I think not, so how many grunts would an ancient von Neumann have been worth to Caesar's army?
With any luck, he'd have been worth a few generals, irrespective of his ability to improve on contemporary siege weaponry, and perhaps he'd have replaced Caesar himself in textbooks – which is, in fact, my point; Ceasar was a genius himself, from what we can tell.
I am afraid you way overestimate how much of ancient history survived.
We know little else than names of many scientists and thinkers considered greatest geniuses in their time.
What would history said about ancient Von Neumann? Something like this:
...
NEUMANUS of Puteoli (fl. first half of 1st BCE), ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician.
N's works are completely lost, but he was mentioned by several second century sources as mathematician and geometer. One third century source claims N. was also writing about ethics and political philosophy.
About N. life is known nothing except he was of eastern Greek origin and moved to Italy later in his life.
There are no contemporary mentions of N. and his works and only few later notices.
1/Second century collection of anecdotes from lives of famous philosophers, contains two tidbits from N's life.
One extremely implausibly describes his mathematical prowess, while another is obviously meant as over-the-top parody of warmongering demagogue (it would be clear to all contemporaries that no Greek could be ever allowed to step in Roman Senate, least of all to implore the Senate to declare war against Parthian Empire in cartoonishly bloodthirsty speech).
2/Fourth century military writer in chapter about siege warfare includes apocryphal story how N. was one of Caesar's influential advisors and attributes to him invention of several war machines (current scholarly consensus is the story is later interpolation).
3/Fourth or fifth century pagan anti-Christian polemic quoted by fifth century Christian writer lists N. among famous learned and wise men who were pious worshippers of pagan gods (reading of name is disputed).
4/Seventh century Jewish chronicle lists N. among Jewish apostates and renegades who betrayed their faith (reading of name is disputed).
edit: typos, my fingers keep forgetting this site needs higher quality input than Reddit ;-)
Eetan
1yr ago
For the life of me I don't know why he does what he does.
I can understand it very easily.
"I made it, I am the richest man in the world! I am universal genius, I understand it all, I can do everything, I can solve all problems of the world!"
"The world is ungrateful? The world does not want my advice? It only proves how stupid they are, and how smart I am!"
I am sure you met such people IRL, people who think genuine success and accomplishment in their work makes them universal authority on everything (and even more people who feel like it without any accomplishment whatsoever)
Eetan
1yr ago
I straight up do not believe in the existence of any specialized «mathematical talent» or «political talent» or any other talent for that matter.
If it were true, Napoleon's romantic novel would be known as masterpiece belonging to the pinnacle of world's literature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clisson_et_Eug%C3%A9nie
Yes, Napoleon like every young man of his time, dreamed to be a romantic artist and worked on it as hard as he worked on everything else. The result is ... similar what would happen if Goethe was given command of an army.
Napoleon is no exception - numerous great and accomplished men - politicians, generals, businessmen, scientists, etc... wrote memoirs of their lives. How many of them are known for their literary, artistic value?
Ed Witten could have continued on the track of politics and journalism; he didn't become any smarter after dropping it.
Was he known as rising star in the world of journalism and politics?
Are "Are You Listening, D.H. Lawrence?" and "The New Left" known for their genius insight?
(anyway, political genius would pick other place to start his career than McGovern campaign)
Some people say that power over humans is just fundamentally not as interesting to intelligent people as playing with abstractions and earning six figures while being a vulnerable serf, which entirely filters out geniuses. I call them nerds and press (x) for doubt.
Power? Job of modern politician is office job that consists of meetings and endless powerpoint presentations, job where you are as easily replaceable cog of machine as in every other job.
Nerd serf worth six figure pay could be fired, could be cancelled and blacklisted if he fucks up badly, and in this is no different from politician (except that the politician would fall much harder).
People interested in raw up your face "powah" become cops, border or prison guards, this is work where you can bully and brutalize your fellow human beings with impunity.
Eetan
1yr ago
Part of having White racial consciousness is, as far as I’m concerned, wanting to safeguard the welfare even of White people who don’t want the help. Rescuing wayward, confused Whites is non-negotiably important, in my opinion - saving Whites from themselves and opening their eyes to what has been done to them with their own ostensible (if compromised) consent.
Good luck with this.
The best and brightest of Whites clearly see that "whiteness" is lost cause and are leaving the sinking ship ASAP to join the winning side.
https://www.thejc.com/news/world/joe-biden-s-very-jewish-family-1.508420
Eetan
1yr ago
The problem of WNs isn't that there are many Jews in positions of power. It's that Whites in similar positions have no agency, qua Whites. Chuck Schumer is a conscious, proud member of a millenia-old ethnoreligious community headquartered in Israel, and explicitly takes actions to advance their interests using his position as an American politician (including assistance in suppressing people who notice and take issue with this agenda). Mitch McConnell is just some turtle-looking Republican. If you remove Chuck, Mitch won't start caring about the continuity or glory of your race. Neither will Nancy.
What can be done with that? Not much, I'm afraid.
What could make rich well educated lawyer feel solidarity with poor illiterate peasants? When he is treated like one of them, when he is reminded he is the same dirty wog like they are.
Make sure Mitch McConnell is oppressed and persecuted like poor Appalachian whites are oppressed and persecuted, and he might reconsider too.
Eetan
1yr ago
So, what view would I suggest? A far more symmetric view: Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality.
Sort of. What you call "left" wants equality of outcome it that sense they want the world as it is, only with all races equally represented in the position of power and wealth. What is wrong with billionaires is that there is not enough BIPOC billionaires.
See the great popularity of fiction set in alternate history where racism never existed, where British Empire was always racially mixed and racially tolerant, where people of all colors were equally represented among aristocracy and it was awesome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgerton
Looking forward to remake of Gone With the Wind, where Scarlett is black and slaves on her plantation, both black and white, are living in perfect harmony without any racism. It will be record shattering blockbuster, leaving Avatar and all capeshit products in the dust.
Nevertheless, such attitude would not be recoginzed as "leftist" by anyone in history before last decade or two.
Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the unachievability of equality and justification of inequality.
"HBDIQ" fans did not came from ranks of Neo-Nazis, skinheads and white prison gangs - these people are absolutely certain about their racial superiority and do not need any bell curves, IQ tables and similar nerd shit.
HBDIQ came from rationalist, atheist, science loving nerds, who did their research.
"Race science? 19th century white "scientists" measured skulls with tape and always fould that white skulls are superior? Haha! This sounds as stupid as astrology, creationism, psi powers, ufology and feng shui. I debunked all this crap, going to research this shit too. When I finish, I will put it on Rational Wiki. For science!"
...
...
...
WTF !
WTF !!!
WTF @#$%%%% !!!!!!!
Eetan
1yr ago
I’m generally pretty anti violence, but this is one area I’d like to see heads roll. The deaths and destruction from their negligence far outweigh the deaths even if we kill every virologist on the planet. Not that I’d recommend that, just putting it in perspective. Again I can’t understand how more people aren’t outraged.
Yes, this is the most blackpilling thing about the whole COVID episode.
Scientists are playing russian roulette with the whole world, so they can publish some journal articles no one will ever read to burnish their metrics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientometrics
And the world is just fine with it.
Including powerful and influential people who can nevertheless die with the billions of ordinary peons when some bigger oops happens in the future.
Eetan
1yr ago
Am I correct in understanding that you’re referring to the Chomsky type of critique, which includes literal conspiracies that actually were uncovered in due time (and even when not, carefully crafted enough to give a veneer of plausibility and deniability), over the general impression of “conspiracy theory” of things like big pharma conspiracies with vaccines and whatnot?
He is referring to thing called parapolitics (TL;DR: hard left conspiracy community crawling through all the rabbit holes whenever they lead, and doing their research without bullshit).
Some people, like Joel Van Der Reijden of ISGP do follow where the evidence leads, all the way to full HBDIQ awareness.
https://www.isgp-studies.com/intro
(warning: site can cause severe case of blackpilling)
The 1980's, time of Iran Contra scandal was the heyday, but the community is still here (although smaller and heavily blackpilled).
This was time when doing conspiracy research did not meant listening to Alex Jones, it meant writing down names on big table and painstakingly linking them with spider web of financial, political, personal and familial connections. If you did it thorougly for long time, you found that some major nodes of the web are people whose faces are not on TV screens and magazine covers and whose names are found only in very specialized sources (and then you would lock yourself in your room and hang yourself).
https://web.archive.org/web/20200806155838/https://lombardinetworks.net/networks/the-networks/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi
Obligatory meme:
"First they came for the pornographers, then the disabled, then the jews" or something.
Been there, done that.
First they outlawed "obscenity", and then they used obscenity laws to silence protestors against WWI and censor their mail.
What could be more obscene than shitting on our brave boys defending civilization from the beastly Hun?
Eetan
1yr ago
I read a post the other day by someone who was trying to get a hitman to kill them and instead found themselves talking to an apologetic FBI sting operation with suicide prevention hotline recommendations. Not sure how common that is, but I'd bet that finding a competent hitman rather than a scammer has poor odds.
To put it mildly. If you do not have very good connections of this kind, if you do not know this kind of shady people who trust you and know even shadier people, forget about it.
Fortunately, we are on the internet, where any interest, no matter how obscure, finds its dedicated fan and support group, and suicide is no exception.
Since the demise of 8chan
https://web.archive.org/web/20190804172611/https://8ch.net/suicide/res/376.html
SS forum is the place to go (it gained enough notoriety to be noticed by normie news, including NYT, it is not some deep secret anymore)
https://sanctioned-suicide.org/threads/suicide-resource-compilation.3/
admins: if this kind of content is too mature for this community, feel free to delete it and ban me
Eetan
1yr ago
Russia is white and Christian
I wish.
Why?
Christian world (Latin America and Africa) has no interest in white supremacy, while White world has no interest in Christianity (and is not keen on white supremacy either).
Explicitly "White Christian" country would be more isolated and treated worse than North Corea.
Not the best way to make Russia great again.
Eetan
1yr ago
Having to continually upgrade my estimate of how blackpilled you are, gotta say.
Blackpilled because there are people researching the best ways of exit in rational scientific way, or because there are people preventing exit by any means necessary with diligence of conscientious guard patrolling the perimeter of camp, checking whether walls are strong and whether barbed wire is not torn, looking for every possible nook and cranny prisoners can use to sneak away?
Remember the SN controversy?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/technology/amazon-suicide-poison-preservative.html
This Dr. Death's super mega deadly connoction NYT wants to ban (for ordinary normies OFC) and fears so much it refuses to name it, is sodium nitrite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_nitrite
Essential medicine and ordinary household chemical, used for preservation of food.
Not any more, if NYT get its wish. Who are you to think about making your homemade ham, sausage, bacon and smoked meat? Go to supermarket like everyone else, consume MegaFoodCorp products like everyone else. If it saves only one life, it is worth it.
Wait when people discover how easily you can use New York Times for suicide...
Eetan
1yr ago
All of that to say, don't believe that China is some sort of "law and order" society. It is, but in the same way the late stage USSR was. The laws exist to protect and advance the interests of the powerful, and crime statistics serve to burnish the country's image, not to actually document how much crime is taking place.
Compared to what came afterwards, post-Stalin USSR was "law and order" society. Do not look at statistics, look at what Soviet people complained at the time (lots of things, but fear of violence and crime was not one of them), or ask elderly people who remember - they would tell you safety was the main thing they miss from the old times.
Eetan
1yr ago
Pedo lifestyles are outside of the Overton window but only for the time being. There's no magic principal limiting the endless expansion of rights and tolerance. It'll never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.
This is common right wing talking point for all of our living memory: "The libs want to mainstream pedophilia!"
While, in reality, "pedos" are people hated by everyone, the last people that are publicly acceptable to lynch, people that everyone loves to compare their political enemies to, and the definition of "pedo" gets wider and wider every year - from actual rape of pre pubescent children to any sex under 18 year line to relationship with "age gap".
No "expansion of rights and tolerance" to pedophiles is evident.
(if you want to reply: "wHY yOu dEFeNd pEdOS? dIe pEdO sCUm"!, thanks for proving my point)
Eetan
1yr ago
Is France ideologically White or Christian?
No one is anymore.
Only ideologically religious countries left are Muslim countries and last country officially based on racial supremacy was South Africa (Israel, despite everything, allows conversion to Judaism, no such thing as conversion to Whiteness was possible in old time SA).
Eetan
1yr ago
I don't think this is a very charitable response. I said There's no magic principal limiting the endless expansion of rights and tolerance
And I said that there is no "endless expansion" - tolerance was expanded in few limited areas, while everywhere else, the hammer will fall on your head harder than ever before if you cross (arbitrary and constantly changing) line.
No one even claims anymore, least of all "liberals", that tolerance is good thing - "zero tolerance" is the spirit of our age.
You can't tell me the slope isn't slippery when we've been sliding down it my entire life.
Yes, and it is slippery against everything that can be seen as "pedo" and it gets slipperier and slipperier. When was the first time you heard about "age gap"?
For the time being we still refer to those changes as "damage" but I don't see a solid reason why given the way things are heading.
Except the things are definitely NOT heading this way. Things are heading into seeing relationship of 45 years old man and 25 years old woman as exploitative and pedophilic, equal to relationship of 25 years old man and 5 years old woman.
Conservatives may claim that only their brave fight prevents libs from mainstreaming pedophilia, but, somehow, they failed to stop mainstreaming of homosexuality, gay marriage and transgenderism despite trying their best.
Eetan
1yr ago
Or you could just have people robbing crypto through more traditional means. Some Russian writer - Galeev? - wrote how it's amazing that Western crypto enthusiasts openly announce online that they're holding crypto - in less secure countries that's just an invitation for criminals to kidnap you and hold/brutalize you until you give the password to your wallet.
Kamil Galeev is proud Tatar, not a Russian bone in him ;-) and the thread is here
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1579138947447279616
All who want their daily dose of horror stories from Russia, follow him, you will not be disappointed.
Eetan
1yr ago
Official propaganda at the time claimed that harvests are record breaking, shops are full and all Soviet citizens live in great prosperity. Nevertheless, Soviet people perceived things differently.
If violence was omnipresent and streets were gang free fire zones, Soviet people would notice it too.
Read memories of Soviets who immigrated to US - they were doubly shocked. Once positively, with American standard of life and how such unimaginable luxury was seen as normal, and once negatively, with American crime and violence and how such endless carnage was seen as normal.
Eetan
1yr ago
Among intellectuals Aristotle thought that men doing physical labour belonged with women and children in the political hirearchy: not fit for citizenship. The normative life for Aristotle was that of a leisured aristocrat, not some proletarian or peasant. Physical labour could be used to keep oneself fit and virile, or monastic labour to get closer to God, or to get out of some sticky situation (see Heracles) but it wasn't something that you were supposed to do to earn a living of all things!
This is misunderstanding of classical antiquity attitude. It was not about "labor".
In ancient mindset, only free man, man worthy of being a citizen, was an independent man.
Who was an independent man?
Slaves were obviously dependent, had to obey their masters or else.
Wage laborers were also considered slaves who had to sell themselves every day in order to survive.
City dwelling artisans were dependent on their customers - if no one wants to buy the shoes you make, you are hosed.
The same about merchants.
In ancient mind, the only independent people were farmers living on their land - both small farmers working their land themselves and large landowners sitting in atrium and watching the slaves.
Eetan
1yr ago
It can be true that the aristocrats believe that physical labour is ignoble drudgery, and also true that the commoners believe that toiling in the fields is "real work" that requires you to get your hands dirty, unlike "women's work" that involves sitting at a desk all day. Both of these things can be true simultaneously, but because commoners are far greater in number than the aristocracy, the latter belief will be held by a far greater share of the human populace than the former.
Where to start...
No, this has nothing in common with "traditional society". No, America seen in 1950's sitcoms was not "traditional society".
Toiling in the fields was, in traditional societies, fate of 90+% men and 90+% women (may differ due to urbanization rate). Labor of peasant woman was lighter than one of peasant men, but still hard enough it would crush any modern man, no matter how tough he imagines himself to be.
Sitting at a desk - work of scribe - was extremely prestigious and desirable work, and it was for (elite) men only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satire_of_the_Trades
See, there is no office free from supervisors, except the scribe's. He is the supervisor!
But if you understand writings, then it will be better for you than the professions which I have set before you.
Eetan
1yr ago
for intro, see newly released "One Nation Under Blackmail" by Whitney Webb
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51074723-one-nation-under-blackmail
Eetan
1yr ago
Suppose you're being honest, what is the requirement for claiming indigenous ancestry? The average white American has 0.2% indigenous ancestry, which means 1 out 500 of their ancestors were indigenous.
There is no universal "official requirement", no one wants to be one deciding how much black or native you have to be to be "black" or "native", no one wants to open this can of worms.
The rules are widely varying, inconsistent and changing all the time as one should expect. For intro into modern Amarican racial classification (with interesting historical tidbits and amusing anecdotes) see this paper
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3592850
The Modern American Law of Race
Eetan
1yr ago
What, exactly, are you arguing with me about? I don't understand your bone of contention at all.
As you phrase it, by singling out men, it might look you imagine that women were not supposed to earn a living by hard labor, that ancient women were sitting on sofas and painting their nails while their husbands and sons toiled.
Let aside "earning a living", very modern term that implies wage labor, something not common to "most men" before modern time.
Eetan
1yr ago
One might have presumed that the weakening of Rome would have caused people to lose faith in Caesars, perhaps reestablishing the wholesome old days of the Republic or something
One might, but in reality the tradition of ancient republic and democracy was at the time completely forgotten, and medieval representative institutions - even in Italy itself - were derived from Germanic traditions.
https://fpb.livejournal.com/141494.html
The chairman of the modern English Parliament bears the ancient title of Speaker, clearly derived from the Lawspeaker who presided the Scandinavian Things, and the earliest name of the city councils that ruled Italian cities in the first age of free republics was Arengo, from Longobard Hring
This is true. Wide open empty spaces are found all over the world, but wide open empty spaces you can cross safely and comfortably are indeed only in America. In Sahara or Gobi desert, in Argentinian pampa or Brazilian cerrado you are on your own.
Even big trip across/around Australia is something not comparable to coast to coast ride.
https://www.jorishermans.com/blog/road-trip-battle-east-coast-australia-vs-west-coast-usa
Fortunately, when you are alone in your big car on the big road, you do not have to care about your obnoxious compatriots.
edit: link fixed
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