Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
It's not that I literally can't drink coffee any more, but I have to combine it with some kind of light morning exercise, moving around, etc. If I drink it while WFHing I get crazy jittery. Started pretty soon after I went to WFH. Then abstaining from coffee does other things to tolerance - e.g. drip coffee sits much worse on my stomach, and I have a strong stomach when it comes to other stuff. Can still do energy drinks, tea, etc. just fine.
May run in the family, my mum consumed heroic quantities of coffee when she was working, then one day it started giving her awful headaches and she was on decaf for two decades.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
Like SteveKirk said, your body's reaction to coffee can also change rapidly without much warning. I had a switch-flip moment too and I can basically no longer drink it. I ask about salty food specifically because if your gut is kind of weak eating a lot of salt can dump water into it, so it depends if you always eat a salty breakfast/drink electrolytes in the morning. w/r/t alcohol, that's certainly possible. If it happens on days when you didn't drink the night before, it's probably not an acute effect, just that your gut health may be poor in general and alcohol isn't helping. I'd take a look at your diet and try to shift overall to something better for your gut.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
Any correlation with what you're eating in the morning? Caffeine, nicotine, salty food, alcohol the night before?
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
For some historical evidence that the taboo comes before the proper understanding of the natural consequences, Xenophon's Socrates claims that the reason for the incest taboo is because the age gap is too great, and thus inferior offspring result because they have a geriatric mother/father. One can argue that it comes about as an instinct through natural selection (my guess tbh), but primitive societies simply didn't have the sample size to note the deleterious effects of inbreeding.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
re: LA Times, though the owner is a Clinton donor, he met with Trump in 2017 and asked for a cabinet position, then was appointed by Paul Ryan to a health policy advisory committee. He's a pharma billionaire who presumably has strong opinions on relevant issues and would like a seat at the table, the LA Times is definitely secondary to that.
Amusingly, he was also an early investor in Zoom. I wonder whether that or his pharma investments paid off better during Covid.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
OK, but once you abandon the philosophical consistency of the system and the arguments that justify it, you're left with common sense with some inspiration from utilitarianism. Nothing wrong with that, it just means you're not really that much of a utilitarian (and has the amusing corollary that you'll become a better utilitarian by reading Aristotle than you will by reading Bentham). Of course, this is what the most intelligent utilitarian in history (Mill) did pretty much immediately on thinking seriously about the theory, it just took him a nervous breakdown to get there.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
I think what my prof was saying was "important to the average Greek listening to the Iliad." It's the bridge between the distant characters of the Iliad and the flesh and blood, the soil and city of the audience. Maybe a mild exaggeration given the different ways passages can be important, but imo a reasonable argument nonetheless.
True - Utilitarianism doesn't work even in theory, because it instantly succumbs to combinatorial explosion once you have to account for multiple orders of consequence. The way utilitarians get around this in practice is adding greebles and epicycles until they're effectively back to deontology/virtue ethics/common sense with a quantitative flavour.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
This is a little bee in my bonnet for me, but the more I read about Ancient Greece, the more I agree with my old Classics prof claiming the list of ships was in a way the most important part of the Iliad. Not to us, of course, but to the Greeks that list of ships was how each city and region could claim its connection to the political founding myth of Greek civilization. Think of it less like part of the narrative and more like Revolutionary War memorials in New England towns.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
Young men, particularly the Rogan type, don't turn out to vote. If Trump can actually get a decent fraction of Trump-leaning Rogan fans to vote, it could make a huge difference - I don't think the timing within most states' early voting period is coincidental.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
For sure. I wanted to raise the point because it's generally undervalued in regular (non-Straussian) academic discussions of Plato. And reading the other dialogues will greatly help your reading of Symposium/Republic/etc. Good luck!
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
No idea on YouTube. Friends talk highly of Alex Priou. But, a word of advice, look up every (named) character in the dialogues. They don't all matter, but in some cases who they are definitely matters to the meaning of the dialogue. For example, Meno comes across as a clever young gentleman, but he's meant to be hiding that he's an arrogant little shit - Xenophon, another student of Plato's, has him as the worst man among the Greek generals of the Persian Expedition (that is, before he betrays them to the Persians). So to read the Meno you need the context that Socrates completely failed to teach Meno virtue! And then to read the Gorgias, it helps to know that Meno was a student of Gorgias (mentioned in the dialogue), so you have a good sense of the kind of men Plato thinks Gorgias educates. The dialogues are literary philosophy, not just treatises; the characters, setting (e.g. in both the Republic and the Phaedrus, it means something that the discussion is held outside the city), historical context. Imagine someone in the 20th Century writing philosophy as dialogues between well-known political and cultural figures, if that helps.
This is probably overkill, but if you have points in the dialogues that you find confusing or want to deep dive into, you can search an archive of Leo Strauss's courses here, including close readings of several of the dialogues.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
Except in super-hot industries like AI, VC checks are too small for a lot of world-of-atoms stuff.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
All the guys I hung out with morphed into generic stereotypes in many ways, happy but just very bland.
That's what people generally use Instagram for, to project an image of bland, legible, public happiness. Who knows what they're like behind the veil.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
Felt the same about CKII. CKIII toned down the wackiness a ton, at least at the start (I only played at release), no horse popes or magical satanists, but it seems like the current issue is, like most PDX games, it's extremely easy to become overpowered with even a modicum of game sense.
Bartender_Venator
11mo ago
The author is Alexander Luria (easy to remember if you're an Infinite Jest fan, sort of). Didn't see it on google scholar with a cursory search, but I'm sure it's out there since I've also seen the pdf.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I've told an anecdote on themotte before from someone who worked under him during his presidency - apparently in private he was eloquent, but had a different accent, posh and WASPy like his dad. It was putting on and maintaining that folksy manner of speaking that tripped him up.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
If you run into any docs fleeing the South African medical system, it's an interesting topic to ask about. Wikipedia claims there may be some psychoactive effects, but I've never heard of that, what I hear from SA medical types is that the binding agent in the antiretrovirals is thought to help hold whatever chemicals they put in it together (plus, most likely, superstitions of various sorts).
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Yes, that's what I mean by clearing the roads in general - banning alcohol probably had an additional synergistic effect on top of that. Also, in addition to clearing cars off roads, a lot of road deaths in SA are pedestrians walking along the shoulder (poor folks will walk very long distances by the highway), who were probably also cleared out somewhat by lockdown. They also wouldn't have the uh, inexplicable uptick in road deaths in the US from the summer of 2020.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I’m wondering if similar social forces are at play in South Africa now.
Though the wider point is a great one, it's not really applicable to SA. The prohibitions were just covid measures - they're seen in retrospect as weird/funny, and there's no appetite to bring them back. More generally, SA politics is not very grassroots, things like that are largely determined in smoke-filled rooms by party elites rather than by social coalitions.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I've gotten emails like that about brothers leaving pots and pans in the sink, so partly there's a difference in communication style. One thing that happens reasonably often with frats/sororities is that an officer in one of the more socially neck-stuck-out positions (rush chair, social chair, VP alumni (god forbid)) will lose their shit because they're feeling hung out to dry by the rest of the brother/sisterhood. These positions fundamentally suck because there's an expectation in Greek life to be way more sociable than almost any person would want to be - with the idea that different people will come in and out but the group as an aggregate will fill out events and provide good vibes - but there's always a danger you'll hit a collective slump in energy/interest/whatever among the group and then it's you getting humiliated in front of the world and your brothers/sisters. Obviously, it's women at UA, and she seems high-strung even by those standards, so a long way from a chill fraternity, but her email basically seems plausible for a social chair or similar officer facing public underperformance to have a performative freakout in the hope the cats she's herding will do their part.
If the sender was the President, that's, uh, very much another story, but the prez of a frat/sorority has a unique role as the university/legal relations face of the frat.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I find it hard to believe that just banning alcohol caused that much of a drop in murders in SA. For one thing, the liquor stores had block-long lines the days before lockdowns, both for personal stashes and for reselling. As for murders, there is a huge domestic violence problem, which prohibition would probably address, but the vast majority of murders in the townships are either for money or gang reasons. The thing is that there are key confounders: lockdowns made it far more difficult to supply illegal drugs like tik (meth and god knows what) and whoonga (heroin and god knows what, sometimes HIV meds), which are also a massive contributor to violent crime, lockdowns make gang activity more difficult and less lucrative, and the additional welfare passed out during lockdown periods probably dissuaded some marginal criminals from killing someone over fifty rand.
I would say that, given the study apparently counts car accidents, a huge chunk is probably coming from that. Driving drunk is totally normal in South Africa, from the richest to the poorest, and the general standard of driving is pretty dangerous (the common estimate is that 1/3rd of licences on the road are fake). Clearing the roads in general with lockdown and in particular eliminating drunk driving probably has some major effect as well.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I wonder, with some affection, how The New Atlantis is doing. They seem to have revamped the website and have articles more suited to internet virality - I remember them as a slightly stuffy, but high-quality resource, essentially the place to find conservative American academics writing on philosophy of technology.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Good post. A few clarifications for people making points elsewhere in the thread as to whether the analogy holds:
- The Crusader States were defeated by external armies specifically because the surrounding Muslim states were unified into a single empire (first under Zengi, then under Saladin). Pan-Arabism tried this, but failed largely because of rivalry between Egypt and Syria - basically, this project is infinitely more difficult in the present day, when e.g. Syria can't simply conquer Egypt with a couple thousand cavalry and have Egypt be happy with their new Sultan. The United Arab States lasted three years, and the Arab Federation six months, and that was an easier project in the 50s, so Arab countries would need a better coordination mechanism.
- On the point of internal Israeli/Crusader disunity, Saladin was given his casus belli for the campaign that captured Jerusalem because Reynald of Chatillion (an eternal loose cannon) violated the truce and raided pilgrim caravans. Contra what some people here are assuming, the Crusader leadership were far more disunified than the Israelis have ever been (also, contra the OP, the Crusaders engaged in extensive diplomacy, they just lacked the control to stop guys like Reynald ruining it). It's very possible that Israeli unity could splinter, but again in the modern world demographic splintering looks very different from personalist feudal politics.
- The Crusader States did not have to disappear when they did. Hattin was a completely unforced error from Guy de Lusignan (a weak king in power due to dynastic bad luck and the aforesaid noble disunity). Without that, you probably don't get the mass capitulations when Baibars storms in. The Crusader States were only 100% doomed when gunpowder entered the conversation, and it became possible for larger states to systematically destroy castles. The lesson for Israel is to be very wary of technological shifts in warfighting, particularly if they represents shifts in power from demographically smaller states to larger populations - but I don't see any coming down the pike in the 21st Century.
Yeah a bad diet will make your intestines more permeable in such a way that your body's more likely to dump water in there, or at least that's what I've heard the link is.
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