Tollund_Man4
No bio...
User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
7mo ago
Thanks.
Tollund_Man4
7mo ago
The 3P standard?
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
How quickly did you think that the story is entirely made up?
Does it matter if it is? It being real just means something unlikely happened to someone who is nobody to you.
Tollund_Man4
8mo 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
8mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
9mo ago
I might still have my old course reader lying around somewhere if you're interested in some more specific suggestions.
I'll take a few suggestions for sure, thanks!
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
And how would the progress justify itself? You'll look more attractive i.e. people will find you more attractive. Sure, you may feel more confident, be generally healthier and have improved mental health, but these are ancillary benefits at best.
Attention from women is also an ancillary benefit (and not necessarily more important than the others you mentioned imo), and something I think could be gotten with much less effort through other means. The gymcel is a real thing and if you're grounding your motivation for lifting on women you're risking disappointment. Unless you take steroids it's going to take at least a year (more like 2-3) and hundreds of hours to get jacked.
I'll expand this to self-improvement in general and say that if something is worth doing it's worth doing even when the ancillary benefits aren't clear, that's how I'm distinguishing shallow from meaningful pursuits. I could try my hand at listing all the external reasons you should focus on fitness but strength is valuable in a way I can't exhaustively articulate, anecdotally I'm getting way more attention from women now than when I was at my strongest but there's still some feeling of loss from no longer pushing the limits of my body.
and failing to recognise this leads to "I don't wear makeup for guys, I wear makeup to feel good about myself" levels of cope and rationalisation.
I'm no feminist but I think it's both. Women do care about beauty for its own sake, this is evolutionarily ingrained in them for its mating advantage but as an internal state the drive for beauty precedes making the connection to attention from men or learning facts about evolution. It also extends beyond the former in the fact that women care about making things look nice which have no connection to male attraction (and might even annoy the men in their life by insisting on beauty at the cost of utility).
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
What I'm trying to get at here is that real meaning is ill-defined and most philosophers do include some form of pleasure and hedonism as an intrinsic value.
Your examples at least don't show that it's ill defined. I think most people would say those pursuits are meaningless or even harmful without hesitation.
Perhaps you can't objectively determine the meaningful ahead of time but it becomes quite clear when things are compared.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
The problem of politics seems unavoidable. People want to have more resources than their rivals. Their rivals want the same in turn. The winning move for humanity is not to play zero sum games.
People want more resources than their rivals sure, rivalries can also be dissolved or transferred into healthier forms of competition.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
Other hobbies like engaging in politics, watching the news, or watching sports do not have any specific design for positive sum human enjoyment. They are much closer to zero sum games, where one person's happiness is offset by another person's disappointment.
This seems like a fairly pessimistic view on politics. Do you not think that political problems can be ameliorated? I'd say the difference between war and peace lies in that realm.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
These can be the same people at different times. In this framework nerds who are drunk or on certain drugs are low value low inhibition.
Though I'd say the nerd bit is far less important than the drink and drugs which make all types more likely to do something stupid or violent.
Tollund_Man4
11mo ago
Fair, I don't know enough about Nordic cultures to pick something specific to them, I was thinking more my own experience of British/Irish.
Tollund_Man4
11mo ago
I really liked using You Need A Budget but I can't really justify the cost nowadays, anyone have recommendations on a free budgeting app (or perhaps how to go about building your own using Excel?).
Tollund_Man4
11mo ago
Causes like communism, that moved hundreds of millions and turned the Earth asunder, are now just forgotten or reduced to cosplay attire.
Communism wasn't that big in the US in the first place, it seems like it being forgotten in the US isn't much evidence in favour of it being forgotten in the places where those hundreds of millions were moved.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
In reality, there's little difference between the usefulness of a teenage girl reading the latest YA novel and a teenage boy playing Call of Duty.
It's much harder to get addicted to books. If teenage girls were reading YA novels for 4 hours a day people would be a lot more worried.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Are you talking about it not being feasible in America or it not being feasible at all? All of these policies have been succesfully implemented in other countries at one point in another.
Contraception was illegal in Ireland from 1935 until 1980, most Western countries outside of the US have strict controls on guns and there's no desire to reverse this, drugs are much harder to get in Singapore and far less people are addicted to them in East Asia than in North America and Western Europe, alcohol use is much less prevelant in Islamic countries.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
I'm trying to learn French at the moment and I wanted to ask if anyone has experience trying to learn a language while also trying to retain another.
I feel like I might be making it more difficult for myself by continuing to revise Spanish on Anki, it's not time consuming or anything but Spanish often comes to mind first when I'm trying to translate a word from English.
Other justifications not mentioned above include retribution and rehabilitation
Arguably retribution is just another form of deterrence, except this time the state is deterring the victims' friends and relatives from taking revenge on criminals (likely to get out of hand when it's a personal beef) by carrying out a more measured form of revenge.
Niether the friends of the victim nor the friends of the perpetrator are happy with the state's decision, but in both cases just enough punishment and just enough fairness has been shown that no one is going to risk jail to fill the gap in justice which the state has left.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
You can't tag people on this site yet can you?
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Yeah it's a tough thing to distinguish and you may be right. What about game theoretically punishing someone out of a sense of duty without the personal aspect of revenge? Like 'there but for the grace of God go I', I'm a soldier and you're a soldier on the opposing side who I hold no personal animus towards but who I'm going to try and kill for what your country did to mine.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
That's what I was thinking Thomas Sowell's Culture series of books (Race and Culture, Migration and Culture, Conquests and Culture) is a good example of this.
I never considered it from this angle before. I'm usually in favour of letting kids work for the character benefits but you do raise a good point.
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