This is often raised as a point (alongside the Herodotus quote that is used to back it up for evidence) but the reality is far more interesting - there doesn't seem to be compelling evidence for the existence of PTSD in the ancient and even medieval periods. PTSD is real, but it is not a simple correlation between experiencing death/danger -> PTSD, which raises some really interesting points about the nature of human trauma and experience that might tie into your argument.
When listening to Daniele Bolelli's podcast on conquest of Mexico by Cortez, he mentioned first hand description of PTSD by conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who wrote about it in his memoirs Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. Here is the relevant excerpt from page 115 of second volume:
The reader will remember above that I stated how we could see the Mexicans sacrificing our unfortunate countrymen; how they ripped open their breasts, tore out their palpitating hearts, and offered them to their abominable idols. This sight made a horrible impression on my mind, yet no one must imagine that I was wanting either in courage or determination; on the contrary, I fearlessly exposed myself in every engagement to the greatest dangers, for I felt that I had courage. It was my ambition at that time to pass for a good soldier, and I certainly bore the reputation of being one; and what any of our men ventured, I ventured also, as every one who was present can testify; yet I must confess that I felt terribly agitated in spirit when I each day saw some of my companions being put to death in the dreadful manner above mentioned, and I was seized with terror at the thought that I might have to share a similar fate! Indeed the Mexicans had on two different occasions laid hold of me, and it was only through the great mercy of God that I escaped from their grasp.
I could no longer divest myself of the thoughts of ending my life in this shocking manner, and each time, before we made an attack upon the enemy, a cold shudder ran through my body, and I felt oppressed by excessive melancholy. It was then I fell upon my knees, and commended myself to the protection of God and the blessed Virgin; and from my prayers I rushed straightway into the battle, and all fear instantly vanished. This feeling appeared the more unaccountable to me, since I had encountered so many perils at sea, fought so many sanguinary battles in the open field, been present on so many dangerous marches through forests and mountains, stormed and defended so many towns; for there were very few great battles fought by our troops in New Spain in which I was not present. In these perils of various natures I never felt the fear I did subsequent to that time when the Mexicans captured sixty-two of our men, and we were compelled to see them thus slaughtered one by one, without being able to render them assistance. I leave those cavaliers to judge who are acquainted with war, and know from experience what dangers a man is exposed to in battle, whether it was want of courage which raised this feeling in me. Certain it is that I each day pictured to myself the whole extent of the danger into which I was obliged to plunge myself; nevertheless, I fought with my accustomed bravery, and all sensation of fear fled from me as soon as I espied the enemy.
Lastly, I must acquaint the reader that the Mexicans never killed our men in battle if they could possibly avoid it, but merely wounded them, so far as to render them incapable of defending themselves, in order that they might take as many of them alive as possible, to have the satisfaction of sacrificing them to their warrior-god Huitzilopochtli, after they had amused themselves by making them dance before him, adorned with feathers.
There definitely are more PTSD-like descriptions of especially brutal fights from history, especially from prolonged fightings. I think it is related to continuous stress such as in trenches of WW1 moreso than just one battle or even series of battles. For instance Jan Sobieski describes sense of hyper-vigilance of people he liberated from Turks in Vienna, who were still on the verge of panic even after the Turks were defeated.
georgioz
3d ago
If liquid prediction markets enable insider trading and other undesirable defect actions, then their purpose becomes insider trading and other undesirable defect actions.
Defect from what? Prediction markets are about accuracy and truth, insider trading increases accuracy. It may be "defect" action when it comes to some NDAs or some sense of fairness - but again these are orthogonal to the purpose of prediction market which is accuracy of prediction.
Also the whole defect thing is stupid in my eyes. For instance apparently some analyst companies employ fleet of drones and satellites to monitor parking lots in front of Walmart to predict their sales numbers. Not every individual investor has access to these satellites. These analysts waste money and time to "outcompete" and scalp average trader Joes in this useless information gathering competition. What if I purchase data from ramps regarding number of cars from somebody inside the company or even better, purchase camera footage and employ AI algorithm to calculate how full are the carts thus showing the middle finger to drone/satellite losers. It is the same stupid information game. What is the defection here?
georgioz
4d ago
What's relevant is whether these policies are good here, or not. Even if Gino were tots correct about selective prosecution and scapegoating and other bad actors, ultimately, that'd just be an argument in favor of Harvard (or, imo, academia) needing to clean out the rest of the stables.
Yeah, the same Ivy league academia that employed literal weather underground terrorists as professors. This is borderline naive, especially as you say that the overall structure of investigation and punishment is as opaque and arbitrary as it gets. Given the current corrupt structure of Academia I think it more likely than not that this prosecution is going to make things even worse.
The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?
I can have such a defense going for it from two angles. First one is selective punishment in corrupt organizations which Harvard arguably is with recent scandals. Everybody is fraudster and everybody knows it. In that sense I was not punished for a fraud itself, but for getting caught or even worse, I was eliminated by internal politicking. It is similar thing to when let's say Xi Jinping or Putin runs another round of anticorruption crusade that for some reason only catches people who fell from grace of existing power structures. This is particularly effective in utterly corrupt organizations, where you have to do some gang-like initiation in order to get there in the first place. Once you are inside, you are never going to betray or you will be exposed and thrown aside.
Another angle is on arbitrariness of merit. Why should it be academic results or IQ tests instead of let's say some form of holmgang, where merit is shown in duel of martial prowess? Does excel pencil pusher in Harvard have more merit than mother of 10 or a small business owner with net worth of $10 million? You say that:
The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.
This is not the whole truth, the missing part is that other people value different things. Some people see "equitable racial diversity" as value to be maximized and thus DEI policy is merit based policy in that sense. Bill Ackman maybe values people who are against Hamas or maybe he really is stickler for due process and he sympathizes as he went through something similar. It is just that you have different value and definition of merit.
I am not that sure. Prediction markets were proposed specifically as an information gathering tool. In that sense insider trading should be incentivized, as benefits of increased accuracy are more important than some sense of fairness. He mentions potential negative impact of lower incentives for traders to engage, but in the linked article Scott uses the example of very limited anti-insider trading rules for commodity markets - and yet those work just fine.
The word 'warrior' to refer to a member of the armed forces of a democratic state is, as kids say these days, Problematic
Agreed, which kind of makes the point. You may aspire to be let's say a warrior of Christ despite degenerate "epicurean liberal" consensus. I think it captures the ethos of masculinity - to be disagreeable toward degenerate ideas despite it being unpopular to an extent, where you are willing to be martyred for it. It does not mean that you will commit violent acts of terrorism of course, but some bravery and confidence in righteousness of your worldview is commendable. You can maybe start with unabashedly saying blessings before eating your lunch in Google canteen. Very warrior like behavior.
georgioz
25d ago
Still - it's painful that we'll never know what we could have done if we were born into a different reality.
I thought about this phrase a lot, and in the end, this is yet another poisonous secular idea seeped in the water you drink. In Christianity there is no such a thing like being born as some other person - as other gender, in other time or other place. You were created as a unique soul by God and it is what it is. It reminds me of the conversation penned by Tolkien where Frodo laments:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
If you don't like Tolien, then look at the Book of Job. In a strange sense Christians are more grounded in here and now, and secularists are more entangled in strange mysticism. Be it Rawlsian idea of how everybody is an immortal soul flying around the Earth waiting to be materialized, presupposing the moral structure from this mystical tought experiment. Or transhumanists raving about uploading their soul and making themselves immortal, or of course transgender activists who literally claim that their souls were materialized in wrong body. All of that is nonsense.
georgioz
25d ago
Capitalism as a system is defined economically by the investment profit motive, by taking investment capital and putting it to work to earn more capital, which will be invested again to earn more capital, and so on and so forth to eternity.
Absolutely unhelpful definition. A peasant under feudal lord can set aside and sell surplus of his harvest in order to purchase a cow or a new plough, which will bring him more profit next season. Stalin also invested into steel and concrete production in order to produce dams and other infrastructural investments.
Investment and profit are innate to social structure, they existed in all forms of government.
georgioz
26d ago
Yes, but they do not perform them in their land as marriages in Israel are officiated by religious authorities. A very ingenious way to solve the problem if you ask me.
The problem is that "liberalism" has decided that it needs to focus on promoting the masculine virtues in women through "Lean in" culture, physically badass women in popular entertainment etc.
This is actually a good point, although I think about it a little bit differently. There is only one set of virtues for both sexes - be it stoic virtues like wisdom, courage, justice and temperance or Christian heavenly virtues (the opposite of deadly sins) like humility, chastity, temperance, charity, kindness, patience and diligence.
Some of these virtues are gender coded, because they are more important for a given sex. For instance if large majority of women lost courage, it would be bad but manageable. But if most men lost their courage, it could be disastrous as they would fail in their role as protectors. The same let's say with kindness for women in their role of mothers and nurturers etc. But it does not mean that men should not be kind or that women should not be courageous.
What I actually think is that leftism completely warped the notion of virtues, and promotes sins instead. It literally promotes for mothers to kill their unborn babies, it promotes pride for gays, it promotes lust as a new norm and it promotes racial revenge and anger, it promotes stupidity as opposed to wisdom where women cannot be given any advise also called as mansplaining. The same goes for "boss babe" narrative - if she was a man, he would be seen as an unhinged petty tyrant, not as a brave man tempered by patience and wisdom worthy to be followed. So "epicurean liberalism" produces emasculated and emotional men as well as toxically masculine women.
In a sense it is inevitable result of leftist analysis of reducing everything to power struggle. If feminists view masculinity as strong and oppressive, while femininity was historically weak and unable to resist, they just want to flip the script, and thus they embody their warped sense of masculinity as source of power. I found this always as a weak point of many of the leftist narratives. For instance - if you are a black woman who believes that white people have privilege, does it not mean that from a pragmatic standpoint you should strive to marry a white husband, so your children can partake in power of whiteness, while black husband will only cause them more misery and adversity? It is self-defeating in that way.
It depends on what you mean by Capitalism. I heard Marxists excusing failure of Stalinists planned economy, because it was actually a state Capitalism and thus not true Socialism.
To me the word Capitalism is often used as anything opposing to fabled Socialism so that Socialism does not have to be defined, it is something like a unicorn. Funnily enough, it is a very postmodern way of looking at things - socialism and capitalism are Hegelian opposites and they need to be abolished in order to usher an era of communism. Which I think is a very unhelpful way of looking at things. It would be like adopting some heretical doctrine of Heaven on Earth (Communism) as some ultimate utopia, and then declaring everything else as Hell on Earth (Capitalism), until we come to finally immanentize the eschaton in some Gnostic way. Just a bunch of nonsense.
My opinion is that Jews are a sort of "Schrodinger's race" in modern American society. Sometimes they're a separate ethnic group, sometimes they're not.
This "schrodingerism" goes even deeper. At face value, Israel is absolutely an archetype of your cookie-cutter ethnonationalist state. Their declaration of independence from 1948 officially calls it as a Jewish state. It also gives a lot of authority to religions, for instance Israel does not recognize secular marriage, thus effectively banning any gay marriage- as no faith in Israel officiates such unions. And on the other hand you have your modern leftist progressives shilling for it anyways.
In a sense this is remarkable achievement of Jews and their version of nationalism - Zionism. Their early leaders ranged from your cookie-cutter 19h century progressives like Theodore Herzl, socialists like David Ben Gurion, as well as "fascists" - or ultranationalists if you will - like Menachim Begin, a proud member of Irgun and youth leader of Betar movement. And yet the latter two both served as prime ministers of Israel. Despite ideological differences, all of them were able to work together toward the national project of Israel: Herzl was an example of your educated international elite, making diplomatic deals with power brokers of his time. Ben Gurion was your charismatic labor leader organizing Jews all around the world. Not many of Jewish refugees and young settlers had any experience with agriculture and hard labor, and yet Ben Gurion motivated them toward creating Jewish working class in order to form a complete nation - as opposed to some sort of Oligarchy like South Africa, where elite Jews rule over native Arabs in some sort of apartheid - with his slogan of one more acre, one more goat. And of course Begin was your enforcer, willing to do the dirty work during wars and times of conflict.
As I said, the whole thing is remarkable example of modern ethnogenesis and state building, that puts all other romantic national awakenings in 19th century Europe to shame - including reviving liturgical Hebrew as an official modern language by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and of course carving patch of foreign land as their own. It would be as if some forgotten tribe of Romans in Romania and Greece created a modern Roman Republic somewhere south of Rome in Italy, using Latin as their official language.
As with many other things, there is a lot of admiration even when it comes to enemies of Zionism, Israel and Jews. They really achieved something unique, including ability to unite disparate ideologies that ultimately ended up benefiting their national cause. I'd say that people like Fuentes would salivate if they could create something like US version of Christian nationalism akin to Zionism.
georgioz
26d ago
Sure, you can put it into the general deindustrialization narrative where corporations outsource their work. But the difference is, that there is a danger even for domestic corporations. One huge canary in the coalmine is the current state of gaming industry, where large woke studios such as Ubisoft experienced similar decline in sales often attributed to "woke" influences. As a result we see a lot of foreign studios such as Chinese giant Tencent producing successful games replacing these domestic behemoths. One other example is Japanese studio Square Enix axing their western branches lately.
So my argument is that overall "get woke go broke" narrative pushed by executives and other managers can have rippling effects for general more conservative workforce let's say.
georgioz
26d ago
You might say "this won't affect you if you don't work in the liberal arts" but it does, because it then affects all culture everywhere. And yes, for a long time it was like we couldn't talk about it for fear of retribution. Hell, it's telling that all of his sources still want to stay anonymous, even when they've moved on to other industries. It must have been a huge effort to find any real data and sources for all this stuff.
I agree. One example is that as of 2025 Hollywood experienced the lowest grossing October since 1997. And that is in nominal dollar terms not counting for inflation. And even that is worsened by the phenomenon of runaway production, where a lot of movies are produced outside of LA and California and it is even worse for other productions such as TV shows. This is the result of years of bad movies, which has huge impacts for other professions - stuntmen, people constructing sets, technicians and thousands of other people completely outside of Culture War origin of the current malaise in Hollywood.
There was actually one part of the piece where he mentions it in passing:
So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoc and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance he had at a career with a single tweet.
“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-Ph.D, and—quite frankly—I’m also a white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together and I’m for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American historian.”
The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just laughable,” wrote The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have you seen the data on professorships?” “White males are 30 percent of the US population but nearly 40 percent of faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at GWU. “Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination.”
So maybe there is some space to hate Nikole Hannah-Joneses of this world, who adopt sneering and mocking attitude toward plight of straight white millennial men? It was probably the closest the author came to blaming somebody other than Boomer/Gen X executives implementing these DEI policies.
Apparently Josh Hawley wrote a book called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. According to AI, in this book Hawley extols more conservative path for men, rejecting "epicurean liberalism" and embracing masculine roles and archetypes such as builder, warrior, father etc. So I think it is a lament that liberals reject men and masculinity, and thus shove men toward more conservative path in order to succeed.
I wholeheartedly agree, although even this may be a different game. There is a strategy of clip farming, where you may look like a moron in a debate, but as long as you can produce couple of viral 20 second clips, you may have been successful in your mission when it comes to certain audience. Here it would be something like Fuentes admitting that he is a racist or whatever.
Like Fuentes said, Morgan is tabloid journalist. All he needs is to create controversy and produce some smears and he may be "successful" in this specific subgame despite losing the overall 2 hour debate. If it is a viable long-term strategy is questionable, but at least it worked for years when it comes to Fuentes alone.
georgioz
27d ago
I don't know exactly how Fuentes genuinely feels about blacks. From what I've seen of his speeches, it's something like "Blacks are mostly low-IQ animals and they need to be controlled, but some of them are okay." Which is racist by any reasonable definition. But he's still perturbing Morgan's assumptions by saying (a) no, I don't hate every single black person, and (b) black people can also recognize and be concerned about uncomfortable truths.
One way to put it is the difference between patriotism and chauvinism: one is expression of sympathy or love or other positive emotion toward your group, while the other is declaration of superiority. In that sense you just ascribe positive or even negative attributes to your identity which does not preclude doing the same for other groups. You may still like jazz, black basketball players etc. It is just a view from the standpoint of other culture.
From my meager experience with Fuentes during latest slew of interviews, this is what he preaches: Multiculturalism is over. Even the mild one such as "judge based on content of character and not based on your skin". Whites should stick together, foster positive relation toward their white identity and become a tribe. This will be especially important as whites will become minority majority. They do not have to be necessarily hostile to other groups, they can let's say be allies toward East Asians, especially if there is a common interest let's say when it comes to education reforms etc. But they should acknowledge that they are distinct group with their own history, culture, religion etc.
Paradoxically this is what Fuentes also says about other groups, especially blacks and Jews. They are Americans, but they also have their tribal/national identity which enables them to band together and promote these interests. Whites should do the same. In this sense I do understand why people adhering to liberal worldview such as James Lindsay call people like Fuentes as "woke right". Although it is interesting that they do not have the same label for other people such as Ben Shapiro, who is also on the right and who also has tribal identity which is sometimes in conflict with general liberal ethos.
georgioz
27d ago
I think this is the result of different strategies that Morgan and Fuentes had with this interview. Fuentes came there with his bloodsport debate style, which is about listening to your opponent and constructing arguments. Morgan came there with tabloid style gotcha questions, moralizing and shaming/guilting - complete with random segues and topic switching whenever he thinks that he got what he wanted.
It was also seen specifically with the part you mentioned, when Fuentes obviously sarcastically admitted that he is "Holocaust maximalist". Morgan did not listen to Fuentes in order to form his own counterargument, he jumped into a gotcha of we know how many Jews were slaughtered. It's at least 6 million. Uh, what's interesting to me is that you appear to now concede that. Which may be news to your regular viewers. So again, even if Morgan thought that Fuentes offered a concession, he immediately went on attack satisfied that he proved Fuentes as a liar for his viewers. It is a different style of discussion, not a debate.
In a sense it was a battle of styles with each side utilizing different tactics, it was almost like a parallel streams with little to no substantive engagement from any side.
I do not know what else should he do especially in the face of "school shooter" argument being such a tangent. Fuentes wanted to say that his argument of 5% blacks being murderers is vastly larger than whatever proportion of whites are mass shooters, which supported his earlier argument of how white people should avoid black people or whatever. Fuentes explained himself clearly at least twice: first by saying that it is something like 0,0000001% and second by literally asking Morgan to calculate "number of all white people as a denominator vs number of white school shooters as numerator". Morgan did not understand what was asked of him.
Maybe this is too mathy language for some people to get, but it was as easy as elementary statistics goes.
Do you mean that PUA guides are all about how to get a virtuous wife you can marry, so you can live together happily ever after, instead of guides of how to become an ultimate womanizer with three digit body count? Maybe they have too bad of a reputation.
georgioz
27d ago
Yes, he was such a genuine "liker" of women, like when he knowingly slept with his own daughter Leonilda in threesome with her mother, who was his previous lover. Excuse me if I do not share this vision of love and respect for the gentle sex. If anything, it is vastly more degenerate than that of Don Juan.
One theory I also heard about, is not to bring those women back home permanently. Maybe you are a digital nomad who just lives in some tax heaven like Panama or Philippines and make yourself home there including your wife/concubines. Definitely a degenerate life, but not unlike sailors of old.
I think the OP had a different argument in his mind. It would be like saying that Patriot Act is about being patriotic because government website said so, or that Inflation Reduction Act is about reducing inflation by ballooning government deficit, which predictably failed to no surprise for anybody, including those who proposed it.
There are real world actions that actually show that fairness is not necessarily the primary value. For instance stocks charge exorbitant money for earlier access to their data or for co-location with their servers in order for customers to reap benefits of high frequency trading scalping regular trader joes. If fairness was their goal, they would take steps in order to reduce such practices - but then they would lose revenue on level of $60 billion a year and increasing rapidly.
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