You should should lean into it.

Tell him you listened to what he was saying about pepa pig and that its worse than he seems to know. Its Nazis that are doing the brainwashing and they are hiding in the CIA. Then dump the skinny on MKUltra/Galidio/Congress for Cultural Freedom and all the shifty stuff the CIA got up to under Richard Helms the nazi lover who was a lead negotiator on project paperclip.

I like to listen to theory a few times as an audiobook while I do chores, cook, exercise, or play less cerebral videogames. It builds a familiarity with the simple ideas and the flow of the text, how the parts relate to each other in general. It lets my brain work on the ideas without my conscious mind getting in the way because it is busy doing other things. Then after listening to it 2 or 3 times read along with it and really get down to attaching all the parts together in the order they are presented and turning them into one solid thing.

Exposure is a big part of it. People like the music that is playing when they are having a good time. People like the paintings that they choose to hang in their house (not the other way around).

Read up on choice-induced preference change and Cognitive Dissonance. There have been multiple studies (starting with Brehm in the late 50s) that show that people will increase their preference for a thing after they choose it.

(This is why they make people vote. You can get most people to say that “all politicians are bad” but then they will defend the guy they voted for because they chose him.)

People’s brains are wired to be happy most of the time (except if you have depression) so if we are constantly subjected to something we dislike slightly, over time it can become passable or even enjoyable. If you include other forms of enjoyment with the music or books you are trying to like it can help trick your brain into associating those types of art with pleasurable feelings by proxy.

So basically just keep listening to Yoko and reading books you don’t like and try to do it when conditions are perfect for their enjoyment.

Have you listened to the album Killer by Alice Cooper? King Crimson was one of his inspirations for the album especially the song Halo of Flies.

The real DPRK troops were the friends Russians made along the way.

Well written. It hits all the points I have come to in debating with neo-luddites. This whole argument happened in miniature when computer illustration and digital music took off in the mid 00-10s. People said that it wasn’t real art because people weren’t making the sounds with mechanical tools or because the digital painters hadn’t spent years practicing how to hold a brush.

The cries of “theft” are silly because every artist is influenced by other artists. Nothing is created in a vacuum and no artist can trace every influence on their work even if they pay lip service to the obvious influences. Nobody cries Plagiarism when a painter does cubism that looks exactly like something Picasso would do.

Only corporate “artists” stood up on the side of the music industry when they tried sued rappers for using samples. That was directly lifting someone else’s identifiable product and putting it on loop with only minimal modification if any.

Automating image generation isn’t destroying art. Image creation for cash is what kills art. Commoditizing creativity was the sin not the automation of image generation. The existence of LLM image generations doesn’t stop people from doing illustrations. The existence of cameras didn’t stop people from painting portraits. The invention of flash videos didn’t kill hand drawn cartoons. There is no threat to “art” it is a threat to occupations.

The issue is that people who generate images for money are losing their control over the means of production. Their investment in those means is depreciating rapidly due to new tools that make any untrained worker capable of the what was once skilled labor.

Just like the Luddites who feared losing their occupation after investing years perfecting their skills these image generations workers fear automation and are trying to destroy the machines instead of destroying the rich people who are profiting by their destruction.