Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
The last sentence is, word-for-word, what a representative of the GDR would say if asked about the Stasi (pre-1989). As such, it doesn't exactly prove much.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
Nietzsche does not uncritically endorse master morality, or military conquest as an end in itself. Neither a state entirely devoted to master morality, or to military conquest, would be Nietzschean states (to the extent that such a thing is a coherent concept, like with Plato's Republic). The Superman is not just the biggest, baddest Bronze Age warlord - there are higher worlds to conquer.
The next aphorism after the Sparta one:
The political defeat of Greece is the greatest failure of culture; for it has given rise to the atrocious theory that culture cannot be pursued unless one is at the same time armed to the teeth. The rise of Christianity was the second greatest failure: brute force on the one hand, and a dull intellect on the other, won a complete victory over the aristocratic genius among the nations. To be a Philhellenist now means to be a foe of brute force and stupid intellects. Sparta was the ruin of Athens in so far as she compelled Athens to turn her entire attention to politics and to act as a federal combination.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
Nietzsche on Sparta:
The recreations of the Spartans consisted of feasting, hunting, and making war: their every-day life was too hard. On the whole, however, their state is merely a caricature of the polis; a corruption of Hellas. The breeding of the complete Spartan—but what was there great about him that his breeding should have required such a brutal state!
Nietzsche on the question of obedience:
A man who wills - gives orders to something in himself which obeys or which he thinks obeys. But now observe what is the strangest thing about willing - about this multifaceted thing for which the people have only a single word: insofar as we are in a given case the one ordering and the one obeying both at the same time and as the one obeying, we know the feelings of compulsion, of pushing and pressing, resistance and movement, which habitually start right after the act of will[...]
Nietzsche is a complex and difficult theorist. A general rule for these discussions could go something like: "In cases where the discussion isn't based on an egregious misreading of Nietzsche, an answer to the objection is almost certainly already in Nietzsche." As No_one suggests, it's probably best to think of this as a discussion of a couple pop-Nietzschean terms, and how they've come to be used in ordinary language, rather than a philosophical analysis.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
Reverse sear into broiler? How does that work? Normally with a reverse sear I would oven/sous vide the steak, then slap it on the pan to sear. Do you mean cooking in the oven and then using the broiler for a reverse sear?
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
All of the four military men had highly philosophical outlooks (even Caesar wrote poems and works on grammar/rhetoric, which are now lost), and I suspect they'd rather discuss more abstract things they learned from their experiences in war, exploration, and statecraft. Junger could hold court explaining industrialized warfare to them, but he'd be too modest to go on at great length, and having Mencken would probably shut down any longwinded boasting from the emperors pretty quickly.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Xenophon, Ernst Junger, Frederick II, Julius Caesar, HL Mencken. I particularly look forward to Junger introducing the other four to mescaline after dinner.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
One thing I’ve noticed is that people in New York sometimes pretend not to know you, even if they do, whereas people in D.C. pretend to know you, even if they don’t.
It’s bad guesting to immediately call gossip pages after a party. That’s called bad guesting.
Those are both from Molly Jong-Fast, who isn't really a typical member of the sort of socialite class this piece is trying to project (she's a red diaper baby kid of two highly successful upper-middle-brow novelists, wrote a book called The Social Climber's Handbook, then tweeted her way into being a political commenter Professionally Terrified For Are Democracy. Chattering classes, not post-WASP or artistic elite). She's part being tongue-in-cheek and part reinforcing the Molly Jong-Fast Brand as someone who's both high-class and interesting enough she would have to deal with that.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Razib has published reputable papers on paleogenetics and Indo-European history, and I have yet to hear from anybody who knows the field and thinks he's talking nonsense (I mean w/r/t paleogenetics, obviously there will always be HBD haters). Burden of proof is yours in this case, I should think.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I find it's easy to clock from the state of the luggage/person. Clean luggage: going to/from airport/hotel/etc. Dirty luggage: hobo. Dirty luggage but looks young and healthy: backpacker/festival/punk type.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I have heard good things about Emily Oster's books. She's an economist who goes through pregnancy opinions and evaluates the studies, should be rat-compatible.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Manchester United's 2023-24 season
Glutton for punishment, huh?
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities? Would Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates be better if there were a possibility of Socrates simply... not dying? If Callicles’s warning to Socrates, that his devotion to the “effeminate” subject of philosophy would be his downfall, might not come to pass? If Socrates might be able to eloquently defend himself at trial and avoid conviction? If he might escape from prison before his execution?
Maybe I'm missing this in another comment, but that actually is how Plato's account goes. He wrote a dialogue called the Crito, wherein a wealthy friend visits Socrates in prison with an escape plan, and Socrates explains why he chooses not to escape.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I've seen a bunch of Uzbeks doing "We're from Uzbekistan, of course we [X]", and it's quite sweet, they're generally wholesome and outward-looking people who aren't really connected to meme culture so it comes off as earnest instead of cringe.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
There are also many literary comparisons (often unfavorable ones) to Joseph Roth.
I'm surprised they're unfavourable. Roth's novels are wonderful, but they're novels, not the same thing, and while I enjoy Roth's personal nonfiction a lot, Zweig is obviously better at that.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
It's a beautiful book. I recommend Joseph Roth, if you haven't read him, for similar treatment of that subject matter (from a slightly different class position, less elite than Zweig).
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Yeah, true that a lot of people with polisci degrees don't end up in politics, just in generic white-collar world. You do actually have to be able to climb those status hierarchies to make it worthwhile entering them. But my experience of DC libs is that they're big on "successful liberals live like conservatives". The end goal is absolutely 2.3 kids on a leafy street in NoVA/Maryland (paid for by Joe Taxpayer, you're welcome).
I guess if I had to pick a particularly marriage-minded demographic it'd be non-engineers in tech. Normie values and ability to get a partner young, tech-adjacent salaries. Lawyers, too, the ones who don't give up their 20s to the biglaw grind. Stability, I think, is very important, and the modern economy doesn't provide it in that many places.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.
Generally agree with your post, but this is quite STEMbrained. If you pursue a degree which makes you more interesting and fun to be around, requires developing social skills, and gives you a status hierarchy to climb, you will absolutely have more romantic prospects than if you were just grinding for money. Your future house probably won't be as nice, of course. To take political science as an example, if you're a reasonably-put-together, educated man who can bring himself to tolerate libs, DC is one of the easiest dating scenes in the world, full of attractive women looking for commitment but happy to hook up. The real downside is that these careers and status hierarchies encourage a prolonged adolescence of sleeping with all the easily available women rather than committing to one (and really, everyone ends up losing - if you want to climb a status hierarchy in creative fields, politics, etc., a good woman in your corner will do far more for your success than just the motivation to look good to girls).
On the topic of marriage and kids, I don't notice a particular difference in career paths between the young people I know who are getting married and having kids and those who aren't, except that there seems to be a gulf in fertility and age of marriage between the ones who went to state schools and the ones who went to "elite" colleges.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
It depends what you mean by "better". A lot of older black folks look back on it wistfully given the current state of the country (I've had them joke to me about asking if they can vote for de Klerk), but for young black south africans the general attitude is that opportunity for aspiration is worth the price.
The real problem with apartheid is just that it didn't work very well. It was a bureaucratic mess dominated by a small group of hardline Afrikaner Calvinists who wished they could repress whites as much as they repressed blacks. The army was stronger than Rhodesia's in terms of size and equipment, but far less well-run and well-led. The "deep state" acted with complete lawlessness, dabbling in everything from illegal medical experiments to rhino poaching. The government blocked the introduction of TV until 1976, in large part for religious reasons. The system's fundamental contradiction between the desire for separation and the need for cheap black labour created a class of displaced single male labourers who would then become the foundation of modern townships. The racial classifications in mixed cities made no sense - Japanese were white, Chinese were coloured, Muslims were coloured unless they were Turks, in which case they were white, and god help you if some bureaucrat decided to screw with your classification. Generally, things ran on Kafka's playbook with a side of hypocrisy.
Now, could apartheid have worked if it had been set up properly from the beginning by some visionary genius and run efficiently? Yes, I suspect so, given the example of Rhodesia only folding to external pressure, or the possibility of simply jettisoning the "bantustans" as genuinely separate countries (though once SA was addicted to cheap labour, that became impossible). Did apartheid deliver many extremely valuable things, like basic safety, that SA no longer does? Largely yes. Could actually existing apartheid have survived, even without sanctions, without ending up collapsing into a race war? Only, in the long run, by becoming a genuinely totalitarian police state with all that implied - and, ultimately, that would have been a sad fate for a country founded by some of Europe's most freedom-loving children.
Could be a regional/linguistic thing, I haven't been up north to the more Afrikaans parts in quite some time, and most of the Afrikaners I know in the Cape are very Anglicized. Imo it would come across as either pretentious or trying to make some political point if a native English-speaking South African put emphasis on the Afrikaans pronunciation (for a foreigner, of course, it's just "ah, you actually know about South Africa!" South Africans, black and white, tend to be quite happy when people know them as more than a caricature - I've been asked by Westerners more than once "Oh, South Africa? Where's that?")
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
So, the ANC has gone back and forth between the two, and there were always cliques moving in and out of the main Xhosa/Zulu power structures within the party. Money united governing factions just as much as tribe. Ramaphosa represents a mildly Xhosa-slanted compromise with moderate/business-friendlier Zulu factions, but there is definitely fear among Zulus that the old Mbeki way of doing things will come back (Ramaphosa is somewhat corrupt - he definitely pays bribes to get things done - but there's a general sense among business-friendly people that he's corrupt in the interests of the country. Mbeki wasn't as blatantly corrupt as Zuma, but he had some awful people, notable for AIDS denialism contributing to SA's horrific HIV/AIDS problem). It's not quite a Zulu/Xhosa crackup of the ANC yet, particularly because the MK is so Zuma-centric and nobody knows where it will go yet. Educated and better-off Zulus are often embarrassed by Zuma representing them, for obvious reasons, and South Africa has a long history of splinter parties which go nowhere. I'd speculate this is more likely going to be a split among Zulus between Zuma loyalists and those remaining with the ANC, which could well spell a decrease in tribal jockeying within the ANC rather than Xhosa dominance. Worth noting that Zuma seems to have significantly greater ability to organize street violence than the ANC, which is a potentially massive wild card. Johannesburg is iirc the largest city in the world without a natural water source, northern SA's economy is dependent on mining exports, and Joburg's lifeline to the coast runs through the Zulu regions...
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
From a South African: great writeup. A couple minor points:
- "uh-par-theid" is a valid English pronunciation. "uh-par-tate" is the Afrikaans pronunciation, but even Afrikaans speakers (those without strong accents) will say apar-theid when speaking English.
- The Zulu/Xhosa divide is extremely important, probably more than any other ethnic division in terms of determining backroom politics, given that it dominated ANC internal politics after Mandela. Mbeki's corruption/nepotism crew were nicknamed the "Xhosa Nostra" ("Xhosa" = "Khosa"), and when Zuma came to power the Zulu faction of the ANC saw it as their turn to eat. MK is essentially those parts of that faction who were kicked from the ANC trying to do their own thing. Ramaphosa, the current president, represents something of a compromise (he's from a small tribe, the Venda, not under either umbrella), but leaning towards the comparatively moderate and business-friendly Xhosa faction.
- Both the IFP and VF+ may sound good now, but they were essentially forced into sanity by irrelevance - both started out as very immoderate parties. Back in the 90s there were very real concerns the IFP would start a civil war in the name of Zulu nationalism, and the original Freedom Front were a hard-right Afrikaans group descended from the pro-Apartheid opposition to de Klerk. Their brands are so tarnished that, realistically, they will stay very small.
- The DA has done a surprisingly good job on the ground in the Western Cape - their main problem, apart from the central government, is that South Africa's problems are so intractable nobody can live up to campaign promises. Secession is far more popular than comparable movements elsewhere, and also imo a very good idea, but the basic issue is that there's very little organization or money behind it compared to the DA. This may well change if the DA fails or is forced into coalition with the ANC and therefore has to take responsibility for ANC failures. Western Cape opposition is, organizationally and financially, dominated by Respectable White People - but I find their impeccably liberal opinions can quickly change to secession talk after a few glasses of wine.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
What concerns me is that a lot of these women hide their issues from a shrink, and only open up to a flirtatious yet good at getting people to talk guy like me.
Yep, that sounds familiar. The Scots have, though, for better or for worse, much less of a culture of hiding dysfunction (I'm sure you've seen the photos of Glasgow nightlife). If you're working for the NHS you're likely to be dealing with serious cases whose immediate and undeniable problems will take up the vast majority of your bandwidth - the cases I touched were generally horror stories and I was just a volunteer. So, uh, at least the neuroses of the genteel are likely to be more of an issue on dating apps than at work.
Here's hoping that Scottish girls are notably less psychotic on average
Scottish girls in my experience have extraordinarily high variance. You seem to be good at spotting the dysfunctional ones, and they get extremely dysfunctional, but the remainder of the dating pool are extremely sensible and down-to-earth while remaining endearing. Chance of meeting the latter is significantly higher in the countryside, set your radius wide and learn to enjoy a scenic drive. (Also, Highland Scots drive like particularly suicidal third worlders, so you'll be well-prepared for them)
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
This post generally makes sense, but I think you're overestimating Sotomayor's health. She's had paramedics called for diabetic episodes before, and from the claims of some of her former clerks she doesn't do the best job of controlling her blood sugar levels. We can't know anything for sure about this, of course, and apparently she travels with a medic, but "top-tier medical care" only works if you comply with it properly...
A side point on this - in reading about the peak era of football hooliganism, knives were common, but not machetes. Weapons were mostly small and improvised, but there are multiple accounts of hooligans using fire axes. I'd assume this is a question of higher surveillance on hooligans and stronger rule of law back then, since a machete is harder to conceal on your person than an axe and "honest, officer, I was just gardening my jungle" wouldn't cut it.
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