Naup1ius
1mo ago
they don't have any magic that works
Pretty much this.
I have some sympathy for the Traditionalist position of people like Rene Guenon and Julius Evola that the world was less material in the past and has "solidified" over time such that now, in the depths of the Kali Yuga, it is pretty much entirely solid, and only the occasional ephemeral anomaly like the sort mentioned in the OP comes through the cracks. You can take a text like Plutarch's "On the Silence of Oracles" (which Scott has mentioned a few times) or old maps with strange beasts on the fringes possibly as expected evidence for this position (though of course they are also expected evidence for a contemporary worldview biased toward believing in such things as well).
But I can't really ask anyone to believe any of this, or even not to sneer at it, because I don't have magic that works. Perhaps that's why the whole "postrationalist" project adjacent of one of our community's predecessors never really got off the ground.
Naup1ius
9mo ago
Somewhere on the "reasons to be pessimistic about India list" there must be mentioned affirmative action, which destroys everything it touches and of which India has a more oppressive and thoroughgoing system than just about anywhere outside of South Africa. Yeah, China has affirmative action, too, but they're 90% Han Chinese, while in India up to 75% of the population gets affirmative action in some jurisdictions. It is one of the main reasons the South Asians in your life are here instead of there.
Naup1ius
10mo ago
The thing you get prosecuted for being different from the reason they really want you put away is not a new phenomenon. I'm vaguely annoyed by the extent to which Catholic apologetic regarding the Galileo affair seems to have won the day (I blame Kuhn, who gave Catholics the greatest apologetic they could ever want). The post-Trent Catholic Church really was pretty hostile to science (the medieval church far less so), and that really did contribute to their sucking the exhaust of Northwestern Europe for 450 years.
Naup1ius
1yr ago
Russia: ISIS did it.
America: ISIS did it.
ISIS: We did it.
Internet people with all their big brained realpolitik and stuff: Ukraine and the CIA did it.
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