanity, everything. And I am afraid. I am selfish. I don’t want to. But I don’t know any other way.

The feelings that scene stir up in me resonate because that is how I feel when I think on the fascist cancer that has once again metastasized in America. Having no enemies… if only. Truly. Having enemies robs me of my humanity, because in fighting them I must bury my humanity. And I know that once I do that, there’s no going back. There will be no redemption.

The thing I am struggling with is… am I the one who makes them my enemies? Or are they? And if the only thing we can agree on is that we are enemies…then what choice do we have when they come for me and those I claim as my kin?

Lol. Nicely shitted.

Illustration major here. Art is such an overarching term that it can pretty much be used as an umbrella term for nearly anything and everything. Etymologically speaking, Illustration just means making something clear, to communicate some idea to someone else. The concept was modernized to encompass the use of pictographs, texts, and diagrams as visual aids.

All forms of illustrations technically can be classified as pieces of art, as the definitions of art vary wildly. I’ve always taken art to be anything that evokes an emotion novel to either the consumer of art or the producer of the art or conveys a novel idea either back at the artist or to the consumer of art, or some mixture of these. The key thing to me is novelty, which evolves and changes based off of sociocultural norms and personal experience. Again, totally my personal opinion, and fine artists in particular would be able to nitpick this idea to death. Conversations I still enjoy when I have the energy.

Rockwell comes from a very classic Americana age of illustration. Iirc he is at the tail end of the second golden age of illustration (though my knowledge on the history is very rusty). I always preferred the work of his predecessor, JD Leyendecker, and his predecessor, Alfonse Much a.

I’m not a fan of the artist who defined the brushstroke style that predominates an entire school of oil painting that still predominates digital painting styles today, pioneered in part by John Singer Sargent and Frans Hals. Which Rockwell and Leyendecker both take some bits of stylistic inspiration from as well.

As per this particular piece, it’s a simple narrative piece, obviously well executed technically in the oil. The narrative is classic Rockwell. I think Rockwell has been ruined for me just because his work created a nostalgia for a time that never quite existed in America. Don’t get me wrong , I don’t think Rockwell was doing anything other than illustrating what he enjoyed and was paid to do.

It’s just that his influence over the American Art and Illustration scene resonates with people who aren’t looking to art for anything more than familiarity, not novelty. Essentially, it’s kitsch. At worst, Rockwell unintentionally created the ideal white American past that boomers currently are nostalgic for. An ideal, not a reality.

And it’s worst manifestation ultimately resulted in producing Thomas Kinkade, America’s richest, and arguably the world’s most evil painter. People like to say second most, but Hitler was always a Nazi first and foremost. Calling Hitler a painter is like calling Ronald Reagan an actor. Like yes, but maybe that’s not what he should be remembered for?

Anyways, the conflation between Illustration and other Artistic disciplines, as well as with differentiating between illustration and art, is a topic of discussion I find very intriguing and one rife with controversy, due in no small part to the ambiguity surrounding the definition of art in general.

Is it a light read?

Great work. They haven’t commented on this matter for some time now and its good to see an updated comment on this issue.

I use Grapheme OS, but do use Mull. I also use Vanadium and base Chromium. Each for different uses. Mull for general browsing (I have many extensions, but I feel a bit more secure by running NoScript).

Vanadium is for when I need more functionality, and raw Chromium for inspecting responsive design of my own sites.

The GrapheneOS community is a great asset to the Android ecosystem, and their mentality has always seemed to be security above all else (even above privacy), which is a voice that is needed in any organization.

Again, thanks for doing this investigation.