Tollund_Man4
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User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
9mo 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
9mo 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
10mo 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
17d ago
There's a few minutes between the bus pulling up and the doors opening, enough time to argue with an old woman is less abstract terms than I have phrased it above.
Tollund_Man4
1mo ago
There are probably thoughts human minds cannot think, though obviously I can't think of any.
The squared-circle is the most common example, but then I am sort of thinking about it already and if I turn mad I might worship it.
Why would constraining thought be an unacceptable restriction on free will but not constraining action?
A Christian might correct me here, but I think the answer is that what you can or cannot do in this temporal world is simply unimportant compared to what you do in your soul. And so we have free will in the things that matter.
One is constraining what you can think and the other what you can do no? I can't really think of any other desire or valuation (whatever mental category worship falls into) that can't conceivably be negated, though maybe somebody could suggest one. It would be odd to have one where there really is no choice.
Tollund_Man4
1mo ago
I'm only listening to what I can find for free on Spotify, mostly librevox recordings. A good reader can make a difference so maybe that explains it.
Tollund_Man4
1mo ago
I realize the critique of the "finishing quantity of books" approach to reading, but I stick to it anyway, sometimes I just need the feeling of closure.
I'm also breaking this rule but it has been very enjoyable. Being able to listen to audiobooks at work has paradoxically increased my reading pace by a lot. Sure you can read much faster than you can listen to someone read aloud, but 6-8 hours of slow listening each day still adds up to more than however many hours I could realistically devote to sitting down and reading after work when I'm tired and have the internet to distract me.
I'm still pessimistic about the use of audiobooks for denser stuff like history and philosophy, but another hack that works here is to bring a kindle to the gym and spend 40 minutes reading on the exercise bike. You can read between sets while lifting too (24 2-3 minute rest periods is a decent chunk of time) but I'm not confident that all the stopping and starting is good for comprehension.
Tollund_Man4
1mo ago
The family friendly form would be gwaylge (gaeilge), I'm not sure if gaelic is an anglicisation or just an old word but gaeilge is the name of the language in Irish.
Tollund_Man4
1mo ago
Leithreas gan sneachta, leithreas gan anam.
An bhfuil ceannaigh mé dul go dtí an leithreas! (I checked after I wrote this and it was even worse than I thought).
Tollund_Man4
2mo ago
Ah well maybe that's why we just call it Irish, 'Scottish-Gaelic' and 'Irish-Gaelic' can get confusing.
Maybe next time I'll go to Scotland and buy a proper Irish dictionary.
One of the best books I've read on Irish culture (the one that died in the 17th century) was originally written in Welsh (excerpts 1, 2, 1000 years of the poets being on icy terms with the Irish kings and then the English), I'd imagine any Scots-Gaelic or Welsh scholar will have some good books on Ireland too.
That's more Irish than I expect any of us here know! For example using Google Translate I discovered that 'ugh' is a valid way to spell 'ubh' and the same for 'eun' and 'éan', if you have the source I wonder if it's an old Irish text (the spelling has changed a lot over the years)?
The gold is a mystery to me. Apparently it was there in case of a collapse in fiat currency.
Accommodation has been expensive and in short supply for years but the ‘making it to Ireland be homeless’ thing is new, we took in a lot of Ukrainian refugees and the normal asylum seeker numbers increased a lot too following this.
As for the arsons, unless there’s a deterrent effect in play I doubt they’ve changed things much. I doubt many people have been deterred, there’s a lot of money to be made from hosting asylum seekers and insurance still pays out in cases of arson. Iirc the homelessness thing was picking up steam before the arson became common (there have been arson attacks going back years ago but it picked up a lot in the past few months).
Tollund_Man4
3mo ago
A considerable amount of research has taken place;
Oh definitely, I just meant the change from one status quo to another isn’t scientifically relevant.
Does it matter if it is? It being real just means something unlikely happened to someone who is nobody to you.
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