@BurdensomeCount's banner p

BurdensomeCount

Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...

6 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 05 16:37:04 UTC

The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.


				

User ID: 628

BurdensomeCount

Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...

6 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 16:37:04 UTC

					

The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.


					

User ID: 628

I second the recommendation to study rhetoric, changed my life for the better and won me a bunch of prizes back in the day.

Oh come on, I can't believe this, every time I make a top level post we get people going "5 secret and esoteric knowledge reasons why BC is actually trolling even when he says he's sincere" that there's no good response to other than going "no" because with text anyone can make up anything to support their viewpoint and make it sound plausible (see your average literary analysis magazine or Scott's Recent Anti-Christ lecture).

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. - Cardinal Richelieu

You are far more likely to meet high quality women in a biology lab

Endorsed. Quant finance is sub 10% women and even the women we do have are very much not "tradwife" types.

I feel like one of those famous artists who puts certain elements in his painting because they look good to him there full stop only for art critics 100 years later to write essays on how "the contrast between the bright cerulean blue of the sky and the complementary colour muted orange of the Autumn hilltop is a very clever trick employed by the artist to enhance the strikingness of the image for the viewers eye" etc. etc. going out to 20 pages of "analysis" when such a thought had never even crossed the artist's mind in the first place.

I'm just giving my genuine honest views but some people here choose to interpret that as me playing 6D chess with time travel...

Some people here, including yourself, seem to have developed the view that I'm some sort of evil genius who has nothing better to do than spend my free time honing the art of the bait and trying those skills out on the people here like some sort of lab experiment. The truth is a lot more mundane (as life often is): everything I say is certified 100% organic and genuine with no artificial preservatives or colouring.

Trust me, I'm not a leftoid baiting. You'll notice the conspicuous absence of any mentions of Rosalind Franklin in my post, which would be the number 1 point anybody of a left wing persuasion would attempt to make here.

Instead I fully and freely acknowledge that Rosalind Franklin has been massively overrated, the narrative about how Watson and Crick somehow "stole" her work (never mind the fact that it's very unlikely she would even understand the implications of the images she produced, it's very non trivial to go from this to realizing it implies DNA has a double helix structure) is completely discredited and her contributions were nowhere near those of the people who actually got the Nobel prize.

  • -12

You think "sunlight exposure is the reason behind 'Latin lovers'" is defensible under any reasonable interpretation? Indians must be drowning in pussy where ever they go if that's true.

  • -21

RIP James Watson

And so we lose one of the 20th Century pioneers of DNA research. He made it to a nice and comfortable 97 so at least he got to live a full life. His contributions were undeniable but we are all aware of what happened to him in his later years when his awards and honours got stripped because he talked to liberally about HBD. Back then I interpreted all this as yet another example of "Woke gone mad" left wingers who couldn't attack the argument so decided the best shot was to attack the man himself.

Other than the HBD stuff I thought he was a perfectly normal retired scientist, a bit wacky maybe but that's almost obligatory if you have a Nobel prize.

However I have very recently (in the last hour after news of his passing broke) learned that there's more to the sorts of things that Watson said than merely "respectable" HBD. For example there's this quote:

“Most men in bio are short because they can’t get women, but because you’re tall I know you’re genuinely interested in bio”

and this:

“Women at Oxford and Cambridge are better than Harvard and Yale because they know their job is to look pretty and get a rich husband”

and this:

“There is a biochemical link between exposure to sunlight and sexual urges.. that’s why you have Latin lovers”

and then there's this:

“Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them”

This new knowledge has made me reevaluate my views on him. Now my new provisional views on him are that he clusters with Brian Josephson: academically brilliant but kooky in the head:

In the early 1970s, Josephson took up Transcendental Meditation and turned his attention to issues outside the boundaries of mainstream science. He set up the Mind–Matter Unification Project at Cavendish to explore the idea of intelligence in nature, the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness, and the synthesis of science and Eastern mysticism, broadly known as quantum mysticism.[6] He has expressed support for topics such as parapsychology, water memory and cold fusion, which has made him a focus of criticism from fellow scientists

except that Watson's views were even more corrosive to modern civil society than Brian's. The more you know, as they say...

  • -25

Fair point. I hadn't been paying much attention to the race so all I knew about him was that he was the Republican candidate who wore his red beret everywhere which is suspect but not that crazy, however looking at his Wiki page I see he's been arrested 75+ times...

President Schwarzenegger would have been so so cool.

Whisper it but I'm actually a fan of Mamdani. Not of his policies, but it's not like the Trump faction has any better policies so it's a wash on that front but Mamdani wins hands down on everything else. Speaking from an ocean away I hope he gives the right a taste of their own medicine.

Truly the Dramatard candidate of choice...

WE'RE PROBABLY GONNA FIND OUT.

Time for the modern version of Lysistrata? Will the men fare any better this time around?

Phyllis Schlafly

Sounds like a venereal disease...

Officially it wasn't a legislative body but practically it had significant influence on the Praetors and the popular assemblies to the point that their edicts were almost always followed by the magistrates.

and the republic was destroyed by a political yo-yo driven by the lack of checks and balances

And what do you think is happening now in the modern US given the lack of checks and balances placed on the executive by either the legislative or the judiciary?

Anyone reminded of the Senate during the late Republic?

I think self@firstnamelastname.com is a very clever ingroup signal that one has at least decent tech skills.

I would agree, provided the other animals accepted they were inferior to the Little Red Hen and accepted their place as lesser beings relative to her.

Under the Romans during the time of the republic the paterfamilias (oldest male head of the household) had full powers of life and death over his progeny, even when they were adults and had been married off, see how during the Catilinarian conspiracy a conspirator was killed with no trial whatsoever just on the command of his paterfamilias.

That too is part of "European Culture" as you say but it's a good thing we have decided as a society that parents killing their children is abhorrent and to be made illegal (this power of life and death was de facto outlawed during the early stages of the Empire, the practice of exposing newborns still continued despite being made illegal but that's a different thing than killing a 20 year old), a very similar argument can be made with Elder care when the elders are those who took and took from society back when they were young without contributing enough and now want the younger generations to cough up more so they can go to the grave living the high life with no regard for what happens for society when they are six feet under.

If you have a pension paying out $127k a year the capital value of that pension even assuming a 5% rate is over 2 million dollars (as a perpetuity, in reality people die so the true value will be less, but still very likely over 7 figures).

aggressive mimicry

Honestly I am in awe at your ability to bring the Jews into every little topic, no matter how distant they may seem. Chapeau...

You think old people extracting wealth through government handouts is bad in the US? Wait till you come to the UK, the whole country is set up as a gerontocracy designed to protect the income and assets of the old over the needs of the young.

And yet I look at my actual pay stub and see that ~24% of that will never even touch my account due to Federal Taxes

If only I could get just 24% of my hard earned money taken from me instead of 47% (marginal).

As a Muslim who knows a thing or two about historical battles I personally think Saladin is massively overrated, he really was too much of a pussy at times when striking at the infidel was the correct choice. Now Khalid ibn al-Walid though, there you have a true conqueror who deserved the epithet of "Sword of Allah".

Europe should just confiscate the Russian assets it has had frozen over the last few years and use them to arm Ukraine. Those add up to more than a hundred billion.

Restarting my read of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. For the age it's a surprisingly pleasant and easy read.

All this argument over who is an alt of whom and all I can do is shake my head. As all readers know: with BurdensomeCount™ there's none of this worry, all of my writing is provided solely under the BurdensomeCount™ name which over time has become its own seal of quality.

Next time you need incisive, deep, free-thinking insight, remember to choose BurdensomeCount™.