Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
Many of those interests know they would be much happier and richer if they could align with the US and get the oil flowing. That's what the deal Maduro was trying to make was about. Hopefully we get the right general taking charge.
Bartender_Venator
1hr ago
Filter bubbles are real. You're very happy to skim a For You feed and only see what you want to see, which is that, surprise surprise, Outgroup is a blob of stupidity. I've curated my spaces for quality - which is actually infinitely easier to do on the right. It would be gauche to boast about my friends, but as far as I can tell, the people making the argument that there are no smart people on the right (which, by the way, is something you have the burden of proof on) just don't get invited to good parties. Of course, there are stupid people in the coalition, and some are even as embarrassing as the ones on the left, but that's all political coalitions larger than a groupchat, you can live with reality or you can get into little huffs about it.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
"Don't believe your lying eyes"
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
To answer the question "why is it blowing up now?": as Hanania has noted on a number of occasions, conservatives by and large don't read. Neutral tone (or even hostile) print journalism isn't going to catch their attention the way video is, even (especially) if the latter is sloppy.
I like that people are considering a viable take, given that the last Conservatives Are Mad Current Thing before this one revolved around a highbrow-toned article in Compact Magazine. Goldfish seem to have better memories than a lot of posters.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Good point, but I'd file this under "the men that are willing to commit are undesirable", as I assume the great majority of the men giving away all that unwanted sexual attention would be willing to commit.
I think you underestimate the myopia of male horniness here.
Bartender_Venator
3d 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
3d 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
3d ago
goose_chasing_man.jpg
"What was the epic poetry about?"
Bartender_Venator
3d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d ago
What kinds of books?
Bartender_Venator
7d 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
14d 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
14d 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
14d 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
14d ago
Casual everyday clothes are more attractive (at least in this, uh, particular context) than Dressing Up.
Bartender_Venator
14d 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
14d ago
The Hakka are the obvious analogy, even within China.
Bartender_Venator
14d 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
14d 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
14d 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.
I agree in theory, but the issue is not with information asymmetries, really - that's just how it's sold as 'fairness' to the public. Insider trading is bad because it radically distorts incentives for insiders and encourages all kinds of violations of fiduciary duty.
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