sun
2yr ago
Stalin was an example of who I described as survivor-dominant type, and by all accounts times under him were pretty hard both in the heart of USSR and its periphery, only exceeded by even harder times Hitler decided to bring east.
Fortunately, strongman leaders tend to croak, and that is how the cycle can weaken.
sun
2yr ago
Too many weak men create space for disaster, but who brings it and perpetuates it? You said it yourself: the barbarians or Stalin do.
sun
2yr ago
To clarify: if having to choose between two extremes, I'd prefer no future rather than boot future.
Is this something you came up with on your own?
I'll resist the urge to ask "does anyone really come up with anything on their own" and say this isn't directly based on me analysing some philosophical movement or author. I've had an argument on the motte and wanted to solidify my objections into a separate post.
sun
2yr ago
Why do people who insist on criticizing the idea of cyclical history always go for the short political slogan version instead of the longform nuanced theories that inspire those political slogans?
but argue against Spengler or Khaldun
Well, I admit - I haven't read those guys, but I've read enough iterations of the political slogan and what were essentially its naive expansions. So I argue against the slogan.
sun
2yr ago
Strong men like good times too.
As I said, pretty much no one embodies the pure archetype. But from what I observe, the more someone valorizes being able to act when life is hard, the more they valorize shunning pleasures, sometimes to the extent of fetishizing suffering. Not a 1:1 correlation, but certainly not orthogonal.
The failure mode of tough construction site man is "I had/have it hard so y'all should too". This is what I'm attempting to expose and warn against in my post.
sun
2yr ago
and whether "thriving" can actually self-sustain such that "survive" is no longer necessary and can be discarded. Is "thrive" simply a rebranding of "eat your seed corn"?
I thought I was rather clear that both extremes are not ideal. Eating your seed corn is the extreme of what I call thrive here.
sun
2yr ago
The "weak" and "strong" for the purposes of this model relate specifically to the ability to do what is required for base survival. Many men that might be called weak are not useless just because their current skillset would be useless in a harder time. It's also important to note that the ratio of survivor/thriver in a man is not fixed for life.
sun
2yr ago
The proverb that goes "Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men" is almost entirely wrong.
For the purposes of this chunk I've decided to put into its own top-level post, man has two natures. The survivor nature is concerned with enduring and overcoming threats to one's life and one's society. The thriver nature is concerned with extracting value from life.
The ones that are called "strong men", i.e. those in whom the survivor is dominant - they love hard times. That's their element, that's where they're at advantage, and they go cranky and depressed when the environment is not competitive enough for them. Naturally, hard times create strong men, by incentivizing the survivor nature.
Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them. It also follows from the incentives - why would they not reproduce the environment that favors them? Most of the time, there are enough other tribes around that much of hard time-creation is aimed at them. However, strong men love hard times so much that they gladly spare some for their own tribe. When the outer enemies run out of juice, those with the survivor dominance that have trouble adjusting turn their attention fully inward. (Recall that tongue-in-cheek alteration that goes "hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times"?)
Weak men create good times. Weak men love good times, and it is often mentioned as a bad thing. (I disagree.) But it is not the survivor who creates good times. Naturally, there are very few people who are fully of one nature, and strong men do create good times, usually for others and sometimes for themselves. But only to the extent that the thriver is present in them.
The thrivers adjust society to be more suited for thriving, to have more good stuff and more time to enjoy it. They do it when there is space for that indulgence. An overabundance of survivors, particularly the inflexible ones, gets in the way of that as much as it might help such a society endure. A society that's comprised fully of pure survivors is the image of boots stamping on human faces, forever. A society that's comprised fully of pure thrivers will dwindle in a few generations.
As someone who puts value primarily in my individual life, I know which one I'd prefer and which one I'd rather not exist at all.
Bugs breed. QED.
That being said, you again drop a correlation without putting any work into establishing the existence of any mechanism. Let's see Russia and Ukraine's birth rates.
sun
2yr ago
Based on what I can tell - I much prefer the warless rates of illness, mental and physical. I, for one, am not in any particular need of Higher Purpose(tm).
sun
2yr ago
I do not see how this is true, much less relevant.
I'll expand. War is where you go to die for the benefit of the hive (that's the best case - oftentimes the hive as a whole is not the beneficiary, only the elites are).
War is where propaganda is at its heaviest and most blatant in retrospect. Men will not go to war without this memetic attack pheromone.
That the modern man "suffers without war" is a) not really true and b) he isn't without war. You have a rich pick of various noble causes all over the world: I suggest the recent little proxy operation in Eastern Europe. In the (I assume) rather unlikely event that the system around you prevents you from joining any organized conflict, go to war against the system.
If your objection is that men are no longer forced to go to war, my reply is thus: then suffer.
sun
2yr ago
The evidence Christians typically cite as the reason for their (continued) faith is usually nowhere that vivid. It's one thing to say "at that moment I felt a presence". It's another to say "a literal biblically accurate angel descended unto me".
Mind, I still won't believe the latter story. But I won't write their belief off as a post-hoc mapping of vague feels onto the religion they grew up around. If you saw a Biblical angel, you are pretty justified to believe in the God of the Bible.
sun
2yr ago
I'll say it again that private profiles shouldn't exist. If ad-hominems happen, let them be dealt with within the rules. Posting history is information, and shedding light on it is according to the website's principles.
sun
2yr ago
They spent half their life in Narnia and then were able to be more or less regular kids again to grow up and not look like isekai protagonists. Maybe the return did make it easy to dismiss the whole thing as a dream.
sun
2yr ago
One thing that would be really, really, really easy to do, though, is to stop supporting sexy drag shows for kids and stop advertising Folsom Street Fair stuff as being family friendly.
Does "neglecting to purposefully seek out such cases in order to decry them" count as "supporting"? Do you think it's fair when the progressives demand the conservatives - the common people ones - police each and every edgelord on their side?
sun
2yr ago
I am saying they were heterosexual or bisexual and become asexual or homosexual.
sun
2yr ago
Nobody worries about a purported rape affect in the cases you mentioned because people don't tend to throw around pedo accusations in the same sentence with grooming accusations in those cases.
This lie persists because it is rhetorically useful to progressives, and for no other reason.
If it's a lie, then speak plainly and specify what kind of grooming you're talking about. Right now it looks all too much like a gotcha - shout "grooming pedos, grooming pedos", then smugly proclaim "ah ha, but grooming doesn't just mean 'sexual'!" when people rightfully assume that "grooming" and "pedos" is the same accusation.
sun
2yr ago
Well, I'd point out that to the extent the word "grooming" has been tortured, it was first done by the progressive movement.
I'm not a fan of that either.
How much would it be if you counted in the time you spent? I don't know what the formula would be for leisure time you wouldn't be spending at your job anyway... say, half of your $/hour?
More options
Context Copy link