Tollund_Man4
No bio...
User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
Sure, and I think governments would tend to do a lot worse. But I won't refrain from criticising people out of fear that it could give ammo to the wrong people.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
From a practical perspective cleaning your penis is a hell of a lot easier without folds
It's not that hard either way.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
The only way for the world to function is for society to assume parents have their biological children's best interests at heart, which they do 99% of the time.
I don't think society functions any less well when we admit that parents can get it wrong out of stupidity, laziness, pressure to conformity, or more serious issues. Parents have their kids' best interest at heart.. and yet there are a lot of fat kids.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
Perhaps a decent proxy — some comments from theshaderoom's latest Kanye post (celebrity gossip Insta focused on black culture, predominantly black commentariat):
TheColi is another site with mostly black membership (I had to laugh one time when there was a thread asking you to post a photo of your hand to prove your opinions on hip-hop were worth listening to), here's what they have to say about Kanye:
I remember when Nas mentioned Doug Morris in hero lyrics and they censored it and it wasn't even that bad , that's when I realized these guys don't play around
^6 likes
Why would companies do anything to Kanye for his comments about black people when you had countless idiots in the black community co-signing his buffoonery? There’s threads on this very site with people agreeing with him on slavery being a choice.
When he said something about the Jews they came together and packed his ass up. You didn’t have Jewish people stepping out of line and defending him or trying to explain what he really meant.
^30 likes
Boo hoo... it's not on white people to be outraged on our behalf.
Seems you dudes are learning the hard way. We should have cancelled him since slavery was a choice came out his mouth. If we had raised the issues back then these companies would have had to respond as well :yeshrug:
Nikkaz gonna keep crying bout Jew power like they are mythical or embrace collective power and learn how to move accordingly. But most would rather still stay stuck on pretending that we can't amass power as well because we don't have the resources. People are the main resource.
^33 likes
fukk Kanye but it’s funny it takes for him to say one thing about the Jews for him to get cancelled for hate speech yet this nikka been running around literally shytting on black people and our ancestors for years now untouched. Either way. fukk him. But fukk the media and the industry too.
^44 likes
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
You might as well say that a conquered state is "mentally" enslaved.
People do say that. This is a common refrain among nationalists, and apparently enough motivation for them to put their lives on the line in rebellion.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
maybe because it's unpopular to be seen as an apologist for alchohol consumption.
It's interesting that this isn't at all true when you phrase it in, let's say 'populist' terms. But when you try to make the same argument in more academic terms you invite unpopularity.
Boris's vices are laziness and incuriosity, not stupidity.
I would say that the first two lead to the second.
How one can be stupid but still have a high IQ is an interesting question. You can be intelligent but lazy, intelligent but incurious, but how about an intelligent ignoramus? Laziness and incuriousity can lead someone into becoming an offensively ignorant person, would we call that person offensively ignorant yet intelligent? It seems there are more paths to stupidity than low IQ.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
what does this even mean
Well a lot according to the book. Has God created a rationally ordered world (realism) or does it all exist at his whim (nominalism)? Given a rational order can we deduce the laws of nature logically or can we only gain knowledge about what God has created through observation of his seemingly arbitrary choices? Is each human simply an imperfect expression of the universal man imbued with the same telos, or is there some divine significance to the expression of individual will?
Secularise these concepts and you derive a lot of the same ideas we believe in today.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
Michael Allen Gillespie - The Theological Origins of Modernity. The argument is that there is far less of a break between Medieval theology and modern philosophy than we think, and that modernity owes its origins to the Scholastic realism vs Nominalism break that occupied the minds of the 13th century. Or as Gillespie puts it:
To understand the shape of modernity as it has come down to us, we thus need to examine carefully the origins of modernity, to look behind the veil that modernity itself has drawn to conceal its origins. The origins of modernity therefore lie not in human self-assertion or in reason but in the great metaphysical and theological struggle that marked the end of the medieval world and that transformed Europe in the three hundred years that separate the medieval and the modern worlds. This book is the account of the hidden origins of modernity in those forgotten centuries.
What are Scholastic Realism and Nominalism?
Scholastics in the High Middle Ages were ontologically realist, that is to say, they believed in the real existence of universals, or to put the matter another way, they experienced the world as the instantiation of the categories of divine reason. They experienced, believed in, and asserted the ultimate reality not of particular things but of universals, and they articulated this experience in a syllogistic logic that was perceived to correspond to or reflect divine reason. Creation itself was the embodiment of this reason, and man, as the rational animal and imago dei, stood at the pinnacle of this creation, guided by a natural telos and a divinely revealed supernatural goal.
Nominalism turned this world on its head. For the nominalists, all real being was individual or particular and universals were thus mere fictions. Words did not point to real universal entities but were merely signs useful for human understanding. Creation was radically particular and thus not teleological. As a result, God could not be understood by human reason but only by biblical revelation or mystical experience. Human beings thus had no natural or supernatural end or telos.
One interesting thing mentioned is that Ockham's Razor owes its origin to this debate:
This notion of divine omnipotence was responsible for the demise of realism. God, Ockham argued, could not create universals because to do so would constrain his omnipotence. If a universal did exist, God would be unable to destroy any instance of it without destroying the universal itself. Thus, for example, God could not damn any one human being without damning all of humanity. If there are no real universals, every being must be radically individual, a unique creation of God himself, called forth out of nothing by his infinite power and sustained by that power alone. To be sure, God might employ secondary causes to produce or sustain an entity, but they were not necessary and were not ultimately responsible for the creation or the continued existence of the entity in question. The only necessary being for Ockham was God himself. All other beings were contingent creations of his will. In a technical sense, the things God chooses to bring into existence already have a nature, but these natures are not themselves universal but apply only to each individual thing. Moreover, they are infinite in number and chosen freely by divine will.
These “natures” thus do not in any real sense constrain divine will except insofar as they exclude the impossible, that is, the logically contradictory. They are neither implied by nor are they the presupposition of anything else. In this way, Ockham’s assertion of ontological individualism undermines not only ontological realism but also syllogistic logic and science, for in the absence of real universals, names become mere signs or signs of signs. Language thus does not reveal being but in practice often conceals the truth about being by fostering a belief in the reality of universals. In fact, all so-called universals are merely second or higher order signs that we as finite beings use to aggregate individual beings into categories. These categories, however, do not denote real things. They are only useful fictions that help us make sense out of the radically individualized world. However, they also distort reality. Thus, the guiding principle of nominalist logic for Ockham was his famous razor: do not multiply universals needlessly. While we cannot, as finite beings, make sense of the world without universals, every generalization takes us one more step away from the real. Hence, the fewer we employ the closer we remain to the truth.
I'm still not sure how you're deciding who had stronger lyricism. Rhyme schemes? Wordplay? Jay-Z is past his prime but latest album blows Kanye out of the water by any technical metric:
Old Brooklyn, not this new shit, shit feel like a spoof
Fat laces in your shoe, I'm talkin' bustin' off the roof
Hold the Uzi vertical, let the thing smoke
Y'all flirtin' with death, I be winkin' through the scope
Hold "the Uzi vertical", a reference to Lil Uzi Vert, one of the new generation of rappers who can't rap by traditional standards and would be laughed at for his look in the days Jay-Z is reminiscing about.
Or from his verse on 'Drug Dealer's Anonymous' a few years back:
I think it's the boys, but I been banking at Deutsche
We got storefronts, we got employee stubs
We been opening studios and 40/40s up
The paper trail is gorgeous
Cases we buries 'em
Before Reasonable Doubt dropped, the jury hung
Bling bling
"Before Reasonable Doubt (Jay-Z's first album) dropped, the jury hung/jewelry hung". As the case was concluding, there was a hung jury/before Jay-Z had money from music he was already rich. The "Bling Bling" is him making it obvious that the wordplay was on purpose. The purposeful ambiguity you praise Kanye for is standard in hip-hop.
And as for rhymes, I'll just post some of Black Thought's verse on 'Crowns for Kings':
Triumph and tragedy, his majesty muscle never atrophied
The devil is a casualty, sucker, you're never catchin' me
Even though you been after me, motherfucker
You gotta bring a army to harm me, I occupy the capacity up
Decapitator of a hater in this modern day
My dossier no less, dealer spray Courvoisier
I'm Jean-Paul Gaultier, Tom Ford, and Cartier
Self-made, I fly vintage from the sommelier
On reserve, flowin' from the blackest fountain
It's all love from public housin' to the Atlas Mountains
I've established the average to always bat a thousand
So after butcherin' this track, it's back to countin'
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
I don't know much about Roos, I've never heard of him before, but does he have much bipartisan cred?
Who has bi-partisan cred these days?
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
Now, this will always be an estimate, but so are many taxes
That reads more like a mark against those taxes than a mark in favour of this one.
Your proposed tax is so ambitious that I think it would be fair to cite the socialist calculation problem and say that the government can't possibly know the tradeoffs involved.
Let me propose another tax: the social good tax. Where we calculate exactly how much is needed to achieve some social good, say health, and let the burden fall in such a manner that it is not completely counterproductive. Once we have achieved this we might look into expanding it to other social goods, say fertility, no more ambitious a good than health. In fact if we can achieve most social goods this way we can just do away with the market economy altogether.
If you can tax in exactly the right place, and spend in exactly the right place, why complicate things?
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
She got a light-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson
Got a dark-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson
But to be serious, as someone who used to be very into hip-hop Kanye was known for some very funny lines but was never considered a top-tier lyricist by anyone besides Kanye Stans (superfans) because (i) his lyrics were never as complex as say Lupe Fiasco, and (ii) it has long been known that he makes use of ghostwriters, which disqualifies you from the discussion as far as hip-hop fans are concerned.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
Jews have a high IQ and HBD would tell you that getting rid of them is a bad idea.
Would it? Of course it was an evil thing to do for other reasons, but the Nazis didn't persecute the Jews because they thought they were stupid, they did it because they considered them to be dangerous. Jews showing smarts could only make them seem more threatening.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
- These people are free to do whatever they want with their wealth, even if they just inherited it all. If you disagree, I would have to ask you why you don’t believe in property rights
Believing in property rights doesn't obligate one to not criticise how people make use of their property the same way believing in free speech doesn't obligate one to not criticise what people say.
Just finished a book about W.B O'Carolan, advisor to Éamon De Valera. It's got an awful title (O'Machiavelli: Or How to Survive Irish Politics) but some funny stories:
I once made a promise to an old woman I met in the Comeraghs. She was dressed in an old coat and shawl and had a face etched out of granite. She appeared to have been waiting for a public representative for many years. I took immense pity on her.
"Are you the senator they sent from Dublin?"
"Yes, ma'am, I am a senator from Dublin, but this is not my constituency. I'm canvassing for a good local man called Dinnie McDermott.".
"Mr Dimmie Mac? My hearing is not that what God gave me."
"DINNIE MCDERMOTT, OUTGOING TD FOR THE AREA."
"And what does he mean to me. Mr Senator?"
"He represents your interests in the national assembly which is part of our democratic system."
"He's never done anything for me, a leanbh. I ne'er set sight on him or his breed in these parts."
"Will you vote for him in next week's election?"
"How can I vote? I'm a poor widow woman without a pittance to my name."
"Have you not got a pension or medical card?"
"Ne'er the bit. No one looks after a poor widow woman."
"Have you heard of Mr de Valera?"
"Who?"
"MR DEVALERA, TAOISEACH OF OUR COUNTRY."
"What has happened to Mr Parnell? He passed this way the once and ne'er laid sight on him again."
I can arrange a pension, medical card and rent allowance for you, ma'am. Just sign here."
As it turned out, the woman was as rich as Croesus and had five houses, two bank accounts and a mechanically-propelled motor vehicle. The press got their hands on the story and ran it under the banner: Politician Grants Medical Card and Butter Vouchers to Rich Woman. It was the last promise I ever made (or kept).
There's also a bit in a letter to DeValera that makes me wonder how old the idea of the deep state is:
P.S. Did you know that Mac [Machiavelli] was a civil servant? The other Mac (MacEntee) says they're the permanent government!
A Chara,.
Ennis, Clare. 8-IV-36
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
I found it! It's from Roger Scruton:
Moreover, the pursuit of irrelevant knowledge is, for that very reason, a mental discipline that can be adapted to the new and the unforeseeable. It is precisely the irrelevance of everything they knew that enabled a band of a thousand British civil servants, versed in Latin, Greek, and Ancient History, to govern the entire Indian sub-continent—not perfectly, but in many ways better than it had been governed in recent memory. It is the discipline of attending in depth to matters that were of no immediate use to them that made it possible for these civil servants to address situations that they had never imagined before they encountered them—strange languages, alphabets, religions, customs, and laws. It is no accident that it was a classical scholar—the judge Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1788—who did the most to rescue Sanskrit literature from oblivion, who introduced the world, the Indian world included, to the Vedas, and who launched his contemporaries on the search for the principles and repertoire of classical Indian music.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
Just worried I'll embarrass myself doing it the first time
That's a pretty common feeling. People are mostly just going to be focused on themselves unless you're doing something that looks dangerous.
What is that quote about the British empire having such effective administrators because they had a broad education and so could draw on the lessons of ancient history to improvise a solution instead of floundering in the face of anything outside of their narrow expertise?
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
I'm not sure if the bar is same in each scenario, the average man who just comes up and talks to her is going to be displaying more confidence than the same guy texting her online.
In first impressions you are only what you signal. Even if you are swiped left on she's not ruling you out as much as ruling out a handicapped version of you who hasn't had the opportunity to show he has the balls to talk to her. You can't presume the latter is disqualified because the former was.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
Many people I know take serious pride and work, and in fact for a lot of people their work is the most important thing in their life. I’m talking people who don’t even really need the money, or who claim that even if they had enough money to retire they would continue working just as much as they do now.
Are those people working the same jobs that people are leaving in large numbers? I don't think many would work in fast food if they didn't need the money.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
Similar to Trump being supported by evangelical Christians.
Tollund_Man4
4yr ago
Except no one feels threatened by that
The Irish are as there are apparently some important undersea internet cables connecting Europe and America off the Irish coast which Ireland doesn't have the naval capacity to protect (the US, UK, and France have been patrolling the area but that still leaves Ireland's territorial waters).
Russian vessels were in the area a few months back. I'm not saying that's what they were there for, but that's what people here are saying.
It’s easy to see that nationalism runs contrary to this goal. If you only ever can be accepted in one country, if you can only be permitted to run important businesses or organisations in the country of your birth; and doomed to be an irrelevant outsider in all others — well, then your government has you by the balls — you have no real negotiating position with the state.
I don't think the policies you mention are inherent to nationalism. What's to stop me from saying "it's simple, we just have a nationalist state without those specific dysfunctional policies"?
After you've already won the Cold War? I'm not sure, maybe it's no longer useful.
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