BANNED USER: /comment/212921
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JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
Banned by: @naraburns
JTarrou
1yr ago
Was it assigned? That's way over the heads of the vast majority of high schoolers. Hell, it's over the heads of most university professors, but that's not saying much.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek - Annie Dillard's masterful contemplation of nature and man's place in it.
The Fall - Camus turns on Sarte, heralding the turn of europe against communism. A veritable nesting doll of allegory.
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber - Hemmingway does battle of the sexes in short-story form!
JTarrou
22d ago
Slave morality can be exploited by non-slaves
There is no non-slave morality
JTarrou
24d ago
Not a Nietzschean, but his basic description of mass religion tracks just fine. Not just abrahamic, I would argue every large religion is a religion of submission, of slavery. Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism etc. all count. All are functionally about convincing the ruled to keep to their place.
Non-slave religions cannot spread beyond a tiny martial minority, nor survive social progress or the achievement of wealth and comfort. The slaves outnumber the free a thousand to one. Religion must take its adherents where they are.
JTarrou
2mo ago
Nah, probably not, unless he was a regular on the strip or in the MOPH.
Behind Covenant is tough, I lived in that area, a dozen blocks south roughly. Behind St. Mary's makes Baghdad look like Bennington.
JTarrou
2mo ago
Necro!
Anyhoo, I liked this particular bit.
Of course it's a lot more complicated, this was some Deep Thoughts With Jack Handy style analysis. I do think it's a useful frame.
Slavery counterfactuals aside, technology provided an option to slave labor. It didn't need to annihilate it. It just had to be a viable alternative, and I imagine that point in time was different for different technologies and different jobs. John Henry is a folk tale about this process, and he, of course, is a freed slave. Freed to have a labor competition with a steel-driving machine.
JTarrou
5mo ago
A lot of artists/authors in the colonial period were famous for running off to Morocco or some such place where pederasty was winked at. Borroughs, etc. Some overlap with gay.
JTarrou
6mo ago
I would say the stereotype is broadly correct, though individuals vary wildly. I am a far less sexually adventurous person than most of my compadres, but my experience there both psychologically and training/observation of technique did vastly increase my success and dabbling in casual sexual encounters, but "vastly increase" is a nice way of saying "started from shit". Frankly, that period of my life wasn't particularly fulfilling sexually, I much prefer longer term relationships.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Forget "nationalism" for a moment, then. What is the correct level of organization for group conflict, or is there none?
JTarrou
7mo ago
What counts as an ethnicity deserving of a homeland with a claim on territory and the right to exclude people of other ethnicities?
Turkey wasn't always Turkish.
JTarrou
7mo ago
Morals don't tend to have much support or actuality in interstate conflict. We can argue about what is "moral", but the only way that has any effect is if we manage to convince some more powerful nation (the US for instance) to put enough military force into the area to create the conditions we think preferable. This sort of thing doesn't tend to solve much.
JTarrou
8mo ago
a more effective method for achieving goals
the only truly unalienable right
I think you're arguing something I'm not arguing against.
Violence is uncertainty. Both about who will prevail and who expects to prevail.
I most certainly do not overlook this, it's what makes the system as fair as anything else that exists.
The rest of your comment seems to think that I said violence was the best political system, but that is not my argument. How power is produced from violence is a corrupt and despicable business, but we call it politics. None of that impacts my argument that violence is the only inherent human right.
It is the only method by which the truly disadvantaged can inject some uncertainty into their otherwise certain outcomes.
JTarrou
8mo ago
we live in the era that states have monopolies on force.
No, we don't. From Prigozhin to Weaver to Rittenhouse, our modern states have long lost (if they ever had) any sort of monopoly on violence.
Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder.
Obviously I disagree. All rights can be misused, but the right is underlying, ineradicable. A right means nothing if it is only the right to do something in a manner prescribed by society in a given time and place. Violence is always an option, if not always the smart or moral one. Point is, the right is "unalienable" in a very real sense. Nobody can take it from you. Because of this, it underwrites all other rights, because if they are trampled far enough, we can activate the most ancient and powerful of all rights.
JTarrou
9mo ago
I see it as fundamentally misguided to try to map all opposite pairs to each other in one neat table with two columns.
Yeah, that would be a giant waste of time, which is why I didn't do it.
Like chaos is female and order is male but then you'd also want violence to be male and peace to be female which is kind of contradictory. Things have both qualities in them and it depends on which one you want to emphasize. The desert sun with its scorching heat and its spiky rays is male. The large nurturing sun is female. The soft moon is female mystery and twilight associated with moist dew. The cold hard rock of the moon is male.
So you have understood me!
Yes. The duality is within us. If you define things carefully and specifically enough, the dichotomy presents itself. A warm sun on a cold day is "female" because it is comforting and pleasurable, something we associate with the feminine, but hot, sweaty sun is more masculine and cool breeze and shade would be more "feminine" in that specific case. This is not about dogmatic categories, but explaining seemingly contradictory ideals.
the world isn't just one axis, there are many.
Exactly. A functionally infinite set of interactions and influences.
The particular beliefs and lines of division between Rs and Ds in today's America aren't derivable from first principles symbolism
Here we may disagree slightly, but it's definitional. I think it is explainable in terms of a confluence of tensions, and I think it is derivable by these methods, but that no one actually does it. This does not mean I think there is some deep essence to left or right, R or D, I merely use those because the tension between them is high and it allows us to see that as you say, there is no consistency in politics.
That's sort of the point. Take gun and drug legalization/restriction. This is a political issue, not a fundamental tension, but this can be seen in terms of different axes of tension. You have danger/safety, freedom/restriction, power/weakness, pain/pleasure, etc. Everyone looks at those issues, does their party affiliation thing and finds an explanation that satisfies them about why they think what they think. The "freedom" value is associated with the "danger", "power" and "pleasure" values here, which means that people who are really far out on the bell curve on the axis of "freedom" would probably scorn the danger and desire the pleasure and be in favor of both (i.e. libertarians). Everyone else is more toward the average of these tensions, and we get the muddy partial restriction of contemporary politics where certain guns and certain drugs are legal in certain circumstances.
JTarrou
10mo ago
Russia has the world's second most powerful military, but even they are largely reliant on a private army to provide their most skilled and motivated soldiers. So much so that the leader of such a force has the apparent ability to reach Moscow from Ukraine to express his displeasure, defy the government and even if he's assassinated tomorrow, live to tell the tale.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I played in bands back in high school and college, mostly rhythm guitar. I enjoyed it, but was never much cop (compared to other musicians). I didn't love it enough to switch to left hand playing after injuring my fretting hand.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Ok mate, I'm trying to be a little coy here and not overdo it. Here's the outline from stuff I've already posted. Born in a faith-healing cult, three years in Russia as a MK, infantry NCO, purple heart, CIB etc. etc. I've worked manual labor jobs planting/picking crops, baling hay, detasseling corn, roofing crew, washing semi trucks, digging spot holes for excavation. Now in arthritic middle age, and officially "disabled", I work indoors and my job isn't nearly as strenuous. Mostly paperwork and shitty customers. So I keep my hand in with a bit of light exercise, which my wife still couldn't do.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Perhaps. Time will tell, but I'm not staking any bets on them shifting the next national election.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Lol, looks like right-wing cancellations are as short-lived and poorly thought out as the left's.
Called it!
JTarrou
1yr ago
Obviously I'm exaggerating somewhat, not literally no days ever. That said:
A dozen miles a week, a thousand swings, a hundred pull-ups, three classes of BJJ, two range sessions. This is relatively lazy, but I'm old and just trying to maintain a bit of capability. Still, not a chance.
Yes and no.
At the most macro level, no. I don't want my tax dollars going to fund religious groups at all.
Given the fact that I don't get a choice in this, my money is going to religious groups, I find the orthodox relatively unobjectionable. Certainly and clearly better than Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, LDS, Academics, etc. On numbers alone if nothing else, they just aren't a priority problem to me. I don't see how they could be for anyone given their insular behavior. They aren't proselytizing, they aren't bombing shit, they aren't doing drive-bys. They're scamming the welfare system so they can sit in tiny rooms and argue about the Talmud rather than man a deli counter. If we're going to waste the taxpayer's money (and, I hope we can agree, we are), our country could do a lot worse, and does so on a regular basis.
If I were king, I would end all federal money going to schools, period. There's no such thing as secular education, so the state should GTFO. But that's not a political possibility, so we're talking about the least-bad policy to have. Lots of religions run this sort of scam, there was a whole thing in Minneapolis about Somali day-care centers that involved a lot of graft a few years back. I suspect which one people get outraged about depends on whether they consider jews or muslims to be their outgroup.
The only interesting thing I see here is that apparently, the NYT considers orthodox jews to be outgroup now.
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