Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Coffee_enjoyer has a rather simplistic view of this stuff, but yours is pure denial. Epic poetry was born as a means of exploring and understanding violence, not moralizing about it (see, for instance, Odysseus's slaughter of the suitors). Grand architecture was born as a means for the projection of power and the defense of strongholds, space travel as a complement to/substitute for nuclear war. The veneer you mention isn't a thin one. In fact, it's the thick crust built over those instincts that makes civilizations great, but the desires to take and to destroy, even the desire for sadistic violence - and, above all, the need to get better at those - are some of the core drivers of civilization. It's only with fairly advanced civilization we even get the concept that this violence could be bad in itself, instead of merely situationally unacceptable (you can rape the Sabines, but you can't rape Lucretia).
Now, there are many ways to deal with it, like the introjection of sadism Nietzsche mentions as the root of guilt cultures, or the sublimation of male energies into productive effort that Freud prefers, but it's not some mere chimp impulse we should beat down in boys. Our schools/phones produce enough castrati as is. Let 'em take it to sports, the arts, the boardroom - when necessary, the military - and remind the world that homo sapiens is the apex predator even when he isn't killing.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Even in Christian Europe it was only in the Middle Ages with the rise of chivalric ideals that "cunning" ceased to be considered one of the manly virtues appropriate for a leader. Robert Guiscard is the last one I can remember to really make it his brand (many Crusaders, merchants, etc. after that, including Guiscard's descendants, but they're treated as much more morally grey). While the chivalric virtues that superseded "trick your enemies and take their gold" can be gotten out of Christianity, they were built into the Church as part of a semi-secular project to build centralized power structures and make the military aristocracy somewhat more controllable.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
goose_chasing_man.jpg
"What was the epic poetry about?"
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Very simply reducible to "I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger."
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
An effortpost on all of this would be interesting to write, but I don't know if I want to be known as the guy who writes about Japanese prostitution.
My understanding is that 90%+ of this world is not open to foreigners, and even less if you don't speak Japanese, so I would think you could do so without undue suspicion.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
These people seem beyond help, but Matthew Gasda's The Sleepers could be a fun cat to throw among the pigeons. It leads with the "queer romance" and only gets subversive later.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Yeah Seiko has skyrocketed. As someone who likes a good-looking watch but couldn't care less about thousand-dollar mechanisms, it's unfortunate (although looking for alternatives gave me a much better sense of how OpenAI is planning to monetize shopping recommendations).
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
What kinds of books?
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I think this is an egregious misreading of Nietzsche, which was wrong when Bertrand Russell argued it and wrong when religious "anti-Nietzscheans" do it - but the best cure to that is probably to keep on with Junger, "Nietzsche's only true student".
Bartender_Venator
11d ago
I don't think that's even what libs feel, they just see Bill Clinton as yesterday's guy, doesn't matter to the coalition anymore.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
So the thing is, the question of consciousness is fundamentally prior to everything we discover through consciousness in the physical world. In Kant, for instance, the question is something like "what are the conditions of possibility for us to experience the the world, with minimal assumptions about the world", whereas physicalists (your choice of term, not sure about the scare quotes, it's a fundamentally metaphysical theory and has to hold up on the level of metaphysics) just make an absolute shitload of assumptions about the mind because, you know, if you give someone a brain injury it does weird but consistent things to them. As for "dualism", it is and has always been intended to be a dirty word, but it also presupposes a lot of assumptions you can just discard by stepping outside of the frame.
Why do you find parsimony dispositive except as a heuristic? It seems to me that parsimony is valuable in making snap decisions, but the reality is that the world is complex. If you're a general making decisions on troop deployment with parsimony as your high heuristic, you're going to lose the battle. Likewise, if you're a scientist using parsimony as your key criterion, you'll get stuck in a local maximum of whatever your field of study is. The world is big and tangled and not all that amenable to parsimony, as useful as it is as an anti-bullshit heuristic.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
Man, I appreciate the thought, but you can't just say "given all the important parts of my argument as axioms, here are some consequences" and make big claims based off that. I could go into some big thing explaining Kant and phenomenology and philosophy of science and so on but it's late and I'm cooking and it won't help you.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
Casual everyday clothes are more attractive (at least in this, uh, particular context) than Dressing Up.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
To quote one of my previous posts:
there is an immense tradition of theory out there, and if you don't put in the years or decades required to study it you will at best be making new mistakes, but more likely making ones decades or centuries old. Plenty of great philosophers have said "everybody before me was wrong"; none of them arrived at that conclusion without exhaustive study of the tradition (yes, even Wittgenstein).
A lot of rationalist/scientist/new atheist/whatever guys want to hack philosophy without engaging with the tradition, and unfortunately it just doesn't work. There's a way of thinking that, if you went back to meet Isaac Newton with a modern physics textbook and explained it to him, he would agree that actually, yeah, we've figured almost all of his questions out, great that we're moving on. This is not the case with philosophy. Philosophy is the study of the eternal questions, the ones which are so difficult and complex that they couldn't be spun off into a science. In fact, that's basically the history of "philosophy" as a term - it was once the study of everything, then natural philosophy slowly became the hard sciences, other parts of philosophy became the soft sciences (for better and for worse), and philosophy remains as the questions which are too big or too thorny for the scientific mindset to tackle. Analytic philosophy has in part been an attempt to chunk off more problems into a domain of scientific assessment, but hasn't gone too well, and the eternal questions remain eternal. Also, beautiful.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
The Hakka are the obvious analogy, even within China.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
Red Mars is a pretty decent book,
The Road is a great, great read and deserves your time. Also very readable, not some ponderous tome that may Improve you. Read No Country For Old Men if you "enjoy" it.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
Eh, physicalism probably accounts for some decent % of philosophy if you account it purely in terms of number of papers produced. But in terms of the possibility space of philosophy, assuming you've solved every question you've raised downstream of physicalism, you've solved maybe 1%.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
The economy somehow not crashing, some deflationary effects happening, and interest rates booming, would save the bacon of the tech right/abundance liberals - i.e. the only people seriously interested in making building housing a political issue. It's only a first step to making housing more affordable, but it's an important one, when you consider the political factions likely to benefit from an economic crash.
Looks like they got him, it was the same guy, and he's a 48-year-old Portuguese Brown student. Some kind of academic beef with both his institution and the professor in question? We'll see. Edit: he was a physics grad student 22 years ago who withdrew early from the program. An odd one, but that connects the two shootings.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
This is one of those things that is a legal red line, but is obviously such a sensible thing to do (unlike, say, having Yemeni-American citizens who run off and become jihadists) that nobody really cared except leftists. There was quite a bit of leftist criticism at the time, I recall, although the antiwar left was already marginalized and so didn't make it into prestige institutions. Now that "line" mostly matters insofar as it points out liberal hypocrisy when they claim Trump crossing much lesser ones is completely unprecedented.
GWOT probably did more to completely normalize line-crossing as a matter of government procedure than anything else - but that's how it works, if it's a matter of government procedure, then by definition it isn't crossing a line.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
If your background is math/econ you could take a look at government jobs related to your blue-collar profession, if there are any.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
My take is that those who don't have to spend 90-hour weeks as a junior analyst if they wish to get their bonus don't really have much right to complain about the financial sector.
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
We are not going to see mass unemployment, even if a few sectors end up being impacted. Smaller organizations are more nimble and able to react to changes while having similar access to AI as large corporations, this benefits small players. AI deflationary as the cost of production go down. AI in ecommerce is making the field even more cut throat driving prices down. Low inflation will cause low interest rates and high asset price inflation. The economy is going to have wind in its back over the next decade as productivity rises. Government is going to be worse at utilizing AI than the private sector leading to an increasing view of the government as incompetent and falling behind.
From your lips to God's ears...
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
I have met some older Red Tribe Republicans who see Obama as having crossed various lines with whatever scandals were prominent for the Tea Party, and some young online Republicans are now taking minor cracks at Obama revisionism. For the most part, the attitude I see in online and urban Republican circles towards Obama is that he was a bad president, but basically a figurehead for a bipartisan process of frog-boiling America that goes back well before him, which accelerated under him, but without major qualitative shifts or line-stepping during his presidency (partly because the architects of this process also draw all the lines).
I think you underestimate the myopia of male horniness here.
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