Bartender_Venator
No bio...
User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
Very interesting! I have not actually read The Problem of China, I'm going off memories of Skeptical Essays, which was much more inclined to make throwaway rhetorical comparisons of enlightened China against the brutish West.
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
There's got to be a further Oedipus link we could make to the idea of removing one's optic gland...
There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.
I would disagree with this, personally. The historical evidence we have on Sparta was largely written by foreigners in opposing or post-Spartan states, yes, but very often by foreigners who sympathized with Sparta for domestic political or philosophic reasons - as sympathizers of the aristocratic elite, Spartan 'virtuous oligarchy' appealed to them as contrast to Athenian democracy. Xenophon, who wrote The Constitution of the Lacedemonians, even defected to Sparta rather than return to Athens. A more accurate parallel would be somewhere between Tacitus' Germania and the tendency of Enlightenment-influenced writers to idealize Chinese government (I recall Bertrand Russell still gushing over China's rational and virtuous political system in the 1920s...).
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
Yeah I think if you're willing to interpret the rest of Genesis metaphorically, there's nothing really stopping you from interpreting the Garden of Eden as the pre-agricultural state of Man, and the 'knowledge of Good and Evil' as the spiritual/cultural prerequisite for the creation of agricultural society.
Bartender_Venator
19d ago
Oh that's another great candidate - harder to sing than the others, though, you need a bit of wind in the pipes.
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
I always find it funny that God Save The King/Queen is generally panned as a national anthem in Britain, compared to Jerusalem, Rule Britannia, or even Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (for the rugby fans), but the Germans managed to remix it into an absolute banger
Bartender_Venator
21d ago
The blue-lined octopus link really makes me wonder how fucked-up the Octopodes' romance novels would be. What I really wonder, though, is how even an advanced technological society would deal with caring for thousands of plankton-sized infants drifting on the currents until they eat enough or get eaten. There would presumably be Octopode religious sects and Octo-EAs obsessing over how to get birthing nets out there, and Octopode Ehrlichs predicting terrible doom if they were to succeed and increase the population a thousandfold in a generation.
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
Forget it, Jake, it's Oak Lawn.
Bartender_Venator
22d ago
Ah, then you probably know far more than me. I always took an interest in the social dynamics of the South Side, but very much as an occasional outsider. Though I did go to Bridgeport cop bars fairly often during covid, because the cop bars stayed open.
So, Oak Lawn is a sleepy, middle-class/lower-middle-class neighbourhood, the sort of place that to this day has a shopping mall, a hooters, and motels. It's right on the edge between what you can call Chicago and what you would call the burbs, and also right on the edge between the black and white South Sides (it's getting more Hispanic, hence my tinder girl, but only in recent decades). Heavily white ethnic in a way that would mean his family wouldn't be particularly out of place there. You're technically in the city, but it's about an hour to get downtown, there's nothing but the ruins of the South Side between you on 97th St and Chinatown on 22nd St, and the tony northern neighbourhoods where the rich kids grow up might as well be a world away. You're raised with middle-class aspirations, but exposed to both black urban dysfunction and the anomie of the burbs (and whatever awful stuff was going on in Hanania's family, that's not something I can psychoanalyze). His educational track also fits for a local boy done good - local community college, then a nice but unremarkable state university, then back in triumph for UChicago Law, the Chicago flagship university both half an hour and an immeasurable distance from home. I don't know Hanania, but I've known many people like this, who grew up on the outside looking in, and finally made it in, but never get over growing up so close to and yet so far away from their aspirations. The wignat stuff is what makes me pretty comfortable in this reading; I wouldn't base it just on his current writing and my knowledge of the area, but that sort of proof of deep alienation, radical desire, and emphasis on race (i.e. fervent hatred of the crappier neighbourhoods next door) offers a pretty good signal of what might be going on in his turn from race war to class war.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
I used to hook up with a Latina tattoo artist who lived in the neighbourhood Hanania grew up in. Fifteen minutes of driving from the freeway to her house and back were enough to realize why it would give a fellow permanently crippling class anxiety.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
There is a bizarre meme going around the segment of the right that still listens to libertarians that in fact, the left are entirely correct about the chuds' motivations for voting, and the sole reason why the American right-wing voter supports capitalism is because they're too racist to spend money on black people. I assume libertarians took on the talking point because it's so detached from actual people that only a highly educated person could possibly believe it ("nonsense is a uniform", as they say), and therefore signals some kind of status in their world - plus that there are few higher aspirations for a libertarian than to find a galaxy-brained way to agree with the left. But it's obviously not true, and is based on a facile reading of studies about the relationship between diversity and the breakdown of social solidary that doesn't survive a moment's contact with empirical reality. No, white Americans did not choose economic liberty as a principle of government because doing so denied gibs to black people. Nobody seriously believes any of this, it's just a Hot Take.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
City people are notoriously authoritarian more or less out of necessity
Have you, uh, been downtown in a US city in the past ten years?
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
"Trump is a Russian asset" is a 'borderline conspiracy theory'
Ok man, take your hands off the keyboard. Take a deep breath, in and out, in and out. Now go into the bathroom, and look in the mirror. Repeat those words to yourself, out loud, looking in your own eyes. Try to keep a straight face - no giggling, no shamefaced grimace. Can you do it? If so, I'm impressed, that's some serious dedication to the bit.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
ok, that makes more sense then
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
I am a notable fan of Napoleon III on balance for his impressive domestic accomplishments, but his foreign policy pretty uniformly blew up in his face - even the unification of Italy just bogged him down in the Papal question.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
He's engaging in siege-warfare egotistical excesses? Or are you referring to Demetrius Poliorketes?
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
Technically, I think the non-consecutive terms make him both brothers.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
Although I'll note that Henry VIII's wars are one of the least remembered things about him, compared to his personal life, religious policy, or even diplomacy (Field of the Cloth of Gold). All that money culminated in... burning down Edinburgh, occupying Boulogne for six years, and selling that town back to the French. Almost as much of a waste of money as the Great Society.
Bartender_Venator
23d ago
Before Covid I went to a couple meetups just to try and meet people in DC who weren't working in politics, and my experience was that the right move on meetups is to go to ones for hobbies that well-adjusted people do, but where they need a meetup to find fellow hobbyists. Recall the writers' meetups being particularly good.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
The big issues imo are that the US did not force Karzai to build a proper national patronage network, and that the projects that could have delivered quality-of-life improvements to the average Afghan were run through useless Western NGOs and development agencies. The country runs on "bribery", as all premodern states did, and doesn't understand democracy, so bribe them and stop worrying about voting.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
The Great Game and associated Great Power conflicts have generally worked well for Afghanistan until they actually get invaded, because being important meant foreign subsidies and arms for Kabul. Afghans simply do not give a shit about "not being a gamepiece" - they're living in a mountainous subsistence economy, and the strategy of successive Afghan regimes has been to try and make themselves important enough to the rest of the world to get foreign funding they can distribute to the regions as patronage. Note also that Pashtunwali only applies to about half of the country. Thomas Barfield very good on this
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
The Taliban are a strange outlier by historical Afghan standards. Generally, Afghanistan has been governed by a centralized Kabul regime which distributes foreign patronage to provincial strongmen in return for nominal fealty. In theory we could have done something similar with Karzai, but he and his cronies just stole all the money instead of delivering it to clients.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
The "attack on the French language" thing is particularly transparently dishonest from Carney. Trump's devastating alpha strike on Quebecois identity is... not requiring US streaming services to promote French-Canadian content.
From my limited experience with rave culture, I agree with you on the vibes. Makes me wish I'd gotten into it in my 20s. Unsurprisingly in retrospect, the scene I wrote off as braindead is super chill, and the indie music scene I gravitated towards as cultured and intellectual attracts utterly rancid people.
More options
Context Copy link