Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
5hr ago
Interesting, I found Kant an enjoyable read because of the ideas, but god, the prose - partly, I think, that's because the English Kant tradition makes a lot of really annoying translation choices, like "intuition" for "perception of an external object".
I've done a Jhourney retreat and it was great. I didn't hit a Jhana but many people did and I still found it very rewarding. Their approach is to treat the Jhanas as simply mental states, without a lot of the religious or mystical baggage, and try to find efficient ways to reach them. Very rat-adjacent. But yeah, super expensive for the in-person retreats and the online ones aren't exactly cheap either, definitely priced for their tech audience.
Bartender_Venator
15hr ago
To be clear, I am a big fan of both thinkers, particularly Hobbes - just because an idea is difficult to apply doesn't mean that it's not productive or even necessary to do so. But they're difficult, even if they're both excellent writers, and it's very easy to get them wrong if you're approaching with a modern conceptual vocabulary (e.g. the kudzu tangle that is the modern conception of "rights"). Argued plenty with good old Hlynka over Hobbes.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Great book. I am finally finishing up A Thousand Plateaus, reading Calvin Westra's Moth Girl (very good, he's unique right now). Just finished Dog Soldier, incredibly well-written and high-octane read, one of the most cinematic books I can recall. It's a crime it was never made into a movie afaik.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Aesthetically, I can't stand it when translators use colloquial English to seem accessible , it reads like a dumbing-down. Specifically to Machiavelli, he is an extremely clear and precise prose stylist; his writing is a succession of syllogisms, whose clarity is heightened by a more formal and precise style. Compare George Bull, I don't know if it's the best but it's the one I happen to have to hand:
From this arises the following question: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is that one would like to be both one and the other; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.
One reads like a tossed-off piece of advice in a conversation, one like a carefully considered thought.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Which translation of The Prince is this? I want to know so I can [fedpost] the translator.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Having had a British education, I always find myself chuckling when extremely-online libs start fulminating about how Confederates were "traitors". Maybe you should have paid for your tea!
More seriously, I think the motte definition of treason in an American context is "aiding enemies of the country in a context where the right of revolution does not apply". The concept of the right of revolution is critical to the Founders' political thought, for obvious reasons (vide), but it was a complex concept that is inextricable from the right of self-defense in e.g. Hobbes/Locke and can't easily be applied in a modern context.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I would say it is more transparent (if you think Aristotle's bad, wait till you get to Kant and Hegel. I don't think they even need to try to write esoterically...) for sure. I am generally suspicious of Western readings of Eastern texts, since the barrier for true scholarship is so high compared to Western philosophy - i.e. can you trust your secondary sources, translators, etc. - but you should go with what works for you. Western philosophy, outside of the Greeks and Romans, tends to avoid the question of happiness, and when it addresses that it generally focuses on the first steps of freeing oneself from pain rather than happymaxxing.
Have you looked into Jhourney at all or the Jhanas more generally?
I don't think anyone knows. In some sense it's lost to history, just as we can't truly know much of the esoteric stuff in the early Church. I think Heidegger gets a lot of it, and the new-ish Joe Sachs translations of Aristotle really change the game for reading Aristotle in English. Leo Strauss came up with this whole framework, but he's very cagey about saying what he thinks the esoteric doctrine of any given philosopher actually is. IMO this is because, for Strauss, esoteric writing is about more than just protecting the polis or the philosopher from bad actors - it's because all direct expression is inherently historical, grounded in its time, and so esoteric writing is necessary to address the eternal questions which span historical eras. It's in the process of puzzling out the esoteric doctrine that we get to touch those eternal questions.
Gun to my head, I think it's that Aristotle is much more of a process philosopher, even a sort of pan-vitalist, than he lets on. There's also probably a religious or mystical component to this that was never written down. Most of the things that we consider states of being in Aristotle are actually processes. Joe Sachs gets at it when he takes the word "Entelechy", usually translated as "Actuality", and translates it as "Being-at-work-staying-itself." Any Aristotle scholars reading this are probably groaning and saying yeah of course we knew this, but that's because it took Heidegger and Sachs to draw that out of Aristotle and return it to our knowledge.
So for instance, Heidegger, in The Question Concerning Technology:
If we speak of the "essence of a house" and the "essence of a state," we do not mean a generic type; rather we mean the ways in which house and state hold sway, administer themselves, develop and decay-the way in which they "essence" [Wesen]. Johann Peter Hebel in a poem, "Ghost on Kanderer Street," for which Goethe had a special fondness, uses the old word die Weserei. It means the city hall inasmuch as there the life of the community gathers and village existence is constantly in play, i.e., comes to presence. It is from the verb wesen that the noun is derived. Wesen understood as a verb is the same as wiihren [to last or endure], not only in terms of meaning, but also in terms of the phonetic formation of the word. Socrates and Plato already think the essence of something as what essences, what comes to presence, in the sense of what endures. But they think what endures as what remains permanently [das Fortwiihrende] (aei on). And they find what endures permanently in what, as that which remains, tenaciously persists throughout all that happens. That which remains they discover, in turn, in the aspect [Aussehen] (eidos, idea), for example, the Idea "house." The Idea "house" displays what anything is that is fashioned as a house. Particular, real, and possible houses, in contrast, are changing and transitory derivatives of the Idea and thus belong to what does not endure. But it can never in any way be established that enduring is based solely on what Plato thinks as idea and Aristotle thinks as to ti en einai (that which any particular thing has always been), or what metaphysics in its most varied interpretations thinks as essentia.
Even though Heidegger likely believes that he's surpassing Aristotle here, I think this is probably a truer statement of Aristotle's beliefs and critique of Plato (accurate about Plato, though). This is somewhat symmetrical with his discussion of the Four Causes earlier in the essay, which makes me suspect that Heidegger knows this and is trying to overcome the simplistic readings of Aristotle that had become calcified into philosophical tradition.
Edit: rereading this, you know what, this just isn't a question I'm The Guy to answer. I'm too much of a Heideggerian; I'll always read Heidegger back into Aristotle. But, in my biased opinion, that's one of the better ways to read him.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I mean in a more general sense as well. When we think of a "job", we tend to think regular wage labour for an employer or owning a business that does a dedicated thing. It gets a lot fuzzier there - for instance, pretty much everybody is selling or bartering whatever's on hand to somebody else. It has a very different relationship to the family and household, since it's basically inter-household trade in goods and services rather than structured labour in the sense an American uses the word "job" or "business".
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
A lot of voters wanted a trade war with China, particularly in 2016 (by 2024 China hawkery had basically become bipartisan, differing on tactics rather than strategy). They blamed China for American deindustrialization and the ensuing job loss; Trump doesn't win the Rust Belt without it. The actual consequences of tariffs and trade wars, well...
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Certainly. But it makes the data impossible to compare to more developed countries imo if we're talking about the difference between a "working woman" and a "housewife". What it means to be employed is too different, and many of the things we would still consider "jobs" are recorded as informal sector.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I was there just before the war. It was extraordinary the extent to which the population were psychologically prepared for war. I've never seen anything like it even in other generally bellicose regions. There were - I don't even want to call it war propaganda, because that makes it seem inauthentic, it was grassroots as much as official and the official stuff was clearly coming from all levels of officialdom - symbolic declarations of war-readiness everywhere. Of course, a lot of those guys I saw who seemed gung-ho ended up fleeing the country, but I bet a lot of them are dead in a ditch somewhere by now. And the really important thing, as you point out, is that it imparts a level of seriousness to the military and civilian bureaucracies that is rarely seen otherwise.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
It's an unexpected case of the book being better than the movie, because when that movie is fucking Stalker that's a serious accolade.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Or, worse, Birmingham.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Because if you don't work you starve. But the real story is further down the page - with very few exceptions (notably South Africa and Namibia), women in SSA are almost entirely employed in the informal sector. Many countries it's 98 or 99%. Basically, cottage industries, little hustles in the village, the gigs one has to take to survive, are counted as work, but they don't look much like what we would consider a "job", more like what our ancestors did before the modern single-earner family. I'm also fairly suspicious of their data quality in Africa for the Female Employment Rate map, some countries have weird spikes and troughs in overall female employment of the size that could only be methodology changes or war-related (what's going on in Niger?), and many have no recent data.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I have a couple Roman coins. Should get more, they'd be a nice way to label my collection of pebbles from historic sites.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
It was well-appreciated at the time that the written works of philosophers in general and Aristotle in particular were their exoteric arguments, not the full doctrine. Both Plutarch and Gellius describe an incident where Alexander reproached Aristotle for writing books, to which he responded:
Aristotle to King Alexander, prosperity. You have written me about the acroatic discourses, thinking that they should be guarded in secrecy. Know, then, that they have been both published and not published. For they are intelligible only to those who have heard us.
I did exaggerate a bit, in that Aristotle probably also wrote some more popular, dumbed-down works which have since been lost. But the Nichomachean Ethics is not a 'treatise' in the modern sense, where an author unambiguously states the fullness of their argument. I don't believe the Greeks thought you could teach anyone that way (see the Meno, where Socrates teaches Meno about knowledge and virtue by step-by-step argument. Meno agrees, and then goes on to betray the Ten Thousand to the Persians). Paradoxically, in leaving Western philosophy and moving to these religious texts, you may have found the way to read that philosophy.
It's slightly different, of course. I'd tentatively say that the difference is that religious figures tend to believe they have a great truth, but one that is hard to get through to people who are less intelligent or temperate. Philosophers believed they had a great truth, and a truth that conferred great power, which as a result must be hidden from people who will half-grasp and misuse it, or who are smart enough to understand some but will fear and hate it. As such, their tactics of concealment and revealing differ.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Fuentes does this on a regular basis (as other posters pointed out, he did it in 2024, he's also done it several times since then). Each time, people talk about it like it's a new event, and some guys who don't follow him closely (good for you) hear it and think it's his first time. The guy is a very savvy self-promoter, and he's in a market niche where he can only disavow Trump, because if he supports Trump he becomes just another player in the MAGA influencer ecosystem instead of a big fish in a small but growing pond.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I'm not sure. It's more like that's a Schrodinger event - will Americans bay for blood, or will half be screeching for Trump's blood and half posting boomer memes about demanding blood in order to get engagement?
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
This is, iirc, Moldbug's definition, though naturally it takes him a couple paragraphs rather than a pithy sentence. I also liked Nick Land's: "Fascism is a late-stage leftist mutation made toxic by its comparative practicality."
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Presumably something can be bad without being fascist, then? Communist countries are also known for putting minorities in camps, after all.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Worth remembering that the Nichomachean Ethics is probably Aristotle's equivalent of boiling his philosophy down for 70 IQ plebs, maybe 100 IQ. Philosophers have esoteric doctrines just as much as prophets.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
That's because, iirc, he had other sockpuppets for other topics.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Having a single glass of hard liquor at the end of the day was very normal for men of a certain age. You could set your watch by my grandfather's evening whiskey, and he drank one every evening until he couldn't stand up to get it, same with my best mate's grandpa. Vodka is unusual, though. It seems like something that's basically disappeared in younger generations, particularly in America - US drinking culture in general has much more of a binary between "I'm not drinking" and "I'm getting drunk", which I think comes from the high drinking age and reliance on cars. I'd put a "drinking problem" as a matter of escalation: if left to him/herself, is someone going over time from one, to two, to three...
Turns out we were all Iranian/Israeli bots, our uptime not so good lately.
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