coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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24d 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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25d 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.
coffee_enjoyer
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26d 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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26d 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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26d 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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26d 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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26d 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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26d 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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26d 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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28d 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.
coffee_enjoyer
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29d 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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29d 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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29d 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
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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