Tollund_Man4
No bio...
User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I don't think the exercise itself would do a lot to undo a terrible diet, but I do wonder if the convenience of a car prevents a lot of "fuck, I'm weak!" moments that might serve as wake-up calls?
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Japan has no gang problem, neither does western Europe where non-immigrant men who have checked out exist in large but not overwhelming numbers too.
This picture sounds a bit too rosy, Ireland and the UK at least have a long history of native gangsters.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
The existence of God can be perceived experientially, and is probably a more robust evidence for God than mere philosophical puzzling (Colossians 2:8).
First hand experience is limited as a means to knowledge. Philosophical puzzling can get you out of the rabbit holes that raw experience can leave you in.
I could take LSD and have it revealed to me that some form of atheistic Buddhism is the fundamental reality. What could you say to me in response if you're saying experience can trump reasoning? You'd be preventing yourself from making the obvious refutation that I was experiencing a drug-induced delusion.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
You can get rhyming translations that try to maintain the spirit of the poem while making it amenable to English ears.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
It’s difficult for me to imagine not being turned on by a nice pair of breasts, but I acknowledge that it must be at least theoretically possible.
I've been to beaches in Spain where nudity was allowed (I wasn't nude myself). It's surprisingly non-sexual, you can sense that you should give people some privacy and not stare even though they're being seen by hundreds of people.
My naïve sense is that Ireland was a very dysfunctional and hardscrabble society in many different ways during that particular time frame
To be honest I haven't done that much research into that period of Ireland's history either, but this was just before the English (re?)conquest so a relatively peaceful time for the country. Having good conditions for agriculture I don't think it would have compared unfavourably to other rural parts of Europe as far as the average person was concerned, though the only European sized city of note was populated by Englishmen.
I’m far from the first commentator to notice that our societies appear to be lurching in a similar direction; the woman strutting around my local sidewalk in a thong, with no fear of repercussions nor even social censure, content that any frustration or angst she generates in nearby males is highly unlikely to redound negatively toward her, strikes me as symptomatic of this development.
I'd be interested in hearing what you make of the possibility that Ireland was an equally lude society in the 16th century, was this also symptomatic of a decline into a Minoan style society or is it a fashion that can have various causes?
Their dresses have wide sleeves, open the length of the arms interlaced very nicely in a lattice. Generally the men, women and young girls wear their shirts open to the waist, without any distinction between them except the women's chemises, as they are over here, are wide below, tapering into four tails which hit the knees as the case may be. So that most young women and girls have their chests naked to the waist; it is as common there to see or touch the breast of a girl or woman, as it is to touch her hand. And so, there are as many different fashions and customs as there are countries. Over here we would mock this because it is not the usual custom, except in secret when Robin and Marian are in an amorous embrace.
There I saw all sorts of breasts according to age. There I saw nipples of girls aged twelve years; afterwards the nipples that they have when they are fourteen or fifteen years old, until they begin to develop in size and shape. Also I saw some completely developed, so very round and pert that it was a pleasure to see them, as here have the marriageable girls of eighteen years and above. I also saw all sorts of tits, middle sizes, big, shapely and in the open hand one would call them firm but yielding. And I saw some so disgusting and unsavoury that I marvelled where the little children could receive their daily nourishment. Also I saw others which were not at all worth looking at, so ugly and wrinkled were they and only deserve the name of flaccid udders.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I'm about halfway through Eisel Mazard's No More Manifestos. I wish I could find a good review online because I can't do it justice, but it's hard to put the book down and hard to scoff at even if the ideas he's proposing are very radical.
In the last chapter I read he proposed that much of the abuses perpetrated by faceless bureaucrats and cops alike are largely the result of boredom, which induces callousness. He proposes as a solution an expanded version of Aristotle's notion of democratic equality (where civil functions are allocated by lot and any citizen can be called upon to serve say any function of the court) whereby any citizen can be called upon to serve as a policeman for a short period, or any policeman to serve a teaching function, or any surgeon a role as a nurse (suited to their abilities of course, a janitor wouldn't serve as a surgeon and a cop might only be suited to teach very basic subjects).
The goal isn't income equality or even a transfer of skills, but a disruption of the boredom induced by specialisation and a way to inject into the workplace a very practical notion of equality without falling into the terrible traps of aiming for income inequality or equality of status. The doctor will have more appreciation for the hard parts of a nurses job if he has spent at least a short time performing them himself, he will also have a more accurate idea of when they are being lazy and can hold them to the same standards he holds himself. The minor corruptions that are wilfully ignored in any job will be subject to more scrutiny if say cops have to allow regular citizens to work alongside them, and people will have more productive interactions with the police if they understand first-hand how difficult a job it is. The type of loyalty that allows police officers to coordinate on a lie covering up a bungled arrest would likely be disrupted if 2 of the 5 officers present during the incident were just normal citizens on a job rotation.
There's an anecdote about his attempt to join the Canadian military, and how as an artillery officer he would not be expected to know how to operate the guns himself. The lack of hands on experience here deprives officers of the ability to really know when their troops are working their hardest and when they are just being lazy, and the same goes for every type of institution.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
With regards to the first claim, is there a European country with a white population of only 59.3% Also do we count Hispanic whites or not? Because that changes a lot.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I like writing as a way of working through my thoughts but I find it very difficult to sit down with a blank page and write anything good. Seeing an interesting motte comment gives me the motivation to put my thoughts on a topic into words. Being forced to articulate a thought is itself a way of testing it, then you've got people replying to it trying to find its weaknesses.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
That's long enough where you might want to switch things up. I haven't had to work through a pullup plateau specifically but the general method is to do related exercises that work the same muscles but stress them in different proportions to the lift you're struggling with.
Your back might be strong enough to do more pull-ups but you could be being held back by your biceps or your grip strength for example. Ideally you already have a rough idea of which area is failing first and you can work those areas directly.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
No worries! I'd prefer people to not hold back if they think I'm very wrong about something.
There are two senses in which it may be easy, I can see why you would object to the second one I'll describe.
The first: that it doesn't require any special degree of status or societal power, is something I am quite confident in, and just saying this was the purpose of my comment (but of course I said more than that and invited people to discuss beyond that point). If you disagree with my particular suggestion of what creating your own values entails, I think you'd still agree that it's largely mental work which requires nothing more than clear thinking, research and effort.
I could have stopped at "is it merely a cognitive act(?).." to make the above point, but I went on because grasping at a specific definition is more interesting even if it brings me into territory I am less confident in. I think there is a sense in which creating your own values could be said to be easy even though it's only 'easy' in the sense that the hard won epistemological lessons of the enlightenment are 'easy'. That is to say, very easy to state, easy enough that a madman would think it sufficient to shout it in the marketplace or for us to feel shock at how ignorant the past was, but extremely difficult to discover in the first place, work out the implications of, and follow through consistently (e.g Nietzsche criticising atheists for barely even realising the implications of their position). A lot hinges on definition, there's a question as to whether creating your own values starts at the point of adopting a truly nihilistic perspective and rejecting all transcendental sources of value or whether it requires going above and beyond Nietzsche and actually developing a successful competitor to modern morality (the latter would be quite hard I admit). Can you create your own values and just do a bad job at it, or does actually doing it in the first place require some genius?
When something like the Bible was condensed from thousands of years of wisdom, distilled throughout the generations. Really?
The Bible wasn't written by philosophers or nihilists, the difficulty of the method used to produce it doesn't set the bar for other methods. A single man in a single lifetime is the minimum bar for a philosopher deriving values from what he sees as transcendantal sources, a single conversation can cast doubt on the ancient superstitions of Athens. As far as I can tell Nietzsche didn't set it any higher for nihilists.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
You can meet hot women by getting a decent job and going to bars.
I don't think this is a refutation. The existence of a more optimal approach to an end doesn't rule out the possibility that other more risky approaches are motivated by the same end.
Sure you can get a good job to get women instead of risking prison, but you might not have thought it through!
Certainly some of the highest status and highest agency men can create their own values, but what about the rest of us?
It depends on what you mean by creating your own values. Does it really require a particularly high amount of societal power or agency? Or at the minimum is it merely a cognitive act involving the recognition that the values you live by have no special authority other than that which you give by assenting to them? Perhaps this is just nihilism and creating your own values demands authorship of something new, but even that is nothing more than a cognitive act at the minimum.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I think you'd have to deny some very in your face facts to think that the world is immutable. Perhaps you are powerless (a state of affairs which can conceivably be changed) but obviously things do change and people change them. When immoral acts are committed it's because someone is committing them, when the justice system works properly it's because people are making sure it does. You're no less of an actor than the people who visibly make stuff happen.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Oh I bring my own laptop. It's really about having a separate space for focused work.
Depending on the quality of the library just wandering through the bookshelves can be fruitful too, found some good books during university that way.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Books aren't prohibitively expensive sure, but space for a home office can be.
I find it much easier to study in a library given the lack of family/housemates making noise and interrupting me, and how few options you have to distract yourself (I could boot up steam in a library but it seems weird enough that I don't get the temptation).
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
How long have you been stuck for? It's not uncommon to hit a plateau you can't immediately break through but if it's being going on for a few weeks despite sufficient rest that's the time to think about switching things up.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Moldbug has talked about this.
You also had Roger Scruton, who while on the fringes of the culture war battles actually influenced government policy through his role in the 'Building Better, Building Beautiful' commission.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Well they found it apparently: https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2023/07/24/gardai-recover-gold-valued-at-400000-after-national-party-complaint/
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I'm hoping this is more fun than culture war: Ireland's far-right National Party has been robbed of a considerable amount of gold (for use in the case of a collapse in fiat currency) by one of its ex-leading members.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I wouldn't underestimate the commitment of normies. When the messaging was on the side of the true Covid hawks the average person was almost indistinguishable from them.
If the Covid hawks are dissidents they only became dissidents after their support evaporated. Before that they were something else... a dissident is on the outskirts of a tribe, they distinguished themselves by being more fervently tribal than those around them.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
If someone claims that gang of people systematically breaking in and stealing all valuable stuff would be solved if social worker would talk with them, then someone is really confused.
Well the claim is usually that if there had been some type of non-policing interventions earlier in life than it never would have gotten to this point.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I'm interested in seeing the for and against for the argument that "crime is a result of social deprivation and social workers are a better use of money than police for solving it". The only arguments I can muster up in favour of policing are common sense ones which don't (though they should) pass muster in online debates.
Caveat: I want to either use this information to win internet arguments or concede the point in my own head and stop starting that argument altogether.
Walkable usually goes hand in hand with cyclable no? At least in Europe this is the case. 15 minutes on a bike covers quite a lot of useful area if you're living near the city centre, even when I lived in what was considered an isolated outer suburb in an Irish city it took 20 minutes on a bike to make it into the city centre.
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