BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
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User ID: 3614
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
14d ago
Ultimately as a Christian, I find this sort of blatant hatred and mockery of the outgroup quite disturbing.
I simply find his aesthetics to be revolting.
What would you say your take is on the aesthetics of Saint Louis the IX?
Louis IX's reign is often marked as an economic and political zenith for medieval France, and he held immense respect throughout Christendom.
Louis was a staunch Christian and rigorously enforced Catholic orthodoxy. He enacted harsh laws against blasphemy,[5] and he also launched actions against France's Jewish population, including ordering them to wear a yellow badge of shame, as well as the notorious burning of the Talmud following the Disputation of Paris.
The loss of Damietta again shocked the Muslim world, and, like his father thirty years ago, as-Salih Ayyub offered to trade Damietta for Jerusalem. The offer was rejected as Louis refused to negotiate with an infidel.
Or the aesthetics of Charles Martel?
Prince Charles boldly drew up his battle lines against them [the Arabs] and the warrior rushed in against them. With Christ's help, he overturned their tents and hastened to battle to grind them small in slaughter. The king Abdirama having been killed, he destroyed [them], driving forth the army, he fought and won. Thus did the victor triumph over his enemies.
Perhaps Saint Bede’s aesthetics when discussing the Hammer of the Moors?
"... a dreadful plague of Saracens ravaged France with miserable slaughter, but they not long after in that country received the punishment due to their wickedness"
Speaking of Saracens, I always enjoy the very modern quote that Ridley Scott puts into Saladin’s mouth in Kingdom of Heaven
Mullah: [the mullah pays a visit to Saladin in his tent after the battle at Kerak] Why did we retire? Why? God did not favor them. God alone determines the results of battles.
Saladin: The results of battles ARE determined by God, but also by preparation, numbers, the absence of disease, and the availability of water. One cannot maintain a siege with the enemy behind. How many battles did God win for the Muslims before I came... that is, before God determined that I should come?
Mullah: Few enough. That's because we were sinful.
Saladin: It is because you were unprepared.
Mullah: If you think that way, you shall not be king for long.
Saladin: [Saladin rises to his feet] When I'm not king, I quake for Islam.
I would happily take a King who refuses to negotiate with infidels, or who grinds them small in slaughter, or delivers them the punishment due to their wickedness, over someone who cares about modern liberal aesthetics. That’s how my side, any side really, gets lasting victories.
This is all a Motte-appropriate long winded way to say, “Modern liberal aesthetics have sucked the nobility and grandeur out of everything. We’ve got to go through the grinding small part before we get out the other end and back to the beautiful and noble aesthetics that I suspect you and I both prefer.”
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
15d ago
Sorry, I had a more detailed response and lost it, but I hope this suffices to give you the point of view I use to think about these things.
He who builds the biggest bridges and the fanciest paved roads is not necessarily going to be the last man standing. There are other very successful strategies for overcoming your neighbor.
The Vandals and the Goths out-competed the Romans. The Seljuk Turks outcompeted the Caliph in Baghdad. The Mongols outcompeted the Chinese, the Persians, the Turks, and the Eastern European principalities.
Those are the obvious military accomplishments, where a significantly less advanced and technological state has the vigor to punch way above its weight class when fighting against more, allegedly, militarily capable states.
There are also other strategies. One might say that the Goths, either wittingly or unwittingly, pursued a strategy of educating their sons in the advanced society of their day, while retaining their essential Goth-ness (by going to clubs), and eventually completing the long destruction of Western Roman society even while they adopted on the surface some of its formalities. What matters here is that the Goths were the last culture standing.
This is obviously an endlessly iterating game, but in this current iteration, I think that the curve might be slow, but the parallel Muslim cultures growing in the West and supported by the Dar-al-Islam, are beginning to outcompete the societies they are embedded in while retaining and even doubling down on their, uhhhh, less than fully feminist laws and cultural traits.
Could this change? Of course. It didn’t take the Chinese very long to out-compete the Mongols via a different strategy, after all. But that strategy is not a silver bullet. The Tatar Yoke wasn’t lifted by the Golden Horde converting to dome-based architecture and Orthodoxy, after all.
So, I don’t count “We have more bridges, McDonalds, and better military toys” as a definitive killer app in the endless war between peoples/nations/cultures.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
15d ago
And also, what do you even call this type of position/argument?
Chronic Scofield’s disease.
Alternatively, the fruits of heresy.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
16d ago
Either way, the picture you paint of the impact of women in the workplace seems nothing short of apocalyptic, so wouldn't you expect at least some examples of societies that don't allow it outperforming those that do?
I would argue that the curve is slow, but parallel Muslim societies are beginning to outcompete Western societies.
We absolutely don’t have to establish any kind of natural level. We know for a fact that the national government of the United States is putting a thumb on the scale by creating laws mandating female-friendly workplaces, benefits for woman-owned businesses, encouraging STEM and leadership programs that are open only to women, lighter sentencing, family law preference, Title IX tribunals, maternity policies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s just the Feds.
In the same way, we know for a fact that the Federal government is putting its thumb on the scales for farmers by providing farming subsidies. The present level of farmers and farming done in America is higher than it would be in the absence of those subsidies. I don’t need to tell you that America requires a natural level of precisely 1,348,756 farmers before we can agree on the number of farmers being kept artificially high for policy reasons.
Now, in both these cases, the government of the nation is pursuing policies it, at least nominally, believes to be in its strategic interest. They might be wrong, but those are understandable goals.
Andrew’s argument is simply that, in the specific case of women in the workforce, the thumb of the government should be taken off the scale. Men should be allowed to have frat house workplaces as women are allowed to have longhouse workplaces. Men should be allowed to only hire other men, as women are allowed to hire all-female workplaces without concerns of successful diversity lawsuits. The Federal government shouldn’t prioritize woman-owned businesses in its contracting rules. Just let nature take its course, and the winners will win and the losers will lose. It may be that the losers are all the pro-men men on “my side.” But then at least we’d know and that would be quite interesting.
It seems like a very simple argument to me.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
28d ago
Why is Lincoln keeping the federal military in the harbors of another nation? It’s obviously a performative provocation which his base is lapping up.
The guy doing the most to fan the flames of civil war is the President himself.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
Aren’t there just fewer young people in general? It seems like that would be the most likely causative process, at a first glance.
Or is it such a precipitous drop in young addicts that it seems likely there are additional causes?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
The stuff they show in "A Grunt's Life" is just straight-up war crimes. Any court would agree. Bombing Nagasaki certainly wasn't nice, but it was legal. This stuff would just get you sent to prison. That's the sense in which I think it's worse.
I think you might be doing a little WWII-washing of what wars are like. Everything you described seeing in A Grunt’s Life is stuff that occurred in WWII, and received much more of a wink and a nod or a slap on the wrist at the time. On the topic of body part collections, in 1944 a sitting U.S. Representative (D - Penn) presented President Roosevelt with a letter opener made from a Japanese soldier’s arm. That’s way higher level than an Lt hiding his tooth collection or whatever.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
Little House on the Prairie springs to mind.
For fantasy, I enjoyed The Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce when I was 11-12ish. It’s basically just your standard medieval setting hero’s journey story with a girl, mostly avoids giving her waif fu, and as I recall eventually makes her a mage to give her a leg up on competing with the full grown adult male knights at the end of the series.
She also wrote the Wild Magic series following a teenage girl who was some kind of special wizard, which had 4 books. I recall the first two being pretty entertaining for an adolescent male, and the last two descending into kind of stereotypical “Who will I choose, poor plain I, the powerful demon or the powerful wizard?” sort of modern female romantasy.
The first series she wrote in the 80s, and the second in the 90s, so there might have been a bit of a canary in the coal mine there as far as which direction publishing was heading.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
2312 came out in 2012, and presumably was written in 2011 sometime, at the latest. That’s at least 5 years before trans stuff really filtered out into normie world, I think.
I think KSR is a bit of an overrated author in the world of SF, but he tends to be well ahead of the current thing.
To his intellectual credit, he strikes me as more of a harbinger of doom than a follower.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
2mo ago
I was passed by a Sherwin-Williams truck earlier today and noted something unusual that had escaped my notice surely dozens of times before.
Their slogan is “Cover the Earth” and it is accompanied by a graphic depicting paint pouring out of a bucket over a globe.
Is there any other company anyone is aware of that is quite so up front about their corporate commitment to instantiating apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenarios? I’m choosing to call the Sherwin-Williams situation an ecru-goo doomsday.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
What did we do? Bombed the shit out of them yes, invaded yes… but what else? Did we engage in a war of annihilation to destroy all Afghans? No. No! We gave them a shitton of money to rebuild stuff, tried mostly to avoid civilian deaths, helped them set up a new government for themselves, tried all sorts of education and policy interventions, lots of stuff! Okay later we tortured some people but look at how we treated the general population.
Would you say that this strategy was successful?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
I’ll light a candle and pray for you to overcome your traumatic time-travel travails.
I’ve chipped in my 10 quid at enough popup RSPCA booths on British Town High Street that I think I’ve bought an indulgence or two. The sad dog posters always get me.
My primary concern is the ghost of Hector haunting me for my presumptuousness.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
Going back in time to create your own cloning and quick aging vats is deeply respectable commitment to your transhuman philosophy, and, if you’re looking for literary criticism, a bit of a ripoff from Warhammer 40K.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
Fast forward to now. A US Airman has died, allegedly because the service pistol fired a round while it was sitting in a holster on his desk.
You spent a considerable amount of words digging away at the foundations of “The Gun That Goes Off For No Reason,” but if it turns out this is true,* would you consider it a gun that goes off for no reason?
*One hopes that everyone discussing this understands that “no reason” means “without purposeful human input.” The guy bumping his desk as he stood up is a reason in the causal sense, but obviously not the sort of thing you want your holstered gun to do.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
- Two hours by car
- Two hours by car
- Five minute walk (wheat)
- Hour and a half by car
- 8 minutes by car
- Two hours by car
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
One thing I’ve found absolutely fascinating about these sorts of “live like it’s X year” experiments is just how surprising and even interesting the “analog” real world is once your brain adjusts to it.
Any links to examples? How far back are some of these people successfully resetting their clocks, as it were?
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
ENTJ
I just did the Meyers-Briggs a few months ago at the suggestion of some people I work with. Unknown to me at the time, the office consensus had settled on ENT already and was only undecided on J or P.
Once I got my results, J seemed pretty obvious to me, but I guess I hide it well or come off differently to people in real life.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
It is chutzpah of the highest order to rely on the charity and good will of your enemy to feed your people.
It’ll be nice to see siege warfare make a return.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
Didn’t realize you are Russian. Good luck, don’t get hit by shrapnel, hope the war wraps up soon.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
Aladdin 3: King of Thieves is pretty alright, on the basis of a strong third act.
Can’t say I know of any other good ones.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
In surveys like this, "household" normally is defined so that 15 unrelated adult occupants of a single house count as 15 one-person households.
This is insane. I love a good example of governmental statistical fudging, thanks!
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
Do you really think shoving all the gays back in the closet and teaching masturbation is evil will fix everything?
A practical Church-oriented solution would probably wind up looking like homosexual desires are a cross some people wind up bearing, like some people have kleptomania. It doesn’t matter how much you desire to steal, or how seen and valued it would make you feel, or what great justifications wordcel kleptomaniacs can generate to justify themselves. Civilization just isn’t going to let people steal all the time. The ordered solution is to not do it.
I imagine Richard Simmons was the optimal gay guy, from the Church’s perspective. Did he break down and sin from time to time? I’m sure he probably did. He was discreet enough that we will never know for sure, though.
But when society condones disordered living, it causes real harm to both society and the individual. Just like when society condones shoplifting, for any reason, SJW or otherwise, eventually stores start shutting down, harming society overall and the individuals who were doing the stealing.
Addendum: This stance presumes that homosexuality is, in fact, irresistibly based in biology, which I am not aware is proven.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
3mo ago
And this is a fair way to say it.
If I am a Martian Elm on Neptune, I’m not concerned much about the plight of the Neptunian Elm. But I also don’t want the Venusian Elm to move in on my nice spot by the river, either, and start competing for water. Even if I am supremely confident I’ll win, there’s nothing I really gain out of the situation.
Besides not speciating into a Quokka Elm, I guess.
I think the problem here is that your (possibly yours personally, but definitely my political opponents) ritual and civic religion is directly contradictory to mine and so why should I not want to tear it down and replace it with my own?
Yes. When one side or the other is so beaten down they accept defeat. That’s when it will stop. That’s how wars, even culture wars, work. And then it will start again at some point in the future, either near or far, about the same or different things.
Or we’ll all be AI serfs. I guess that might be enough to finally beat that dawg out of humanity.
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