LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
No bio...
User ID: 657
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3mo ago
Corrected, thanks.
Those people work with a very loose definition of genocide.
Personally, I'm not particularly interested in the question of whether Israel's actions meet the 'definition' of genocide, formal or otherwise. I get why it is important (least of all for the ICC and other international law proceedings) but at some level it just becomes a semantic question. I do think those who claim Russia is committing genocide against Ukraine but refuse to make or support the claim that that Israel is committing genocide against Palestine have a huge double standard.
My perspective is that, at best, Israel has displayed a overwhelming level of disregard and negligence to the Palestinian people that amounts to criminality, both recently and historically. At worst, I have to take at face value the multiple statements, both recently and historically, of senior Israeli officials that they want to utterly destroy Gaza and/or the Palestinian people. I both these things to be horribily immoral and should be rebuked. Whether they meet the formal definition of genocide I don't particularly care to argue.
In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.
Judges 21:25
The final verse of the book of Judges, the majority of Judges describing the people of Israel committing horrible atrocities.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
5mo ago
To talk about the plagarism allegation specifically:
Such an allegation is a bit rich when Hbomberguy is close friends with Hasan Piker, is who is the king of freebooting and stealing content. But I guess it's okay because in the video Hbomberguy makes one, tiny joke about Hasan where he doesn't even mention him by name and he got permission from Hasan to make the joke beforehand. So I guess that's fair and Hbomberguy is principled in criticising everyone, right.
The whole of "BreadTube" rife with plagarism and stealing content - it's just selective outrage against IH because he's an ideological enemy. At the very least, IH did cite the article and substantially valued added even if he could have done more.
A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches".
Why is this a competing hypothesis? I would imagine they're interrelated. It seems obvious to me that conservative parents would have greater restrictions on, or at least greater oversight of their children's social media usage and technology use. And the other way, it is likely a child who hasn't been 'influenced' by social media drivel is more responsive to conservative parenting and a better relationship with (conservative) parents.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
5mo ago
(Perhaps I'm being rather rose-tinted about journalistic standards in the past and this is all one big "always has been" meme.)
This video essay makes a pretty compelling argument that, yes, in fact the news was (more) unbiased and higher quality in the past and it's not just nostalgia.
Some of the examples are mindblowing. The example of the reporting on the Soviet Union's political affairs is remarkably unbiased and uneditorialised despite it being the literal height of the Cold War.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
5mo ago
If you just take the Pauline letters as the orthodoxy in the early Church, which it was and still is, there's virtually nothing disagreeable (modern progressivism notwithstanding)
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
6mo ago
Probably just because of that F1 Netflix documentary/reality show that was really popular. Played to typical reality show elements.
Are American political and social institutions really that liberal if Trump became president?
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
8mo ago
More and more young men are deciding to defect from a combination of pure lust mixed with either anger at the world, rejection of God and/or other religions, rejection from women they can't emotionally process, or all three at the same time.
To be fair, it wasn't men who defected first, men are finally playing catchup after women have been defecting for the last 60 years and men have finally realised that women aren't going to stop defecting. Unfortunately everyone is worse for it.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
9mo ago
I actually very much agree with you, that men and women are by nature complementary and cooperative. However, I was arguing withing the author's own feminist frame of reference.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
9mo ago
Do you really need a degree in 'library science' to achieve this?
It seems like the activities you're describing have little to do with the library themselves and could be performed by anyone with pedagogical experience (or any other 'social' type work with kids) and not necessarily a 'proper' librarian with a degree in 'library science' (this is your tiny school library, not the Library of Congress). Of course, modern pedagogy has also been overrun with woke ideology but that's a discussion for another time.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
9mo ago
All the Greek words I dropped being Logos, and... all the other ones?
Even if I had "dropped" a bunch of Greek words, how is this a rebuttal? Greek terminology is extremely commonly used in Western philosophy in general and a basic Greek vocabulary is useful for anyone wanting to engage with it.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
9mo ago
I also have sympathy for that view, and it's refreshing to see the discussion around religion evolve from 'religion is stupid and holding us back from rational utopia' to 'religion does have some real social utility'. However, it's hard for me to take this claim of wanting to believe seriously from some people who make this claim when I see a dismissal of all metaphysics out of hand from those same people, from what I believe is not from a serious consideration of metaphysics but a reflexive dismissal of anything that isn't materialist (scientism).
At the same time, I see a lot of what I'll perhaps uncharitably describe as 'playing' at atheism. That is, a refusal to engage with the actual consequences or logic conclusion of atheism, as outlined by philosophers like Nietzsche and Sartre - perhaps because the conclusion is so undesirable. Instead, we see this glossy and superficial atheism professed by the New Atheists, whose critics I think quite rightly point out are attacking Christianity while relying on an underlying implicit Christian morality in practice. They profess a rationalistic/scientific approach to moral issues which I think is a fool's errand - the scientism I was criticising in my original post.
This really is a matter of preference. Some people, like you and Tretiak, prefer the authoritarian blend, others like me prefer the liberal blend.
I can't speak for the others, but I think characterising this distinction as 'authoritarian' or 'liberal' misses the point. It's not freedom or lack of freedom, but rather one conception of freedom verses a different conception of freedom.
There's two very brought conceptions of freedom, which the first of which I'll label the British/empirical/analytical (liberal) conception of freedom, and the second I'll label the continental conception of freedom.
The analytical conception of freedom is the one that people in the Anglosphere are most familiar with, given that its modern form was born out of the English philosophical tradition. Locke, Mills, and of course the American Founding Fathers. Simplifying greatly, their conception of freedom is one where the external tyrannies of government (or some other external authority) be limited to allow individual freedom and human flourishing. In the extreme, individual rights only end where they infringe upon another person's rights, only as a matter of practically managing conflicting individual rights. Again, something that I'm sure pretty much everyone here will be familiar with.
The continental conception of freedom, for which I name after the poorly defined school of continental philosophy, has a very much different conception of freedom. For the continental philosophers (and I am painting with a really broad brush here), the true constraint on freedom was not some external tyranny or power structure, but yourself. To the continental philosopher, the most shackled man was one who was a slave to his own desires and unable to pursue the "Good" ("Good" here is a big placeholder for any given philosopher to insert his own conception, often it was capital-R Reason, or God, or something else). The continental philosopher looks at a man who wantonly satisfies all his baser instincts as no better than an animal. Consider a man who just fulfills all his most base and carnal desires today - maybe this man sits in his parents basement all day, eating junkfood, smoking weed, playing video games and jacking off to porn all day. Is this man truly free? From a liberal perspective, yes he is. He can do whatever wants with no authority to constrain his behaviour. But to the continental philosopher, this man is a wretched beast in full thrall of his desires. He has no capacity to reason, to think, to act. He's not a moral agent in the same way an animal isn't a moral agent.
Instead, a man truly becomes free when (in one conception) he is able to use Reason to overcome his desires and fulfil a higher purpose. Freedom then, paradoxically, comes from restraint, and restraint from your base desires most of all. A man who commits himself to Reason, or God, or some other higher purpose is infinitely more free than the man who jacks off all day in the basement, even when that commitment requires some external restraint and authority imposed upon him. Actually, even that's not completely accurate. It's more that the continental philosopher sees no distinction between freedom and external restraint. If you're a Kantian, to be free is to use Reason, which is to follow the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative isn't so much an external constraint on behaviour but the natural outcome of someone who is truly committed to Reason and is liberated by it.
Edit: To clarify, the continental conception of freedom believes that true freedom is the ability (granted by Reason, or God, etc) to make a choice: live your life for the purpose of the Good, or live fulfilling your base desires. Obviously choosing the former is the correct choice, virtually by definition. Those who are slaves to their desires don't even get to make this choice, thus aren't free.
The continental conception of freedom has been in many cases criticised (typically by those who believe in an analytic/liberal conception of freedom) as leading to authoritarian tendences. This is not an unfounded criticism. Because this conception of freedom comes by serving the Good, sometimes this means that people have to be made free. Not in the liberal sense, but people must be forced to act in such a way that they will eventually become liberated. This is where you get things like the wonky Marxist conceptions of freedom. To the Marxist, man is not truly free in a liberal society, he is a slave to the capitalist socialisation. Only when man achieves critical consciousness and and achieves the Marxist Good (communist utopia), will he be truly free. Which is why one-party authoritarian Marxist states can claim to be more free than liberal democracies, because they see themselves further along that path than liberal democracies.
However, I think the idea that the continental conception of freedom must necessarily lead to authoritarianism to be unhelpful and untrue. I would say it's about as equally true to say that the analytical/liberal conception of freedom must necessarily lead to moral nihilism, hedonism and solipsism. That is to say, neither of them are true, but they contain an element of truth to them.
And while I have framed the above as an Enlightenment phenomenon, really these ideas are much older than that. In Plato's The Republic, the old man Cephalus cites the poet Sophocles who says*, to paraphrase, he is glad to have become old where his desires (eros) has diminished, and that his desires were like a harsh and cruel mistress which he is now free of. His base desires having left him, he has now truly become free. And similarly, St Augustine's doctrine of original sin. We are all sinful, miserable creatures. It is only by the grace of God which allows us to overcome our sinful nature, our sinful instincts, do we truly become free.
I think what "authoritarian"-preferring commentors (as you are describing them) are saying is that that is a clear void in our society where the continental conception of freedom is concerned. This void was traditionally filled by traditional religion and traditional morality, something that has been dying a slow and painful death. I tend to agree with these commentors that the liberal conception of freedom alone isn't sufficient and is a strong source of societal decay. Actually - there is a form of continental freedom that is gaining traction nowadays, an old friend back in a new skin: Critical Marxism/Neo-Marxism/Western Marxism aka the woke or whatever you want to call them. I believe to truly stop the tide of the woke you need to offer an alternative form of continental freedom. Liberalism isn't enough.
*Translated in the version on Project Gutenberg as: "How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age, Sophocles,—are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master."
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
Don't have any specific references to if you, but just wanted to comment that the concept of 'natural monopolies' is closely related to what you are describing.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
I mean, that's true, but I have two comments:
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Even if the APS is left-leaning, which it is, there is a commitment to impartiality that is clearly being eroded when events like above are allowed to pass, something that didn't happen before.
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The APS is become decidedly MORE left wing and woke than it has ever been. This is mostly a flow on effect from the universities and academia. Most non-clerical or mid-high level APS employees are university educated, so as the academy becomes more left wing and woke, so does the APS, and all other instutions which take university/college grads (which turns out to be basically everything). Which is why I maintain the root issue is the academy and the key way to fix this issue is to target them.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
Indigenous ethnicity in Australia is more a cultural thing than a literal biological genetic thing. The reality is that the majority of Indigenous people in Australia are heavily genetically European due to generations of interracial marriage, Stolen Generation etc. Many urban Indigenous are physically indistinguishable from whites (they basically are white, genetically). But this is not disqualifying. The only Indigenous who are pure Indigenous ethnically are a small minority located in very remote Australia.
In this context, Lidia Thorpe is 100% indigenous, there's really no argument given the current way Indigenous is defined/percieved. She has the credentials too, as her grandmother was a prominent Indigenous activist in her own right.
Diamonds suck and are boring. Aesthetically they're really uninteresting, extremely expensive pink diamonds etc not withstanding.Hopefully, (and she sounds like she isn't) your girlfriend isn't the kind of woman who just wants a real big diamond for supeficial reasons cause that's what you're meant to do.
For a yellow gemstone I recommend a yellow sapphire/corundum. They are nearly as hard and wear resistant as diamond, and are only a fraction of the cost, and can be quite beautiful. You can use extra budget to get a really large stone and/or have multiple stones in a nice custom design that symbolises something meaningful to both of you. Maybe even go a multicolour arrangement with different coloured sapphires with a large yellow sapphire in the middle. If you put a lot of thought into coming up with a beautiful custom multigem design, that will just as or more meaningful then shelling out many thousands on a big diamond.
Ultimately, it's up to you, you know your girlfriend best. Don't worry about what other people will think, just get something your girlfriend will love and appreciate (within budget of course!)
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
Either grey or dark navy blue suit as a general purpose business suit. Up to personal taste. Though apparently there's a cultural element where like Southern europeans prefer lighter grey, and north Europeans and Anglos prefer dark blues but idk if this is true.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
These kinds of leaks just reinforce my postion that woke corporations aren't just acting woke to 'respond to the market' or to cover their own asses from regulation (i.e. that corporations are only acting woke for sound, economically rational reasons), but that corporations have been subjected to entryism much the same as any other insitution and that market forces and competition aren't some impenetrable bulwark against woke entryism.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
You won't update; nobody ever does.
I don't know, I think my political views have changed somewhat in recent years. Less than a decade ago (I am relatively young) I would describe myself not dissimilar to OP, as a social democrat, albeit I never was 'woke'.
However, I find myself nowdays identifying far more with Catholic social teaching and political theory (e.g. Chesterton and distributionism, at least as ideals). I guess means I have become more conservative, though it's a very specific kind of conservative that's heterodox in modern political discourse.
Bit of a false equivalence, because Danzig and Istanbul were specifically made international cities as a punitive post-war measure against Germany and Turkey respectively. A better analogy would be the various international and concession cities of the 19th century, which were generally pretty successful until the wave of anti-colonialism in the 20th century made them politically unpalatable. But even this is an imperfect analogy.
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