Shit people get wrong about Lovecraft

[Faust]

I think I should make a creative work that NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO DO ANYTHING WITH FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS AFTER I'M DEAD. That's totally fair to the culture that raised me and filled me with enough interesting ideas that I was able to synthesize my own.

Or we could not play hyperbole?

Artists don't create for other people. Just as a live artist has the right to create the most  earth shattering piece with profound cultural significance and never show it to anyone, so too have they the right to distribute it and pass that right onto whomever they wish to should they die.

Artists may absorb culture, but artists don't owe culture anything.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I think I should make a creative work that NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO DO ANYTHING WITH FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS AFTER I'M DEAD. That's totally fair to the culture that raised me and filled me with enough interesting ideas that I was able to synthesize my own.

Or we could not play hyperbole?

Artists don't create for other people. Just as a live artist has the right to create the most  earth shattering piece with profound cultural significance and never show it to anyone, so to have they the right to distribute it and pass that right onto whomever they wish to should they die.

Artists may absorb culture, but artists don't owe culture anything.

This, right there.

Intellectual property is property, period.  If I build a factory, I have the right to allow my children or the benefactors of my estate to inherit it.  The same goes for a book I write.

Leonardo Davinci didn't owe Florence a Goddamn thing.  Horrible times make great art, but you don't reward the horror with partial ownership.

[LMNO]

[flip-flop]

But when corporations get hold if it, work-for-hire stuff, so they "own" it, should the same rules apply?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

[flip-flop]

But when corporations get hold if it, work-for-hire stuff, so they "own" it, should the same rules apply?

If I own it, I can sell it.  If I commissioned it, I own it.

And whomever I sell it to takes title.  Just like anything else.

The fundamental disconnect is based on the ease of copying intellectual property electronically.  To say that this validates just taking it is the same as saying you have a moral right to steal a car if it's left unlocked.

The fact that a theft is easy doesn't justify the theft.

[Faust]

[flip-flop]

But when corporations get hold if it, work-for-hire stuff, so they "own" it, should the same rules apply?

When the creator agrees to it sadly yes. Example: Alan Moore got fucked on the watchmen because the clause was the ownership would revert to him when the book went out of print for a year.
It has never gone out of print.
DC are an evil manipulative company not honouring the mutual understanding of the previous agreement by looking for a loophole in said agreement, but from Moore's end he should never have entered it.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

[flip-flop]

But when corporations get hold if it, work-for-hire stuff, so they "own" it, should the same rules apply?

When the creator agrees to it sadly yes. Example: Alan Moore got fucked on the watchmen because the clause was the ownership would revert to him when the book went out of print for a year.
It has never gone out of print.
DC are an evil manipulative company not honouring the mutual understanding of the previous agreement by looking for a loophole in said agreement, but from Moore's end he should never have entered it.

If I hire a carpenter to build a house, who owns the house?

The thing here, I think, is to treat an artist as any other fundamentally essential craftsman.  Society can't function without plumbers, and on another level, it can't function without artists. 

Even the worst societies have art.  Horribly sterile art (usually of Dear Leader, etc), but art all the same.

[trippinprincezz13]

He certainly had a problem with race, there's no doubting that.

And "his times" aren't really an excuse, because other writers that dealt with race that preceded him (Kipling, Twain) had a far more realistic attitude.

And of course they are vilified for using the colloquial terms of the day in stories that depict brown  people, etc, as PEOPLE, and Lovecraft gets a pass even though the smudgy people are invariable evil and degenerate in ALL of his stories in which they were included.

Out of the three, I've probably read Twain the most, which still isn't saying much, but I have an idea of all their writing styles. Would it be reasonable to assume that the Vilified v. Pass, is on account of Kipling/Twain, in a sense rubbing the racism of the day in people's faces by depicting colored people as regular people, who are treated as sub-human by many around them (this is where the slurs, etc. come in)? (If I'm way off, I apologize. I've read bits here and there about criticisms of these authors' works as being racist, but I'm not entirely clear on what their personal opinions may have been).  Whereas Lovecraft reinforced people's attitudes towards colored people by depicting his villains as colored, etc. but it was "clean" because he didn't specifically use slurs or blatantly state "meanwhile, those shift arabs, horrible as they all tend to be, blah blah blah"? I.e., "it's ok, because he didn't say nigger, regardless of what he implied."

Of course, I could be way off base here.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

He certainly had a problem with race, there's no doubting that.

And "his times" aren't really an excuse, because other writers that dealt with race that preceded him (Kipling, Twain) had a far more realistic attitude.

And of course they are vilified for using the colloquial terms of the day in stories that depict brown  people, etc, as PEOPLE, and Lovecraft gets a pass even though the smudgy people are invariable evil and degenerate in ALL of his stories in which they were included.

MOST old stuff has racism in it, and it's really easy to blame it on the times, but yeah.
Here's a movie that I thought would be totally cringe-worthy, that turned out not to be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW-LC4CroIM
Nobody got tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail for making that.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

He certainly had a problem with race, there's no doubting that.

And "his times" aren't really an excuse, because other writers that dealt with race that preceded him (Kipling, Twain) had a far more realistic attitude.

And of course they are vilified for using the colloquial terms of the day in stories that depict brown  people, etc, as PEOPLE, and Lovecraft gets a pass even though the smudgy people are invariable evil and degenerate in ALL of his stories in which they were included.

Out of the three, I've probably read Twain the most, which still isn't saying much, but I have an idea of all their writing styles. Would it be reasonable to assume that the Vilified v. Pass, is on account of Kipling/Twain, in a sense rubbing the racism of the day in people's faces by depicting colored people as regular people, who are treated as sub-human by many around them (this is where the slurs, etc. come in)? (If I'm way off, I apologize. I've read bits here and there about criticisms of these authors' works as being racist, but I'm not entirely clear on what their personal opinions may have been).  Whereas Lovecraft reinforced people's attitudes towards colored people by depicting his villains as colored, etc. but it was "clean" because he didn't specifically use slurs or blatantly state "meanwhile, those shift arabs, horrible as they all tend to be, blah blah blah"? I.e., "it's ok, because he didn't say nigger, regardless of what he implied."

Of course, I could be way off base here.

This is absolutely correct.  Spot on.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

The thing about Lovecraft's racism was that he was so bad at it. Regardless of his intent, by the end of the story it's always the foreign heathen cult whose beliefs are justified and the white christian protagonist who was laboring under an ignorant and superstitious belief system.

EDIT:
Of course that partly comes down to hate as well. It helps that he hated Christianity as much as he hated foreigners.

EDIT:
Which brings up the few times in the mythos when the christian character's beliefs might bot be unjustofied, to wit, when the monster is possibly a metaphor for Jesus, (cf. Dunwich Horror, compare the horror's death to Jesus' death scene in the gospels, the similarity of "Yog-Sothoth" to "Yah-Sabaoth" and the similarity of parts of the necronomicon passages to parts of John 10:7-9)

It's funny how nerds have latched onto the guy, when he literally represents the backwards attitudes most of them despise in the world around them. He was afraid of scientific progress, of racial diversity, and so utterly confused by women that barely any appear in his stories. The time he lived in (1890-1937) was full of massive cultural and scientific upheaval, and his response to this was to dig his heels in and screech about the horrors all around. A contemporary of Tesla and Einstein, all he could see from their amazing work was that MAN IS LOOKING INTO THINGS HE SHOULD NOT KNOW and he filled his stories with fevered dreams of what nightmares science might unleash.

...

He contributed something to society, it's true. He and Mary Shelly paved the way for modern horror: terrifying stories based not on ancient superstition or religion but new and terrifying things outside the scope of human understanding. Scientific horror.

I think a lot of the nerds empathize more with the villains and mad scientists than with the heroes of such works.

(His rejection of superstition also endears him to nerds)