BreakerofHorsesandMen
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User ID: 3614
BreakerofHorsesandMen
3d ago
I’m with you on schools being ineffective, but I think this is a side (possibly intended) effect of the last 70-80 years of school design.
School, like everything else, is effective when it is a challenge that can be meaningfully failed, when there are stakes attached to failure, and when there is a meaningful release valve, i.e., productive work for dropouts. It’s hard to say any of those three things apply to American schools in the 21st century.
In that regard, you’re right, American schools need a huge overhaul anyways, and trying to encourage physical fitness activities was already being consumed by leftism as far back as Kennedy. Any serious measures would probably fall flat on their face in the teeth of “just be kind” teacher resistance and “don’t get sued” admin resistance.
That being said…
As to having all the joy sucked out of physical activity, sorry, I say this as an obvious nerd of the sort who discovers and posts on the Motte, but not everything is supposed to be joyous. I still eat my vegetables as a middle-aged man, because it was joylessly ingrained in me by adults and is provably demonstrable in the real world that a healthy amount of vegetables is better for me than tubs of ice cream, or even my preferred all steak diet.
Physical activity is the same way. Maybe it’s just the “eating your vegetables of life” activity for the nerds, but I think “it won’t be hedonic” as an argument against something is an argument on weak footing.
Having done a lot of cycling over the years, including as a commute for many years in undisclosed European country, 1 in 5 cyclists are normal human beings, and the other 4 are CYCLISTS.
I have a theory that I derive from a great philosopher of our era, that in a contest between a weak and a strong horse, observers will naturally back the strong horse. However, caveat, in WEIRD society, there is also some sympathy for the weak horse, sometimes misplaced, but definitely there.
The horse that is really out of luck is the middle horse, and cyclists are the middle horse.
Motor vehicles are strong, confident, fast, going wherever they please with an inherent “Be wary of my power” statement accompanying them every where they go.
Pedestrians are frail and slow, but humanly so, and they have an inherent “Be cautious of my frailties, I am easily hurt” statement accompanying them wherever they go.
Cyclists are inhumanly fast, but also vehicularly slow. They can cause serious injury and possible death to a pedestrian, but are also prone to serious injury and death from vehicles. They are neither strong nor weak, but in the mushy middle.
This isn’t an insurmountable problem, until you run into the 4 out of 5 CYCLISTS who really, really want the rules written in such a way that they can push around and get mad at pedestrians in a way that even the strong horse motor vehicle users usually don’t want to treat pedestrians. While at the same time wanting to be treated as a weak horse that gets to both ride with the strong horses and be babied and given extra privileges like designated lanes, lane filtering, and bike boxes.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
3d ago
But in the previous comment’s context, they’re already being forced into activities and have limited agency, by virtue of being in high school.
Why is promoting a culture where physical fitness is an important aspect in any way less agentic or more forced than the situation where kids already have to be at school doing things adults tell them to do?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
7d ago
If great men are those who plant trees who will shade those long after they are gone, then the weak man consumes those fruits, and leaves the future to the harsh light of the unforgiving sun.
You’re right about this, but the problem is that the great man won’t look like democracy. Many “human rights” will be crushed out of existence on the way to resolving America’s fiscal problems.
This is, I think, the currently insurmountable mountain facing America. In order to resolve its problems, the great man will have to take the nation in hand, ignore a large proportion of the populace entirely, and take our present “leadership” behind the woodshed for a long time. That’s not happening anytime soon, because who’s going to be that great man?
Musk? Thiel? It won’t be a general or admiral, they’re all politicized non-entities these days. Maybe Hegseth, if he could be SecDef for 8 years and spend all that time ruthlessly purging the Pentagon until he had stacked the ranks with loyalists or ideological fellow travelers.
It’s sad, but I suspect America is on its way to experiencing its own Crisis of the Third Century, and someone with the vision and will to power of Diocletian is at least a couple of generations away.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
7d ago
Sorry man, but you taught your kid to respond to random violence with wisely targeted violence.
Unless you are operating on a very different definition of pacifism than I am, you are a bad pacifist, but if it’s any consolation, you are a good dad.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
13d ago
Who doesn’t value being young and attractive?
Confucian societies?
My read is that Aella’s problems are a combination of:
A: Pretend Patriachal Upbringing
I. Her father wants to fulfill his role as leader of the family. This social technology has basically been lost by the 80’s and 90’s, so he fills the gap with a untested hypothesis.
II. But he’s not actually the leader of the family, the government is, and deep down, everyone knows this. It’s why the image of the father subtly threatening his daughter’s garbage boyfriend is an image of hilarity in the modern era. Everyone knows Dad is completely emasculated.
III. He can try to raise her right (and be bad at it, possibly, but directionally correct.) Also, being blunt, he seems ignorant of certain commonsense items, such as paying to send his daughter to a college in line with his ideals, whether he thinks he’s the perfect daughter or not. Better to send your “troublesome” daughter to Pensacola Christian where she can meet a good man, than throw her to the world’s lions.
IV. But once she’s 18, at the latest, she is free to do anything she wants, and as a young attractive woman, in a world where women are wonderful, she discovers she can wrap a lot of people around her finger and potentially is naive to the fact that they may very much not have her best interests in mind.
B: Women are Human Beings
I. As was alluded to elsewhere in the thread, it’s not surprising that Aella wants to be valued primarily for her innate characteristics. She’s a woman, that’s par for the course. Hence the joke about battle writing in women’s fantasy novels vs. men’s fantasy novels.
II. Aella eventually and unsurprisingly discovered that her most marketable asset is her sexuality. This has been common knowledge, although not phrased that same way, for all of human history prior to the last 100 years or so.
III. As I previously mentioned, at this point no one in her family has any capability whatsoever to pull her back from the brink, either by force or by reason. For example, we would have much less of a drug problem if parents could bring their children of any age back into the family home, legally and by force, to separate the kid from the drugs. A good, or even mediocre, father is very likely to think the same way about his daughter and prostitution, but is in the same fashion stymied to prevent it.
IV. Aella, at the center of a number of failures and bad incentives, turns to sex work because then she doesn’t actually have to accomplish anything to earn her money, and can receive market value for her innate characteristics.
V. One of her innate characteristics is being an undeniably smart wordcel, so she is able to justify all this by making it sound cool and empowering, and she is in the Bay Area sphere where lots of excellent rationalizers both live and want to fuck her.
VI. *Et voila*, here we are talking about her.
To summarize, mostly I just feel bad for her. If she converts to traditionalist Catholicism in her 60’s, it won’t surprise me at all. I think she is papering over many terrible things with her mental firepower, eventually it will all catch up to her, it will turn out the money and the fame were fleeting, and she will turn that high IQ to higher things at last.
Additionally, as a father myself, I think fathers should be very aware of the very real limits placed on our ability to lead our families. I don’t know what the best solution is, but cosplaying as Abraham ain’t it. Be as unemasculated as possible, without going to jail, I guess.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
13d ago
You know what, I stand corrected.
I was under the impression that B. burgdorferi was the only Lyme disease causing bacteria. If that had been the case, I would stand by this as a failed replication, but with the new information, I think you are right.
Caveat for: All “Science!” seems prone to fakery in general, but I can’t see why anyone would fake these particular results, so it seems reasonable that I was wrong.
George Washington’s secret bioweapon program would still be dope, though.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
14d ago
You could probably dial that back to a bioweapons program run by George Washington, because, shock and amazement, that study failed to replicate.
To confirm LMAT’s ability to analyze large (real) metagenomes and provide new biological insight, we downloaded the Tyrolean Iceman sequence data (Keller et al., 2012) from the SRA, which constituted 150 giga-bases of raw genomic data. While 78% of the sequenced reads were reported to be human, only a small percentage (0.84%) of the reads was reported to originate from bacteria based on a sample of 8 million reads. Our hypothesis was that LMAT could examine all the reads on a single large memory compute node and efficiently provide a more complete analysis of the microbial contents. For this application, the human genome (v19) was added to LMAT’s database to classify human and microbial reads simultaneously. The analysis on the raw 150 giga-base dataset (2.3 billion reads) ran in <20 h on our single node large memory computer (see Supplementary Material for additional details). LMAT output agreed with the published finding that the vast majority of bacteria were from the phylum Firmicutes and under the class of Clostridia. Similarly, only a small fraction of reads were reported to be from the Spirochaetes phylum. LMAT results did not show evidence for the presence for non-phage, non-retroviral viruses, fungi or protists after adjusting for previously unidentified human contamination in draft eukaryote genomes present in the LMAT reference database. The key observed difference was in the Borrelia species previously reported to be the first documented case of Lyme disease in humans. Although LMAT’s findings support the presence of the Borrelia genus with 16 180 reads assigned a read label score greater than 0, a more complex relationship is shown between the new Borrelia sequence and previously sequenced Borrelia genomes. Although Borrelia burgdorferi was previously reported to be the likely species present, LMAT shows that among the reads assigned to the Borrelia genus, the majority of the reads are assigned to non–species-specific genomic regions with species-specific reads assigned to several Borrelia species, including B.burgdorferi, Borrelia garinii and others. The Borellia reads were compared against all sequenced Borrelia genomes to compute an SNP-based genetic distance matrix. The phylogenetic tree given in Supplementary Figure S10 supports LMAT’s finding that the Borrelia variant is divergent from B.burgdorferi.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3753567/
A movie about George Washington’s secret bioweapons lab would be dope, though.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
16d ago
This is the kind of comment that isn’t really a Quality Contribution, but it is a great contribution to brightening someone’s day, and also I just really respect the commitment to the bit.
You made me laugh out loud in the barbershop, so congratulations, man.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
16d ago
The current advice is insufficient only in that it is not clear enough to men that they need to stop whining.
Whaaa this untamable wilderness isn't being fair Whaaa this untamable ocean isn't being fair Whaaa this vast untable universe isn't being fair None of the men who have ever done anything of note ever at any point in human history have done so by meeting something that was fair. Your effort and the effort of the women you want to date will not be equal. It will not balance out. If anything, the shortcoming of the advice you have heard is that you would ever expect that.
Man was not owed the wilderness, and men are not owed women.
Good comment, I agree entirely.
Men conquered the women, conquered the wilderness, and they should go about reconquering the women.
One day, this past 150 year interlude can be looked back on as the sexual post-apocalypse, before men as a whole reconquered and subjugated the world again.
Great post.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
16d ago
Most of why I'm not into it is because my morality, the rest is because of a sense that wanting to restrict women's sexual liberties as a man is loser-coded and the proper masculine thing to do is to let women do whatever they want and attract them anyway, not to try to restrict their sexual decisions.
Dragging only this chunk out to comment on it.
If you firmly believe this, it implies that men as they acted for the first 6000 years or so of civilization had masculinity wrong. I find this to be extremely improbable, and I am betting that you are operating strictly on modern vibes regarding masculinity, which I believe are actually designed to destroy masculinity in both thought and deed.
If I am wrong and you feel you have applied a great deal of thought to the idea, then I accept we have come to different conclusions. But if on reflection you also think that you may just be running on vibes, I urge you to really dig deep into how some male role model of yours in the pre-modern era approached his interactions with women.
Speaking from a different fight sport, your idea of going to other open mats is a good one. I think you’ve said you’ve gone to other gyms before when you travel, and traveling to fight different people and see different styles is awesome. You can get significantly the same benefits by just hitting every other gym in town occasionally, which is convenient.
Alert your partner that you want to roll intensely, if they want to negotiate you down, try to stick to your guns and cone to some agreement, like “Our third roll will be competition caliber.” Then do your best to just crush them (with technique and your natural gifts.) Maybe you win, maybe you lose, but you will eventually get a better feel for rolling in your top gear.
Also, not saying you specifically are doing this, but I see it in fighters sometimes. They get to be friends with people at the gym or the club, and then they develop a bit of a mental block about really just smashing their friend/opponent. It’s okay to crush their dreams (on the mat, with technique+natural gifts.) Just keep being the same you before and after, and they will more likely than not love and appreciate the challenge.
Iron sharpens iron or some such cliche but also true BS.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
22d ago
Bob Jones is already buck broken. They’re 10% minority now and haven’t restricted interracial relationships for a quarter of a century.
They even let women wear pants these days.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
24d ago
Can’t speak fully to the others, but Ligotti is very leftist.
Q: Does it irritate you to hear that some people consider you a nihilist?
A: I would call myself a pessimist. At one time I thought it simply inaccurate for anyone to call me a nihilist, since the dictionary definition of nihilist applies to me in very few of its aspects. The term nihilist is more apt in connection with someone like Nietzsche, for whom I have no use at all. Nietzsche also considered himself a type of pessimist, but after he ceased to admire Schopenhauer he modified the term pessimism so that it carried almost none of its original meaning. These days I don’t mind being called a nihilist, because what people usually mean by this word is someone who is anti-life, and that definition fits me just fine, at least in principle. In practical terms, I have all kinds of values that are not in accord with nihilism.For example, I politically self-identify as a socialist. I want everyone to be as comfortable as they can be while they’re waiting to die. Unfortunately, the major part of Western civilization consists of capitalists, whom I regard as unadulterated savages. As long as we have to live in this world, what could be more sensible than to want yourself and others to suffer as little as possible? This will never happen because too many people are unadulterated savages. They’re brutal and inhuman.
For the people, and truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as any body whomsoever. But I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having of government those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, sirs. That is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things, and therefore until they do that, I mean, that you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
25d ago
Ashli Babbitt was a very stupid person who got what she was asking for. Putting barricades in place is a signal that one is willing to use violence. It may not be an accurate or reliable signal, but it is a signal. Therefore, Ashli should have been prepared for and expecting violence when she overcame that barricade, just like the first man reaching the top of the wall expects the defenders to use extreme violence to deter him and everyone after him. Her being shot and killed is not police brutality, or a crime. It is one side engaging in violence in the pursuit of its goals.
That being said, movements run with the martyrs they’ve got, even if I could wish for a higher caliber of martyr.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
25d ago
The topic of this past Sunday’s homily at my parish touched on how Gnosticism is the great heresy from which many smaller heresies sprang.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
25d ago
In the West, broadly interpreted, you’re probably looking at the gap between pre-civilizational primitive democracies and the Assyrian Empire, more or less. That would seem to be the peak period of God-Emperor creation worldwide, and thus the least likely to retain the concept of elections for power positions.
But voting is just “My warrior band all gets a say, because that keeps us all pointed in the same direction” writ large, so I suspect voting played a role, even if a small one, in the God-Emperor states as well. There’s no point in having a council if you can’t get a sense of the room.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
25d ago
What is it about modern society that has given rise to this absolutely overblown concern for “suffering?” We live in the most hedonic times imaginable in all of human history, and so the idea that anything less than total hedonic pleasure, or even less than net (50%+1) hedonic pleasure makes life not worth living is utterly bizarre to me. Millennia of people, intellectuals and not, passed through life experiencing plague, famine, short life expectancies, unanesthetized surgeries and dying of untreated cancers without coming to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to stop having kids, kill themselves early, or kill everyone.
This doesn’t even get into the issues surrounding this anti-life thinking and the hedonic treadmill. If my Oreo is good today, should I live? If it is slightly less good tomorrow, should I propose panicide?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
27d ago
I was at my local organic co-op today, and I discovered that they have, as is typical of hippy-dippy stores, a reusable bag policy. In this case, every reusable bag I use, up to four total bags, gets me a small discount.
Being the sort of person who posts on the Motte, I immediately thought of gaming this system by putting as few items as possible in each bag. Preferably, I would buy four items, put one item in each bag, walk the bags out to my car, deposit the items in a separate container, then go back inside and repeat the cycle as often as necessary to get everything I want and maximize the discount.
This is, of course, both strictly legal under the store’s very poorly written policy, and also going to get me banned in no time.
But it led me to think of the deeper issue. Many, perhaps all, policies and laws are prone to extreme lawyer-brain galactic thinking like this. Imagine that the store couldn’t just ban me, because I am a member of the store and they can’t just get rid of me, and they must also put in place a policy that is fair to every member of the store. So they start trying to specify the volume of bag that must be filled, the types and sizes of bags that are allowed, minimum item counts in each bag. Soon, cashiers are bogged down in the minutiae of various arcane bag to discount ratios, rather than just scanning items and making pleasant small talk. Everyone is worse off, and the only plausible escape is to eliminate the discount itself, thus taking away a benefit of being a store member and reducing the overall value of that status, causing long-term harm to the store’s “health,” as it were.
Fortunately for my local Hippy Mart, they can still keep a FAFO policy in place for the chronically politically diseased such as myself. Anyways, I was just thinking about this and the contrast with the American legal system, which would be obviously incapable of maintaining such a simple and poorly written policy for longer than a nanosecond or two.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
27d ago
A: What evidence is there that any/some/all of the dead died because there was no overnight forecaster? I checked the stats for 2023, a good Biden year, and there were 87 dead from tornadoes that year, including 23 from a single storm. 27 doesn’t seem wildly out of line with those numbers.
B: Was the NWS mandated to cut permanent overnight forecasters, or did they choose to cut that position to save other preferred bureaucratic spending priorities, or did they just go straight to malicious compliance and make the worst possible cuts?
C: Did the former overnight forecaster just take a buyout, possibly? You can’t force people to stick around on the job, and I wouldn’t be surprised if NWS offices have gone without permanent forecasters for a while in the past.
D: How many NWS offices surround the Jackson office’s area of responsibility? While tornadoes are notoriously localized and unpredictable, if the permanent forecaster has been gone for longer than a week or so, it seems like any serious agency would have taken steps to get as much forecasting ability as possible from other supporting offices.
E: At a minimum, the following:
As the MAGA-rampage against science continues unabated, how many more will pay for the ignorance of this administration?
With an above-normal hurricane season starting in two week, how far will Americans let these threats to public safety go?
Does not strike me as the sort of phrasing used by someone who is simply expressing scientific concerns without fear or favor.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
1mo ago
It reads like ChatGPT, very much so.
You will catch trolls, idiots, and other bots. If that’s your target, you’re spot-on.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
1mo ago
Okay, I can’t speak to liberal university college students, not having gone to college, but that wasn’t the original assertion.
I can tell you anecdotally, n=1, that while “Normal Christians” in flyover country won’t know the jargon, they are definitely aware that people are out there, both on the coasts and in flyover country, trying a new spin on justifying sexual sin.
Link is empty. What was the stunt photo?
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