Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
28m ago
...I hope you're not claiming to get that view from actual Straussians. The closest thing there is to a (West Coast) Straussian perspective on the current state of Congress is that the Constitution intends for the legislature to be a dynamic, powerful branch which acts to shape the law as necessary. The Senate is a participant in that process, but a participant in an actual working process. Congress today is a castrati choir because of the Leviathan you mentioned, but Congress also willingly abdicated their power to Leviathan in order to keep their chairs comfy and spend more time fundraising.
Then, I'd like to see a hard RETVRN to Federalism that places states as the primary "actors." California can experiment with its polyamory socialist redistributionism while West Virginia fucks around with legalizing machine guns.
From your lips to Lady Columbia's ears.
Bartender_Venator
9hr ago
I do think the word had a different valence in the 19th Century, more neutral - in part because of its entirely negative use by socialists. Think of the the way the word is used for the exploitation of mineral deposits, for instance (that is to say, "exploitation" had the connotation of treating people as resources, still mildly negative but not as inflammatory as today). For what it's worth, the robot agrees - but I may be wrong, this is just the vibe I get from old books. At the same time, Marx was very much a pamphleteer as well as economist, so I think it's partly both.
Bartender_Venator
9hr ago
My sympathy is strictly with the textualist Marxists who also find this annoying when the kids around them are doing it. They do exist and I appreciate their grumpiness.
Bartender_Venator
11hr ago
Because if you are, then you should know that preserving the original sentence structure is flat out impossible in many cases because languages have different grammars. What is correct structure in language A can be very much not correct in language B.
I think I've been unclear there. What I mean to say is that if a book has complex and layered sentence structure, that should be reflected in the translation, and likewise if it has clear prose with short sentences. Translation is not a case of going word for word. For instance, if you are translating a single-sentence modernist novel, your translation should if at all possible be a single sentence in the other language. It's an art that trades off preserving word-for-word accuracy, semantics, flow, rhythm, and structural considerations. I've read a couple works in multiple translations, and you can see how the tradeoffs work and which translators do it better.
I did see your examples, and I'm sorry to say that Example 3 is just worse prose (to be fair, Example 2, the Finnish translation, is execrable, I assume because that sentence structure is impossible in Finnish?). It's easier for an inattentive or less experienced reader to follow, because it breaks up the sentence with an extra verb and a reminder of the subject, but it kills the rhythm and unbalances the structure. Try reading the original and the edit out loud - notice how, for instance, the original is instantly dramatic, with the little break between "Woodhouse" and "handsome" making you read "handsome, clever, and rich" with energy, notice how the emphases on "house" and "handsome" both play on each other and break natural iambic rhythm in a way that makes "handsome" bounce off the tongue, and that runs all the way to the next strong syllable of "COMfortable". Meanwhile Example 3 reads comparatively flat, just conveying information, more like a movie narrator or a story you could read out in a classroom.
Seriously, what is it with these condescending personal attacks? Do you truly believe that anyone who disagrees with you can only do so because they are somehow inferior?
It's fine for the various forms of art appreciation to be skills you have to learn and develop - and, as you point out, only a small fraction of native speakers ever develop them. As an example, I am a complete philistine when it comes to appreciating music (but I also don't insist to my Wagner-loving friends that he's got too many notes and they're just gatekeeping). I suppose I could couch it in more padding and compliments and so on, but this is the Autism Forum. I told you how it is, and gave you my advice, which is to use authors who bridge the gap in prose style between the modernists and the Victorians as a way to develop those skills.
To a more general point, I think a lot of people have skills they don't think of as "skills" but as innate things which are reflections of their intelligence, self-worth, whatever. I've made this point a lot in the various Wellness Wednesday discussions of socializing, making friends, dating, etc. that those things are skills you have to learn and practice consciously, and doing that is the difference between getting what you want socially and becoming an ngmi shut-in. People are more receptive to that advice about social skills here, because, again, this is the Autism Forum, but it's also true of reading and writing prose. Such is life.
Bartender_Venator
13hr ago
Calvin Westra's Moth Girl. I, uh, didn't think anyone would ever write a good novel told almost entirely through text/internet messages, and I think I was wrong. Also interesting to see the book take themes and tricks from his previous novellas and expand them. The man's a maestro and I expect great things in future.
Bartender_Venator
13hr ago
However translating to a foreign language - which throws the sentence structure to wind and streamlines it significantly
Then that is a bad translation. If a book has complex and difficult sentence structure in the original, it should be preserved in translation (and some translations, like Ottilie Mulzet's translations from Hungarian, imo qualify as great works in themselves). Of course, good writing, ideally, has sentences which are complex but not difficult, sentences which flow, which pull you along in a clear semantic progress from concept to concept. Reading these sentences is a skill, one which modern readers have to develop, but that's fine, it's part of being a good reader. You may be taking too much of a jump at once - consider taking a look at Conrad or some other turn-of-the-century author, who can act as a bridge into the Victorians. Personally, I read very few Victorian novels, too stodgy for me, but still try to keep sharp on it to read Victorian poetry, history, and philosophy.
With respect to archaic terms, that's understandably frustrating to non-native speakers, but also part of the game. There are very few cases where you can seamlessly replace a word without some semantic or rhythmic difference. Where I do share your frustration is with the ebook format. Footnotes are very easy, and often necessary, on a physical book (e.g. there is simply no way to do without them for a Classical text), but a huge pain in the ass on e-readers.
Bartender_Venator
13hr ago
This is one of many cases where Marxist Language and ordinary language hit friction. "Exploitation", in Marx, is a very precise concept that is supposed to be a technical term, different from ordinary use (iirc, the employer's capture of surplus-value, as in asdasd's examples). Of course, in practice, it becomes a case of using the scope of the technical term with the moral connotations of its ordinary use. I sympathize with the ornery back-to-the-text Marxists who also find this frustrating, but it's an inherently frustrating thing about arguing Marxist theory and the majority of "Marxists" seem to enjoy the motte-and-bailey games it enables. Honestly, I think Marx did, too, there's always a tension in his work between the serious economist and the firebrand pamphleteer.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Seconding Erbil, once things have calmed down. Also get out to the countryside while you're there, many historical sites.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
And while the University of Chicago is Ivy-tier academically, and covered with physical ivy, it is not an Ivy League university - that's purely restricted to the Northeastern US.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
If a motivated administration could actually take down corrupt urban political machines, the deportations thing would be a footnote afterwards. But at that point you might as well ask for a new flag.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Ah, yeah, I've posted before about my travails in college diagramming out Kant's arguments for a required formal logic class. Impressive to do at 17, or really at any age where you're not being forced to do so. But it was always really the transcendentals and related stuff that interested me in Kant, his morality is far too autismal.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
maybe I'd try reading Heidegger's Simulacrum and Simulation
I would also love to read that book! Maybe AI can write it someday...
Assuming you mean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, it's a great book, but it's also very theoretical and very much of its time, you're not going to get actionable insights from it. What I would recommend, from a Heideggerian perspective, is Matthew Crawford's book The World Beyond Your Head - Crawford is definitely the best writer on this stuff who makes the philosophy accessible, concrete, and practical. Then, if you want to connect that to more academic philosophy, check out Albert Borgmann's Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, which is an attempt to use Heidegger's theory of technology to interpret the situation of modern life.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
Turns out we were all Iranian/Israeli bots, our uptime not so good lately.
Bartender_Venator
7d 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
7d 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
8d 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.
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
8d ago
Which translation of The Prince is this? I want to know so I can [fedpost] the translator.
Bartender_Venator
8d 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
8d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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.
Airport security basically doesn't exist as an inconvenience any more if you are willing to pass a background check and pay some money. The background check is what actually replaces the security, the money is why they keep the shitty lines for the plebs.
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