Tollund_Man4
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User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Then we're just debating the meaning of 'a lot'. A substantial minority to me still seems like a lot, a doubling or tripling compared to America seems like 'a lot more'.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
What are some good beginner benchmarks I should aim for with the exercise bike at the gym? Like should I be aiming for say half an hour, a certain incline level or a certain speed? I'm not unfit but I just haven't trained this way before.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
It's surprising how much reading you can get done if you corral all the spare minutes in your life. You can cover a fair bit in the doctors waiting room, the bus and the quiet times at work.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I've gotten through some short books using the rest periods from weightlifting. It's not reading while literally exercising but it's close.
What do Europeans have to do with the discussion?
I just found it to be a funny unintentional marker of the same cultural gap between Americans and Europeans that starts lots of arguments here.
They don’t, except of couple of places, which is no different than in US.
The full bike sheds at my old 6:30am-start factory workplace would seem to indicate otherwise but of course that's anecdotal. Ipsos tells me that 5% of Americans cycle to work, which is on par with Britain, but half or less than half of the number who do in Spain, Italy, Norway or Belgium, a third or less of Germany, Hungary and Poland, a quarter of Sweden and one sixth the number in the Netherlands.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Right, maybe that discomfort is also the feedback by which people are motivated to stay in shape. If I go for a cycle and feel terrible, the cycling itself won't have done much for me but it will be a wake up call for me to cut down on smoking/drinking/gaining weight (or if I'm feeling lazy, a wake up call to quite cycling).
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
instead of faffing around on a child's toy?
Is this a jab at the Europeans who cycle to work?
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I don't doubt the science on how many calories cardio burns directly, but there must be something more to it. Why do people who do a lot of exercise just never seem to be obese? Where are all the avid gym goers with double chins? Does exercise also help regulate appetite or something?
The exceptions I can think of are ones where piling on muscle is worth it even if it comes with a lot of fat.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
is it really obvious things are much worse
Aside from the cost, things aren't obviously much worse than they were in the past 50 years but they're not very different either. Asking what subjects are taught is one way of evaluating a university, but I'll just throw some ideas out to illustrate that there are other avenues where innovation could have been made but wasn't.
How about asking if some of the subjects are being taught to an objective standard at all? There are language courses where you get your degree and can't speak the language, Buddhist studies taught by true believers who won't bring your attention to the ugly aspects of its history etc, and a lot of dishonesty about whether this degree will help you in life at all (employment being the obvious one). It's taken for granted in some industries that your degree has not prepared you for the job at hand and the necessity for further training is a given, but there doesn't seem to be any incentive for the university to care about this.
Then there's the format. Why is a lecture hall with hundreds of students the unquestioned standard? There is a surplus of PhDs in many fields, it wouldn't be that expensive to drastically increase the student to teacher ratio (or the professor to admin ratio to get more directly at the cause). As much one on one tutoring as possible seems to be the ideal but apart from PhD students no one is even aiming for that.
And lastly, how can you encourage critical thinking amongst students when, in the liberal arts especially, the person with the power to fail them is also the someone who they are supposed to be confidently and credibly accuse of bullshiting?
And back to the original topic, I think the factual accuracy of (most of) the internet far-right including bap is now comparable to that of the ethnic studies people. The far-right carries forward a bunch of accurate claims, but is accreting an ever-growing ball of nonsense onto it. Part of hanania's popularity comes from not being like that!
I don't disagree, though the guy I'm quoting from is definitely not of the far-right. The original topic is a few comments back so I'll have to reread and maybe edit lest I misunderstand you.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I think he extended that table metaphor a bit too much, but the point is that technological progress can go hand in hand with stagnation in universities, police departments, parliaments etc, though it gives the illusion that these things must also be obviously better than they were in the past.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Yeah his YouTube can be very off-putting. I first got interested in it as a curiousity and then he surprised me with how well read he seems to be in history and political philosophy. His other writings are mostly academic style articles where he claims that millions of Buddhists have been mislead by scholars on the embarrassing role of flatulence in breathing meditation present in the ancient Pali texts:
In plain English, what he calls “abdominal breath” is flatulence –and the mistranslation of the corresponding passages of the canon is very nearly the apotheosis of farting. So-called “breathing meditation” is not at all what millions of Buddhists have been lead to believe: many passages of the PTS translations (old and new) are grossly misleading, and, in one important aspect least, they are flatly wrong.
Almost finished Eisel Mazard's No More Manifestos. The last few chapters have been criticising the American constitution for falling into tyranny (by the definitions provided by the founders) almost immediately, and asserting that people like John Adams quoted ancient republican/democratic sources selectively to bolster their image of being learned men. For example providing an almost totally different definition of "separation of powers" than was praised by Machiavelli or Polybius (Machiavelli's "separation of powers" was basically a non-Marxist version of class conflict where the poor, middle and rich are vying against each other for political power). Apparently even the beheaded King Charles claimed to be emulating Rome's mixed government so the bar for being a faithful inheritor of Rome was not very high.
I'm not sure how new that would be to anyone here, but I'm very interested in his discussion on what the Founding Fathers could have taken inspiration from and chose not to. Apparently Pasquale Paoli of the Corsican Republic was very popular in America at the time with a number of towns being named after him, and (before the French invaded) it was an example of a healthy republic springing seemingly out of nowhere in an area with no democratic tradition (earlier in the book the author cites the Mongolian revolution of 1990 as another example of this). The contention is that the American republic would become very unexceptional if it were admitted that a bunch of illiterate Corsicans could achieve the same thing. The mythology of true geniuses deeply learned in ancient political thought creating the American republic might have served the interests of the founders, but it misleadingly makes imitation of their achievement in areas of the world not gifted with a generation of geniuses seem like a near insurmountable hurdle, and makes writing a better constitution unthinkable for Americans today (unlike say the Swiss constitution which makes provisions for its own obsolescence).
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
And unless I misremember, Lewis is on record as saying he believed that socialism was the most Christian economic policy though he himself disliked it intensely.
Unless I'm misremembering he talks about the political system Christianity aims for in Mere Christianity, and says that it would contain elements of conservatism, socialism, liberalism etc while resembling none of these as a whole.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I do not foresee or dream of a collapse, but I'm also not looking forward to this kind of dysfunctional culture being empowered by technology indefinitely.
I've been reading which I think put this distinction we should be making between cultural and material progress quite well. From Eisel Mazard's No More Manifestos:
We are much more willing to look at the progress of technology as the model that social progress "should" resemble, no matter how improbable the resemblance might be. The cycle of invention and obsolescence is more appealing than the tragic history of "the rise and fall" of Rome: technology promises us a rise without a fall, and a history without heroes or villains – only inventors. Unlike a struggle between factions, with each side pretending to be certain that they alone can lead the public to a better future but living forever with uncertainty and regret (as when the Tories slaughtered the Whigs, and vice versa, in the American Revolution) about all the good men who died on the other side, half wondering as to whether or not the unexpected outcomes of all the violence really were "the best of all possible worlds", as Candide would say, when we imagine social progress in technological terms we need not question the extent to which we will be heroes, villains, or simply passive cowards, in the next chapter of history to be written. Brutus must have wondered, before his death, if he had been more a villain than a hero, and must have questioned whether or not he would have been better off a coward and a conformist –whether or not all of Rome would have been better off, by the same token. Instead of all this endlessly ambivalent tragedy, we can all fix our eyes on a new cellular phone, laid bare upon the dining room table, and express our astonishment at how much "the state of the art" has improved in the last twenty years: now this is progress!
We ignore that the table the phone is sitting upon hasn't changed at all; nor has the concrete floor, nor the pipes that bring us water below the floorboards, and so on. It does not occur to us that the stasis of our senates, parliaments, prisons, police services and universities should be judged more harshly, relative to the rapid progress made in other fields (or at least in this one). Instead, we behave as if the innovations made in consumer electronics were infectious. Perhaps if you leave that cellphone sitting on the table long enough, the ingenuity embodied within it will seep through the polished surface, drip down the wooden legs, through the concrete floor, and then percolate into the pipes --revolutionizing the sewage system along with everything else it touches, without any of us having to be bothered about leading a revolution.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
The main thing Ireland contributed was a sympathetic alternative for international support which the UK was seriously constrained by. I'll grant that this is an advantage American conservatives don't have, America isn't nearly as reliant on international support and even if it were Europeans don't like conservatives anyway.
I still think the advantages American conservatives do have are substantial. For all the bias that the FBI has against conservatives they still hold a lot more sway than nationalists ever did in MI5 or the Royal Ulster Constabulary. They still make up a far larger portion of the population, control a far larger portion of the government, and are much wealthier and better armed than nationalists ever were.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Yeah, if you ever take a long break from the gym after getting fit you can feel this yourself, the first time I ever went to the gym I somehow ended up with terrible tricep pain despite only doing back exercises.
Luckily it usually only happens the first few sessions.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
The laws of physics state that warm water passed over the lid of a pickle jar will cause you to burn your hand while not eating pickles.
I use boiling water from the kettle then grip it with a towel to open it. I'm pretty careless while cooking and often get burns and scratches but I never got burned doing this.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Here's a hard bullet to bite: perhaps things don't usually get better.
I haven't actually said they will get better. Dropping out of adult life has a cost, someone might have squandered most of their opportunity by the time they decide to change. My point was just that the addictions we associate with 'checking out' come first (whether or not they're causative).
If you wind up reaching an adult height of only 5'1" and realize that you don't have what it takes to become a billionaire, you're going to be making some frankly rather nasty compromises if you want a partner.
There are guys who are 5'1" and there are guys who are so ugly they are hard to look at, but even amongst guys who don't have romantic success or were bullied in highschool, these people are the minority. Even amongst the cohort of sexless young men they are the exceptions.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
As a young kid I wanted to be George Bush's right hand man. As a teenager I wanted to be an economist. By college age I was studying philosophy and now I'm happy if I have a job that will let me read on the side.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I think if we look into the specifics you'd have a hard time making the case that conservatives have less power in American institutions than nationalists had in Northern Ireland at the outbreak of the Troubles.
Even in the Republic it's not as simple as it seems, the Irish government was sympathetic to nationalists but not to the IRA. Ireland still has a secret juryless court which was set up specifically to jail paramilitaries.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
However, I think this idea is almost totally wrong. In my view, the main reason to reward some people more than others is if doing so leads to better social outcomes. The point is not to provide personal benefit to the people rewarded but to incentivize behavior that benefits the entire society.
A slight disagreement on your phrasing. I don't agree with Freddie but it does seem like you might be begging the question in this paragraph. If you exclude the premise that virtuous but untalented people being able to live a life that is not "barren of wealth, stability, and success" is also a desirable social outcome, one that may be more important than those you justify meritocracy on, then you've won the argument before it even started.
Freddie is (intentionally or not) inviting you to get bogged down in arguments about what social outcomes are desirable instead of the economic points you bring up, the normal way around this is to say that even granting his premise the least talented have a hell of a lot more wealth, stability and success than any other system that has been tried.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
They fall back on reliable distractions (current iteration being video games and anime), and opt out of social activity entirely
I can see one reason to be skeptical about this model. Young men and teenagers fall deep into video game/porn addiction well before the time where it would be reasonable to conclude that they're locked out of the sexual market. It would be ridiculous (in a typical immature way) for an 18 year old to look at his high school romantic failure and say "I guess it gets no better than this", it would be surprising to find an 18 year old who hasn't already spent at least a few hundred hours gaming and indulging in Netflix and some fraction of that watching porn.
There's a real question here as to how demoralizing school must be that men seem to be pre-emptively dropping out of adult life, but there's also the simple fact that distractions are more addicting and ever present than ever before.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Incidentally this method might solve your women problem in the first place. Women are attracted to status, looks etc of course, but genuine ambition is an underrated trait that men can develop. The guitarist seeking fame might do well with women because they are making a rational bet on how much status he might accrue in future, but there are attractive qualities present there already.
Personally I've ended up incidentally attracting women a few times by sperging about the latest book I was reading and the research I wanted to do because of it.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
You're probably right, there's a lot of low hanging fruit if you're starting at zero.
Wouldn't a lot of high IQ men have to shift into less intellectually loaded but still necessary work? It's just the law of comparative advantage, more menial but unavoidable jobs being done by a bigger labour force frees up time for the cutting edge stuff.
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