Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
2hr ago
Women: "I hate these maga chud romance novels. Where's the rape??"
Bartender_Venator
2hr ago
That seems to be all liberal women go for now, they only have a taste for stories about outcasts coming-to-terms with their true selves.
The TLPish take on this would be that the fantasy of being the oppressed outsider who finds his/her true self is actually a fantasy of being unique, and therefore appeals to people who secretly fear/know they are mass-produced. But it has to be done along culture-war lines, because a story of a genuine outsider (e.g. Faust, Stephen Dedalus, the von Trottas) would be unintelligible to a mass-produced person, it would be like asking them to interpret the roaring of a lion.
No, but absolutely sounds worth a watch. Clip for reference. Definitely old-world sensibilities in the books; I recall giggling as a kid over the phrase "Biggles sat forward in his armchair and violently ejaculated".
If you feel like you're a guy, and you don't read enough, stop forcing yourself to read highbrow literature or books like you feel you should read, and track down some lowbrow junkfood. I suggest /r/Romance_For_Men , /r/HFY , /r/ProgressionFantasy , or anything on the royalroad front page. If you're a parent of one or more boys, point them toward the pig food dispenser. Just like babies have to eat mashed-up food before they can chew through steaks, young men need a regular diet of sophomoric fantasies before they're ready for Asimov or Murakami.
No this is a terrible idea and will make your son retarded or, worse, end with him poasting here. Thankfully, there is a simple solution: read old books. Start him on Hardy Boys and Biggles, get him to John Buchan and James Bond.
More generally, the good and the bad exist. Some art is objectively superior to other art, and it is good for you to prefer the better to the worse (even utilitarianoids had to admit the theory of the "competent judge"). The question is, though, given that the same industry problems exist for both - the feminization of publishing is strangling literature just as it is slop - how do we find, publish, and promote the good? What's wild to me is how young this problem is. If you'll forgive me some memory lane, when I was a whippersnapper squatting in a frathouse, it was simple: you'd go to The Quarterly Conversation, find a book Scott Esposito recommended there, and you'd have a 10/10 foreign author you'd never heard of before. Now Scott Esposito is a woman who posts about nothing but lowbrow current-thing trans stuff. Sam Kriss wrote a bit about this in All The Nerds Are Dead, but didn't quite draw the conclusion, because it would be difficult for him to take the responsibility required. What astonishes me is how durable and self-reinforcing the literary culture of the 2010s seemed to be at the time, and then how quickly it got taken to the Lubyanka basement and shot in the back of the head.
Bartender_Venator
7hr ago
o7 Beebo
Bartender_Venator
22hr ago
Yes, I read Victory when I was a teenager absolutely enamoured of Conrad, and even then I felt it was distinctly weak. Balcony is a really, really good read imo.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Heidegger, I think, clarifies this: "Meaning is that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself. That which can be articulated in disclosure that understands we call meaning. The concept of meaning includes the formal framework of what necessarily belongs to what interpretation that understands articulates. Meaning, structured by fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception, is the upon which of the project in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something. Insofar as understanding and interpretation constitute the existential condition of the being of the there, meaning must be conceived as the formal, existential framework of the disclosedness belonging to understanding. Meaning is an existential to Dasein, not a property which is attached to beings, which lies 'behind' them or floats somewhere as a 'realm between'. Only Dasein 'has' meaning in that the disclosedness of being-in-the-world can be 'fulfilled' through the beings discoverable in it. Thus only Dasein can be meaningful or meaningless."
To put it into three sentences: Meaning is something we always have and create as we live in the world. The concept of meaning is the reflexive self-understanding of our primal and direct relationship to the world around us, and, as such, can neither be absent from, created artificially by, or inhabited directly by Dasein (us). Meaning is fundamentally a secondary concept which we use to understand who and what we are and, while it's an important one, is not itself what we actually care about, and so a fixation on the meaning of life is at best only a way to get to life itself.
(apologies for any typoes in the quote, I typed from the book rather than looking for a pdf)
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Thank you, I will put it on the list! Honestly, I strongly considered putting The Opposing Shore down around 15% through (I'm reading on a kindle, no page numbers), but now things are heating up I'll keep going. Have you tried A Balcony in the Forest?
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore. Started strong, then the fantasy world really started to drag for quite a while, but now it's getting interesting as the mysterious, beautiful, aristocratic woman enters and throws everything into chaos, as is wonderfully mandatory for mid-century European literature. Two big departures from Gracq's A Balcony in the Forest: long and overwrought descriptive passages, which I honestly just don't enjoy, and a protagonist who isn't afraid to be genuinely unlikeable at times. He's angry, snippy, and petty exactly when you want him to learn more and get people to open up to him about what's going on. Overall, I'm interested in seeing where things go, but I don't think it'll top A Balcony in the Forest for me, if only because that book has the indisputably perfect setting (the Phoney War) for Gracq's style.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Actually, I strongly disagree with your take - southern Italy, and particularly Sicily, was the most advanced place in the Christian Mediterranean and the cradle of the Renaissance under the Hohenstaufens. Southern Italy reintroduced Roman ideals into the otherwise Germanic Empire, leapfrogged the comparable Norman administration in England, and gave us Thomas Aquinas. It's not biology, and it's not Guns Germs and Steel (it's never Guns Germs and Steel). It's the Sp*nish. It's honestly astonishing to me how bad Spain was at ruling her dominions in the Early Modern period; they had empire handed to them on a silver platter and they managed to turn everywhere they ruled into a fucked-up backwater permanently. I recommend Denis Mack Smith on the topic.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Yeah, "Italians aren't white" is a common joke.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
There's a natural desire for symmetry, equivalence, in these things, but symmetry in intranational political psychology is by definition rare. The data center thread earlier gives a better view into the mindset of the modern Republican - he is essentially moved by suspicion. Where Lauren is over-credulous, Bob is over-suspicious (well, accurately suspicious with respect to Our Institutions, but it takes incredible epistemic depravity to justify Bob's level of suspicion).
For Edward E. Expert, my experience is that they basically say what they think. If you read The Economist and Foreign Policy, and I guess some academic journals about race and so on, you have his number.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
The US had to be cajoled and suckered into joining the War, three years late. WWI is actually a very strange thing in that, while there was popular enthusiasm for it that we can't imagine today (essentially, the chickenhawkery seen on the right with GWOT and from libs with Slava Ukraini, but actually followed through by going to the Front), the path from assassination to war was the first disaster of modern bureaucracy. The sluggishness of Austria, the complacency of Germany, the paranoia of Russia, the confusion of France, the duplicity of the British Foreign Office, and the do-gooding sociopathy of the Wilson Administration all, when you look at the details, look far more like the spring of 2020 than they do anything out of the 19th Century.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
He or I could write the same post about DSA guys in barcade neighbourhoods of big cities (though I don't have much reason to - everyone on this site is familiar with redditors) and you'd give it the exact same response. Also, it's "diametrically", not "diagonally".
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
The Spanish royal family has not been genetically Spanish in any meaningful sense since the House of Trastamara died out. However, they are still not white, as they married into the House of Savoy and are therefore Italian.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
One of the great paradoxes of political economy is that the free market is the creation of the State, and must be carefully stewarded by the State if it is to survive. In fact, after law and public order, it's probably the paramount criterion of good governance in the modern age. How free are your markets = how good is your State.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
Luna is incredibly useful if you have a task scoped right for it. Funnily enough, low effort seems to perform better than high/xhigh, because the latter keep trying to find a way to galaxy-brain their way around simple evaluation tasks.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Maybe I should have expanded on that: when you use LLMs a lot you have to be careful about putting their own tics into your style. It's something I notice myself when I'm dashing off posts here. Much of the post is very evidently human writing, and then, in one or two paragraphs (I'm guessing the ones you kind of dashed off in between the more major events), you're dropping LLMisms that stand out.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Kristin Stewart could have done it perfectly if she didn't take the arthouse route. She even has similar physiognomy to Gosling.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
The old version was begging for a verdict. This version was loading a gun.
Too much Claude man.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Open borders and demographic replacement is a, if not the, mainstream Blue Tribe progressive position, though obviously they would not use those exact phrases.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Bro you are looking at a story of successful modern-day assimilation. This guy has assimilated as thoroughly into the Blue Tribe as any Rawhide Kobayashi.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
What I find really funny is that, right before the war, I was in Ukraine, and I said "Kiev" - my guide's face darkened, he took me around the back of an armoured van, and he explained "I know this is what you say in the west, you should not say that here, it's sensitive, might cause trouble. You say Kyiv" and coached me on how to pronounce it like a Ukrainian until I got it right. But it's nothing at all like how westerners now pronounce "Keev", it's more like "Kyuff". I know that you should never expect libs to understand any of the cultures they valorize, but this drives the absurdity home to me every time it comes up.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I also do not recommend adopting the parenting habits of poor families in the Bronx, just pointing out the distance in experience. I was a horrifically picky eater growing up, but kids often grow out of it (it helped, also, to grow up in the first generation to learn that broccoli, brussels sprouts, etc. could actually be delicious if you char them instead of mushifying them).
It's very British and difficult to understand outside of that context. JK Rowling, like many of her generation, "knew her place", and wanted to look up to her social betters - that is, to have "betters" actually worth looking up to. So, the high drama is replacing the unworthy aristocrats with worthy ones, the long-lost prince returning to high society and mogging the bureaucrats. Ron and Hermione are the good servants of the prince, the stolid man (it's not a coincidence that Ron is red-headed and has a big family, that's saying he's the wizard equivalent of a Celtic Catholic) and the brainy woman, who represents the fantasy of a nerdy girl wishing she had a worthy man to serve, with the Platonic nature of the friendship making the service more pure. It goes back to to the middle ages - think about Robin Hood's relationship to the Good King Richard and the Bad Usurper John.
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