coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
I don’t think it’s impossible. The Epstein network had blackmail on all the right people and friendships with all the right people. Epstein had at least a passing interest in video games (he opened up a trial account for WoW) and emailed five 4chan threads over as many years, indicating familiarity with “youth” activity. If anyone could have his death faked, it would be him. And how would he spend his time? He is clearly a dopamine fanatic, so the only answer is video games. Very implausible, but not impossible.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
The Odyssey and the Iliad were foundational texts of Greek culture and the staple of education for every boy. This is pretty basic knowledge but for a source you can see my comment downthread from the Encylopedia Britannia or consult Wikipedia. This is why Plato names Homer “the one who taught Greece”. Stories in antiquity were never purely entertainment, by the way, they were means of communicating and teaching social values.
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3d ago
The content of the works are what the culture considers important. What the poet spends time describing. What comprises the actual listening experience among the poet’s audience. You have to think more deeply here. You admit the works are about war and brotherhood. Well, why did the Greeks make their two foundational works about war and brotherhood? If you wrote them, perhaps you would make half the text about domestic issues or marital strife or longing for one’s partner. Why did they have a different idea than you? Why is 90% of if not about family life? Saying “it’s a war story” begs the question, because the culture selected a war story as its bedrock text for a reason.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Homer-Greek-poet
the two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture throughout the Classical age and formed the backbone of humane education down to the time of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. Indirectly through the medium of Virgil’s Aeneid (which was loosely molded after the patterns of the Iliad and the Odyssey), directly through their revival under Byzantine culture from the late 8th century CE onward, and subsequently through their passage into Italy with the Greek scholars who fled westward from the Ottomans, the Homeric epics had a profound impact on the Renaissance culture of Italy. Since then the proliferation of translations has helped to make them the most important poems of the Classical European tradition.
Antigone was important as a tragedy but it wasn’t, for instance, the bedrock of Greek education
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
The tribes of pre-civilized Greece and Rome may very well have practiced family-oriented extended kin networks for hundreds of thousands of years before they ever developed into a civilization. Lots of primitive tribes did that. The road from the dark ages to the archaic period to the classical civilization of Greece is marked by a different activity: male political formation involving the polis. The men leaving the family to go join (or obey) other men in political matters. Is my understanding correct that you want me to call the Greek dark ages “civilization”?
It still occupied a massively important part of their society long after the point
No doubt, but that doesn’t make it the bedrock of the civilization — the necessary precondition, the cornerstone, the thing which once achieved places them on the road to civilization.
However, under that understanding, the Third Reich was extremely “civilized”. It was wealthy, highly politically centralized, had a thriving artistic and philosophical life, and was in every way a peer competitor to the other rich European powers. Whatever Chesterton seems to mean by “civilized”, it has only a tenuous connection to those elements.
But I am disagreeing with Chesterton, though retaining the appropriate turn-of-the-20th century understanding of “civilization”. Here, as an example, is the definition of civilization in Webster’s 1913 dictionary:
The act of civilizing, or the state of being civilized; national culture; refinement. *”Our manners, our civilization, and all the good things connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles -- . . . the spirit of a gentleman, and spirit of religion. Burke”. Civilized: Reclaimed from savage life and manners; instructed in arts, learning, and civil manners; refined; cultivated.
This is what I mean by civilization. I don’t see much of a reason to determine the exact moment something constitutes civilization. To paraphrase the highest court in our civilization: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["civilization"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the [hodgepodge kin networks] involved in this case is not that.”
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
As I wrote,
the Iliad and the Odyssey are for the most part concerned with Brotherhood
Maybe 5-10% of the lines are about family life. The majority of the content is about brothers-in-arms doing things. The foundational works of Greek culture are simply not about family. If they treasured family life over “brotherhood” (using the term very broadly) then it would have comprised a majority of their bedrock literature. Most of the time they are very far from their families. This is on purpose, it tells you their values. I’m sure you’ve read the works, of course, so you know this.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
If there are human societies which emphasize the family unit, but which have no civilization, then something else is required to cultivate civilization. The Ju/'hoansi have marriage ceremonies and families, but would never develop civilization. The barbarian German tribes practiced more faithfulness in their marriages than the Greeks or Romans, but they didn’t really have civilization. I am using the 19th century of civilization that is appropriate to remarking on Chesterton. A modern anthropologist would probably say all of these are equal civilizations.
This means that even though the Hellenic peoples spent a much larger period of time without such a superstructure than they did with it, all the before stuff doesn’t factor into your analysis.
Well yeah, this makes sense, because we want to look at where their civilization began. If they had 50,000 years of families and extended families, which is possible, then that stuff doesn’t really matter as a bedrock for civilization. If some men get together and steal women as property and then start forming a city that will one day make art and enjoy philosophy, which is Rome, then that’s civilization. If Cistercian monasteries pop up in the middle of nowhere, all unmarried men, and after years a micro-civilization begins to spring up nearby as an outgrowth of their industry, then that’s civilization founded on the opposite of the family. Or if some of Alexander’s troops get bored and settle down with some women they took, then that’s civilization with a very ad hoc family. I can imagine Spanish troops taking indigenous wives in Mexico and forming a little city with art and music — in what sense can we plausibly say that the foundation of this is the family?
You get to pick and choose the precise moment when you think a multi-thousand-year-old societal evolution began to count as a civilization
I suppose we first have to determine what we mean by civilization; I’m pretty sure Chesterton has a certain thing in mind.
you conveniently discard the preconditions that led to it as long as they don’t satisfy the parameters you want a civilization to look like. In my opinion this reveals the fundamentally constructed and aspirational nature of “Western Civilization” discourse. Do you acknowledge it as such?
Western tradition is to only call certain things “civilized”. I guess we can disagree with this, but is that a fruitful inquiry? This may be a matter of taste, but I highly doubt Chesterton would believe that the pygmies of Africa have civilization because they are mostly monogamous.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
But it was the male heads of the gentes who determined the allocation of privileges and roles per gens, and who put together the rituals, customs, and rules which grew Rome from a collection of backwater kin networks into a civilization. They made their determinations not within the family or family network but between the male heads, in the Senate or through another male-determined process. It was males with families deciding things with other males that have families. The gens existed as a consequence of male political life, as a way to neatly ascribe responsibilities and privileges and promote order.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
The family was never the bedrock of Western Civilization. The Iliad and the Odyssey are for the most part concerned with Brotherhood; the Gospel is wholly concerned with Brotherhood; Roman society revolved around fraternal organizations; medieval society revolved around male guilds or monasteries; American culture revolved around fraternal civic organizations (see detoqueville); and freemasonry (highly influential precursor to modernity) was a brotherhood that emphasized equality between members. It is more correct to say that the bedrock of western civilization is the männerbund and not the family. It is true that men cared much for their family name, but they cared so much because it enabled rewards and status among male peers. All striving was done by men, with men, and for men, negotiated among men outside the family fold. I’m not really sure where this idea originates that the “family” is the bedrock of the West.
Even just at a basic level: Rome was established by two brothers raised outside any family. After one slays the other, he invites other men into the city, exiles and criminals. They proceed to steal women in order to have progeny for their city. Obviously this didn’t happen, but it is a symbolic account of how the Romans saw the foundation of their culture: men negotiating and fighting with other men is the essential thing, women and the family an annoying requirement to keep things moving. And if it is disagreeable that the Roman myth could inform us today, then read the gospel again. Almost immediately, Jesus departs from his parents (curtly rebuking his mom) to find other men with which to found His Kingdom. Some of the Apostles had wives, and they aren’t even mentioned in the writings, so we don’t even know their names. The crucial bit is how men interacted with other men, in the ecclesia or assemblies of men, which prefigured our modern brotherless church, where only men were allowed to speak, where women were taught to “learn quietly with all submissiveness […] not permitted to teach or to exercise authority over a man, rather is to remain quiet”.
the monstrous and monotonous omnipresence of one symbol, and that a symbol of which nobody knows the meaning
Chesterton is funny. He would have done great on Reddit. I wish he were alive today so I could inform him that the Christians used the swastika symbol before they ever represented the cross. Not because I particularly care, but just to dunk on him.
There is a cold nihilism and gleeful cruelty in the MAGA intelligentsia.
When you are a medic on triage, your task already determined, what use is it to cry over destiny? Does civilization begin with weeping? Stephen Miller understands civilization and what it has consisted of since the dawn of time. I’m sure he is familiar with Agincourt and Toledo.
The rank-and-file MAGA populists cower from modern complexity, preferring the comfort of totalizing and simple narratives
And Chesterton’s beloved civilization was at its best when it bathed in a totalizing and simple narrative. Chesterton forgets this. The narrative was “God and King”, and both were simple. There is nothing simpler and more totalizing than the original gospel message, either of Jesus or Paul.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
I politely but passionately hold the opposite view of Train Dreams. I can’t say anything positive about it, except that some of the shots in the beginning were gorgeous. It presents an anachronistic view of the past and past attitudes, and it doesn’t say anything important or beautiful or useful about suffering. It doesn’t even present a particularly captivating portrayal of maximal suffering, if this were its intended object, and it doesn’t show its catharsis in any worthwhile way. In effect, it does nothing, but in fact no, it does worse than that. Because the director took the time to ensure that as you experience vicarious suffering for no reason whatsoever, you also become misinformed about the past: the women don’t believe in marriage ceremonies and everyone is an atheist (except the guy who is killed right after reciting the Bible, for being racist of course, and the kind fellow who finds trees divine). But the inaccuracies extend further, and more noticeably. Our protagonist in actual history was involved in labor strikes that won him an 8hr workday with Sundays off; he formed relief for laid off and injured workers; he formed ad-hoc civic and biblical organizations in his free time. That’s what 1890 to 1920 was actually like: hopeful men forming civic organizations. You had 50k woodworkers striking in Washington and Idaho during WW1 when the movie took place. These men weren’t hopeless, weepy, wimpy, and ignorant. And they would not have been traumatized seeing Chinese laborers deported (lmfao), because those were his wage competitors. White laborers were the very party who lobbied for mass deportations and got them, to secure their quality of life, which worked.
As art, unbelievably horrible; as propaganda, extremely skilled.
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6d ago
He really is the globalist Forrest Gump. He had a hand in the subprime mortgage crisis? And the development of video game micro transactions? He helped Larry Fink’s son through the drama of knocking up his situationship? He’s acting on behalf of the Rothschilds while funding random far right geneticist bloggers? He may actually have had the most interesting life in his generation.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Someone should correlate the emails sent by Ghislaine to the subjects discussed by MaxwellHill. Eg on Jan 10 when Ghislaine’s email is about x, is the account more likely to post about x? In emails where she is on a flight for 8 hours, is there a lapse in account posting?
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Mossad helped Maxwell buy newspapers, and Maxwell allowed Mossad to use his wealth to fund operations in Europe, according to Victor Ostrovsky’s book. In that sense he was a super agent, but it would be more correct to say he was a super saiyan, those individuals who inform Mossad about important details around the globe. And that sounds like a very good line of work for someone like Epstein with his suspicious sum of money and suspiciously intricate recording equipment in his home. According to a separate whistleblower, Ben-Menashe, Maxwell tipped off Mossad about Mordechai Vanunu
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
That’s Les Wexner. There’s no evidence they were gay, but there’s evidence both were straight (the girls). Those who deny that Epstein worked for Israel can only hold up their hands in confusion as to why a billionaire financier set up Jefffrey Epstein with properties, powers of attorney, a jet and an infinite money glitch. But if you look at what Wexner was doing in the same year he employed Epstein, it was forming the MEGA Group, billionaires who would meet in secret that directed their funds and influence toward pro-Israel causes. Then of course, Ghislaine’s father was an agent of Israel (as per Victor Ostrovsky) whose funeral was attended by “the President, Prime Minister, and six serving and former heads of intelligence” of Israel, with Yitzhak Shamir eulogizing “he has done more for Israel than can today be said.” Epstein may have been working with other intel agencies at the same time, but I personally believe the Israel connection is the most satisfying explanation for his rise and reach.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
Interesting that m00t met Jeffrey Epstein right around the time the political board reopened.
This is (modest) evidence that ICE are not all psychos: you can yell at them, spit at their door, smash their car light, and all they will do is push you down, and not even charge you. There were likely hundreds of similar instances in the Minneapolis area since the start of the year. [On an unrelated note, I think recent events are as evidence toward my thesis a month ago that humans naturally love engaging in the evolutionary Coalition-Trickery-Warfare repertoire of instincts. The anti-ICE folks love to engage in coalition-formation against a common enemy, they love harass the enemy “raiding parties”, they love to use Call of Duty -esque profane language against their enemies, they want to see them miserable and crying, they enjoy conspiring in secret on how to trick and subvert their enemy’s expeditions, and they are even using primitive war whistles. They have completely dehumanized ICE agents, which is also adds to the fun. I wanted them to activate these instincts against Somalis, but their ingroup / outgroup wiring is different, so they are having fun doing it against ICE, and investing many hours in it. Because it’s fun! These are people who would ordinarily call themselves non-violent pacifists; unfortunately for such people, they have the same exact instincts as the rest of us].
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9d ago
I’m half-serious and half-joking. This is how most people have their implicit attitudes changed IMO and there’s research to back it up. The reason you can hold a picture of Stalin and say you’re a Stalinist to normal person in America, and they will just laugh at you, whereas if you do the same with Hitler they will have an immediate negative reaction, isn’t because of some reasoning or knowledge on their behalf, but because only of these stimuli has been consistently conditioned to produce terror and other aversive responses (cf my first link). I think this was largely behind the anti-police shift of 2015-2021, as there was very little reasoned logic for their aversion, but very much a conditioned logic for their behavior. Tens of thousands chanting ACAB and putting it in their bio because the conditioning machine media would incessantly pair “police CS” to “aversion US” hundreds of times, thousands of times perhaps on social media, whereas studies show that you only need a few dozen for a noticeable increase in aversion? I’d prefer if we go back to 19th century Lincoln-Douglas discourse culture and minimize propaganda as much as possible, but until then you have to reply to it in kind. (Factual discourse is where? Here? Maybe a couple subreddits? Destiny livestreams, barely? Some elite university dining halls? The future is miserable)
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10d ago
Any uniform that codes “strength” and “beauty” will increase the ire of the protesters. Instead, they should enrobe in the sacred insignia of the protesters’ own culture, the pride flag colors. The media will have a difficult time propagating imagery from events because it will necessarily harm their own cause by associating the most unique in-group “cues” with aversive stimuli. ICE needs to employ a cadre of beautiful black women, not unlike Gaddafi’s Amazonian Guard, all draped in rainbow flag drip, all holding large images of Gavin Newsom and playing loud audio recordings of Newsom’s voice. The moment they step out of the rainbow-colored van to announce “this is white racism” and “a black woman is speaking” is the moment President Trump unleashes the trve discombobulator technology upon the world. Photographers will be paired with each unit to take photographs of any protester who dares assault a black woman.
Right. The issues: not a memorable name like “Good”; you don’t hear her agony; you don’t get a close up of her; you don’t see her dying out; the aggressor is inadvertently sympathetic (as she is insane); and most importantly, we don’t experience the event through the vicarious social learning of mourner. The reason you had wealthy professional mourners in ancient Babylonia, and paid wailers mentioned in the Old Testament, is the same reason a weeping Mary is often depicted in crucifixion scenes — it introduces the targetted social response to the subject, for you to imitate through peer pressure or social learning, like a director playing weepy music in a movie.
It’s all very sociopathic to think like this, but I feel that someone in the DNC is plotting this out behind a bunch of excel sheets. The strategy is just way too predictable, they do it every cycle. It honestly feels like like wallhacking at this point. Wailhacking, if you will.
To don a tinfoil hat, they also de-martyred Charlie Kirk. They created the most viral meme of the month called “Kirkification” where the youth would blend Charlie Kirk’s face with a bunch of random faces, so that the memory of his face made you laugh, and millions of young people did this. Massive trend. Then they launched the “we are Charlie Kirk” trend, where the emotional memory of name was blotted out as well; and at the same time the idea of mourning him became the focus of derision and laughter. This sound was used in maybe 500,000 discrete videos across social media. Possibly people just organically stumbled on the best way to blot out the memory strength of Charlie Kirk, but I find it more probable that there are dark forces doing this sort of thing behind the scenes. Look at what they can do against ICE for free with activists, now imagine the tools at their disposal among the people they actually pay.
Both of those things are being done. I think what Trump has to do instead is go all-in on videographic propaganda. His opponents are cherrypicking the most emotionally-potent videos of death they can find and then exaggerating the details. So he needs to find the most emotionally-potent video of death he can find and then exaggerate the details. I’m sure his team can find a high fidelity video of an innocent American crying in a pitiable way while gruesomely slain by an illegal alien. He just needs to martyr-maxx these videos constantly, as no human has infinite mental bandwidth for tragedy. It’s literally been more than a decade of Democrats leaning into martyr-maxxing, Trayvon and Floyd etc. The best they could find was a bus grainy video of a Russian Ukrainian woman being killed, which isn’t really effective. They need to study how martyrs function in social ecosystems and then have their own, because it’s like a zero-day vulnerability on the public’s psyche at this point, just easy mode for Democrat persuasion.
coffee_enjoyer
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11d ago
Perhap I would support giving Trump the brief tyrannical power to punish everyone responsible for America’s demographic changes, including churches, but this is well outside the Overton Window and presents other problems. But the artful deployment of ICE is no more offensive than the artful deployment of other agencies, which have always been deployed with punition, whether against innocent Christian bakers or against innocent conservative nonprofits (the IRS targeting campaign).
The surge was specifically for the Somali daycare fraud, because “half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that supported 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen.” There are 100,000 Somalis in Minnesota, many of them illegal. This is a punitive expedition and I could not support it more. Minneapolis allowed this crime to go on for years because Somalis are a D voting block and provide political donations to D. This is punishment against both the Somali community and the corrupt political establishment of the state. The news is complaining about “innocent” Somalis being detained for days, which likely means that the targeting of the community is working. The more Trump punishes, the most investment leaves the state. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/surge-in-federal-officers-in-minnesota-focuses-on-alleged-fraud-at-day-care-centers Noem says 10k have been arrested in the Minneapolis area, so the surge is working, to some degree. It’s not like this is some conservative conspiracy theory. Per NYT: https://archive.is/NNG45
How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch: Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible
Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.
Returning to your post,
here are cherry-picked cases
What do you expect us to do with this? Errors happen all the time, in everything. There were five train derailments in Spain last week, do you think there was a conniving transportation officer trying to fertilize the land with innocent Iberian blood? You need an argument rooted in statistics if you’re alleging that ICE is (1) concerningly incompetent or (2) evil. There is literally nothing we can do with these isolated cases.
officers get annoyed and take photos
Okay? They are human too. If someone harasses their local bus driver they are liable to be punched in the face. We aren’t Sparta, we don’t have endless pithy and stoical military elites to fulfill every social need.
coffee_enjoyer
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11d ago
For Yiddish-speaking households: https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/fertility-and-nuptiality-of-ultra-orthodox-jews-in-the-united-states/
In the American Community Survey 2021, looking at spoken language at home, Somali sits at 5.2 https://x.com/BirthGauge/status/1583095374654283776
coffee_enjoyer
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12d ago
After Yiddish and Pennsylvania Dutch, the language with the highest TFR in America is Somali. Also, you can probably find a study on urban-dwelling Salafist families in the Middle East who have huge families, ie there are fundamentalist families in Riyadh working oil & gas who will have 5+ kids.
A lot of people would have considered “close friend and agent of the Rothschilds ran a sexual kompromat operation that possibly ensnared two American presidents” to be as impossible, if not more impossible, than faking a death, so who knows?
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