Bartender_Venator
No bio...
User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
None unusual on their own, but what about a gazpacho mix? Onion and garlic powder, bell pepper powder, chives, salt and pepper.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
William Zinnser's On Writing Well is by far the best book on concise writing. You end up learning to edit as you write.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Caught up to the present episode on the History of the Germans podcast. I like to think I know a lot about Carolingian/Medieval history, and this is easily the best podcast I've found on that period. He's good with the sources, presents historiographical debates where they're important, and, as a banker-turned-lawyer, brings real expertise to describing economic and legal matters in particular. A must-listen if you like history podcasts and are interested in finding one on the Middle Ages (Germany is also the best place to cover most of Europe, because their central location and the Imperial crown means that they get involved basically everywhere except Iberia and Russia).
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
not least because I think that moral feelings — especially the “rights of small nations” — played a key role in influencing British and American geopolitical strategy in both WW1 and WW2
The diplomatic history doesn't really bear this out, at least for WWII, given how many small nations were thrown into Stalin's lap before he even had to ask. A more accurate take, I think, would be that moral feelings, such as the "rights of small nations", end up being outraged when and only when a violation of such moral feelings is also a violation of the prevailing international order. Moral feelings towards small nations act as a defense of geopolitical order, and are stirred up more by threat than by empathy. Hitler was violating the international order more gravely than Stalin in the run-up to war, by taking more critical states in a more flagrant manner, and by 1945 there was no international order at all save for what the Allies were constructing. This theory also has the benefit of continuity to the present day.
The revisionist take errs in a more simple way, by ascribing to malice what was actually incompetence.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
As one Ceuta-based army corporal, Roberto Perdigones, explained in El Español: ‘For changing my gender, I have been told that my pension has gone up because women get more to compensate for inequality. I also get 15 per cent more salary for being a mother.’
Ex-Dudes Rock. Southern Europe, particularly Spain and Italy, has an unusual combination of bureaucracy gone mad and extremely ineffective architects of bureaucracy. I hope the entire Spanish Army catches on to this grift.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
South Africa even has separate executive, legislative, and judicial (until 2013) capitals - Joburg, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein respectively.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Specifically, it's a term originating in the 70s, used to obscure the fact that the idea was coined by James Burnham, a former Marxist-turned-anti-Communist, in the 40s - thereby making the idea safe for Leftist intellectuals to discuss. Burnham simply called them the Managerial Class.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Second the recommendation of the trial and death sequence. The Republic is a very daunting text, whereas those are more engaging and comprehensible. I'd suggest, if that frees up space, to add Xenophon's Apology alongside Plato's. That can start a discussion about how to read Plato's portrayal of Socrates critically - e.g. Xenophon's Socrates is much funnier, explicitly making jokes. A couple possible questions that could get students reading critically, particularly regarding the dramatic framing of the dialogues (which often goes unquestioned, but is extremely important):
- Why does Socrates decide, right before his trial for impiety, to publicly play games with a priest?
- Did Socrates want to die, and if so, why? (This connects to the themes of glory in the Iliad, if you raise the explanation that perhaps Socrates wanted a death that was glorious in its own way, which would ensure the immortality of his legend and of philosophy itself. Also to the Job/Antigone question of bad things happening to good people, if Socrates has found a way to turn the bad to his good)
- How serious is Socrates? Is it different from the way we would think of a philosopher or teacher as serious? Can joking or even trolling be a way to be serious about something higher?
- Plato was the founder of the Academy (and, in some ways, closer to a startup founder than the dean of a modern university), whereas Xenophon was a military man who lived outside Athens and had little fear of their authorities. Does that show up in the way they write their Apologies? E.g. Plato provides a magnificent speech showing off his rhetoric (which could be yours, for a small fee), whereas Xenophon makes Socrates more relatable.
- Were the authorities right, from their perspective, to execute Socrates? Was philosophy destabilizing to Athens? Is youthful ambition inherently dangerous to the powerful? (connects to Iliad and to some extent Antigone)
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Song of Roland is an excellent companion to the Iliad. The parallels are strong enough that it can be a great set-up for a discussion on the differences between ancient and medieval warrior culture - roles of kingship, religion, loyalty, violence, etc.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
It seems the chairman of Morgan Stanley International is also missing, almost certainly dead. I sincerely doubt HP whacked him - if you want to blame someone, God's sense of humour never fails.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but it varied wildly between dynasties. Notably, the Kings of France were extremely good at having male heirs (and, generally, having them young enough to succeed as adults), which was a huge part of their ability to centralize into a functioning state. The one time there was a really disputed succession, it kicked off the Hundred Years War. In Germany, on the other hand, comparable houses were much less fecund. The Ottonians died out quickly, in part thanks to their insistence on sending Imperial princesses to the Church, and the only eldest son of the Hohenstaufen to succeed directly was Frederick II, after a 17-year struggle and some minor miracles (Barbarossa was succeeded by first his third and then his tenth child). The Habsburgs did somewhat better, until they got too inbred...
Shower thought: "trying for an heir" was probably notably easier for some kings than others. Medieval kings moved around a lot, because of the need for personal rulership and the heavy demands the royal household placed on any given host. The Kings of France were mostly in and around the Paris area, having the closest thing to a settled capital. Except on Crusade, they were rarely far from their marital bed, their doctor's workshop, etc. The Holy Roman Emperors, by contrast, often spent most of their reigns on the move all across Germany/Italy, reducing fertility for two reasons - firstly, that military travel, particularly in the disease-ridden swamps of medieval Italy, was a terrible environment to have a healthy child in, and, secondly, that their wives often stayed somewhere else to act as regents or co-rulers. Poor relations with the Popes also meant that it was harder for German and English rulers to divorce wives who were infertile or refused to sleep with them, like Barbarossa's first wife. In the end, the difference between dynasties was probably a fair number of little things and a lot of luck.
If you're having trouble with the mechanics, check out amateur threads on /gif/ or some other repository of short clips. That'll let you get a sense of where to put your limbs in each position, potential positions, etc. Not professional porn, of course, since that's done for cameras over comfort. Start with some dry-humping (e.g. her straddling your lap while kissing) so she gets used to moving her hips and you get a sense of how yours should move. Make sure to use your fingers, it should be really easy if you pay attention to what makes her react, or react badly. If she can't be verbal about not liking a move, the pressure, etc... that's a bad sign on her part. Again, start through the panties. Ease into things and let the positive feedback give you confidence - don't jump from any stage too fast (and look up how to find the clitoris/g-spot, it's really simple). Once you've established that rapport between your bodies, it'll carry over into actual sex.
Contra the common advice to make her cum first so the sex doesn't seem so important, don't worry too much. Try, of course! But a lot of women, particularly in these days of SSRIs and general poor health, can't cum from any kind of sex at all. The journey is just as important as the destination. And the best way to make her orgasm from sex once you have some confidence in yourself is again likely (again, not all women) going to be to not care that she does and to do what you want.
And, for god's sake, talk to her, and definitely not in a mopey and self-defeated voice where you blame yourself. That's a fast track to making her blame herself, at which point it's game over. Calm, open, no blame, "I want to learn how to please you."
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Barsky also had two children by black (immigrant, interestingly) women, so he clearly took his mission to "blend in" seriously.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I actually have a very rare thing - a friend who grew up in Gary. Her description is that that the only people left are the very elderly, and the people who are so dysfunctional they drop out of the South Side of Chicago and go to Gary. The latter would be a real problem if they got a gun and spotted you, but for the most part they're too low-functioning even to do that, otherwise they'd be driving up Chicago's crime rate.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I've been to Adjara and I've still never heard of it. I would imagine it's an "autonomous region" in the same way Russia has "autonomous oblasts". From a quick read it seems like it used to have a lot of autonomy under a local strongman until a local crisis in 2004 after Georgia's colour revolution.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Whoop is excellent for this without all the doodads of a running watch like a Garmin.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
I strongly recommend the Atkins translation of Faust. Avoid any rhyming translations...
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
Not to say anything about your wider point, but just because I'm seeing this everywhere and this is the first comment currently: the Superman is not the same as the man of master morality. Master morality is not the morality of the Superman. The Superman is beyond both and transvalues both, though to us in a slave-moral society he would look comparatively masterly by contrast.
Bartender_Venator
1yr ago
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.
Bartender_Venator
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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.
I seem to recommend a lot of history podcasts here, but I'll plug When Diplomacy Fails's current series on the July Crisis. Covers a lot that popular accounts don't, including the historiography around the run-up to war.
Having had a British education, I mostly found it surprising how much British diplomacy appears to have been done by a small cabal acting behind the backs of the public, who intended to manipulate the country into a largely unnecessary rivalry with Germany. However, this seems to have been a general trend - the high diplomats of many of the Great Powers were effectively off the leash and playing all kinds of too-clever-by-half schemes which then blew up in their faces (and Germany was particularly guilty of letting Austria-Hungary do this).
My historical understanding is stronger on colonial politics than internal European diplomacy, but I will point out that the continuity of England's balance-of-power politics is generally overplayed (because her balance-of-power diplomacy in 1914 looks superficially similar to 1815). In reality, much of the century before Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905 was based on colonial rivalries, in particular with Russia in Asia and France in Africa - it was only when Russia was revealed as a paper tiger that British policymakers began to look around and realize that Britain's worldwide imperial politics may have been coming at the cost of security in her backyard. My reading is that the British mistakenly believed that aligning with France and Russia would provide a stable balance of power instead of creating two evenly matched blocs ready for war, and totally missed that, in trading off imperial security for European security, she would lose both to long-term rising powers on the periphery (the US and a revitalized Russia). The breakdown of the Dreikaiserbund/Reinsurance Treaty was also a symptom of myopia, with the Great Powers focusing on short-term concerns rather than the greater long-term dangers of revolution and irredentist nationalism.
So, I guess the takeaway is that policymakers have to think long-term. Which, uh, good luck.
More options
Context Copy link