I didn’t take any good photos recently, so here’s a video with creepy music instead – the better to with this scifi horror short story that I read recently, “Lena” on ems by qntm.
Much darker vision than Hanson’s. Though I suppose if there are trillions of ems, only a small percentage of them will be in simulations run by sadists. Unfortunate instances regardless, net welfare will likely be way higher (at least until Malthusianism sets in).
There’s some vigorous debates (read: mud-flinging) on whether Navalny is a nationalist. They all miss the point. I need to do a writeup of that thread while people are still interested.
This is the current Open Thread, where anything goes – within reason.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Commenting rules. Please note that anonymous comments are not allowed.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1336796546843684864
Game was trash so maybe not perhaps not a big issue…
Aliev says Pashinyan is full of goat droppings…
https://insomniacresurrected.com/2021/02/26/the-president-of-azerbaijan-says-iskander-missiles-werent-used-against-azeri-military/
Based Roach.
Read understand American culture and decline, Read, Christopher Lasch’s revolt of the elites and the culture of narcissism.
tl;dr atomized boomers and capitalism are a match made in heaven. the emphasis on social ties and morals of self discipline, modesty and rigor have been replaced by what P.T Barnum called “money getting” (barnum wrote a neat primer http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm one of Donald trump’s favorite books)
to the extant that boomers admire old values such as self discipline, modesty etc. it is in the service of money getting. furthermore the value of money getting is also accompanied by extravagance and the pursuit of pleasure.
Another neat read is the chapter, future perspectives in Carroll Quigley’s tragedy and hope available for free online http://www.carrollquigley.net/books.htm
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1365112032974970881
Some way to start the day. Mike Cernovich — at least he has a sense of humor.
Another example of how Counterpunch has changed:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/26/vladimir-putins-very-bad-week/
Tesla stock now 25% below the top. That still puts them at a highly overvalued $640B market cap. For comparison, Toyota $200B and Volkswagen $100B.
LOL.
Complete joke article obviously. Protests just getting started? In reality the complete opposite. Prisons getting full? This is a funny one considering incarceration rate in Russia is decreasing every year.
A lot of links in the text. Mostly mainstream anti-Russian propaganda. I think the idea is that it makes the article look more journalistic. The more sources the better.
I rarely read anything from Counterpunch but isn’t it supposed to oppositional and anti-mainstream?
I find it interesting how the two women who made up the 90s/early 00s Russian pop group “Tatu” have now reinvented themselves as conservative, anti-LGBT Orthodox Christian women when the whole theme of “Tatu” was overtly pro-LGBT, degenerate, Atheistic, etc.
It just goes to show how much mainstream Russian culture has shifted in a short space of time and how people just mold themselves and their values to conform with the current “zeitgeist”.
The powerful take in long-form was delightful.
Women being women. Though tbf, you often most hate the evil that you’ve been part of and am familiar with the depth of it.
It’s a kind of redemption. Redemption has a price.
Politics is the art of forcing everybody else to live by your values. It is the belief that there is only “one” right way that everyone must live.
But must it always be so? At the root of the problem is the idea that “humanity” is a single organism rather than just a collection of individuals. Humanity is a protagonist in a drama that is going somewhere. Therefore we must fight over which vision of the “common good” will steer the ship of humanity.
For an individual human, obviously he must choose one course of action. Humanity as an individual must obviously have only one course.
This is a great example of how abstraction and language can trap people in self defeating fantasy – language is on some level a disease, despite its obvious advantages.
A very simple solution for most of our political differences would simply be to create different living arrangements for different people.
You want to live with only people of the same race as you? There are towns and cities for that. You enjoy living in a community with people from lots of different races and cultures? There are towns and cities for that.
It’s funny how there are so many rational and sensible solutions to human problems, yet they never get implemented.
It’s not just that humanity gets caught up in collective myths that are just the reification if language, it’s as if there is an irreducible element – a group of people – in humanity working against happiness.
Is hardcore atheism and materialism primarily an urban phenomenon?
The last 5 days I spent in solitude out in the desert. I am about 30 miles from a town and I have internet, so not true isolation or wilderness. It’s high altitude desert so the air is crystal clear and the nights cold. I am at the base of a jagged range of mountains, with gigantic boulder fields and jagged rock columns and spires – the kind of “badlands” scenery you often get in semi-desert areas.
There are sweeping panoramic views in every direction, and at night small twinkling lights from isolated homes appear on the desert plain. There is a profound silence over the landscape, and there has been a rising moon the past few nights.
I find myself at odd moments overwhelmed by an almost unbearable sense of the “numinous” and find myself flooded with thoughts of a great World Soul behind it all and in it all, and something indefinable and mysterious. And I sometimes catch myself laughing in gratitude.
Don’t get me wrong – this is not a “theistic” feeling necessarily. If anything it’s more pantheistic – and it is more Taoistic in its sense of an indefinable force. But it makes me think that all our religious categories are really inadequate – theistic, pantheistic, Tao. Just inadequate words used to divide an ineffable reality.
I wonder if true atheism – not defined as disbelief in the Christian God, but rather defined as the complete absence of the sense of the numinous that characterizes certain hardcore materialists – is only really possible in an urban environment?
It is remarkable how humanity needs to step out of the human world on a regular basis and confront the “non-human” – and perhaps temporarily lay aside for a while the disease of language – in order to stay sane and come into contact with the deepest parts of himself and crucially – something beyond what he customarily takes for himself.
The political insanity of modern time, the nervous tensions, the hatreds and obsessions, the anxieties and depressions, may simply be the result of being utterly immersed in a man-made world and the loss of contact with the Other, due to mass urbanisation and population pressure.
“I rarely read anything from Counterpunch but isn’t it supposed to oppositional and anti-mainstream?”
On Russia matters, it has developed into something like Democracy Now. This started to happen when Alexander Cockburn passed away.
From Counterpunch to KosherPunch under Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.
Imagine, Linh Dinh and C.J. Hopkins among others wrote for Counterpunch.
Was World War T designed as an attempt (successful) to weaponize the narcissism of trannies? And just the follow up to weaponizing the narcissism of gays? Which, in turn, was just the follow up to weaponizing the narcissism of blacks?
Some others as well. Mike Whitney hasn’t been there for awhile, as well as some woman whose name presently escaped me.
My last Counterpunch piece was awkwardly taken down from its homepage (while still otherwise being up as a link at that site), after Mark Galeotti bitched about it on TWITter.
Louis Proyect a regular Counterpunch contributor, has posted Pilsudskiite and svido leaning BS at that site. There’s something psycho rabid about him.
You are into something here, and even though I am myself religious (traditional Catholic) I agree almost completely with your comment. The Indo-European word for God (*dyew) came from the bright clear sky. In larger urban areas the sense of infinite depth and transcendence of the sky, the diurnal and especially the nocturnal (due to luminic pollution) is lost. My own personal experience is that in the city I am always locked up with a roof over my head. As I myself am a traditional Catholic, I often go to a monastery in a rural area and an important part of my religious experience for me there is to contemplate the clear, unobstructed night sky.
OT, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is weakening.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/25/atlantic-ocean-circulation-at-weakest-in-a-millennium-say-scientists
Fred Hoyle’s sci-fi classic The Black Cloud, 1957.
https://epdf.pub/the-black-cloud.html
Saint Anthony of Egypt, the original Desert Father, who spent many decades living ascetically in the Egyptian desert.
Twitter search doesn’t show any mention of Counterpunch on Mark Galeotti’s twitter account. What article was it?
Irish monks sought out desolate islands because they reckoned that was the closest way they could imitate the earlier desert hermits, like St. Anthony.
Yes. The greatest generally being that a sizeable enough minority or plurality of people really just despise the idea of letting others live lives that they do not agree with. At this point, the only true equality of lifestyle comes with power, and that power unfortunately is still currently concentrated in a a few people and fewer countries.
Trump will speak Sunday. Carl Hubbell summed-up the situation this way:
“Gehrig is great, of course. But somehow you don’t get the same feeling when he’s at bat as when DiMaggio comes to the plate.”
I don’t think so. I purposely live on the countryside and spend as much time as I can in the surrounding mountains and deserts (as a matter of fact, I’m taking to the road tonight and we may cross our paths somewhere in the Southwest, who knows) but this hasn’t helped me much with my lack of religiosity.
On the other hand, there is a deep and somewhat mysterious reason why I chose to live close to nature. I am not sure that I could express it properly with words. Being in contact with nature allows me to feel its beauty and its innate perfection, which are totally different from man-made works of art and engineering, and amazingly came about without anybody building it. Natural landscapes just formed themselves out of chaos and spontaneous natural forces but somehow we humans were born with the ability to appreciate its beauty and serenity. I’m not sure that any other animal has this ability.
Being out in the middle of nature is also for me a humbling experience when I feel how fragile I am compared to its vastness and the power of its forces. But perhaps the most important feeling that I try to recreate is the happiness that I felt as a teenager when I saw virgin mountain landscapes for the first time. I guess being in nature is for me a way to try to find happiness in life and at least to some extent it works.
https://twitter.com/marksleboda1/status/553628466990821378?lang=hr
You can go to Galeotti’s TWITter account and get the initials specfically mentioning that Counterpunch piece.
That article:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/09/deconstructing-establishment-kremlinology/
https://www.eurasiareview.com/13012015-enigmatic-russia-detractors-analysis/
There’s a massive push also for lesbianism at the moment. I used to look at the schedules or reviews of new films coming out at arthouse cinemas and the non-black ones often had a lesbian relationship (usually with two young, cute actresses) even if they were not otherwise specifically homosexual films (unlike gay films, which had their own separate genre).
I don’t really understand the reason before this. Obviously lesbianism does not actually exist, so unlike with gay films there is no sort of market for these. The only thing I can think of is that it is a way for film directors and producers to fulfil diversity quotas (which already exist for many film awards) without showing male homosexuality, which is more viscerally disgusting.
Maybe, soft porn for straight men, on streaming services? I’m honestly more surprised by the other side of it – but maybe, I am just naive.
I too have puzzled over the economics of gay films. Two competing theories: 1.) somehow it leads to sex – either in exchange for giving people starring roles, or by having some party at finish, or from social signaling, or 2.) They have disproportionate influence within the industry (similar to politics), and people court this influence by making films that cater to them.
I’ve often been grossed out by unexpected gay references in mainstream films – sometimes going back into the ’70s – and occasionally in movies that were ostensibly made for kids, or at least young teenagers. I can only think that gays were behind it on some level.
Those girls are not original artists, but two actresses, who were hired to perform a specific character (anime pseudojapanese schoolgirl lesbians for clickbait).
When actors stop to receive a salary, as in Tatu’s case for a number of years, then they stop acting in the character they were hired to be. I.e. they speak as themselves, instead of fake Japanese anime kissing lesbian schoolgirls.
This is partly what allowed Tatu to be a relative peak of postsoviet pop – because it’s such a fake manufactured group, it had talented professional musicians writing their music and songs, and their songs were therefore quite good.
Pop music in Russia in the 2000s while highly cynical manufactured clickbait, was also more decentralized from the politicians, and postsoviet pop had original locally-specific melodies and instrumentation, which was like the accumulated capital that was developed by talented producers of postsoviet pop in the 1990s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4FYO8tGToU
2010-2020 I would say the trend of pop videos is a postmodernist “Age of Timati”, when mainstream rappers like Timati or Geegun, are Mountain Jews, or Bulgarians (e.g. Doni) or Ossetians, that pretend to be African Americans, and closely connected with politicians , and more self-serious stars were coming Belarus (e.g. Max Korzh)
If in beginning of the decade 2010s, there was an attempt to promote heterosexual versions of Tatu (e.g. Nyusha), by the end of the decade the direction of pop videos in Russia was postmodernist comedy clickbait to the computerized youth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcXNXnUr16Q
2020-2030 – the pop videos is going to turn to pure clickbait comedy for the increasingly computerized generation – what kind of omen is this rapper Morgenstern for the decade.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdk4hVPN_F0
BTW, I have been wondering where Another_German_Reader and Another_Polish_Perspective fit into your eschatology of Unz. We are in the Kali Yuga, I believe? When Tatu puts on Christian airs?
Great comment, thanks.
I would argue that this mysterious feeling you cannot express in words is precisely that experience of the numinous 🙂 Words can only hint at it. Mystery, wonder, magic – these are terms that hint at something, but we know not what.
Your attempt to describe it is beautiful and gets at many aspects of it.
And no, I am not arguing for traditional religion – just this experience of wonder.
Nature really Paradise Lost, isn’t it.
We evolved to be hunter gatherers, and in that kind of environment we find out greatest satisfaction.
I was car camping on a ledge overlooking this vast savanna like field dotted with scrub and some dwarf oak trees, with massive boulders strewn across the field, and the other side the mountains started.
In the cool early morning I would just set off exploring across this savannah, with no trail and no plan just to reach the mountains, and just wander. It was a completely different experience than hiking on a trail – “straight line, clear direction” – and I think, more satisfying. I was amazed how intuitively I was able to find my about and back to my car.
It was perfect hunter/gatherer terrain.
Btw, if you’re heading Southwest, might I recommend the Dragoon Mountains of southern Arizona? That is where I have been the past week.
Sublime scenery and a place of great spiritual power. It was in these mountains that the Apache Indians lived and fought, defeating the Spanish for centuries and staving off the encroachments of modern civilized life until final defeat.
So it’s one of the last stands of hunter-gatherers and life in the paradise that is nature against the dreariness of modern machine civilization 🙂
The spirit of Cochise and his band of happy warriors smiles benignly on all true-hearted lovers of nature who come into his realm 🙂
I drove down a BLM dirt road and accidentally found one of the most sublime camp spots I’ve ever been – if you end up going, I can give you the GPS coordinates its not on any map.
Enjoy wherever you end up going.
Yes, I am not religious in the traditional sense, and I have religious friends who object to my forays into nature as frivolous and having nothing to do with religion – I try and explain to them I am closer to something that might be described as divine in nature than I can ever be in the cities.
I am glad that your brand of traditional religion has retained this connection to nature. I love the old tradition of Catholic monasteries in lonely areas of great beauty.
ANNIVERSARY
https://youtu.be/BOSisnarbYE
Mike Whitney’s last Counterpunch article was about three years ago. Was there some sort of incident?
A girl I banged this summer, who was some 15 years my junior listened to these Russian rappers. It ain’t a bad cultural export. Slavic THOTs love it.
This is a major problem, yes. I think comes from fear and insecurity.
Most people are not satisfied with their way of life, so to strengthen their faith in it they insist everyone live like them. People who don’t live like them threaten them.
If their way of life gave them genuine pleasure and satisfaction, there would be no threat in others not living like them. The rewards of their way of life would be self-evident – they would not other people to build their confidence they have chosen correctly.
But in fact different things make different people happy. I think the solution would be for people to live for pleasure (broadly defined) and not according to what society tells them is “valuable” – this way, they all discover what they find intrinsically satisfying, and will not be threatened by others doing what they find intrinsically satisfying.
Thanks. It sounds like a magnificent place but that’s too far away for the short weekend trip that I have planned. I’ll be somewhere around the Four Corners area.
Desert areas absolutely lend themselves to discovery and making your own route as you walk. Watch the rattlesnakes.
https://twitter.com/BirthGauge/status/1313506814449905675
Interesting.
Enjoy your weekend jaunt.
I left this morning for what is supposed to be some very rugged and little visited desert areas on the Mexican border. We shall see.
I disagree with your religious friends. Going to nature and contemplating it is very important to help achieve contemplation of God, and many serious Christian saints and mystics also taught about this. And this has hardly anything to do with the “mother nature” cult that even the current Pope adheres to, nor other hippie/new age movements.
The parish priest of the SSPX temple I go to is an alpinist. Every summer he rises the Aconguagua, the highest summit in the Americas. He also says it helps his spiritual life.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/02/26/statement-by-president-biden-on-the-anniversary-of-russias-illegal-invasion-of-ukraine/
Aaron, I think I speak for everyone hear when I say we’re all just touched that in these moments of peak spiritual elevation – aka shroom ingestion – it’s us you think to share your insights with.
And to be honest, although I seldom agree with much of what you say, it’s sometimes just kinda fun to read along with you.
Lol.
Well….the light needs to shine where it’s darkest. Jesus hung out with prostitutes and outcasts, I hang out with the good people at Unz 🙂
Enjoy the read, my friend.
Nature’s okay, but really, four hours is the most that anybody should want to spend in nature, and even that is seriously pushing it. Personally, I start getting bored after fifteen minutes. Once you’ve seen two or three beaches or mountains or lakes, you’ve pretty much seen them all. I know each one is unique and all that, but that’s something you realize straight away and it doesn’t prevent the boredom from setting in.
What you do in nature anyway, just look at it? How many people can really do that all day though. That’s why we have picnics or go for swims or even just walks, because nature, of itself, is fundamentally boring and we need something to distract us when we’re in it. Personally, I think an underrated reason cities have attracted people for thousands of years is because we’re anxious to get away from nature and its blizzards, its heat waves, its stings, its snakebites, its swamps and its sands.
For me, the really humbling experience is to take in the splendor of the city from an elevated vantage point and reflect on the myriad benefits that have accrued to us from transcending nature’s meager bounty. Always remember: I could go three years without nature and not miss it, but could you really go three days without electricity?
Here’s a very beautiful song: Midnight in the Desert by Crystal Gayle
That’s exactly how I feel about cities.
Once you’ve been to several of them, what can you possibly expect to find different in another one? More buildings, streets, statues, churches, museums,…? Fine if that’s of interest to you but I’d gladly trade an early and comfortable retirement tomorrow in exchange for not visiting another city in my life. The only ones I would miss are Las Vegas and Donosti/San Sebastian, for different reasons, but it would be perfectly bearable.
To make matters worse, I was born in Europe and visited early on most of its major cities. I have spent enough hours visiting old churches, cathedrals, museums and historical monuments to last me the rest of my life.
With that said, I am not interested in preaching my way of life to anyone. I am OK if the vast majority of people feel like you do and I know plenty of them who do (although one of them couldn’t help feeling genuinely amazed when I took her to see the Delicate Arch near Moab, UT).
Besides, not everything in my life is nature and I would be very unhappy if that was all I had. Social life and family are at least as essential. I can even enjoy urban entertainment (bars, discos, casinos) as much as the next one but they are not as fulfilling to me as nature.
In summary, my only disagreement with you is this: “four hours is the most that anybody should want to spend in nature”. Like it or not, some of us have our brains wired very differently.
PS- The only one city of the entire US East Coast that I’m planning to visit again is Miami Beach (mostly for the beach and year-round warm waters) and the one that I hope I’ll never have to visit again is rodent-infested, dirty New York .
Song about the Church of Woke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSAWylw8dwQ
Thank you.
I read Desert Solitaire as a teenager and I remember it made a strong impression on me. I remember him writing about how the canyon country of Utah was for him, the ideal landscape, and I was intrigued.
Those quotes from the book are true and beautiful, and the music is lovely.
As I noted further up this thread: after Alexander Cockburn’s passing, Counterpunch has gone in the direction of being more establishment like on Russia related matters, along the lines of the Amy Goodman hosted Democracy Now.
An example of a hypocritically pious and ignorant Brit:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/olympics/article-9305463/Olympic-chiefs-slammed-British-cycling-gold-medallist-Callum-Skinner-Russia-stance.html
No outrage that clean Russian track and field athletes weren’t allowed to compete at the last summer Olympics. In addition, Russia athletes will be barred from competing in the upcoming world indoor championships.
I just saw the head of #CPAC on TV. He seems really gay. Flaming.
Don’t hate me; but Hawley seems a little gay (and a little autistic), too.
As in the world in door track and field championships.
I guess if Counterpunch were to host an author who says that airplanes and cars are secret aliens from outer space that are a threat to Earth then the publication bears at least some responsibility for the quality of the works of the author? Does some webzine bear zero responsibility at all in terms of the quality of the articles and authors that it allows to be posted on its pages, that it as control over, with no obligation to police the quality of any articles posted? I mean if a webzine were to posts articles by an author about how penicillin for pets is a secret plot to turn their DNA into stone, should the owners of the webzine have some accountability with regards to the lack of the use of proper discretion in terms of which articles should be allowed to be posted? Are people categorically arguing as a policy that a website should not be able to exert some form of control over which articles by people it allows to be posted on its website, some of which may affect its reputation?
Say not counterpunch, say your local newspaper allows stories written by a reporter that a 100 mile asteroid is going to crash into earth tomorrow, should the editor not exercise some control over the articles that his reporters post?
Hey Anatoly,
You didn’t answer my question on the last open thread. If I stop contributing to your Patreon (because you said you have lots of money and don’t need it), will I still get your signed book for past donations if you ever get around to writing it?
That said, I might not stop contributing since this is pretty much one of the only sites that I read, I have money as well, and last week it has been worth it.
For anyone who doesn’t mind bad movies, I recommend the Russian movie “Blackout: Invasion Earth.” (2019) I heard the budget was only $5 million. If so, at that price, I would say it is more of a spectacle than most Chinese movies that have a budget of 4-6x.
I interpreted the ending as being a secretly based message.
https://twitter.com/hami/status/1365339498364604419
This one might have some legs.
When US leftists are paranoid right now, this provides all the Brown Scare they need.
One day YouTube will save millions of dollars in hosting fees by teaching people the simple right-click -> loop function.
Ah who am I kidding, plebs on reddit still take PHYSICAL FUCKING SCREENSHOTS of their monitors instead of hitting print key.
Really, Cyberpunk 2077 was trash? I read lots of good things about it as long as you get it for PC, where the bugs are minimal. Why was it bad exactly? Since it didn’t get overwhelmingly good reviews, I was thinking of skipping it this year anyways since there are lots of other games to catch up on. There was a Polish nationalist on Twitter who was quite proud of it too…
That sounds plausible.
Are people who are highly engaged politically generally happy? Are they generally successful and content in their personal lives? Are they psychologically stable? Are they people who would be regarded by others as pleasant people to be around?
Is it possible that political engagement is a mental illness?
And is it possible that a society in which huge numbers of people are passionately engaged in politics is actually a very sick society?
In a sane society people would pursue love or friendship or sex or art or just doing things like they like doing.
A major factor that works against human happiness is the desire to be useful (and politics is part of this unhealthy desire). We need to spend more time and energy on useless things. That’s why art is worth pursuing. It’s entirely useless. It exists merely for the pleasure of creating it or the pleasure of viewing it. Hobbies are useless, which is they’re worth doing. Going for a walk in the park or along the beach is a useless activity which is why (if you happen to enjoy such things) you should do so.
Trash is maybe pushing it. But it’s nothing special. And I don’t even care about the bugs.
The game is mostly linear with few branching paths. Very few real choices with consequences. Gameplay is mediocre. Nothing to do in the city.
The game clearly lacks many intended features and some parts are obviously placeholders. For example: the police in the game doesn’t chase after you, instead they just spawn a few meters behind you…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwYPmMrzY6I
Being in nature makes me anxious and depressed. But a lot of people seem to enjoy it, so good luck to them.
On the whole I find more beauty in artificial things than in natural things. To me a gothic cathedral is more beautiful than a mountain. There are even some modernist buildings (such as Saarinen’s TWA terminal in New York) they I find more beautiful than forests.
Whatever floats your boat.
Maybe the market is heterosexual men. If the movies in question involve lots of sex and nudity then the market is definitely heterosexual men. If the movies in question involve lots of angsting over relationships then the market is lesbians.
There was a whole genre of lesbian vampire movies back in the 70s, with lots of sex and nudity. They were aimed at heterosexual men.
Although I have come across a handful of heterosexual women who like 70s erotic lesbian vampire movies.
Maybe some women find depictions of lesbian sex less disturbing than depictions of heterosexual sex.
I assume these modern Hollywood movies are all about the emotional angst and there’s nothing lesbians love more than emotional angst.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHgI6um1BMc
Cities all feel very similar after a while, but I agree that there is something seriously missing in AaronB’s hypothesis. Humans are social and the greatest joys will only come from interactions with other humans, especially if you treat living in society as an ultimate ‘simulation’. I just enjoy When I was young I moved to a completely different city and enjoyed setting up a new life from basically nothing. I did have an ‘out’ of possibly moving back with my parents if I ever ran out of my meagre savings, but luckily didn’t have to use it.
I can probably last several days in nature and if you know a bit about rock formations or types of plants or insects, it can definitely capture your attention for a while. I’ve hiked on mountains and camped there, even though this was a while ago. But it is true that it is pretty unforgiving and modern humans can’t survive there. If you ever want to be stripped of your mystical regards for a city, go to a Japanese mountain and look at a Japanese city. There are probably few urban agglomerations more ugly than the Japanese city. Some say that this is because the Japanese see nature as an enemy that tries to kill them with earthquakes, tsunamis, torrential downpours and landslides, etc… and there is quite a bit of truth to that. It’s no surprise that the Japanese city is an ‘opposite’ aesthetic to the grandness of nature. True, Middle Eastern cities are way uglier, but they don’t have the majestic nature that is present in Japan right beside every ugly city, which creates quite the contrast.
You guys should try getting laid.
Yeah. It hasn’t always been the case, certainly not in every society, but it has been a characteristic feature of western civilisation since the 19th century.
It’s also a characteristic feature of Puritanism and Calvinism. Such people know that they’re the Elect and they know they’re good and righteous but they’re miserable and they’re enraged that all those wicked sinners are enjoying themselves. They must be stopped.
Puritans love misery, but mostly they love inflicting misery on others.
Since SJWs and Wokeists are a mutated variety of Puritan they share this mindset. They know they’re super-virtuous but they’re not really happy and they’re angry at the thought that the non-virtuous might be happy.
People think they’re doing what they want to do but they’re still unhappy and dissatisfied, so they’re threatened by anybody who has made different choices. And they get angry if those people who have made different choices seem happy.
The comments below that Twitter post are smooth like an inflated balloon. There is not one wrinkle expressed when they are all enabling each others’ beliefs that CPAC2021 is an openly Nazi event. This is impossible to differentiate from psychosis.
If you just know you’re good, without having to earn it through intense doubt, you will do a lot of bad. Like seeing yourself through glasses with a halo and angel wings etched on them, even when burning witches, you’ll look beatific.
https://mobile.twitter.com/BirthGauge/status/1313507391418368000
Can this really be the only thing that changed? Seems quite amazing if it is.
Fortunately (for the country) and unfortunately (for the sake of these statistics), MENAPT (Greater Middle East + Somalia) are only 55% of Denmark’s non-Western immigrants, so the birth rate of the more undesirable population is higher to some degree.
Hopefully when the government starts publishing data based on the new classifications we will know more.
Did one of their authors actually argue this or are you just making up hypotheticals?
I don’t really find the writings of ex. Vltchek (too many “powerful takes”) or Hopkins (boring and repetitive) interesting, but their content seems quite in order with a magazine that is, at least ostensibly, supposed to be a kind of dissident, “anti-imperialist” outlet.
Given that we have seen other magazines (see The Intercept) that have been not only diverted but even turned actively against the original aspirations of its founders by more politically establishmentarian newcomers, it does not seem unreasonable to question the motives of the editors.
I didn’t say that I have lots of money. I have enough money that I don’t want to take money from people who are in financial hardship and for whom such contributions could lead to a noticeable decline in their material quality of life. If on the other hand you are substantially moneyed and enjoy reading my poasts or at least derive some value from them, then yes – monetizing a minor part of said value and transferring it back to me is something that I highly appreciate.
I know you contribute, thank you, I keep a list of contributors which I update every few months and you are on it so if you stop you’ll certainly get the benefits you signed up for.
Ah okay, I misunderstood it I guess. I do enjoy reading the posts and derive value from them so thanks for that.
I still should probably shill out for the Gray Mirror as well.
By the way, this is not for everybody and is probably not worth it if you’re under 40, but to make more money, I suggest not drinking alcohol. I stopped completely six months ago, after a previous six months of drinking very little, since I just didn’t have the time and needed my brain to be working better at my job. The time thing didn’t work out since now I just sleep more than before, but brain is working better and I can focus more and get things done faster. As a side effect, I think I lost some weight, but definitely I’m not losing the ~100 dollars a month or more that was spent on alcohol previously. I do miss the social aspect of drinking with all sorts of strange and different people that I meet around here, but with the pandemic shutting bars, it’s not really much of a choice.
If only the rest of the world had copied New Zealand, then we’d have eliminated covid and there’d be no more lockdowns:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/27/new-zealand-auckland-to-go-into-seven-day-covid-lockdown
QAnon levels of schizophrenia.
The rest of the world consists of more than small island nations.
I know, but maybe they were just unlucky, there’s lots of other small island nations that were able to lockdown long and hard enough to get covid cases to 0 and then completely cut themselves off from the rest of the world, so that they’d never have to lockdown again:
https://jerseyeveningpost.com/news/2020/11/07/islanders-warned-that-jersey-could-be-heading-for-another-lockdown-as-active-cases-top-100/
https://www.itv.com/news/channel/2021-01-23/guernsey-to-enter-lockdown
https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2021-01-05/isle-of-man-re-enters-lockdown-after-fears-of-covid-spread-in-the-community
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/world-australia-56035668
only a covidiot would oppose such a strategy, what’s stopping the USA and Russia? The uk has just extended lockdown by another 4 months despite vaccinating nearly a third of the population.
I find that “organic-seeming” architecture made by people more connected to the natural world (such as the builders of the Gothic cathedrals) is more beautiful than modernist works made by people who are disconnected from the natural world.
Lockdowns are based on fake science.
https://www.bworldonline.com/its-final-lockdowns-dont-work/
Consider also that most “science” cannot be replicated and, therefor, cannot be considered legitimate science.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=241683
Some believe that the design distinction here is between one of a saving economy (gold-backed currency) and one of a debt economy (fiat currency.)
I think it is also true that the medieval world was more cultivated. For example, forest trees were pruned in such a way as to make poles (so that they took on an unnatural appearance.” A lot of natural grasses were cut for winter fodder. Though no doubt, it was earthier and less paved over.
I agree with your sentiments about NYC, but I think it would be fair to call the natural outdoor environment rodent-infested.
I mean, once I was sitting by a fire in the darkness and I heard a rustling behind me. I mistook it first for a mouse, and then a skunk, but it turned out to be close to a 40 lb porcupine (2nd biggest rodent in NA), and as I stood stock still, it came close enough to sniff the toe of my boot. Meanwhile, I remembered with horror, the tales of porcupines chewing up the boots that people left outside their tents to get at the salt on them.
All this talk of maximizing the phenotype IQ of blacks with expensive interventions (such as I believe even Molyneux advocates for) seems rather silly, IMO. It is probably impossible to move g, even if IQ can be nudged a tiny bit. The real efforts should be put into trying to modify black behavior. This would not necessarily be too hard or expensive. For example, get the media to stop valorizing them.
Ages ago, I recall reading a Nazi-era essay critical of the Superman comic. I wonder what Nazis would say about the rumored new movie to be produced. Directed by JJ Abrahms and written by Ta Nehisi Coates, and possibly starring a black Superman.
I’ve been curious about that area myself. I drove through Anza Borreago desert last weekend.
Very cool with its dramatic flatness and view of the Salton Sea coming down from the Peninsular range.
I like driving around California’s natural areas because you will always see at least a few things that makes you do a double take.
In this case it was seeing random solitary RVs parked in the desert, based near the mountains ranges. Another was the highway into the Salton Sea with a landscape which was a mini version of what you see at the Petrified National Forest- layered orange canyons with a flat top.
I kind of like nature to have some movement to it. Either the thing moves or I’m moving.
So if the scale is vast, like Death Valley. I like driving through it. If it’s on a medium scale, I like walking through it. Red Rocks Canyon, Mammoth Lakes are great places to hike. Really, any place with water works.
Red Rocks Canyon Trails is highly recommended. Very few people there. A profound 2 hour hike or longer if you want. Dramatic shifts in surfaces and sense of kinetics of mountains. Mostly sagebrush and cactus. Red columns mountains faces. Really beautiful. Another thing is, you can have the feeling of having the entire park to yourself.
https://twitter.com/TheresNoFate/status/1365648560608468996
If you liked the organic elements of Gothic architecture, have you looked more at Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts?
Though the two related movements had different perspectives towards the past – with Art Nouveau seeking to create a new world and Arts and Crafts embracing mediaeval and folk traditions – they both incorporate natural themes in their works very beautifully.
Yes, those are very nice also. Things took a wrong turn when people became too abstract and divorced from nature.
What is the correct atomic policy for atomophiles to advocate for, if one is realistic about dysgenics? Are ultra-high IQs only needed to design power plants? Not to build, or maintain them? Or deal with the waste products? Or should we be piling money into research now, for energy and rocket engines, to take advantage of the bigger smart fraction we have now?
Or must an atomophile (who does not want to destroy the world) necessarily be a eugenicist?
It strikes me that the ban on the spread of nuclear weapons is, whether by accident or design, possibly the only non-blankslatist policy advocated on an international level.
Sizeable chance that the image circulated a day before isn’t fake and his wife does have a German passport. Some groups are saying that the number on the document does match to a woman with the name Yuliya Navalny, in Germany. The number more important than the photo or signature for finding the truth here
On the matter of media buying into negatively inaccurate stereotypes along the lines of the Counterpunch piece I linked further up this thread:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/02/27/putting-artemi-panarin-situation-in-proper-perspective/
Sad news to share with any music buffs out there. The very talented mandolist/violinist Peter Ostroushko recently passed away after trying to recover from a stroke that he had two years ago. He had a long and distinguished musical career, inluding session work with Bob Dylan, stints on Austin City Limits, work with several symphony orchestras around the world, a regular on the ‘Prairie Home Companion”, and the scoring of some of Ken Burns masterful documentaries regarding American history and culture. He even once played in a concert in Moscow. A mainstay in the Ukrainian-American community of the Twin Cities, he’ll surely be missed. On a personal note, he was one of the first persons to influence me in my spiritual walk with Jesus Christ. Vichna Pamiat Peter.
https://www.startribune.com/peter-ostroushko-virtuoso-musician-with-everyone-from-bob-dylan-to-minnesota-orchestra-dies/600027280/
https://ss.metronews.ru/userfiles/materials/165/1655012/858×540.jpg
In St. Petersburg, anyone can freely vaccinate in shopping centers. There are no queues, the points accept hundreds of patients a day (although they are designed for twice as many). The situation is about the same in all cities of Russia. This is (to a large extent) the result of the anti-vaccination campaign that the media controlled by Washington conducted in Russia
https://gazeta.spb.ru/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/photo_2021-02-24_11-16-39.jpg
Would that artwork be considered as HumansOfFlat?
Speaking of North American musicians of Ukrainian ancestry, have you ever listened to Sarah Jarosz ?
https://youtu.be/hWqeMODlW0k
A talented young lady.
Diversity rhetoric is really incentivized within the West, so that it infects practically everything, to mind-numbing levels.
But if you go to the Middle East, the incentives are different, and the rhetoric is all about diversifying the economy and planning for the future, when oil runs out. It is imbued into everything, seemingly to the same degree. Though, it appears more sensible at first, it is really not because it is also based on blank-slatism.
I mean anyone who thinks the UAE will develop an indigenous space economy is bat-shit insane. Kenya has a better chance leasing space for someone to build a space elevator, putting a tax on everything going up, and demanding that Kenyans do all the loading, and catering work for what foreign workers are actually needed.
My kids and I once spent about 15 minutes happily close to a porcupine peacefully munching on grass. We got close enough to touch it, but did not do so. Interesting how perceptions can be different – nothing horrible crossed our minds.
Here’s Peter being interviewed hanging out with a Russian guitar friend of his. He’s at home, and there’s a clip of him in his backyard garden inspecting his tomatoes and beets. There were a lot of bumper crop gardens in our Ukrainian neighborhood. I always had one going to0…
https://youtu.be/0fZ6haOLbmg
так як мед смакують!
Quite a strong powerful and melancholic voice. Reminds me a bit of a young Stevie Nicks…
Porcupines move fairly slowly, you should not be very worried, if you encounter them in daylight.
However, they have bad eyesight. If you encounter them at night, there is a good chance, they will not be aware of you. I wasn’t worried as I was observing it, expecting it to walk by me. I did not expect it to come close, and I mean close.
The end of my feet were tilted upwards, so it could have easily fit my toe inside its mouth – I don’t believe it was even aware that I was there – just my boot. Meanwhile, I thought it was too close for me to move suddenly. I am not talking about feet, but <1 inch, like kissing my foot close.
You might not have an appreciation of the biting power of rodents, but I do. Rats can chew through concrete or steel. I've seen squirrels chew through old growth oak boards. And I've seen beavers chew through trees. One beaver nearly killed Lewis and Clark's dog. And porcupines can kill dogs with their quills – they work their way deeper, into the organs. Probably not great to have in your ankle, when you are in the middle of the woods.
Ng Man-tat (Ngo Manh Dat in Vietnamese) is dead since yesterday due to cancer!
He was the famous Uncle Tat character who was always with Stephen Chow in HK cinema.
http://media.doisongphapluat.com/702/2021/2/27/chau-tinh-tri-chua-the-chap-nhan-ngo-manh-dat-da-qua-doi2.png
I loved this man’s movies with Stephen Chow, God of Cookery, Prince of Beggars. It’s really sad reading his career after his parting with Stephen Chow, such is the life of many famous stars in HK cinema.
Rest in Peace!
As I define it, only “ultra” high IQ to design them. To build to spec and run them, significant IQ, plus a culture that’s compatible with the domain, which for example excludes Japan, realized long before Fukushima. To maintain, maybe not “ultra,” but pretty high IQ for some of the problems that can arise. Waste products are fairly easy if you ignore recycling which you shouldn’t, encase them in something really durable, bury and wait 600 years, by which time they’ll be no more radioactive than the ore from which the fuel was mined.
Societal and national capabilities for building them can be lost “overnight,” see the US, and now France, or so I hear after it busted up its old organization that did that. Counties like Germany can also just go insane and believe everything can be powered by solar and windmills, and decide nuclear is too dangerous even though they’re very much not Japanese.
Indeed, but for the West’s ruling trash globalism and importing hordes of low IQ Third Worlders is a religion you might say; I don’t know about Russia. As for the U.K., they’re trying an experiment where they give everyone a single jab ASAP, with the booster at many as 12 weeks from them. Not supported by the mRNA companies which simply didn’t test that regimen, but there’s a good chance this is mostly harmless, and could be much better for the AZ/Oxford disappointment. Which means a large fraction of that nearly one third aren’t yet properly vaccinated.
One way in which SJWs are mutated puritans is that they have absorbed a certain amount of ‘classic’ Marxist and Hegelian beliefs. One of these is that the existence, and happiness, fulfillment etc. of any human individual is dependent on the collectivity and cannot exist or be realised outside it. Similar to the paraphrase of Hegel ideas that the individual is to the state as the eye is to the human head and body, if the eye is severed from its parent body it is dead and cannot function.
This is one reason they are preoccupied by controlling everyone’s ideas and behaviour, because they believe it is the only way in which the correct social/collective conditions can be created for anyone to be fully happy. I suspect they pick up ideas like this through the literature and ideological material they study, it is an interesting aspect to SJWism that doesn’t seem to get the attention it should.
It would be something like: We told you this is what they will do and what your children will end up watching.
FFS Mr Hack/ Oscar Pistorious ( the implication being that I am like Oscar Peterson and you the exact opposite) – can you stop with the fake news BS of “Ukrainian community. ”
All you are thinking is Banderetard 1940s/50s Nazi fugitive, CIA smuggled lowlifes who went to America.
There has never existed such a concept as “Ukrainian community”…. this is why hugely embarrassing for these cretins (as I have written before) there is not a single place in America named after the “homeland” of these fake communities. All there is…. Russian world places named after expatriate settled areas. In America all the other European settled communities have these places….. Khokholand has not been registered.
What there was though is the Austrian intelligence created death cult that was created in the early 20th century that was called “Ukrainian nationalism”
Ostroushko , or if not this ape then definitely his parents are experiencing incineration in hell at the moment for their disgusting Banderite evil activities.
Why am I taking such a negative tone to this man?
I don’t like you working for Austrian intelligence so insidiously in supporting this sick cult dishonestly. Your using fake music sincerity as an outlet for khokholism. He wasn’t even that good. It struck me once when you ascribed the ex US Open tennis second place Rusedski this fake ethnicity of “Ukrainian”. I was thinking would Mr Hack ever refer to the very high quality and world-class tennis player Nikolai Davydenko as “Ukrainian”? Then I realised of course not (he is from Lugansk).
Or the Immortal legend of Yuri Vlasov, a hero of mine, great mind and inspiration to Arnold Schwarzenegger ( who wrote brilliant tribute to him)? Of course not because the idea of Khokholism is a big fake.
“oh no” what could that mean ? ukrop are Russian are 2 “different languages” LOL.
Cmon melanf…. you are incorrect. I don’t know what it is for SP, but for much of the country antibody tests are an absolute requirement for being allowed to take the vaccine(if have antibodies then can’t vaccinate) . I think our vaccination rate is good, but antitel tests make it pointless to say are rates are low. Also don’t forget that many doctors don’t like mixing vaccines for different diseases so close to each in date.
Look at the facts…. we had nearly 80 million people take the flu vaccine last year. That has to be one of the highest rates on the planet. We are a country of frequent mass international travel to exotic/nontemporate locations (places that require or recommend to take various vaccines before travel, which most of us do). We are a country completely different to all the other post-Soviet countries in the last 20 years in that our rates of vaccination, incidence of deaths or illnesses from the diseases like TB, Measles, polio etc, are significantly less exactly because we are less skeptic and more sophisticated on these issues than the other post- Soviet states (notably ukrop and Gruzia).
Although 1 covid test does not mean 1 test per person…. we do have a very high rate of testing… which again shows that people can’t be that reluctant to vaccinate if they are are so eager to be tested!
Vaccination must be going great because advertising on TV or on street is negligible!
This is funny because hopeless liberast scum in Russia have permanently and shamefully discredited themselves even worse than usual…. by nearly all running like rats to get the SputnikV vaccine from the “regime” BEFORE the Lancet endorsement of phase 3! I couldn’t think of more idiotic, self-discrediting tactics from these clowns.
Anyone know if there is a Chinese aphorism something like “an empty house collapses the fastest?” I heard it in a Chinese movie, and thought it was pretty clever, but ever since it has been bothering me, like a tune stuck in my head, just to know whether they wrote it for the movie or whether it is an old saying.
It had a context in the movie, but here is what I was thinking: a regular fire drives out moisture in the air. Without the fire, the beams get damp and rot, and so collapse.
Use to happen regularly with small cottages in Ireland. And I recall reading a book by a Tiananmen agitator, where he afterward escaped into the countryside and had to have a fire going for three days to drive out the damp of the uninhabited cottage he occupied.
That’s a valid preference, although it’s not my preference.
I see nature as ugly and depressing and I see art as a valiant attempt to create beauty in an ugly world. At least that’s how I see the function of art.
Of course the artistic establishment stopped believing in any kind of beauty a hundred years ago.
But some modernist architects (and I emphasise some) did still manage to create beauty. Most just created ugliness, but not all.
I don’t dislike “organic-seeming” architecture. An artist (or an architect) can take the ugliness of nature and create something beautiful out of it.
Natural things are more beautiful when the chaos of nature is moulded into some kind of order. Forests are ugly, but formal gardens are beautiful.
I don’t subscribe to the Cult of Nature, which I consider to be one of the many pernicious legacies of the Romantic Movement.
Few things are more beautiful than a mature forest. I don’t think anything humans have ever created can compare with that.
You’re very sick in the mind and soul, Gerard. Peter Ostroushko’s father fought valiantly for the Soviet army during WWII, and lost a leg fighting at Stalingrad against the Germans. There, do you feel completely foolish now? You should, you heartless and stupid SOB.
It’s a cultural preference. Before the Romantic Movement came along nobody would have agreed with you.
You’re certainly entitled to your cultural preference. I like the fact that people have different cultural preferences. It makes life interesting.
When it comes to aesthetics there is no objective truth.
We’ve been heavily indoctrinated into the Romantic viewpoint on nature for the last couple of centuries. That doesn’t make the Romantic viewpoint wrong, but it doesn’t make it right either. There are differing aesthetic tastes and we should never assume that the aesthetic taste that happens to be culturally dominant at the moment is some kind of eternal truth.
The aesthetic tastes of westerners prior to the rise of the Romantic Movement were so radically different from ours that it is difficult even to comprehend such a viewpoint, but their tastes were just as valid as ours. Just as the aesthetics of other civilisations (such as Japanese civilisation) are radically different from ours but just as valid.
I have no desire to convince you that my aesthetic tastes are superior to yours. They just happen to be different.
I thought he was 1940s/50s Bandera diaspora Mr Hack. Happy to apologise and discipline myself, IF you can adequately show what you say is correct. Definite 40s/50s emigration to US of his family, standard Galician views did suggest to me no Red Army connection, but if wrong then I’m wrong.
Even if not, you are too harsh….. I was going to say I could play the mandolin with my feet superior to Peter with his hands, but because of my inate humanity I respectfully decided to not make that comment!
BTW saddened to hear about Chick Corea – a true great. The talented Ostroushko does appear to be a pleasant guy, if you knew him.
To each his own. Thinking of the world as nan essentially ugly place seems rather depressing, though.
People have the capacity to make nature more beautiful but how can one deny the beauty of a mature forest with massive trees, the smell of pines or maples (particularly after a rain), etc.?
This is in northern New England:
https://www.planetware.com/photos-large/USNH/usa-new-hampshire-the-basin.jpg
https://cdn.architecturendesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/AD-The-34-Most-Beautifu-Forests-In-The-World-31.jpg
The old formal gardens were made by people who were still connected to nature, hence their beauty.
This is a very good point. But the Cult of Reason also lacked a certain balance…
It has nothing cultural about it, I come from the Soviet cultural environment – a technicist culture if there ever was one, it is just that I am able to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the natural patterns and shapes.
One should be aware that a single living cell is complex enough that it takes a high computational capacity to even attempt to simulate that.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/to-model-the-simplest-microbe-in-the-world-you-need-128-computers/260198/
People think that living things are simple and boring, but that’s because they are used to live in human-built concrete jungle.
Where is this required? When I was vaccinated, they asked me only my last name – and nothing else (they didn’t even require documents). People I know have been vaccinated without any tests. From other parts of the country, people write the same thing – tests are not required. Here is the official instruction:
“PCR testing before vaccination is carried out only if there is documented contact with a COVID-19 patient and the person has any clinical manifestations of the disease”
vaccination is slow because people are slow to go to vaccination centers, not because of the tests
Perhaps it depends on location. My in-laws were tested prior to vaccination, and found to their surprise that they had antibodies. The slight cold they had a couple of months earlier, that they dismissed due to mildness of symptoms, turned out to have been Covid.
I read an interesting article about mask-wearing in Japan. It has been highly prevalent since, well, since the pandemic 100 years ago. The reason for mask acceptance that surprised me the most: The Japanese tend to be introverted, and often they enjoy a feeling of being socially walled-off inside one’s mask. I can imagine how, packed into my sardine-can subway car, aside from feeling protected from pathogens a few inches away, I would also feel psychologically protected.
By the way, here in California, a large cohort of people do not wear the mask over the nose. I was curious whether this is the case in Japan, and so I performed an image search. My conclusion is that not wearing the mask over the nose is virtually unknown.
And when were they vaccinated? Initially, it was supposed to vaccinate only those who do not have antibodies (to save the vaccine). now there are many more vaccines than those who want to be vaccinated and vaccinate everyone who wants to be vaccinated
https://youtu.be/JcMFxKtVY5k
You can play the mandolin better than this? You really are the consummate BS artist.
Man and Nature
https://d.radikal.ru/d15/2102/b4/dacb93955379.png
“It’s a cultural preference. Before the Romantic Movement came along nobody would have agreed with you.” – You are full of it. I could say that communist and Jewish anti nature materialism is talking through you. I could say that you would like to pave up with asphalt the all of Siberia if it was up to you. I could say that “American pastoral” by Philip Roth is a good exemplification of Jewish fear and apprehension of nature because for Jews nature is goyish.. But I won’t. Instead I will say that you have no original thought of your own. You are a pretentious bore.
I don’t think that way. I think of nature as ugly but I can find lots of beauty in the man-made environment. Some people can’t. I’m not accusing you of this, but there are people who just have a knee-jerk reaction against man-made environments. I have a knee-jerk reaction against natural environments!
They were still connected to nature, but not in any kind of modern sense. They saw nature as something that needed to be tamed, controlled and reduced to order. Being close to nature they recognised its dark side. Many people today romanticise Nature because they’re not compelled to confront it the way people of the past were.
Yes. There’s room for both approaches. I take things a bit far in one direction but I have no problems with people who tend in the other direction.
Diversity is our strength.
I thought of you and your young family last night after watching this very good Ukrainian fantasy film, ‘The Stronghold”. I was impressed with the overall quality of this film, the special effects were as good as anything Pixar/Disney/Marvel put out. The story line is good and the acting is adequate too. Family friendly that I think that your kids would greatly enjoy. You can watch it for free through YouTube on your large Samsung TV. The print is good too, if not 4K then definitely some kind of high definition.
https://youtu.be/wsgKX21tbvM
It’s still a cultural influence, whether you accept the prevailing cultural view or react against it.
I’m certainly aware that I’m to some extent reacting against the modern western Cult of Nature. I also admit to being a contrarian. Whatever the prevailing view is, I’m going to regard it with scepticism.
Seeing things as communist and Jewish plots is so dazzlingly and breathtakingly original.
I have two hobbies: reading obscure books and walking in the woods. If you do not like walking in the woods I will not bore you. But this might be of passing interest: in The Greeks and the Irrational by Eric Dodds he offers as a passing and insignificant observation that in ancient times almost all experience by men of divine inspiration or divine experience or the transcendental occurred by old guys walking by themselves in the hills or in the mountains. Dodds was an atheist and this meant nothing to him. He has a preliminary apologetic disclaimer like he is sure this bit of trivia would interest almost nobody.
https://www.amazon.com/Greeks-Irrational-Sather-Classical-Lectures/dp/0520242300
Lesbianism obviously does exist. It’s not so exclusive as male homosexuality, but there are women out there who do have sex with other women.
It improved my quality of life when I started scrolling over those comments. But, to each his own.
Walking in nature is a good thing, but only if it’s not a totally wild nature. You don’t want bears and hungry wolves around.
Coleridge’s advice to his son Hartley: A life close to nature, my boy!
(Midnight Frost among other works contains such advice.)
(Forgive me, Harvard and the rest of the “refreshed”-literature crowd, for
the reference to Coleridge.)
Speaking of nature, Peggy Noonan, in today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, wrote that New York City has “the greatest” parks. I would have thought it might be Yellowstone, or Yosemite, or thousands of other parks that are not Central Park. It would be difficult to find a better example of progressive close-mindedness and contempt for deplorables.
Oh dear, perhaps you ought to have clicked the links. All those examples are countries that have attempted such a thing, declared success only to have outbreaks and subsequent lockdowns again,… and again……and again. They’ve also painted themselves into a corner as the likely endgame of all of this for most of the world is that corona will become endemic, defanged by vaccines quite soon in developed countries, a few years away in the rest; it’s going to be politically very difficult for them to open. Quite frankly, any benefit from reduced immigration to developed countries in such a scenario is more than counted by citizens of those countries having less freedom to travel than a medieval peasant (Australia actually has commie exit visas).
Double post, please delete
It exists but it obviously has little or nothing in common with male homosexuality. Which is hardly surprising given the enormous differences between male and female sexuality.
Most of the lesbians I’ve known (and I’ve known a lot) slept with men from time to time. And quite a few ended up in permanent relationships with men. There are a lot of “lesbian until the right man comes along” lesbians. But some lesbians seem to remain lesbians.
Aesthetics are subjective, yes you are right, I myself find beauty both in nature and in the works of human ingenuity.
This is so true, for people of the past nature was something dangerous and wild, to be tamed by human hands. Romanticist notion of nature was born later.
Women can’t have sex with each other
What are commonly known as lesbians (i.e. cohabiting middle-aged spinsters) do not even pretend to (‘Lesbian bed death’).
What is depicted in these films as lesbianism (i.e. hot, feminine 20-30 year old women passionate for one another) does not exist. I have never met a genuine lesbian in my life. The head of the LGBTQ (etc) society at my university was a supposed ‘lesbian’ yet had a boyfriend at the time and for several years previously and I once recognised her at a nightclub snogging another man. From what I gathered, her one lesbian experience consisted of kissing her best friend once at a party in her last year of school.
Animals usually avoid humans the best they can. They know we are a source of trouble.
These people don’t know what wilderness is. Their spirits have been tamed to such an extent that they imagine nothing as beautiful as their own cages.
They are human hamsters threading in their spinning wheels.
When I visited NY I truly marveled at how anyone could willingly live there. I have the same feeling now about Moscow where I was born. I can still enjoy small provincial towns and villages, but the megalopolises are such an agressive environment…
Ancient pagans everywhere did not see nature as evil. They saw it as the norm and did not feel the need to classify it as good or bad.
Many groups of people also considered mountains holy, believe nature is full of spirits, etc. Maybe this is all consistent with the idea of nature being tamed, but it seems strange to me. Certainly in visual arts one can find an emphasis upon the vastness of mountains long before the Romantic movement. I don’t see much sign of taming in most mountain paintings. I would also add that people can be thrilled by danger.
I can go along with the idea that people who are living an easy life can afford the luxury of admiring scenes etc. But I think dfordoom (as usual) is overgeneralizing.
I can of course appreciate both natural and man made objects, although I am firmly in the camp that the natural world is more beautiful. To me, preferring a painting or a building to a natural landscape is like preferring a painting of a beautiful woman to the real thing. I could come up with intellectual reasons for the idea, like a painting could be made to have less imperfections etc., but I can’t actually fathom believing such a thing. To my puritanical mind, the idea seems depraved.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/52uot1y9xb0?start=343&end=420
This claim seems dubious to me. People’s perception of beauty seems to at least be partly objective. For example is the appreciation of symmetry, which is an objective, mathematical principle.
One persistent point that anti-vaxxers make and which I have no real response to though is why Putin hasn’t publicly taken Sputnik V himself.
I suppose that as a religious conservative boomer he might well be an anti-vaxxer himself although one who doesn’t want to signal it.
This all is true, but you really couldn’t walk freely in the forests or mountains before the 19th century, they were everywhere full of beasts and sometimes vagabonds. We can’t even fathom how dangerous places they were. Even in thinly populated modern countries like Sweden, Russia, Finland bear and wolf populations are carefully kept small and in check. Wolfs and Bears are not stupid, their mentality must nowadays be quite different of those wolves and bears of the past, who were against men armed with bows and polearms. Anyway in my knowledge Medieval Europeans didn’t paint any landscape paintings depicting mountains or forests like Chinese or Japanese did, even during renaissance intricate depictions of nature were just a background art for important people. I don’t know exactly what was the Orthodox attitude towards the nature in the olden times, but I know very well that for Protestants Nature was something given by God to Man, so that Man could rule the nature, tame and control it, so that he could forge order out of chaos.
I myself have quite utilitarian attitude with the nature, I grew up in country where there are lots of forests and nature, as did both of my parents, beginning from my childhood years I have spent lots of time in the forests, so to me they dont have anything special in them, in army we had long training camps in forest, living in small tents during winter in a very cold climate near the sea, after such I cant enjoy camping much, why I should force myself to live again like some filthy animal? Camping in nature is no fun, but trekking is nice, especially if you have a cottage where you can spend your nights. Best experience is when faith, sport and beauty meet, which is for me the Buddhist areas of Inner Asia, where the land does not just have a natural beauty in it, but also there’s a Sacral Geometry, or how you say it in English? You know Holy mountains, lakes, caves and small temples and trekking to such places where Buddhist sages and saints have lived, in such circumstances my trekking has a spiritual significance, its not just only a sport or having a fun as a tourist, but a pilgrimage!
This is unlikely. It was Putin who pushed for vaccination in an accelerated manner (which was the subject of attacks by liberals). The ROC officially supports vaccination, the second person in the church (Metropolitan Hilarion) who was ill with covid then (after recovery) was vaccinated in September to give an example to others.
Most likely Putin has some health problems that he hides from the public. Otherwise, we will have to admit that he is a member of a very strange sect that approves vaccinating everyone else, but prohibits vaccination for their co-religionists
Probably it depended on which kind of spirits inhabited the place, but I was writing about later development of European man, the prevalent attitude of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era, that the nature is something to be tamed.
Animals are afraid of humans. For hundreds of thousands of years, they are genetically accustomed to fear humans as the most terrible predator. In this case, even the reserve “Cedar Pad” (in the Far East of Russia) where there are many tigers, leopards and black bears, it is quite safe for humans.
Here is an exception – polar bears are not afraid of people (because they have almost no contact with them), and where they are, you have to put bars on the windows
https://moya-planeta.ru/upload/images/xl/fe/bd/febd1f3168fd21ed1136cde39252132ed144f8b9.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyfmRgVWoAA0FV1.jpg
Wolves were really dangerous for people in ancient times, in Primorsky Krai theres probably only couple hundred Tigers and Leopards in area of 150 000 sq km, so statistically speaking you have a quite small chance to encounter one, unlike with wolves in premodern Europe, that had much larger populations, even in Ireland and England they were legendary for the danger they possessed for humans.
Yes, walking alone in a dense forest was probably not a great idea.
The Church held landscape paintings in low regard. This is why medieval Europe lacked landscape paintings. The respect for landscape paintings to a large extent is a result of German culture, like with the Danube school, and later Romanticism(which was also British), even Durer did some earlier. It hasn’t much to do with Protestant or Catholic divisions. Most good things in western Europe were created by Germans.
Wolves attack humans only in the rarest of cases. Cars are much more dangerous than wolves – crossing the street at a green light, we risk more than during a walk in the woods with wolves.
The Cedar Pad Nature Reserve is a place where there are really a lot of tigers and leopards in a small area. But if you go there for a walk you will not see these predators as they will avoid meeting people
Central Park is really beautiful though, not a formal garden, but cultivated nature at its best. Just ignore the rats and crowds.
To a certain extent that’s true. As I said in an earlier comment lesbianism bears no resemblance whatsoever to male homosexuality. Male homosexuality is mostly about sex. Lesbianism is mostly about hyper-intense emotional dramas. It’s all about the relationships. The sex is a minor part of it and yes, in many cases sex is an almost insignificant part of it.
Most of the lesbians I’ve known felt sexual attraction towards men and I’ve heard lesbians admit that as far as physical pleasure was concerned sex with men was a lot better than sex with other women.
But you have to remember that female sexuality in general bears no resemblance to male sexuality. For women sex and emotions are inseparable. For men sex and emotions are two different things that happen to overlap.
There used to be a huge gulf between the “bar dykes” and the “political dykes” – there’s no question that for the vast majority of the “political dykes” being a lesbian is mostly a political statement. Most of them are in fact heterosexual. That’s what has always fuelled their anger. They’re at war with themselves. They’re usually very psychologically unstable. It’s the “political dykes” who attracted the most attention.
The “bar dykes” usually had very little interest in politics, usually got along extremely well with men and did actually seem to be sexually attracted to women although the sexual attraction was always hopelessly entangled with emotional attraction (which is usually true of heterosexual women).
Well there’s various health rumors about Putin, but I have generally dismissed them all as ill-wishing conspiracy theories, considering they never panned out and that Putin’s relatives seem to have consistently lived very long lives (esp. by 20C Russian standards). In any case, basic point that catching Corona is worse than getting a vaccine stands, esp. if you DO have preexisting health problems.
It doesn’t necessarily need to have religious motivations, vaccine skepticism is high amongst Soviet-style people too. (Decades of pushing atheism created a population highly susceptible to conspiracy theories and mystical thinking of all sorts as seen in the 1990s).
Many wolves and even bears seem to be quite friendly with people. A long-term selection for bears/wolves that had good relations with human camps is not something I consider implausible.
This after all is not an uncommon theme in Russian paintings:
https://foma.ru/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/0005-Medved-copy.jpg
Grizzly Man communed with bears for 20 years before he was killed by one of them. There are quite a few places in the world and even in the US where he would, in all probability, have been killed by humans quite a lot sooner.
Polar bears much more dangerous – sure. But even in their case:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7rZTZBOrqQ
LGBT Identification Rises to 5.6% in Latest U.S. Estimate
Notice the rise in “bisexuals”
https://i.ibb.co/Vp3545V/1.png
According to the media, Putin lives in the strictest quarantine, and the few people who contact him pass tests for the crown every day
Well, my experience is different-although my region had relatively low deliveries of the vaccine until 3 weeks before now. I am probably biased from the situation 1 month before in my region (antitel test required) when I was motivated to get first dose in clinic but not, just as you say, applicable now – and certainly not to the places of higher availability as SP and Moscow.
I would say that rules say its still recommended to get antibody test before and to not do vaccine if already had illness. Did they not at least ask if you have had an antitel test?
Still, the following things are relevant:
Very high rate of flu vaccinations in 2020 (75M+),which I would be very surprised if other white countries have a higher rate, does not indicate skepticism
Seeing or hearing absolutely zero advertising encouraging to get SputnikV vaccine on road, TV, radio, papers, at work or anywhere does suggest the government at not seeing low vaccinations level
If you have antibodies or already had the disease then it is a complete waste of resources and time to get the vaccine for the next 4-5 months
Different vaccines like flu are recommended to not mix with coronavirus for time gap of less than 2 months
Next season for coronavirus is expected only in autumn (though would need to receive both doses by 4-6 weeks before then to have developed immunity), so there is no rush
For my western friends, antibody tests seem to be nonexistent, at least compared to us.
You can add in weather and more places open in Russia compared to most western countries (bars, shops, schools…. that because they are unused are now places for vaccination in west) as reasons for illusion of non vaccinations in Russia. OK, your experience is in big shopping centre an
He is possibly having some health issues. Possibly something impacting immunity.
I do think the Romantic Movement marked a radical change in the way people looked at nature.
I started out by making what I thought (in my innocence) were a couple of incredibly uncontroversial points – that aesthetic tastes vary and that it is possible to find beauty in man-made things, that it is possible to see beauty in the artificial as well as in the natural. I expressed, quite honestly, my own personal preferences. I made it very clear that I was not making any sort of value on judgment on people whose aesthetic tastes differ from mine.
I guess I was making a plea for tolerance of differing views on aesthetics. I didn’t realise that aesthetics was a burning moral and political issue.
It’s called have differing aesthetic tastes. It’s not something to be threatened by. Apparently I’ve committed a crime against Aesthetic Correctness. I didn’t realise that not liking natural landscapes made me a bad person.
I’d also like to stress that I’m not an apologist for Modernism. I think 90% of Modernist architecture and 98% of Modernist painting is ghastly. I love 19th century academic art, 19th century neoclassicist art and 19th century Symbolist art. I like the Gothic Revival style. Oddly enough I’m not the biggest fan of neoclassicist architecture but I love neoclassicist painting. I dislike the Impressionists. I’m suspicious of the Romantics, although I’m a huge fan of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. On the whole my artistic tastes are very old-fashioned.
There is however some Modernist architecture that I really really like. And personally I do prefer cityscapes to natural landscapes.
I find it very difficult to see aesthetics as a moral question. Do you think it’s a moral question?
In the Western world, many people take up hiking as a way to leave their natural cityscapes behind and be able to commune more intimately with mother nature. People with time and money on their hands schedule vacations to more exotic locales with the purpose to climb a mountain or to even watch birds that they wouldn’t normally be able to see in their own neck of the woods. While visiting the pristine Osa peninsula in Costa Rica, I was able to take a boat trip into the sea where after about an hour, I found myself in the midst of a huge congregation of dolphins surrounding our boat (500-600 dolphins). Some passengers jumped into the water and had intimate contact with these beautiful animals. Another time, I witnessed the raw and humbling experience of mother nature when upon waking up from a nap, our cabin was soon besieged by thousand of “army ants” out on a patrol. They left after about an hour, and luckily they didn’t return from what I’ve been told could be millions of such ants out for a more complete and engaging outing.
https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1365732863455293442
WE DINDU NUFFIN
According to statistics, the absolute majority of wild predators run away at the sight of a person, a small percentage behaves friendly, another small percentage-aggressively. In the video, tourists feed a wild wolf with lard
https://youtu.be/Be8gWRPZCcE
Cathedrals of light.
In addition to raccoons and coyotes – the latter likely in the category of coywolves.
Not necessarily mythical to second guess the long term effects of these Covid-19 vaccines. “Science” changes, as evidenced by how antibiotics were once casually given for the common cold.
What is remarkable is that Central Park had not been sold off yet to earn money for the City, and right now it is just a park, considering that the land under it must be worth hundreds of billions for the City.
I don’t have much time to write, but…
You certainly aren’t a bad person for disliking nature and I’m not going to abuse you 🙂 , but aesthetics seems to me to go deeper than mere accident.
When we say something is beautiful we mean “this is good for me” and when we say it’s ugly we mean “this is bad for me”. Or so it seems to me at least. We are making a judgement on the subconscious level.
So in some sense you are really saying that natural environments are bad for you – which is interesting because this has been a major distinguishing strand in Western thought, the War Against Nature, of seeing nature as Other and as mankind outside and above it, cut off and alienated from it.
(and I am saying I feel at home in natural environments and feel myself a part of the whole, connected to it nourished by it on a profound level as the source of my being)
In my opinion, this war against nature has led to the concept of subduing and dominating it, to science, the devastation of natural environments, and then to the war against human nature which culminated in things like Puritanism, Calvinism, the anti-fun movement, and all the various neuroses, anxieties, and the general sense of being repressed and unhappy in modern times.
People who fear nature fear nature in themselves – and tend to see themselves as outside and above nature, and become alienated and alone in a dead, sterile world; the condition of modern man. They cut themselves off from the Whole.
Again not a moral condemnation and I would defend your right to never see nature again jn your life 🙂
As for Romanticism, it was hardly the first apprecation of nature. The Far East was in love with nature from the begining, and the Pagans thought every river had its nymph and forest it’s fauna. The Pagans loved nature.
The Christian Dark Ages in part turned against nature because it was Pagan, and Christianity is famous for having introduced the division between man and nature. Nature was evil to them. However I believe this is a bad misinterpretation of true Christianity and more a political reaction against Paganism.
St Francis of Assisi was a great lover of nature, and all those hermits in the deserts and forests, and all those monasteries in especially beautiful natural landscapes… 🙂 Seems to me the heart went where the mouth said it shouldn’t.
Already in the Renaissance Petrarch was writing of his sheer delight in wandering the local woods.
Romantic love of nature arose precisely when the mechanistic and anti Nature strand in Western culture reached a crescendo, as a counterpoint.
I think the alienation and malaise of modernity will only heal when Western man reconciles with Nature and once again sees himself as part of the While, and not as outside and above it, or cut off from it, and likewise reconciles with his inner nature.
After all, urbanism is like 8,000 years old or something – a mere blip in the hundreds of thousands of years man spent in nature experiencing himself as part of the whole.
But in the meantime I would fully support the establishment of communities of people like you who wish to live only in a man made environment 🙂
And now I must continue my journey into the beauties of nature…
Exactly. Light, energy, information. An old forest that has not been extensively logged for generations is a wonderful place. The mature ecosystems have everything in its due place it is highly organized and optimized, while still allowing for the maximal possible biodiversity.
https://images.app.goo.gl/RQvCnQFxLNbcx6RS6
Save constant repair, modern human cities won’t last for a hundred years. A forest would last millenia if left to itself.
Only high status people live near the park – they would protect it, to protect their status. Not to mention, there is a reservoir there, and it would be a bad idea to get rid of it.
Are you talking about the Unz Review or something else?
Is the beauty of a cathedral even comparable to the beauty of a forest or a mountain? I find it strange to exclude whole categories of beauty, I’d find it a tragedy to lose either.
I also like little things like the yellow and brown leaves on the ground at a playground, which is a little piece of nature with lots of concrete around it.
I wonder, how do viruses spread, if lockdowns don’t work?
The study seems quite dubious to me, comparing very low population density Sweden with a generally very disciplined population (who keep a distance from each other, pandemic or not) to high population density countries like Italy or the Netherlands. South Korea is mentioned in both, so it’s unclear whether it was considered a country with or without a lockdown. But clearly South Korea did lots of things not done in the West, they did restrict individual freedom in substantial ways, so I’m not sure why it’s supposed to be an example of a hands off approach.
Parks like that can have all sorts of structures built on it. A suburban park comes to mind. Over the past 25 years, it has seen the construction of a swim complex, ice skating rink and miniature golf course.
Do you really walk in the woods though? I like to tell myself the same thing, but the reality is I’m just walking through parkland. My favorite trail is heavily wooded and runs by a river on one side and a golf course on the other. There are sports grounds close by (football, netball, cricket), and if I go walking at dusk I can hear referee whistles in the distance and I can see the headlights of cars as parents arrive to pick up the kids from training, so even if I’m walking along a portion of the trail where it’s where to encounter other people, there are plenty of other reminders that human activity is taking place very nearby. That’s quite different to what a walk in the woods meant for most of human history.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/bear.jpg
Bears can be domesticated. There is a monastery in Bosnia where the monks keep pet bears in honor of some hundreds-years-dead saint who they say hung out with friendly bears.
Mothers with cubs and grizzlies should be avoided. Male black bears are harmless unless you are stupid. I will never be in a situation where I will see a polar bear and you shouldn’t be either unless you are on a job with really great pay.
Wolves, mountain lions whatnot are more afraid of humans than most humans are of them. When Daniel Boone settled Kentucky he wasn’t afraid of any bears. He was afraid of Indians.
During a long mountain hike (70 km) I once met on a trail an old trekker who was walking alone for some 250 km already. He was 66 years old. He told me that the previous year he walked 1200 km on different trails. I believe him. During this hike we met a few elks and saw traces of lynx and bear. I also know that there are wolves in that area. The old man was all alone and he did not seem afraid of anything.
I walked trails with my children: my six old son walked 16km in a day, my 11 years son walked 24 km of difficult mountain terrain in 2 days, when he was 14 we walked 32 km of forested highland in two days. He often says that these were very good experiences that he truly liked.
And I am pretty sure that these Indians were not afraid of bears and wolves either.
I think so, yes. I think it’s weird to argue that natural beauty must somehow be superior to artificially created beauty.
I think the Cult of Nature is to some extent a symptom of the increasing self-hatred of western civilisation. It seems to me to be a desire to disparage the human ability to create beauty. And a desire to disparage the achievements of civilisation. The striving to create beauty and order is what makes a civilisation.
Civilisation is a precious thing. But it’s something that we in the West increasingly despise. We’ve lost confidence in civilisation, which is tragic.
This is correct.
At least 1 of VVP’s daughters has had SputnikV doses at early stage
He may just have natural immunity to it and not want to appear a showoff by not requiring SputnikV , or have had the disease already (many at the top level of government and in Presidential administration have) and want to wait the recommended time before receiving vaccine….plus there are about a million security reasons why he may not want to publicise that.
VVP could easily just lie about having the vaccine anyway – particularly after the freakshow of Poroshenko and Zelensky getting drug tested for TV before a “debate”, Russian public not desperate for gratification to see if VVP vaccinated or not
Technically, you mean “tamed.” Domestication involves selective breeding and genetic changes leading to certain common traits. Though arguably, being able to be tamed suggests the possibility of being able to be domesticated.
Partly, depends on height and mass. Many aren’t afraid of kids – and young children working the fields is one reason for higher attacks in the Middle Ages. Many children are still attacked by wolves in India. When mountain lions attack, it is commonly women joggers under 5 feet tall. They would not attack a “jogger” like Ahmaud Arbery.
I don’t think that we need to choose; they are beautiful in different ways. It’s also clear that without nature there could be no mankind and thus no art whatsoever, so it seems silly to choose art over nature, but I digress.
It depends on a Clintonesque definition of sex. They certainly can be naked while causing sexual pleasure to each other, whether with the help of their tongues, fingers, or certain tools, is immaterial. What matters is that it can to a very large extent be a substitute for actual intercourse with a man, and some women engage in it regularly.
If you are not loud enough, you can get surprisingly close to bears. It does occasionally happen to tourists that they get in between a female bear and her cubs. Which could easily result in a ferocious attack by the bear.
Even with 100% immunity, he had to (for the sake of his own political image) be publicly vaccinated in August-September
The Animals, particularly predators, don’t seem to have evolved at all in dealing with bait tactics from humans. Humans directly carrying bait are as likely to be attacked now, or to attract the animal for kill…. as they were several centuries before.
Sheep and cows have been killed billions of times by humans but shown zero evolvement including when defending their young. Have herds of Indian cows evolved into not protecting their young from humans because the cow is sacred there and very safe? Don’t know.
Africans must have killed millions of crocodiles to practically use their skin or for black magic sh*t, but when we went to Crocodile place in South Africa we basically gave the crocodile a full massage! It was middle of the day, so very hot and so you can do to the the crocodile what you want in that temperature, which of course as Russians we can’t resist! Fence was very thin, malleable wire fence that was very easy to put hands and arms through and stroke and lightly poke 2 crocodiles (obviously not the head, but the body) . Fencing spherical in places because the Croc was resting there, and in another place because a Croc must have previously stayed there.
A beautiful creature to touch, wonderful skin.No supervision and very safe!
I think wolf DNA may have been changed some by interactions with Neanderthals and then people. Though, not much of a genetic “domestication” difference between modern and medieval wolfs. (In fact, modern ones might be more wild, as they were repopulated from wilder places?) Maybe, half of historical attacks were rabid wolves – behavioral patterns encoded in DNA being overridden by viral RNA. I wonder what percentage were due to wolf-dog hybrids that might have had some kind of mental imbalance due to genetic mismatch – or rather people expecting them to have dog behaviors.
What has changed from the Middle Ages is many environmental characteristics. More sources of food for humans today (people used to sometimes raid eagles’ nests for food!), more natural prey for wolves today. Less contact between the two today, as forests are often bigger now, and there are less people on farms. Maybe, more lone wolf behavior in past (stressed circumstances in past.)
I feel like there is such a thing as a bull-dyke. That is, one has certain physical and behavioral characteristics, and therefore, there is such a thing, as a lesbian.
Though, perhaps, Sailer is right with his theory that when men were tougher, they could put bull-dykes in their place and so bull-dykes got amorous with them. It is interesting to consider the historical examples of women in hetero relationships enlisting with their male lovers in pirate crews or armies, and not being found out – it suggests to me that they were not very feminine-looking, and possibly what we would consider butches today.
I theorize that the number of true female lesbians is lower than male gays due to them having two X chromosomes.
Does Anyone know what Ethnicity Nemets @Peter_Nimitz is?
Are his ancestors from the Russian Empire or former citizens of the USSR?
He comments here on occasion, perhaps he could answer.
It doesn’t matter if a bear is black or white so long as it catches mice.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSQWbkiKkKur-bfdjhOs6UVOqhU3gU31KwwgQ&usqp.jpg
Suspect it’s probably just a personal habit he seems to have where he’s extremely private with all things to do with his health; machismo, presidential image, personal preference, who knows. He’s probably had a few minor operations that nobody but a small clique knew about.
Russia seems to have avoided the kind of hysteria which has paralysed Europe, so, as long as the vaccines are readily available and everybody who wants one can have one I don’t see the need to get upset over a few refuseniks though I’m not going to die on a hill to defend them if the hysteria gets refocused on them instead of…..people sitting in parks drinking coffee (or whatever it is this week).
Fwiw I’ll take the vaccine at the first opportunity, and my stock argument in dealing with antivaxers is that they ought to go pet a dog… that’s got rabies then we can continue the argument six months later. Advocates of zero-covid and forever lockdowns have a certain implicit antivaxx sentiment which you need to acknowledge: “Take the vaccine by all means, but lockdowns and social distancing need to continue for months anyway” is essentially saying that they don’t work and it’s as as antivaxx as some fool saying it’ll alter your dna or let Bill Gates chip you or whatever. The difference is that the former have significantly more influence on policy.
Er,Mr Hack/ Elephant man….the proof? Where is evidence Ostroushko’s father was a hero at Sralingrad and not a POS UPA swine?
Proof may be too difficult to ask but reliable anecdote of who, what and where you heard this….. and where exactly Ostroushko originate from.
Remember Mr Hack…..NO Austrian intelligence disinfo BS, and no Romanian gypsy folktales ( your breed of Khokholism)
Don’t project the mir/svet fantasist retard AP when talking about “consummate BS artist”, I was mainly referring to my piano playing, which includes successfully playing the Chopin Waterfall Etude in recent days. I listened on YouTube to the obscene faggot Lang Lang play the Ossia cadenza in Rakhmaninov 3rd Piano Concerto….. I’ve never been so insulted ever-his behaviour an absolute disgrace! It provoked me into trying to play that part of the Concerto, but did not get anywhere!
She sounds like Rachel Karen Greene (Jennifer Aniston) in The One with Rachel’s Big Kiss who claims she had a lesbian fling in college because she snogged the Sorority social secretary (Winona Ryder) at a party.
I wonder if Southern and Northern English people are the same ethnic group. Southern and Northerners have very different accents/dialects and local cultural traits, and many Northerners tend to see themselves as “oppressed” by the Southerners and see Southerners as a distinct group at odds with themselves.
The South, especially London and the South East, contains some of the wealthiest regions of Europe, whereas the North contains some of the poorest of Europe, although there are notable exceptions to this rule.
I struggle to think of another country in Europe that exhibits such large regional variations in its native people as England does.
My working theory is that the genetics of the South, especially South East, are heavily derived from the Anglo-Saxon and Norman elites, and perhaps even Jewish to some extent especially amongst the upper classes. In contrast, the genetics of the North is largely derived from assimilated Celts who have a historical memory of seeing the Anglo-Saxon and later Norman “Southerners” as the oppressors.
Michigan woman charged with caring for wildlife without permit, animals killed by state officials
I wonder if it would be fair to say that Muslims elected Biden? If so, his involvement in Syria is on them.
Interestingly Orbán just got vaccinated with the Sinopharm vaccine publicly. He imported that vaccine in spite of a lack of approval from the EU, amid general mistrust by the population. (My mother just rejected it because she didn’t trust the Chinese vaccine.)
Well, they’re arguably best in combination and complementarity to each other. Who wouldn’t want to live here?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EeD3tEEU8AEZS-N.jpg
Rich people always liked to hunt in the forest. It was perfectly safe (there were accidents, but not much more dangerous than driving sports cars in the 1930s), but not a solitary activity. Nature was dangerous for a person walking alone.
He’s an American currently in LA, not an immigrant or of East European heritage.
Sure, I don’t think any reasonable person would support lockdowns now.
Looks like all the nature in the distance is supposed to just be images on a screen? Too fake.
I find it weird to even think there could be a choice. What is more pleasant, eating a menu in a Michelin star restaurant or listening to a Beethoven string quartet? Is sex better than the ability to read books? Is sunbathing better than doing pull-ups? I find these questions silly.
Believe parts are supposed to be landscaped in the style of wilderness, for parks. I.e., real (made from matter) hills or mountains. I don’t believe a blimp would work too well in an O’Neill cylinder. (high winds). But who knows?
Because he uses a picture of Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel, I thought he might actually be a descendant of Russian Whites, of whatever ethnicity. There are many of them in Cali, as you would know.
They have Pagodas but no Minarets.
BASED
Did anyone have the idea of ‘nature’ vs. ‘man’ before the 18th century? As far as I know belief that nature or material creation was evil was considered a heresy by Christians in this period; it was linked to Manicheanism.
This might be the most Anglocentric comment which I have ever seen.
You realize that it’s only true in the 21st century but not in the 13th century. Wolves in most of Europe were completely exterminated, and the few wolves who survived in a few places were invariably the ones most inclined to avoid humans at any price.
Those places have a lot more humans than Alaska has grizzlies, so it’s an unfair comparison. Probably the average bear is more dangerous than the average POC in Detroit.
That’s hubris. He thinks that America can win against China (whose economy is going to be bigger than the American economy) allied to Russia, while antagonizing all of its minor allies unless they toe the American ideological line. I guess on top of this he’s a purist internally as well, enforcing diversity wherever possible, and not expecting performance to drop.
I think the only thing stopping this ideology will be cold hard military defeat. Although perhaps there’s a chance of them running out of steam peacefully, I just cannot imagine how. I’ve seen only increasing radicalization both internally and externally.
I like this comparison – it makes one think. What if…
-you only compared males, selected for the most aggressive age cohort (with blacks only over 200 lbs, 6 ft, and with a mass advantage on their prey)?
-gave blacks comparable weapons to bear claws and teeth?
-you called the bears and the blacks both the N-word?
https://youtu.be/-gnXktop0xg
In his own words about his father..about 1:35 -2:42.
I agree. I’m the one who, at the beginning of the discussion, said it was purely a matter of personal taste and that we should respect different people’s different personal aesthetic tastes. Whatever floats your boat.
But some commenters didn’t seem to agree and seemed to think that my personal aesthetic tastes were invalid and that my personal aesthetic tastes made me a dangerous Jewish communist who wanted to turn Siberia into a parking lot. Which I thought was extremely weird, although amusing.
I do find it amusing that Unz Review is a site that mostly attracts right-wingers and yet here you will encounter the sort of intolerance of dissenting opinions (even on entirely non-political and unimportant issues) that you’d expect from Wokeists. I also find it amusing that on a site dedicated to freedom of speech there are people who will react aggressively if you say something as uncontroversial as, “personally I find gothic cathedrals more beautiful than forests”.
It is pretty silly when people get bent out of shape about such things. Silly, but kind of funny.
Well if you got attacked by wolves I guess you’d have some concept of nature vs. man!
That was a great interview Mr Hack. Peter looks exactly like my best friend in Highschool. RIP
I would suppose the Bosnian monks de-select the feistier bears. They have been keeping the bears for many generations.
The last time I saw a mountain lion it took one look at me and took off in the opposite direction at 100 m per 8 sec. He or she could have passed Usain Bolt. I am average size in my zip code though in the Netherlands I would be short. The last attack on a human that I know of was in Washington state and it was a mountain biker and a mountain lion who had some kind of wasting disease that had taken out its normal ability. Normal healthy mountain lions never attack normal healthy humans around where I have been.
Israeli Jewish culture is relatively anti-city, and the only people outside internet forums like this one I ever heard to say “I hate cities” was secular native Jews in Israel.
When I was in my early 20s, I had culture shock from talking to natives Israelis in Israel, because they say when you ask if they’ve visited other countries – “I love Peru and Nepal – I don’t want to visit cities like Rome”.
That’s likely the reason Tel Aviv is only the size of Novorossíysk, and so undeveloped and financially neglected in the centre. Secular Jews have been constantly trying to leave places that feels like a large city, and to live in green suburbs and miniature villages which are all running all the way along the coast, and as a result Tel Aviv becomes an undeveloped warehouse/industrial zone, only poorly developed into a normal residential city, and only this decade will be is starting to get normal features of a city like a tram service.
To love great cities is usually correlating to people with a higher European cultural level. To be enchanted with Rome, London, Paris and New York, is usually people who are under spell of complex cultural products related to those cities and/or their history.
People that read Zola and Victor Hugo, are enchanted with Paris; if you are a fan of Tosca, you cannot visit Rome without hearing a certain melody; if you are fan of “Mrs Dalloway”, then Oxford Street in London is a pilgrimage zone.
On the other hand, if you never had a specific historical and cultural background to appeciate them, then these cities might be justifiably felt to be nothing more than a concrete jungle with high prices and uncomfortable crowds.
For people without a specific “cultural/historical priming” then it’s possible that Peru, Goa or Thailand, can seem far more interesting than Paris or London. To enjoy Patagonia doesn’t need you to have a specific cultural background – it is intrinsically beautiful and interesting; while to make London to be interesting, might often require you to be a fan of specific culture and history.
I will disagree, as Northern European architecture from the medieval stage, had been usually trying to exclude nature (with an exception of country aristocratic retreats, and monastic, later university architecture*).
On the other hand, from 19th century garden suburbs, and then more so modernist architecture, has been trying to incorporate nature into the house, and blur the “indoor/outdoor” distinction. For modernist architect’s desire to incorporate nature, can see “Falling Water” by Frank Lloyd Wright, or Barbican in London as a famous example, or alternatively any tour of modernisty style American suburban houses on YouTube.**
The changing attitude of architecture to nature, is as Marx has predicted, that as we become masters nature following the industrial revolution, our attitude to nature has become more sympathetic and sentimentalized than it was in earlier historical stages.
–
*If you compare architecture of Edinburgh in Scotland, with Oxford/Cambridge in England
Cloisters of English university architecture, as of monastic architecture before it, was trying to blur indoor/outdoor distinction.
https://i.imgur.com/6PG1Diq.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/w3dS1zY.jpg
On the other hand, Edinburgh is a more typical European city, where nature was overthrown until the 19th century city, and the human world replaces it.
https://i.imgur.com/6KR04DJ.jpg
** I have some culture shock looking at the American modern house tours on YouTube, where the high level of glass and low level of distinction between indoors/outdoor – so that interior house feels only half-way indoors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ4v-yxuPk8
I don’t think the LGBT topic is very important, as it was just a marketing gimmick (the cultural difference between Russia and the West on LGBT, is exaggerated a lot – it’s more like a difference of etiquette about the topic)
The “Age of Tatu” (2000-2010) will be seen as a relatively peak of Russian pop music, in comparison to the “Age of Timati” (2010-2020), when postsoviet pop music become increasingly globalized and generic sounding.
Although it was already in 2005, when Tatu is last produced with half-postsoviet pop sounds.
For example, the song “Disabled People” (2005) the producer is already at half-authentic Russian/postsoviet pop sounds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9526tRl4w2E
By 2009, Tatu is sounding much more like London pop of the 2000s.
E.g. by 2009 Tatu has become musically globalized, and this is the trend for Russian pop to lose any idiosyncratic sounds into the 2010s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qjx8IXkgjE
It’s an interesting question what can make a different nationality, create a specific pop sound, that is distinctive to its culture, and what causes this to end.
In Japanese pop, the explanation seems to be quite simple, as its distinctive sound is mainly on the harmonic level, as a result of the higher training of its musicians: that is we hear in Japanese pop music a lot of sophisticate voicings in the chords, and use of higher intervals including the melody.
Japanese pop is being very stubborn to be one of the last nationalities to hold onto unusual different sounds into the 2020s.
If you live in a cold dark Northern place, then nature is indeed boring and inaccessible much of year, especially in those countries where too much was converted to agriculture, and the city seems comparatively more necessary.
On the other hand, if you live in a temperate area like Southern Europe, then your attitude can be different, and nature is much more welcoming for more months of the year, and the idea of living in an isolate village can be quite attractive. If someone said you will be forced to live in a tiny village in Tuscany for a year – does that sound so scary for us, like a small village would be in a Northern country?
And if you live in a Caribbean island, I’m sure you can be entertained simply by the warm sea.
Concept of sublime beauty of nature, applied Kant, can seem a response of people living in luxury of too safe conditions, in regions of the world where the weather rarely injures mankind.
I doubt if you experience regular earthquakes in Japan, or cyclones in Bangladesh, that you would romanticize it as a category of sublime beauty, but rather as an unpleasant trauma. On the other hand, when you are in one of the most naturally boring and stable regions (i.e. Germany), – then it becomes easier to view such things as sublime.
I’m not.
I’m not an urbanite either. I was once. Now I’m a semi-ruralite. I’m just not a mountains-and-forests person. I have no objection to the existence of mountains and forests. They just don’t appeal to me aesthetically.
I’m not sure that there’s any real complete explanation for aesthetic tastes. Obviously cultural conditioning plays some role. But that doesn’t explain why I dislike most Modernist buildings but there are some that I love.
I don’t think there’s any real complete explanation for any aesthetic tastes. Some people prefer Mozart to Beethoven. Some men find certain women attractive while others have totally different tastes. Some people prefer mountains to forests. A lot of people find old buildings attractive but some like the gothic style and some prefer the classical style.
I’m sure there are complicated theories to explain aesthetic tastes. I remember reading Roger Scruton’s book on beauty but I didn’t think it was very illuminating.
It seems like Visegrad countries apart from Slovakia, can be entering the beginning of a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
https://i.imgur.com/9svAM9X.jpg
There seems to relative lack of success in the lockdowns in the Visegrad countries of the last six months compared to other regions, including different parts of Europe.
Ah Fukushima! They built the nuclear power plant on a river, you know. They later said they hadn’t noticed the river was there. Four hundred tons of water every day!
It really was a good interview and it went a long way to explain about the Ukrainian diaspora that settled in the N.E area of Mpls. Of course when I refer to it as “our Ukrainian neighborhood” it was equally the neighborhood of the Poles, Italians, French, Germans and others that settled in the neighborhood too. As Peter said, our Ukrainian neighborhood included immigrants from the first waive that included those up until WWI, and those that settled there after WWII. They all settled around the growing Ukrainian churches, cultural center and the really great Ukrainian deli and bakery (that I’m sure Peter frequented).
I wonder if that idiotic You Know Who, will take note of how dearly Pete referred to the Russian immigrants that moved in across the street from where he lived and invited him over for a dinner party, filled with other Russians too. How the home looked and was filled with scents that reminded him of his childhood Ukrainian home, how they all chimed in and sang songs familiar to everybody there? The idiot will be nitpicking through the interview looking for ways to prosecute his case against any and all Ukrainians, just watch. 🙁
I am under the impression that the 18th century Enlightenment was a secularization of Christian attitudes basically.
It’s true that hard core rejection of the physical world was a Gnostic position, but mainstream Christianity was very fearful and negative about Nature as well as far as I understand.
You see this fear and anxiety live on in people like dfordoom.
That being said, I think “true” Christianity was friendly to nature – I think Jesus basically recommended one live a natural life – and St Francis of Assisi perceived this and created a very beautiful nature centred Christianity.
And then all those beautiful monasteries in magnificent locations…
From the Western perspective, it is of paramount importance. Western liberals can’t criticize Islamic, Indian, African or Chinese attitudes on Pride. To do so is to invite accusations of cultural imperialism.
But as Russia is coded as “white”, it is fair game.
The Russiagate conspiracy theory combined two enemies of liberals, the US Right and Putin. Thus serving to terrify and motivate their base.
The Bluestani culture industry has also eagerly promoted works like the Handmaid’s Tale, a 1980s Canadian polemic against social conservatives.
In countries like Germany, social conservatives are such a minority of the population that they can be ignored, and if that fails, placed under restrictions. In the US that is currently impossible.
It’s not an accident that putting a Pride event in Kyiv was high on the agenda for the US.
You say those Israeli nature lovers of yours like to commune with nature in Peru, Goa and Patagonia. By getting stoned and doing drug trafficking, right? Here is one who loved nature in Goa and Peru:
The Israeli lovers of nature in Patagonia were quite successful in pissing off the locals who apparently were not appreciative of their love for nature:
racialists & nationalists are a kind of puritan where they black-white assign virtue based on characteristics.
Puritanism created the modern world & the bureaucratic, legalistic state.
Puritanism seems to be a way to deal with fast pace of change.
I see it dying down in the next 80 years,
West pushes feminism on all those cultures anyway.
That just means there’s less people there who believe in Westernism.
Meanwhile, the entire history of the Russian people(s) over the last 1000 years has been begging the West for acceptance.
tattu means someone who sucks ballsacks in Panjabi.
From tattaa or ballsack.
😉
Israeli youth culture is marked by elements of communalist, collectivist behaviour among themselves, with anarchism in relation to external surroundings. So they all travel for 6 months to the same places after the army: going to the same Patagonia or boat in the river Amazon. You can see where they are travelling if you search Hebrew in YouTube for the name of the post military trip to South America – hatiul hagol (“the big journey” הטיול הגדול)
They are choosing the most isolated Southern locations of South America. After arriving, they seem to like hotels run by Israelis, and eat in the Israeli restaurants, and become friends with other Israelis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCEcB96xEg4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E-6mm5UNPc.
But the communal location choice is somewhere isolated. Young Israeli Jews’ concept of happiness, is not for most of them a night in La Scala in Milan, or to go to the Met in Manhattan, – but being stoned jumping up and down to psytrance in an empty forest in Patagonia.
–
But until recently, the Jews that live in America today, were not any sophisticated city people, but rather the opposite.
A large part of America’s Jews immigrated to the USA directly from primitive small villages in the Western Russian Empire, and Jewish folk culture of that epoch, represented in Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem, is about impoverished village life and provincial scandals.
American Jews have been urbanized to a “big city” life, only as a result of the 20th century immigration patterns and then subsequent embourgeoisement. Today, after a couple of generations they might disproportionately constitute America’s sophisticated city people that are addicted to the Manhattan art gallery and the opera house, but this “big city life” is recent in the family history of most of the American Jews, whose ancestors some generations ago were more likely living like Tevye the milkman, in a primitive village without water, outside Gomel, under leaking wooden roof, and surrounded by mud.
Possibly we will see in our own lifetime that non-Haredi Jewish culture cannot survive much more than a century as a separate culture in America, and will dissolve as a separate nationality within one or two more generations. While by contrast the Haredi Jews can survive in the city by recreating the intensity of a small village, and that’s why they live in very densely populated communities where everyone can check each other and see if they are obeying the internal religious rules.
In Hungary people no longer take it seriously and it’s impossible to enforce. Even the cops don’t care for violations, at least often they don’t care. Like theoretically you are supposed to stay home after 8 pm, and people go to private parties etc.
Obviously people who like walking in the woods actually like walking along paths maintained by the local forestry department. The woods should have a comfortable presence of humans, like not so many wild beasts (especially not aggressive ones, nor too many and/or too large insects and similar creatures) and relative proximity to civilization.
But that way it could be something which people find superior to a big city, especially if they do live in a big city. Would they live in the forest, and the city would be a good experience a couple times a month.
Does your exploration into the beauties of nature include flesh scarring fungus, leeches, bacterial infections, parasites that live in your eye, malaria, and tapeworms by any chance?
While it’s great to get spiritual sustenance from nature, nature does not reciprocate and it sees you in purely neutral terms. As a source of sustenance that is part of its food chain for predators big and small. It’s only sedentary civilization and the resulting urbanism, when people had a few free evenings free from damp, hunger, and disease, that has allowed your philosophical musings on nature to develop.
And yet it’s in the cities worldwide that the current pandemics has taken its highest toll.
In general bugs whose vectors are humans are the most dangerous where other humans are present in large numbers. But there are many different types of bugs.
In fact human health did not improve during the neolithic agricultural revolution. It deteriorated considerably.
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/28/13721
Agriculturalists also had less free time, not more leisure as mentioned in the comment by blatnoi. And it’s the hunter gatherers who lived in a world still replete with megafauna that created the amazing European cave art.
The name dfordoom is apposite then! Sorry that must be tough
The agricultural revolution allowed a gigantic increase in population. Even the losers with poor health preferred it to the daily struggle against nature, and of course the big plus was the creation of an elite that allowed for mathematics, writing, and all the things that make civilization pleasant for us.
You might appreciate this idea more if you watch the first episode of James Burke’s famous old show, ‘Connections’, which tracks the development of the Egyptian civilization from the invention of the plow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
Viruses and bacteria also existed before the agricultural revolution, but the progress since then has allowed us to come up with vaccines. I think that the best way you can appreciate nature is to think about its deadly and indifferent cruelty to the average primitive human, while hiking in the mountains. It makes me also appreciate civilization a lot more, since it allows me to hike in the mountains unnecessarily, not worrying that I’m taking a risk breaking my leg (which would mean certain death for a hunter/gatherer) or if I get some strange disease after the hike is over.
They’re all spiritual experiences, if you look at them the right way. Even getting eaten by a grizzly bear can be a spiritual experience.
Correct.
That was a great TV series. His later series The Day the Universe Changed was just as good.
It seems that people who appreciate civilisation are more and more a minority.
What in your opinion causes this?
It’s technically neutral, but I like to personalize it and say nature tries to thwart human existence at every turn, so fuck nature, nature is the enemy. To me, it’s more fun to see it that way.
Now, while nature can be terribly destructive, it’s also tremendously creative, and on the materialist account of human origins, it’s this creative force to which we owe our existence, and anything that we do to “transcend” nature unavoidably occurs within nature, so nature merits a measure of respect as well as hatred. But it’s a mistake to respect nature too much, because that needlessly humbles us and blinds us to our capacities to improve on the hand that nature has dealt us.
If respecting nature too much is a mistake, it’s certainly a far greater mistake to worship nature, the way greenie lunatics do. The way these sickos fawn over nature repulses me so much. Oh gosh nature is just so lovely and delicate that we mustn’t harm a hair on its head. Are you kidding? Someone mentioned Siberia earlier. Great example: wtf is in Siberia worth trying to preserve? Pave the fucking thing over – even if for no other reason than to prove you can. Pave it now! A shopping mall on every square mile of Siberian turf would be a huge upgrade to the ghastly tundra that land is cursed with.
I would say then, that it’s a much more pleasant spiritual experience for the onlooker, which would be the right way to look at them, than for the partaker.
I think the main thing is taking it for granted. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” It’s like some dumb rich kid thinking that being wealthy is “overrated.” Wtf does that moron really know about it? Deprive him of his riches and see quickly he changes his tune.
Sounds great in theory, but the problem is that as you knowledge, you are incorrect here:
Since in reality nature is neutral and humans are part of nature, our brains are wired to become happy from natural cues such as increasing sunlight, birdsong, breathing fresh air, etc… You can’t divorce your brain from your body, which receives environmental cues, and tells you to be under sunlight to be happy. This is why I enjoy hiking in the mountains or desert canyons. Enjoying being in nature is something that is required for human happiness until we transfer our consciences into robotic bodies (spoiler: don’t worry about this). You won’t be able to sustain your hatred for nature if you consider it logically, but you don’t want to go the full AaronB either.
This is also why living on Mars will never happen on scale unless the planet is previously terraformed (spoiler: which won’t happen anytime soon since Elon Musk is a bit of a fantasist/(con-man?)) Can you imagine living in a small room for the rest of your life, with no birds flying outside the window, not being able to go outside without a space-suit, slowly deteriorating bone density due to the lower gravity?
Even if you thought of it as an enemy, to needlessly pick fights with powerful forces is a good way to ensure one’s doom.
OTOH I think there might be more to this rejection of civilization. Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment comes to mind. People living under strong civilizations end up mentally and morally exhausted. It’s dehumanizing to spend one’s whole life in an artificial environment. We need to walk the middle path between culture/civilization and nature/wilderness. We need to be able to do complex work, contemplate abstract ideas and yet retain some “feral” aspects of our human nature.
Too much of civilization kills civilization.
Both nature and engineering are ultimately but manifestations of the purer and more beautiful mind of God. There is divinity in Man for when He created us from clay and spirit in His Image and as such we wrought much that is beautiful, but there is also the order and beauty in the wild. In the end, there is nothing that is engineered that has not been based in principles of nature, viz nature. I am a transhumanist but I also see the divine in all things.
Sir Francis Bacon, one of my inspirations said as much:
It is impossible for me not to see some element of the divine, even if it is beyond the absolute understanding of the human mind. When I was a child, a poisonous snake ambushed me in the yard and a pair of mockingbirds swooped out from their territory to drive it forth and away from me. An explainable happenstance: snakes are in wet places, mockingbirds are hostile hosts in the territory they reside in, and more hostile to snakes than they are to human children – but even so, there feels a symbolism in it that I have always appreciated and felt that inasmuch as nature threatened me, so did nature preserve me.
It was amazingly effective, though. When I first heard about them, I looked them up, and I thought, “sound isn’t great, and I know prettier girls.” But I was impressed that they got on my radar (all the way from Russia) by someone actually telling me about them. I would say it might be the second-best marketing gimmick, after The Blair Witch Project.
Modern pop is pretty bad, but putting it aside (and globalism), it is interesting to consider the music of different countries. I feel some just have terrible music for HBD reasons. But I am not knowledgeable enough to draw the full map, and some places might be so influenced by Western tastes, like Hawaii and Japan (even though it is surely unique in a way) that it is difficult to tell, what the true native sound is. Anyway, one eccentric idea might be to create a passport system based on musical tastes – would have prevented 9/11.
It just so happens, that hunter gatherers had significantly more leisure than was available in agricultural societies, and mankind suffered much more from disease epidemics in crowded cities. And complex civilization introduced harsh hierarchies and slavery.
We went over this ground before on other threads.
However, I understand many people on this blog are what I described in my original comment as “hard core materialists”, who necessarily view human comfort, or some kind of physical advantage, as the highest ideal.
Even if everything you say about the discomforts and dangers of nature are real, I am saying prolonged time spend in nature offers an intensely pleasurable experience of a kind not found in cities, which for those who have it, seems well worth the sacrifice in comfort, and which can transform one’s sense of place in the universe and put strictly human concerns – like status, money, competition, even survival – in a different perspective.
After all, many people sacrifice comfort and advantage to climb mountains or race across deserts – and report the experience is worth more than any comfort sacrificed.
So again, if comfort is your main priority, or safety, or long term survival, or extending human power over the physical world – stay in modern civilization. (Debatable, there is a huge downside in comfort and safety in crowded cities, but I will concede your point).
But if your main concern is an “experience” – an ecstatic experience of life that cannot even be put into words, that religions sometimes hint at but get badly wrong when they try and institutionalize it, a thrilling sense of mystery, or in less intense form and less dramatic terms simply an experience of pleasure that can’t be had in crowded human cities in a man made environment by coming into contact with something elemental – then prolonged contact with magnificent natural settings is the way to go.
This is certainly not for everyone. Many people might even fear it.
And even though I come down on the side of a life in nature, I see like cities and see beauty and value in them, and enjoy visiting them for a few days. In some ways, a huge city can be as mysterious as the wilderness, with winding alleys leading to the discovery of strange cafes and bars and art galleries and hidden shrines and temples, and magnificent architecture. In other words not planned, organized, rational cities, but organic cities that retain a whiff of nature.
So cities can have a Romance of its own, if done right (most modern cities are not).
I am suggesting that man needs a sense of the mysterious and the numinous, and needs to come into contact with the non human world and see his essential connection with it. That this is not a question of comfort or safety or any kind of purely physical advantage – and even that deprioritizing these things can be beneficial for a while. That man is a part of nature and if he builds cities, to build them in organic, unplanned ways at least in part, that represent the organic pattern of nature and not sterile, cold rationality.
But to each hisown.
Wait you are two different people and not the same guy?
Anyway Kali Yuga will continue for hundreds of years, we are nowhere near the end times when things get really crazy, at least our era still has concepts like family, religion, nation, love, father- and motherhood, though in corrupted form, sadly this madness will go much, much further… Just as foretold by our sages… Only when people collectively and innately understand that there is no happiness in fleeting sensory objects – only then will the Dark Age end. Then the war for [*********] will begin!
So what one can do in a degenerate time? When it all seems so hopeless? To attach oneself in one’s faith as closely as possible, there is no other option. One’s Dharma is one’s fortress, as well as we uphold our religious obligations and rites, as well will be our fortress’s walls and towers manned and guarded.
As the great Guru Nanak said:
“Now, the Dark Age of Kali Yuga has come.
Plant the Naam, the Name of the Lord.
It is not the season to plant other seeds.
Do not wander lost in doubt and delusion.”
You believe in intelligent design?!
America should bugger off, they should be expelled from Europe.
Well 2/3s of Russians are Corona antivaccine and also 2/3s think that coronavirus is a biological weapon, so maybe your own propaganda worked too well on you?
I believe that evolution is divinely influenced, yes.
Well as Aaron and Germans say, to each his own – Jedem das Seine.
(Still where and how is the divine influence to be found?)
https://twitter.com/antiputinismus/status/1309466922149445632
https://twitter.com/antiputinismus/status/1352274931380326402
https://twitter.com/antiputinismus/status/1356312116072996864
Is Andrei Nekrasov just anti-“liberal” and pro-Putin now? Maybe he got redpilled when his Browder movie got released. He probably was naive enough to think that he could expose Browder as a con man to Westerners.
I wonder if someone has done solid research on this.
I intuitively reached a similar conclusion in the early 2000s when I as a college kid discovered trance music and listned to pretty much nothing else for the next few years. This was the era when PvD,BT,ATB,Tiesto etc were at their peak.
I first thought others would also love this and the reason they don’t is because it wasn’t commercially available in India(this was the era of Napster,Audiogalaxy and dial up internet)..but that wasn’t the case..at all.
Then I noticed an overwhelming majority of artists were German,Dutch and Northern Europeans.
Perhaps there is a gene/s which enables some people to visualize or otherwise experience music without needing lyrics.Such genes may also positively correlate with other useful attributes.
Being a liberal and being naive go together. Nekrasov has simply evolved, the dichotomy of pro-anti is not how people are.
The ‘give us a bribe‘ video, or Assange, will not be in the Western media. They won’t do it, they don’t have to. Screaming hypocrisy and double standards is infantile – people in power have no understanding of what it means. They act in their self-interest and nobody ever gets anywhere by telling powerful they are hypocrites. Of course they are, that’s what having power means.
Telling Nobel Committee they are hypocrites is like telling them ‘you have power and we accept you’. Why would anyone do it? Their power is in other peoples’ heads, as they themselves say: ‘a soft power‘. In the hunters world, they are the story-tellers sitting closest to the fire and getting best morsels of the meat. As long as they talk and others attentively listen, it will go on. I understand that it’s hard to abandon long-term prestige memes, but that’s what is holding up their soft power. They don’t have much else, they are cowards with few skills – but the problem is not with them, it is with us, too many can’t bring ourselves to let go…
Wow, it’s Brahmins pretend they’re white day already?
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1366332524146937859
LOL
My old theory on the popularity of techno and trance was that it had something to do with the lax social mores regarding dance, omnipresent in the West, but perhaps more profound in Western Europe than America. Even though America is in a state of advanced moral decay, there is still a limited puritanical residue present, mostly around teenagers and alcohol that I think is largely missing from Europe. And I think these styles are a bit more popular in Europe.
I recall going to a dance club in Germany with other people aged around 14-16 and being really shocked at some of the options on a printed sheet, which one could check off, and send to someone of the opposite sex, to show them that you had interest in them.
Of course, back then, I thought music was more of a cultural phenomenon. I’ve since changed my mind based on what I consider to be the uncanny popularity of rap music in sub-Saharan Africa.
Possibly, another interesting facet is how multiculture seems to affect music. The ’80s seems to have been full of unapologetically SWPL music, whereas the ’90s had grunge (still very white, but full of angst).
I am sure any restaurant that is caught serving alcohol to 15 year olds in Sweden will be in a heap of trouble.
I had quite many friends who listened such music when we were young, but everyone of them enjoyed ecstacy or speed, such drugs were wildly popular among European youth who enjoyed electronic music in the 90s and early 2000s.
The name of the region -Haryana- is derived from Aryan. What was the prevalence of Y haplogroup R1a among these people?
Swedes start drinking much later than other Nordics, lol they are only Nordic country where red wine is the most popular alcoholic beverage, their party and drinking culture is very soft and weak, but no wonder, you cant even buy real beer from a Swedish shop when you are 18 years old.
https://cdn.digg.com/images/741c2a2c27904f6a9b7bc20d49c18ba8_77e002a603674e66a1caebaedc2bbc9a_1_post.png
What the hell even Danes? And I though that those guys are excellent and heavy drinkers, at least they were not long time ago. Oh well they still drink much more than Swedes, drinking culture there is very good in my opinion. I hate how beer and wine are destroying the drinking culture everywhere. Maybe beer with food, wine for women, but men should have fun with hard liquor.
Bring back the Vodka Belt!
https://mtdata.ru/u19/photo7284/20148673293-0/original.jpg
https://twitter.com/INechepurenko/status/1259811569657090050?s=20
I think Sweden has (had?) a more sexualized culture than the US, so they might pick up some laxity on that end compared to the US, where dances for young people are very chaperoned.
I should have been more specific about the printed sheet: it had flirtatious phrases begining with the benign (K-pop aside) “Will you have an ice cream with me?” And rising in gradations to more risque activities.
I also wonder how much it had to do with cities. Young white Americans had basically been kicked out of their own cities. College kids aside. So, being more suburban, it was harder for them to get to clubs that wouldn’t have faced severe zoning pressures and community backlash.
Oh rectified spirits are too much for me, though its “funny” how they burn through your membranes. Really you dont have even to drink them, just put in some in your mouth and they will burn into your bloodstream. But really that stuff breaks kidneys, no joke.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/Alcohol_belts_of_Europe.svg/1175px-Alcohol_belts_of_Europe.png
Here are the traditional Alcohol Belts of Europe, but sadly globalisation is everywhere destroying local native traditions, now I understand how old indigenous people must have felt when they saw their youth losing their culture….
You needed to dilute with a powerful antidote before consuming it.
https://cs7.pikabu.ru/post_img/2018/04/26/0/1524691851189794938.jpg
Supposing that they can solve basic problems, get a basic industry going, or get durable equipment there, then I think that they could create some really fantastic underground spaces on Mars. Even ones populated with small birds, or other small wildlife.
Some of the Mars enthusiasts are really nutso though. I heard one talking the other day about walking a dog on Mars and using it in spacesuit to smell out mineral resources! I wonder if some of these crazy ideas about Mars are due to our low fertility culture. I’ve been thinking that a truly natalist culture would have built a space station in LEO big enough to simulate Mars gravity (with spin) to figure out if it was enough to have babies. And for them to mature and be fertile.
I disagree about techno music. Dancing to that sort of electronic music in Britain always seemed to me much more individualistic and much less about intimacy with women. Usually the men dancing to Drum and Bass type music were much more interested in just amusing themselves or their friends by doing weird things with their feet (you can’t even dance properly to that music with another person).
On the other hand, when I have been to clubs in Italy/Spain the music was almost all slow or Reggaeton type and the men and women were rubbing up against each other and dancing with one another much more. On the other hand, that sort of thing means a lot less with Southern Europeans. When I went to Spain for the first time I thought ‘wow, Spanish girls must really like me’ because every one I met was touching me constantly.
It comes down to mushrooms. In the late 80′ and early 90’s European hippies were experimenting with electronic synthesizers and created psychedelic trance. A fraction of them liked to travel to India and eat mushrooms on the beaches of Goa. A very powerful and melodic style of trance was evolved on those beaches. Here is an Italian example from late 90’s.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3pC2M6nuUxI
It was good to listen to, but not good for dancing as it was too complex. So people then dumbed it down for the dance floor, and trance got more popular in the 2000’s. It also gained vocals to be more attractive to mainstream.
If you dig something like 50 km down on Mars, you can simulate Earth atmospheric pressure. I don’t know about birds, but cave bats might be happy. It is a lot of work though.
And yes, we should have started doing simulated gravity experiments decades ago. It doesn’t even have to be fancy – two cabins and a rope will do. Even an ISS sized setup can’t be more than $100 billion. US government budget defict (on a good year) is around a $trillion. We could have built 10 orbital stations per year simply by redirecting some of that government cheese.
Yes, Goa Trance was strong back then. I still remember the Dragonfly Records and Goa Head compilations. But raves started earlier.
Already in the early 90ies, rave parties had their musical style evolved from the Detroit house music. In Europe it rapidly gained ground in Netherlands, UK and Germany where it became a social phenomenon by the late 90ies with May Day and the Love Parade.
Bonzai and Platipus records were important for early Techno music, there were others that I don’t remember which I really liked, Italian ones if I am not mistaken.
In Russia too Techno and Trance was quite popular in the mid – 90ies. There was an excellent electronic music program on one of the Moscow FM radios that I used to listen to.
https://youtu.be/kZynI2APMRg
https://youtu.be/G-NhwX1pvT4
I was going to the raves for the shamanic feeling, it brought something very strong in me. If one wants to immerse oneself into nostalgic memories of that time, German Lola Rennt movie is just perfect.
https://youtu.be/PvTEZgrH5tw
Never thought of making artificial spelunking caves on Mars. Seems like a good idea – though I guess it would involve a lot of work. What I picture earlier is small-bore tunnels that loop, for running. rollerblades, or bicycles. You could even fill them with water for canoes, skiing or ice-skating (if the last two would work). Really endless recreational possibilities, once you solve the basics.
One of the difficult things would seem to be how to clean an underground park that has living things in it. Get rid of the dead skin, neutralize the bird and (red) squirrel waste.
Another thing that made the youth culture of Europe different from America is that it had good trains and hostels. In a way, one could think of it like a pre-internet network for partying, competing with America’s college network, which did not have connections as dense. Perhaps, blacks helped disrupt the hostel culture in America, keeping the general youth culture a bit more puritanical.
Ah yes, good old Radiotrance!
Vostok 5 is favorite by them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X_AZvnprygo
Летайте Ракетами Восток!
As you know, the West is so vast that you may have visited an area several times but you can still discover new wonders on the next trip by just changing the route a little bit.
This time I’d say that the highlights of my weekend trip have been the Trail of the Ancients, comparable to Monument Valley, and the Sangre de Cristo mountain foothills north of Santa Fe. I was expecting the typical landscape of these southern, high-altitude areas: thick forests with a high timberline hiding the top ridge. What I found instead was an amazing combination of bare red rock desert cliffs and a snowed mountain chain in the background, where the highest alpine peaks were perfectly visible.
As the New York painter (ie someone who loved human-made beauty) Georgia O’Keefe said before moving to this part of NM, “it’s so beautiful there, it’s ridiculous”.
On the other hand, most everyone you see in this area seems to be Mexican or Native American and it shows in the houses and trailers where they live. Generally run-down and untidy. It reminded me of the popular barrios in Chile. Some houses did retain the very nice adobe architecture of the colonial times, though.
That squirrel waste will be worth more than gold in space. Lots of gold out there, but proper biomaterials, including biowaste, will be hard to get.
I agree that it’s totally pointless to try to convince other people of one’s aesthetic preferences. When you find someone who happens to share yours, it’s great because you have a lot to talk about and experiences to share but they’re obviously of no interest to the rest. As far as I’m concerned, the more people stay in cities and the less they crowd the natural spaces, the better.
But you haven’t answered an interesting question upthread. Do you prefer to contemplate a man-made representation of a beautiful young woman or the actual woman herself? Arguably, the most beautiful thing nature has made for us humans to enjoy seeing is the female body so this looks like a valuable comparison in this discussion. Can humans make something of comparable beauty at all?
To be fair, the question is a bit tricky because nature also gave us males the desire to posses that beautiful body so a fair assessment may be difficult. How much is appreciation of beauty and how much is desire? But, talking about lesbianism, I think that women, regardless of sexual orientation, are also perfectly capable of appreciating the beauty of their own bodies. Miley Cirus recently put it bluntly: “breasts are nicer than balls”, an assessment that both my wife and I agreed with when we heard it.
One of the big things has been environmentalism which has taught people that civilisation is wicked because it’s supposedly destroying the planet. Environmentalism is a weird quasi-religious doomsday cult but most people (even on the Right) have swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Environmentalism has much in common with the Romantic Movement – a silly sentimental worship of nature, an irrational hostility to industrialisation (factories bad, forests good) a simplistic rejection of materialism, phoney pop spiritualism and the idea of technological progress as sinful.
What’s really worrying is that so many people on the Right (or at least on the far right) have become anti-civilisational. Partly that’s because they hate cities because they think cities are full of liberals. Partly it’s because far right Christians think cities are full of atheists. Partly it’s the growing irrationalism of the far right – the story of western civilisation from the beginning of the sixteenth century has been the story of the triumph of reason over superstition but the far right prefers superstition (as evidenced by their obsession with conspiracy theories).
Partly it’s the American far right’s idealisation of 18th and 19th century (or even 17th century) rural life – sturdy patriots with guns, women who did what they were told, close-knit communities in which everyone believed in God and guns and hated commies, an idealised nostalgia for an era when non-whites knew their place and grovelled to the White Man, a nostalgia for an age in which kids did what their parents wanted and if they didn’t then obedience was beaten into them, an era in which uppity women got what was coming to them.
The American far right would have like history to stop around the mid-19th century.
You have probably heard of Calhoun’s rat experiments?
It’s a simple answer but I’m not going to give a simple answer.
Firstly, I’m not hostile to the human world. People often disappoint me but on the whole I like people and I’m fascinated by them. I like women and I’m fascinated by them. And I can certainly appreciate female beauty, both sexually and aesthetically.
I’d rather contemplate a picture of a beautiful young woman than a picture of a mountain. I’d rather contemplate a flesh-and-blood beautiful young woman than a real mountain. I’d rather contemplate a picture of a beautiful young woman than a real mountain.
I’d rather contemplate a picture of a mountain than a real mountain (in fact I’d prefer to contemplate neither but if I had to make the choice I’d pick the picture of the mountain).
As for a flesh-and-blood beautiful young woman versus a picture of a beautiful young woman, I’d obviously prefer to have a sexual and/or emotional and/or affectionately friendly relationship with a flesh-and-blood beautiful young woman rather than with a picture because you can’t have a relationship with a picture. But you can get a great deal of pleasure from contemplating a picture of a beautiful young woman. And human beauty is fleeting while art is forever. So the appreciation of a beautiful young woman is not the same as the appreciation of a man-made representation of a beautiful young woman. I can appreciate both, in different ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOLEPq40Kdg
Footage of the Iranian missile attack from early 2020.
https://twitter.com/StopFakingNews/status/1365739379956850694
You don’t want Disney to get stolen by Russians, right?
It seems that people who appreciate civilisation are more and more a minority.
What in your opinion causes this?
Another interesting thing to consider is the far right’s hostility to art, which is an important component of the far right’s anti-civilisational bias.
I can understand that hostility up to a point. When you look at the sorry history of western art over the past century then hostility towards art is understandable. And artists have very often been liberals or leftists.
But for some on the far right that has led to hostility towards art in general. And it has strengthened their hostility to civilisation since they see art and civilisation as being closely linked, which of course they are.
It depends on the person and it depends on the artificial environment.
I’d find it dehumanising to have to live in a shack in the wilderness, with only guns and a Bible for company. But some members of the far right would love it.
People vary. Some people need to be surrounded by lots of other people while some prefer solitude. Some people need to be near forests and some people need to be near shops and museums and art galleries. Some people like Italian food while others don’t. Some people like playing golf while others like playing chess. Some people like hiking and some people like fast cars. Some people like living in city centres, some like living in suburbia, some like living in small towns, some like living in the wilderness.
It’s dangerous to start thinking that one’s own preferences must be shared by others and it’s even more dangerous to think that there’s something wrong with people who have different preferences. That’s dehumanising. And it’s a kind of dehumanising thinking that is increasingly common among both liberals and conservatives.
Agree with that, this is because our social tissue, our links as a human community – as a civilisation – are coming undone. This is a symptom of a deep social and cultural malaise. But the symptom is not the cause.
You didn’t answer my question about Calhoun and his experiments. I would be surprised if you didn’t hear of his Universe 25.
Depending on how barbarian they were, the majority of our ancestors have practiced agriculture for 2,000-10,000 years, and those who didn’t were usually nomads rather than hunter-gatherers. This means that we have been heavily selected for that lifestyle rather than hunting-gathering, so we are probably no longer well suited for that.
But you are correct that the horrible diet of early (and even later) agriculturalists (including ourselves) was way worse than what the hunter-gatherers ate, and the introduction of lots of new diseases with human vectors caused a marked deterioration of quality of life as well as lifespan and healthspan.
A real pity this type of music is no longer produced..
https://youtu.be/44E8mz6I6o0
https://youtu.be/g4pOl5DEU0c
https://youtu.be/5f2SJZTHCwU
https://youtu.be/-MU-PGePJsQ
There used to be this website ‘Tranceaddict’ on which you could download live sets by these greats ..
I agree that it’s just bizarre to hate nature, while worshiping nature without considering that most of us (I guess everyone in this thread) would quickly die without civilization is equally silly. People need some kind of tamed nature for their happiness and perhaps even to stay alive, and they need civilization to… stay alive.
Sure.
Studies on rats don’t tell us much about human behaviour. We are cultural animals, and we’re the only cultural animals. Some of our behaviour is innate but a huge amount of it is either culturally determined or modified by culture.
You could for example create a perfect environment for rats, or cats, or squirrels or for any other animal species. You can’t create a perfect environment for people. We’re too different. We’re too different due to social/cultural influences. A utopia for one person is a living hell for another.
I agree. But a lot of people want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The fact that a particular human civilisation, namely modern western civilisation, has developed very severe problems is no reason to reject civilisation.
It’s also no reason to reject every aspect of modern western civilisation. Modern western civilisation, with all its faults, is preferable to living in a pre-civilised society.
On the contrary, I’d say that we already have created our utopia as closely as Calhoun’s rats have. And like his rats, find it much to dissatisfaction.
To completely ignore his experiment by claiming human exceptionalism is quite missing the point and loses a lot of potential knowledge to be gained from it.
I know it’s a very radical suggestion but maybe we need to learn to accept compromises. And maybe we need to learn to reject extreme solutions to social, political and cultural problems. Maybe we need a society in which it is accepted that people have complex and differing needs.
In order to be happy some people need more contact with nature and some people need less. Some people need more contact with other people and others need less. Some people need to live in crowded cities, some people need to live in small communities, some people need to live in solitude. THere’s no right way to live and no wrong way.
The only solution is to accept that there’s no one solution. The only way to create a liveable human society is compromise. Which means giving up on the idea of imposing our differing views on others.
Midwit take.
I said, “Studies on rats don’t tell us much about human behaviour.” I didn’t say, “Studies on rats can’t tell us anything at all about human behaviour.”
If you completely ignore human exceptionalism and rely on studies on rats you’re going to be led badly astray.
Not as badly astray, I suspect, as someone who didn’t bother understanding the study at all, and therefore can profit neither from its discoveries or its errors. Try this, perhaps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
One thing that Calhoun demonstrated was that highly organized artificial environments can be population sinks even if everything is provided to ensure population survival. Civilizations create highly organized artificial environments (big cities) which always act as population sinks.
Also, Calhoun demonstrated that in these population sinks, the drop in reproduction is not due to lack of ressources, but to an excess of intraspecies stimulation and interaction and lack of natural stimuli and stress. Simply said, too many people drive people nuts, they start to experience neuroses and develop biologically inadequate behaviors, reproduction drop, offspring rearing is no longer functioning and population dies out.
Many past civilisations have exhibited these symptoms. Starting with Neolithic Malta and ending with our global Western Civilization, which was the greatest of them all until now.
Too much Civilization kills civilization.
There are lots of excellent electronic music produced today. This channel on YouTube has a lot of it.
https://youtube.com/c/ThePsychedelicMuse
Those were interesting times. We would call a hotline to find the place in advance (these rave parties weren’t legal), go to an abandoned factory deep in Detroit. Some local gang was paid off and kept an eye on our cars and kept everything safe. I was at a party with perhaps 800 or so people in Detroit, and later in Frankfurt I would be at a rave with the same DJ, and several thousand people.
But I never made it to Goa.
I listened to a bit of the first tune you linked, and I was going to write a mocking comment about how I once used to listen to this kind of music, but that I never was never a huge fan of it and that I only really ever got into because that’s what the crowd I hanged out with listened to, that my listening to it had far more to do with the kind of social image I wanted to project than my actual enthusiasm for the music itself.
But then I clicked on each of the other videos in turn and listened to at least half way through, and I began to be flooded with memories of parties and clubs and friends I’d forgotten about and loves lost, as well as cringey memories of the way I used to be and the stupid things I’ve done, and regrets – lots and lots of regrets – and even a bit of nostalgic longing for a phase of my life that is now obviously impossible to recover. So I think, all in all, I probably did genuinely enjoy this kind of music more than I’ve been telling myself in my cynical older age.
Lol, come on. You really think I’m sitting here in my seat, gripping the armrests, grinding my teeth and stewing with hatred at nature? (“goddam fucking nature, just you wait, I’ll show you, ya bastard!!!”)
As I acknowledged, everything that I am (and think and feel) is inescapably a part of nature, so unless I strike you as a complete moron, it’s silly to take my “fuck nature” statement too literally.
While the distinction between natural and manmade is obviously artificial and illusory, in everyday language we all know what it’s trying to get at, and I think I’m perfectly within my rights to be more impressed by the latter, and maintaining an attitude of “fuck nature” is the surest antidote I know against being seduced into worshipping the former.
Heh, we’ve all moved on. The music still works well for nighttime drives though.
The hunter gatherer lifestyle also meant a much lower population density, and you cannot be sure it was that much greater leisure. The few who survived to adulthood would have a greater abundance of calories, but would also face war and population collapse. Living in an ordered agricultural society on the Nile meant that you could be assured that not all your children will die before 5 years old and you could hope for them to move up in the hierarchy.
Today I used two machines that cost a million dollars to look at some properties of substances that I made that would not exist in free nature, but obeys its laws. Only two countries have companies that sell these machines for basic/industrial research (USA one company for both types and Japan two companies for each instrument type). I guess other countries can make something in-house for a boutique use, but these are our only options since these companies specialize on making easy to use instruments in largish numbers. This is a very involved supply chain and required thousands of years of civilizational advance to get to this point, with straight streets so that the instrument doesn’t get tipped over on a sharp turn. Looking at an electron density map that has tight peaks (and thus would give a good quality structure) and letting a computer algorithm solve it in 10 seconds, or at a very pure nuclear magnetic resonance spectrum with its sharp peaks for each hydrogen nucleus after the computer performed a Fourier transform on a bunch of overlapping frequencies in the time domain, allowed me to see two very unusual compounds this week that will probably turn into two papers a few years from now. But it also filled me with a sense of wonder of how the atoms could be put together to make these compounds that are really surprising and unexpected. It’s basically looking at rules of nature and a non-human world, and having our advanced civilization to thank for it.
Your ability to appreciate nature as some sort of a religious experience is also dependent on advances made by our civilization, but perhaps not as blatantly explicit and technological as the example above and maybe having something to do with an Enlightenment influenced philosophy (Hermann Hesse?). You probably realize this to the extent that you didn’t disappear in the woods like Ted Kaczynski or an Irish hermit monk, and are still checking the Internet and leaving comments on various websites.
Well, you know. I don’t know what you look like and we’re really just user names and some text to each other. After I read over my posts, I actually can’t believe that I wrote that since it sounds very different to what I imagine myself to be in daily life as well, so that’s another layer. I definitely don’t have the least generous interpretations of other commenters because of that.
For what it’s worth, I think I get what you’re getting at in the rest of your post and it’s a valid sentiment in a way.
Sounds reasonable. Is there any evidence of this effect in earlier times? If cities are the population sinks you claim they are, I think there should be such evidence. Or is the claim that level of stimulation reached today is such that these effects can be expected? That sounds reasonable too.
Even before the internet, I was well aware that some sorts of people rub me the wrong way so much that their presence is never anything but a source of irritation to me; but the internet – specifically, social media – has brought home to me just how great and unbridgeable the differences are, as well as making it more difficult to ignore or forget about these people’s existence.
So is the answer to reject civilisation? Should we all live in huts in the forests? We can’t simply dismantle civilisation.
Going back to nature is not a solution.
It’s also possible that the problems of urbanisation will solve themselves. If cities lead to declining populations we may end up with something closer to an optimum population. If the problem is that cities are bad because they have too many people but cities lead to declining populations then what you have is a self-correcting problem.
And we’re smarter than rats. Rats finding themselves in a destructive environment can’t do anything about it. We have more options. For example we have the option of making changes to urban environments. Rethinking our ideas on what cities should be like. Rats can’t do that because rats are terrible at urban planning.
If I was younger I would have gone to one of these outdoor festivals:
https://youtu.be/UiM5CgT1g7Q
I am not a primitivist. I wrote in one of my comments above that we need to thread a thin line between too much civilization and not enough of it. As a species we need both nature and culture.
Now, on a personal level, once my professional life is completed and kids have moved out, I hope to be able to move into a small chalet in the woods. My dearest wife agrees with the plan as long as we also keep a small flat in town and have a couple of guest rooms for the family reunions in the chalet. If it was just me, I wouldn’t keep a flat in the city. I have had enough of it.
Rats have been put in the optimal environments. Calhoun did his very best to satisfy all their needs, he tried many designs of his artificial model environments, all of them ended up with similar results. He failed because mammals are animals that need natural stimuli and natural population distribution.
I suggest you read Desmond Morris’ Naked Ape. It describes perfectly what is wrong with our civilization and he does that with a lot of zest. That was the first book that made me question whether technological progress was really that great for human happiness. I have only discovered Calhoun’s studies much later.
Although smaller, it actually looks a lot like the granddaddy of them all:
https://youtu.be/JaaT_HRb4GU
I didn’t know anybody who went and was too young to go myself, but it played a lot into the imagination of my generation. Juryj Ostroushko, Pete’s older brother that I mention above, did however make it to San Francisco, during the ‘Summer of Love”. He honed his skills there as a poster artist and when he returned to the Twin Cities was in great demand. There’s a hardcover book out now including all of his significant concert posters.
https://juryjart.square.site/uploads/1/3/0/3/130368968/s125218729374746257_p4_i1_w2560.jpeg
I think that you are avoiding a direct answer to the question because it would show that, at least in some instances, you also prefer the work of nature to the work of man. But that’s OK. If you feel disgusted by nature in most instances it doesn’t make you a bad person to me. Just a little weird, perhaps, and I could also try to find a theory to explain why your preferences are so different from mine but I’m too busy living my life for that. I don’t care.
However, I do think that your theory about the influence of the Romantics does not explain my inclinations at all. I came to love nature through mountaineering and this is an activity that began to become popular among the higher classes in the 18th century. If anything, it must have been the Enlightenment that propitiated this kind of activity. Before those times people tended to avoid the high peaks because they evoked the presence of fearsome spirits. The end of those superstitions and taking the natural word for what it is is what must have brought about the desire to explore its most remote corners.
Key word is proportion. Food and drink and drugs and sex provide satiety if we are paying any attention to the senses feedback. This is not the case for money or power. Nobody has a sense of too much money but there actually is such a thing. Good for us it is hard to come by!
I appreciate your scientific experiments and that they can be a vehicle for wonder and a form of contact with the non human. Many scientists certainly felt that way and it’s a valid position. Certainly on a higher level than mere interest in domination over the physical world (although the two cannot be easily separated).
While valid on one level and an important experience, it is still the world “”interpreted” by the human mind and it’s categories – even if it takes one to the very edge of these categories.
I would submit that we can benefit from contact with a realm not “interpreted” by the human mind on any level, but that is beyond language and all question of physical advantage.
When I go into nature and have a sense of the numinous, the experience cannot be put into words or logical formulas and does not pertain to any question of physical advantage or survival.
It is, in fact, to leave “human concerns” – our preoccupation with physical advantage and survival, the heart of science and every day life, and the humanly “interpreted” world, behind.
For that reason it is healing.
What you get through science and what I am describing are not opposed, but complimentary.
Unfortunately, this has become a “fight”, between two “sides”, as everything does these days.
My original intention was not to take away anyone’s comfort, safety, and convenience and suggest they live a primitive life. I merely wanted to share a beautiful experience, and suggest that the troubles and cares, anxieties and depressions, that so many in the modern world feel, can be lessened through contact with a world that is beyond the man made.
But I’m not saying one should completely spurn the man made world. I myself am car camping for much of this trip. I enjoy in the cool crisp mornings going to nice cafes in nearby towns and enjoying a delicious breakfast and good coffee.
Every week or so I check into a fancy hotel. Mike just did a road trip enjoying spectacular landscapes – unless I’m wrong he stayed in hotels and drove the whole time.
One of the most delicious experiences on this trip I’m discovering is to watch movies in some wilderness area in the middle of nowhere on my tablet, and drink a few shots of good whiskey, in a remote, lonely location amid natural splendor. Every so often I will take a break from the movie and step outside to stare at the stars.
I love old architecture and medieval towns and gothic cathedrals and good art. I enjoy the conveniences of civilization.
I am only saying that there is a certain kind of very good and important experience that you can only have away from the human and man made world. Keep your pleasures, your conveniences, and your safety, but perhaps realize there is something bigger out there that may help you to come into contact with every so often.
I enjoy excursions into the wilderness on my own or with a small group, living in the wild and walking from camp to camp, for several days. It’s one of my most intense and interesting experiences. But at the end of that I enjoy a delicious hot shower, and my first cheeseburger is a revelation 🙂
And these insights can help us craft better civilizations. Ones that are more “organic” and not too far from natural patterns, like medieval cities. Ones that are less sterile, inhuman, and rational, but stick closer to nature.
A good town or city, built of stone or wood, with architecture that pays attention to beauty, with parks and fountains, and winding streets and mysterious little alleys with hidden cafes and shrines, with the countryside not too far away – in other words, a city devoted to life that works “with” nature and follows an organic pattern, and not a city devoted to rational abstraction, efficiency, “control”, domination, and inhumanly sterile, can be sheer delight to explore.
That being said, the wilderness and the non-human still retain their importance to us and will always offer an experience not to be had elsewhere.
And some people need this more than others. Only a few people became monks or lived in lonely monasteries atop hills. Perhaps people living in cities were inspired by such people even if they had no desire or capacity to emulate them.
Physical comfort is important – but so is poetry.
And if you simply can’t see the poetic side of life, and want to live only in a very safe, comfortable, sterile, and efficient environment – I would support making arrangements for you to live that way. I know people in my life whose paramount concern is safety and comfort. For some people that side of life concerned with physical advantage – safety and comfort – perhaps out of a predisposition to anxiety and fear of death and an inability to develop a metaphysics that takes the sting out of death, is paramount, and they should be accommodated.
I don’t wish to force my way on anyone – I only wish to share with those who already half share my vision and awaken those who can and wish to be awakened.
As the Buddhists say, may all beings flourish. May everyone fund happiness as best he can.
Nor is appreciation of nature only a byproduct of civilization. The first 12 years of my life I lived in a small town where the forests and hills began where my house ended. Every day after school I would spend exploring the hills and woods behind my house and on weekends go on longer excursions. It was a sheer delight and pleasure and I never wanted it to end.i had never been in a big city and didn’t know such things existed
Taoism and Chinese nature painting and poetry developed well before modern civilization.
That being said, of course complex civilization will produce a more self conscious awareness of what has been lost and literary expression of that sense.
https://gogov.ru/articles/covid-v-stats
Vaccination statistics in Russia.
Be careful with such generalizations.
We are definitely smarter than rats but being smarter only means we are more able to achieve things we want. If something in society or environment is manipulating our wants and desires we are exactly as powerless as rats to overcome it.
It is quite possible that urban high-intensity lifestyle is attractive precisely because it gives us plenty of supernormal stimuli that replace the “normal” ones. People in cities do not reproduce not because they have no reproductive instinct but because it is hijacked. The instinct is still strong, but being directed to supernormal stimuli it directs people to work endlessly to increase the “fake” targets even more.
So even though people are able to do urban planning, they will not use their ability to make more “livable” cities.
We know that starting from the earliest times, a civilization lead to urbanization and then to its own downfall. Perhaps the best documented case are ancient Rome and Greece. By the end of the Roman Empire the number of children dropped significantly, while the number of people who wished to remain single increased significantly. We might think that this is mainly due to the mass conversion to Christianity, but it might well be that the mass conversion itself was the result of the accumulated social malaise.
Starting from the Middle ages the cities mainly grew because they attracted and integrated people from the countryside. Without this influx of peasants, the population of the cities would have dropped with each generation. Now European countryside is no longer ptoducing excess population for the cities to absorb, so we are bringing in immigrants. Once urbanisation reaches a high level everywhere, including in the global South, where will we find the new populations to absorb to the megapolises ?
Yes, all these Trance festivals tend to reproduce hippie attitude. Except that people just go there for a day or two and do not adopt it as a lifestyle anymore.
All complex life on planet Earth will be exterminated in a billion years.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2269567-most-life-on-earth-will-be-killed-by-lack-of-oxygen-in-a-billion-years/
Ironically, it will be lack of carbon dioxide leading to shutdown of photosynthesis that will do us in. So drive those SUVs as much as possible 🙂
A few key points.
A billion years is far too optimistic. The process will start as soon as 500 million years from now, warmer temperature due to Sun expansion will cause CO2 to absorb into rocks which in turn will kill C3 photosynthesis which is by far the dominant oxygen production technology on the planet. Considering that everybody alive today is at least 4 billion years old as measured by genetic lineage tracing back to Last Universal Common Ancestor, a billion years is not that much time. If you view Cambrian explosion as the start of complex life, then complex life has lived about 1/3 of its lifespan on the way to total elimination on planet Earth.
Plants invented more advanced tech – C4 photosynthesis, that can cope with low CO2 environment, but its not widespread. You are talking conifers basically. Its not enough.
Earth was not an Earthlike planet. Earth was terraformed twice, by cyanobacteria. First, they invented and deployed photosynthesis during Great Oxygen Holocaust. Second, they invented and deployed molybdenum catalyzed nitrogen fixation which solved protein shortages. The only human technology of similar planet wide significance is Haber Bosch process which solves protein problem via iron catalyst. All other human technologies are rather irrelevant in comparison. If we want to keep Earth Earthlike, we will need to get into geoengineering in a big way.
In the long run, future is in space, not just for humans, but for all species that will exist. It is not negotiable. No amount of geoengineering will save Earth as Earthlike planet.
SpaceX continues to pick up military contracts, this time – heat shielding for hypersonic weapons.
https://spacenews.com/spacex-wins-air-force-manufacturing-research-contract-for-hypersonic-vehicle-thermal-shields/
Jeff Bezos better hurry up with Blue Origin.
Comments are funny still thinking Mars mission is the main SpaceX focus, and not military.
there are no viruses
https://www.bitchute.com/video/0GsgiYrDlQ8g/
https://www.globalresearch.ca/dr-stefan-lanka-2020-article-busts-virus-misconception/5719146
stop mentally masturbating….
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0709-x
You are a moron.
I don’t think our species will survive for 500 million years.
Not in current form, but we’ll survive.
Thanks for that! I hope my next trip will be June, when it’s too cold to go too far north. So you’ve given me a good idea.
I know what you mean about Indian areas. I drove 100 miles through the T’ono Odham Indian reservation in southern Arizona, and there were only 2 tiny run down fly infested towns the entire stretch. Beautiful desolate scenery though.
I’m now in Organ Pipe Cactus NM in southern Arizona on the Mexican border. Few people make it here. The ranger said I should drive 21 miles down this dirt road into the backcountry and there will be a place I can park. From there I have to walk in at least half a mile and I can camp anywhere. There are no trails.
I was the only one in the backcountry for the night, and it was a gorgeous piece of Sonoran Desert scenery, with huge canyon walls, utterly wild and desolate. Huge winds picked up during the night echoing through the high canyon walls and crashing into my tent. It was a noisy racket.
My tent held, but the wind blew in a fine red sand, and I had to wrap my head in my jacket to avoid it getting into my eyes and nose. In the morning there was red sand in my tent. But it was easy to shake out.
I thanked the mountain for not destroying me, and enjoyed the morning sunshine and calm. I swear I am becoming more of an animist every day out here 🙂
It’s amazing that in this day and age when everyone is obsessed with safety and the nanny state is omnipresent, they casually let you walk into a harsh, pitiless wilderness with no trails just like that. All the ranger said was – do I know I have to carry in all my water? That there are no trails? That you’re completely on your own? That I’m 21 miles from base? Yes? Go enjoy yourself.
Oh, she did say this is an illegal smuggling area and if I encounter any Mexicans getting smuggling, don’t engage them or give them any water. She said they tend to avoid contact with people anyways. So that was interesting too.
The complexity evident even within a one celled amoeba, not to talk about something as advanced as a human being, is way to complex to have evolved by chance no matter how much time you’d allow such an occurrence to happen.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/20/fb/3f/20fb3f5665d299a1d429afa78fbe340d.jpg
Chance or design?
Any photos that you’d care to share with your charmed audience?
Maybe the ranger figured that as long as you have internet access, you’ll be okay.
Neither, but action and reaction.
Action or reaction inside of a perfect vacuum without a first cause?
Well, evolution is not random, it is directed by the environment and organisms themselves. Like Arctic foxes evolve furry coats because its cold outside – its not a random process. There’s a problem and evolution provides a solution.
As far as first cause goes, we need to look for LUCA. Unfortunately, while we have evidence of life going back 3.8 billion years, we difficulties going beyond that due to tectonic plates moving and burying the fossils. What would help is finding asteroids formed during the Earth bombardment phase – think of them as well preserved ancient Earth baked rocks, from well over 4 billion years ago.
Imagine we locate Earth planetecimal aged 4.3 billion years with RNA/biomolecules baked into it. There are a few possibilities.
A simple Last Universal Common Ancestor type RNA and its fragments in various stages of construction. It seems the most likely possibility at first glance however to this day we haven’t been able to reverse engineer LUCA. If simple fragments were sufficient, we would have been successful at abiogenesis a long time ago. Because abiogenesis appears challenging in the lab, i predict historical evidence and biomaterials will also be non trivial in nature.
A common theme genetic toolkit. Just because all life decended from LUCA doesn’t mean LUCA was the only thing around. It is rational to expect other biomolecules evolving side by side with LUCA, them being suboptimal and thus outcompeted, but still along the same theme. By ‘theme’ i mean a specific environment. Say, hydrothermal vents. So all the fossils will be biomaterials optimized for hydrothermal vents to various degree and LUCA being the best.
A variable theme genetic toolkit. This is the most exciting one. If we find biomaterials optimized for thermal vents next to materials optimized for methane ice or something, this will raise some interesting questions. In that case, life on Earth may well be a science project for aliens elsewhere. That would be an interesting first cause.
I think the best trance was from the mid 1990s.
This masterpiece was from 1993, I believe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDL569Ae5DE
I never needed ecstasy to enjoy myself all night in those times.
So obviously they weren’t actually optimal environments.
I don’t really disagree with you, or at least I don’t wildly disagree with you. It’s obvious that modern civilisation has to a large extent become dysfunctional.
Yes, I agree with that. Although I’d argue that some models of civilisation may be more dysfunctional than others. Our western civilisation has only become seriously dysfunctional fairly recently and I suspect that too much exposure to mass media and especially too much social media are the main contributing factors to modern civilisational neuroses. It’s not necessarily a question of too much civilisation but rather the type of civilisation.
The main point I was originally trying to make was just that people vary in the amount of exposure to nature that they require. Where I live I can get access to nature very easily, there’s nothing stopping me, but I just don’t feel the need for wilderness. A small amount of exposure to nature under controlled conditions is enough for me. I have nothing against birdsong but I’m quite happy just to have birds singing in my backyard. I can get enough fresh air by opening my window.
And on purely aesthetic grounds my preference is still for art over nature. I am quite happy for wildernesses to be preserved as long as I don’t have to visit them or look at them.
It’s also not a choice between urban environments and a hut in the forest. You can live in suburbia, or in the semi-rural fringes of cities, or in small towns.
I read The Naked Ape many many years ago.
I think you mean “initiated”. Btw, you are probably familiar with Petrarch’s Ascent of Mount Ventoux: https://history.hanover.edu/texts/petrarch/pet17.html
That’s some really hard shamanic stuff. Solar Quest also produced some beautiful ambient:
https://youtu.be/O7gS1m24Ezk
And as I mentioned in a reply to Vishnagupta, there are still very talented Trance acts producing music nowadays. An example below:
https://youtu.be/_6B9tBRFEeE
The video clip is well made.
https://youtube.com/c/ThePsychedelicMuse
More electronica above, different types, a great channel to find new stuff.
For rats only the “natural” environments appear optimal, all the artificial ones that Calhoun produced lead to the same negative results in the end.
I would have been surprised if you didn’t. Do you think it might clarify why we ended up in our current social disfunction and civilizational disrepair?
Why does Algeria spend ~6% of GDP on defense? The high spending is a pretty recent thing too, just the last decade. I guess it’s good for Russia since they buy mostly Russian equipment.
Which was the exact time that the Romantic Movement began. And the Romantic Movement is where the cult of mountains really began to take hold.
The Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement were closely linked, with Romanticism being a kind of reaction against the Enlightenment although it’s more complicated than that. The Romantic Movement and the Enlightenment shared many assumptions. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution was also something the Romantic Movement was reacting against.
Interesting it was also the time that gothic literature made its appearance and the first beginnings of the Gothic Revival style in architecture also dated to the late 18th century. There was a real battle between reason and emotion at that time.
The Romantic Movement wasn’t just a sudden interest in mountains and forest. It was a sentimental highly emotional interest. It was a whole different attitude towards nature. The Romantic Movement represents the beginning of the idea of Nature Good, Civilisation Bad.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
Morocco stands out. The only poor country with first world tier vaccination rate.
Barely anyone vaccinated in South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Why is that?
The numbers doesn’t seem correct for all countries. Iran has gotten a few hundred thousand doses from both Russia and China so they should be higher than 0.01%.
That’s not really entirely accurate. People are capable of being aware of being manipulated, or at least some people are. We are not as powerless as rats.
Which might be bad for society but good for the individual. Some people actually prefer to do other things besides raising children. To some extent raising children was an example of wants and desires being manipulated by social and cultural forces. Some people are happier not having children. What’s good for society is not always good for the individual.
But unlike rats we do have the ability to make more “livable” cities, although we don’t necessarily choose to do so. It’s also possible that for many city-dwellers our cities actually are “liveable” – in fact many city-dwellers might well find the countryside or the wilderness to be “unlivable”.
The CDC Covid-variant website boasts that “since early in the pandemic” the CDC has been on top of variant-tracing. Now, after one year, the U.S. manages to be only ranked 30th at this. I have posted before the remarkably narrow range of U.S. rankings. Whether it’s competence of medical staff, or primary education, or the recently released “Democracy Index,” the U.S. always seems to be around number 25.
What would be a counter-example? Fictitious money? Video games? Fast food?
You mean like the civilisation of imperial China? Which lasted for a few thousand years. Or ancient Egypt, which lasted for nearly 3,000 years? And both those civilisations were strong enough to survive major crises.
And what about mediæval European civilisation, which only led to very small-scale urbanisation?
Is there any actual evidence at all that urbanisation was responsible for the downfall of most civilisations? Maybe it was a factor (among many other factors) in the case of Rome, but there’s no reason to think that the eventual collapse of Imperial China or ancient Egypt had anything to do with urbanisation.
I think that there is evidence that cities didn’t reproduce in the Middle Ages and probably earlier. Parasite load was always consistently higher (and thus mortality, including childhood mortality, higher as well) and birth rates lower than in the countryside. But I cannot remember where I read it, I’m just fairly sure that it was not just one book or one source but several.
But maybe it’s wrong.
For example I think there is evidence that the big urban centers were more multiethnic than the countryside but that later Italians don’t show all that many signs of admixture, i.e. they seem to be purely the descendants of the rural population.
Or for example the population dynamic on the island of Sardinia show that the inland rural population is surprisingly ancient, while the coastal areas, especially the cities, received a very high influx of newcomers from elsewhere, including other parts of Italy (but also from the Sardinian inland), only to keep constantly disappearing and replenished from elsewhere over and over again.
To be honest I never thought this issue could be controversial at all.
Of course there were a few cases where an urban population biologically survived for a long period of time, especially Jews come to mind. This was used as evidence that they had relatively high status in the cities, since the poor kept getting replaced, their mortality rates pushing replacement fertility too high.
I think the relatively low fertility (usually below replacement or barely above, while the rest of the population underwent a population explosion) of cities have existed since the beginning of statistics already in the 19th century.
There’s also evidence that urban populations are and probably have always been smarter than rural populations.
Since civilization invariably means that there are cities growing out of towns and villages, and smarter people tend to flock to cities, it inevitably creates some selection for lower intelligence. Probably civilizations with lower level of urbanization are therefore more sustainable from a purely biological point of view. That’s a pretty important thing, since we are mammals.
Another factor is military. Urban people are usually less capable soldiers than farmers. (Herders and hunters are usually more capable still.) So a very high level of urbanization, all else being equal, usually means a less capable military. This is often more than compensated for with a higher level of technological development.
It doesn’t follow that all civilizational collapses were always invariably caused by urbanization, but I wouldn’t discount it as a contribution factor.
The Poz is strong because of this. Short term, it’s always more pleasant to have casual sex but not children (and even less a family), watching porn is more pleasant than improving oneself, etc. The Poz will indulge you with these and then tell you that you need to be celebrated for being degenerate, that it’s a valid choice in life. I’m not sure if that makes you happier long term (I suspect not), but it’s surely destructive for civilization.
Some childless people contributed in ways that might seem better for society than if they just had a family instead. Beethoven didn’t have children, but he created some of the best music out there. Mozart did have children, but no living descendants, but the same point applies.
Hitler didn’t have children, but… oops.You get the point. Unless you write something worth as much as the Fourteenth String Quartet or the Eighth Piano Sonata by Beethoven, you should concentrate some of your energies on having children.did you watch the video ? the three seminal papers upon which this whole nightmare is based are completely bunk . their “conceptual isolation” computer wizadry is not actual science .
yeah and Nature magazine … that wouldn’t be a biased source at all i’m sure… what’s next , links to CNN for immigration facts ?! why would an UNZ reader not understand this ?
if you actually do the research and stop reading the black grimoire vomit of the technocracy that will cause your grandchildren to spit on your grave , then you will see that NEVER has a virus been ISOLATED according to the definition of the word… the “cytogenic effect” that all these scumbags refer to in lieu of actually ISOLATING anything (since they couldnt and cant because the demons do not exist) is simply what happens to cells when you remove them from their environment , and place them in a lab while “protecting” their contamination using a bunch of industrial toxins and antiBIOtics, all while STARVING them… THEY NEVER CONTROLLED FOR THIS ! and the few who have done this experiment , including the man who won the german high court case against himself , proved that the EXACT SAME cytogenic effect occurs with cells that have not had the metaphysical boogyman added to it …. lol absolutely ridiculous and completely unscientific.
there has been a bunch of obfuscation , outright fraud and treacherous use of language to mask the holes in this neoplatonic fantasy of little invisible demons that invade us from the outside… but go ahead , keep jacking off with your little platonic ghost forms and fucking up your childrens life , destroying their economy , and underestimating the nature of the enemy and the danger you face…
The current situation
All claims about viruses as pathogens are wrong and are based on easily recognisable, understandable and verifiable misinterpretations. The real causes of diseases and phenonema which are ascribed to viruses have already been discovered and researched; this knowledge is now available. All scientists who think they are working with viruses in laboratories are actually working with typical particles of specific dying tissues or cells that were prepared in a special way. They believe that those tis-sues and cells are dying because they were infected by a virus. In reality, those prepared tissues and cells are dying because they were starved and poisoned as a consequence of the experiments in the lab.
Virologists primarily believe in the existence of viruses, because they add allegedly “infected” blood, saliva or other body fluids to the tissue and cell culture, and this, it must be stressed, after having withdrawn the nutrients from the respective cell culture and after having started poisoning it with toxic antibiotics. They believe that the cell culture is then killed by viruses. The key insight, however, is that the death of the tissue and cells takes place in the exact same manner when no “infected” genetic material is added at all. The virol-ogists have apparently not noticed this fact! According to the most basic scientific logic and the rules of scientific conduct, control experiments should have been carried out. In order to confirm the newly discovered method of so-called “virus propagation”, in order to see whether it was not the method itself causing or falsifying the result, the scientists would have had to perform additional experiments, called negative con-trol experiments, in which they would add sterile substances or substances from healthy people and animals to the cell cul-ture. This, of course, to check whether it is not the method itself that yields or falsifies the results.”
This completely unscientific approach originated in June 1954, when an unscientific and refutable speculative article was published, according to which the death of tissue in a test tube was considered a possible evidence for the presence of a virus. Six months later, on 10 December 1954, the main author of this opinion was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for another equally speculative theory. The speculation from June 1954 was then raised to a scientific fact due to this distinction and became a dogma which has never been challenged to this date. Since June 1954, the death of tissue and cells in a test tube has been regarded as proof for the existence of a virus.
The apparent evidence for the existence of viruses
The death of tissues/cells is also regarded as the isolation of a virus, because they claim that something from the outside, from another organism, was presumably brought into the laboratory. The fact is and remains that a virus has never been, the fact is and remains that a virus has never been isolated according to the meaning of the word isolation – has never been isolated according to the meaning of the word isolation, and it has never been photographed and biochemically characterised as a whole unique structure. The electron micrographs of the alleged viruses, for example, really only show cellular particles from dying tissue and cells, and most photos show only a computer model (CGI – computer generated images). Because the involved parties BELIEVE that the dying tissue and cells transform themselves into viruses, their death is also regarded as propagation of the virus. The involved parties still believe this because the dis-coverer of this method was awarded the Nobel Prize and his papers remain the reference papers on “viruses”. More about this below.
It is important to mention that this unpurified mixture consisting of dying tissue and cells from monkeys, bovine foetuses and toxic antibiotics, is also being used as a “live” vaccine, because it is supposed to be composed of “attenuated” viruses. The death of tissue and cells – on account of starvation and poisoning and not because of an alleged infection – has continuously been misinterpreted as evidence for the existence of viruses, as evidence for their isolation and as evidence of their propagation.
Thus, the resulting toxic mixture full of foreign proteins, foreign nucleic acids (DNA/RNA), cytotoxic antibiotics, microbes and spores of all types is labelled as a “live vaccine”. It is implanted in children through vaccination mainly into the muscles, in a quantity which if it were injected into the veins would immediately lead to certain death. Only ignorant people who blindly trust in the state authorities who are “testing”and approving the vaccines can regard vaccination as a “small harmless prick”. The verifiable facts demonstrate the danger and negligence of these scientists and politicians, who claim that vaccines are safe, have little or no sideeffects and would protect us from a disease. None of these claims is true and scientific, on the contrary: upon precise scientific analysis, one finds that vaccines are useless and the respective literature admits to the lack of any evidence in their favour.
Individual molecules are extracted from the components of dead tissue and cells, they are misinterpreted to be part of a virus and are theoretically put together into a virus model. It must be stressed, that a real and complete virus does not ap-pear anywhere in the entire “scientific” literature.”
source: https://wissenschafftplus.de/uploads/article/wissenschafftplus-the-virus-misconception-part-1.pdf
source : https://wissenschafftplus.de/uploads/article/wissenschafftplus-the-virus-misconception-part-2.pdf
btw , the author of those is a microbiologist AND virologist (unlike you who apparently considers NATURE magazine sufficiently benevolent and absolute to bestow , upon yourself , authority) who discovered the first giant “virus” in the ocean… this led him on a journey to do the actual research that you seem reticent to do… ultimately he ended up being vindicated on his challenge for ANYONE to be able to show him actual proof of the measured existence of the measles virus… and he offered $100k for anyone who could , so it isn’t as if the incentive wasn’t there. if the whole issue was as easily foo-foo’d as you seem to imply, then he would have lost the challenge… but no , the supreme court ruled in his favor…
sorry, you are a mental masturbator – enjoy your global depression based on cooties from 1st grade , child.
your job is to refute whats in the papers i provided to you . if you cant do that , you GOT NOTHING … but wait , you dont have an economy , freedom of movement , dominion over anything in your life … so i guess you are already there… how is your modern day belief in invisible demons working out for you and your family ?
When I see ambiguous garbage like “make them livable” instead of a more forthright “increase the fertility rate of urban dwellers” I get the feeling that the urbanization=death of civilization folks are more interested in tendentiously propounding their thesis than in examining its merits.
You go here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/all/?term=Virosphere%2C%20taxonomy%2C%20reviews&sp=c
And stop posting stupid stuff.
Hi, I’m a Neoplatonist and I can use the MORE tag.
I think that most would agree that simple forms of life preceded more complex forms. So what was the problem that caused the first single celled creatures like an amoeba to appear in the first place?
The depiction of an amoeba depicted above in #344 really doesn’t even begin to show the real complexity involved within an amoeba’s structure. I remember once being in the office of a professor of biochemistry at the farm campus of the U of M (on financial matters), and within his private office he had a huge (4 ft x 6 ft) depiction of a one celled amoeba framed on his wall. It was incredibly detailed and also included some inscriptions of the functions of the component parts. Take for instance just the outer wall of the amoeba, the cell membrane, and its particular part of the whole process that is much more complex than what you might think by just looking at the depiction in #344. The way the membrane regulates the passage of fluids within itself and that what it contains is just amazing. All of this complexity arose as a solution to what exact problem?
I’ve noticed that the right generally seem to rely more on emotiveness than statistics and facts. Like often on right wing forums and blogs they’ll post articles about blacks and Muslims committing heinous violent crimes as definite proof that all blacks and Muslims are evil basically.
Yet if someone mentions that there are plenty of examples of whites committing similar crimes, they then become angry and defensive and accuse the person of being anti-white, and try to claim that white criminals are not representative of the white race overall in the same way that non-white criminals are of their races.
This is especially true in the UK and Europe where there seems to be less definite stats proving that non-whites are more violent, in the US there seems to be more hard statistical evidence proving non-white criminality.
A lot of right wing thought seems to rely on the blatantly false mythology that white people do not commit crime, especially serious crime, and that they are uniquely and exclusively victimised by non-whites. Most white normies in the real world just find such an idea laughably absurd and ridiculous.
I also get the sense that a certain element of white nationalists are actually impressed by white criminals and see them as some sort of last stand of white masculinity, and see them as the last hope the white race has for competing head to head with the black and Muslim hordes.
I’m not cheering for that, it’s a simple empirical observation. The idea that it’d be possible to increase urban fertility rates (it evokes efforts to increase the fertility of inner city blacks… when in fact I’m talking about the urban middle and upper middle classes) is cool, but certainly no one is putting serious effort into it. Which might mean that it’s not possible in the real world, because civilizations are structured in a way that it’s never even tried seriously.
I saw the Grizzly Man film. Grizzly man and his girlfriend died because he ignored his own knowledge of the bears when they went back in the fall. That summer was a draught, meaning less food than normal in any given area. That meant when fall came, the bears had to roam a lot further in order to eat, and bulk up, for the winter hibernation. Being around bears at this time is dangerous to begin with, and even more dangerous as a result of the draught. As a bear aficionado, he knew these facts, Yet, he completely disregarded them when he went back to his “area” that fall. There were other bears, ones unfamiliar with him, in the area (duh! because of the draught) that were the ones that killed him and his girlfriend.
The Grizzly Man had a romanticized concept of nature and the animals that comprised it that was not consistent with reality. In the end, that is what killed him.
Survival. Amoebas without advanced fluids management systems died out and were unable to transmit their genetic information down the generation lines. So what you observe is the expression of the data set that was an effective solution to amoebas’ environment.
Just like for humans and all other critters, final form is less important than genetic content for the amoebas.
Going back earlier, it can generalized to life being a method for converting excess energy into information. All of us play a role in it as information storage devices as long as we survive long enough to propagate though the ages.
You’re just wrong.
The French and English aristocrats that started exploring the highest parts of the Alps at the beginning and middle of the 18th century could not have possibly been under the influence of an artistic/intellectual movement that had not even begun.
And Romanticism has very little to do with current mountaineering. Most of us do not have any interest whatsoever in giving up the advantages of modern life and civilization. A very big part of modern mountaineering is nothing more than vanity, which I can often recognize in myself when I inadvertently start bragging about my “victories” in the mountains. Climbing in that respect is no different from parachuting, car racing, boxing,…
But for me (and I know from many conversations I’ve had for many others) mountaineering is more than that. Some years ago I tried to climb the Aconcagua in alpine style (no mules o porters). I only had one week to complete the ascent and I couldn’t acclimatize so I began developing acute altitude sickness and lung edema. The headache wouldn’t go away no matter how many aspirines I took and I couldn’t stop coughing and wheezing so I decided to return to base camp in the middle of the night before things got worse. Dismounting my tent at 5F was a real torture. And making all the way back to civilization (20-30 miles) walking and coughing with a heavy backpack was one of the most agonizing experiences I remember in the mountains.
But a few weeks after I had returned home I began feeling nostalgic for those moments I had spent in the mountain. I wanted to go back. I didn’t return to the Aconcagua because shortly afterwards I moved to the US but there is no doubt in my mind that I’ll return some day and fight again against that hostile but beautiful environment.
Are you seriously telling me that I experience this kind of inner feelings because someone wrote something in the 19th century that is influencing my deep emotions?
I don’t even know what the hell Romantics wrote about mountains. I don’t read much fiction at all these days, I much prefer to use my limited reading time to essays and educational books. The only thing I know a little about the Romantic period is its music and I actually find it much less appealing than the previous Classical and Baroque periods. Your theory is totally flawed.
Thanks a lot for pointing out my bad choice of word. I now know that it does’t mean what I thought.
I was aware of Petrarch’s ascent, as well as many others that must have occurred in ancient times. I’ve seen remains of Inca burial sites at incredibly high altitudes. But there is a surprising lack of accounts of such ascents until the 18th century, even for easily climbable mountains such as the Mont Ventoux. Nowadays you can get almost to the very top on your bicycle.
But you still haven’t answered my question as to why did amoebas form in the first place? You stated that where ” There’s a problem and evolution provides a solution.” What was the problem (indeed, I don’t perceive of any problem, whatsoever), that precipitated evolution producing the first one celled amoeba in the first place? If they hadn’t been created in the first place, there wouldn’t ever have arisen the need for “survival”. To my way of thinking, without a first cause, something much less substantive than a perfect vacuum makes perfect sense.
Well, amoeba is a rather advanced example, but to generalize the mechanism, the main problem is excess energy. In our case, mostly coming from the Sun.
The Sun constantly pumps radiation to Earth, supplying energy, and our constituent particles (atoms, molecules etc) want to be in the lowest energy state possible. We can’t radiate away all of solar energy, so particles have to do their best to organize a more or less stable configuration. This leads to local reduction of entropy (disordered state) aka information gain. Life is not the only solution to this thermodynamics problem of course. You can radiate energy away or make crystals for example.
Anyway, the main problem that life tries to address is thermodynamic disequilibrium. If you turned off the Sun, problem would go away and life would stop.
Amoeba cell walls and ion pumps etc are a part of this energy management process. Amoeba with cell wall was able to deal with excess energy better than amoeba without.
So the reason that life exists is only as a reaction of thermodynamic desequilibreum? Seems like lifeforms should be evolving everywhere that sunlight (radioactivity) hits a cold surface, and we know that this isn’t true?….
https://twitter.com/NATO/status/1366355680681209859
I’ve basically only heard this used ironically. At least this exact phrase. Is there any original source of the phrase?
I don’t know, but when used ironically, I always thought it was an allusion to the slogan of the Party in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Ignorance Is Strength.”
But I think it is used unironically by true believer multiculturalists.
Considering that we have bacteria living on the outside of the International Space Station, sunlight hitting cold surface is the main critical requirement. Of course, raw materials are also nice, but those can be recycled.
There are other energy sources as well but on Earth Sun is the main one.
But yea, those bacteria in the vacuum of space are reacting to thermal disequilibrium. On other planets and moons, i would be surprised if we don’t find life where organic materials can be concentrated.
Dan Quayle, of all people. Bush Sr.’s idiot vice president. He was the first to say this exact phrase:
http://www.vicepresidentdanquayle.com/speeches_StandingFirm_CCC_1.html
From the perspective of many Japanese, the ethnic diversity of our culture is a weakness compared to their homogeneous society. I begged to differ with my hosts. I explained that our diversity is our strength.
Isn’t the phrase true for bioleninists? I mean, just because they want you to say it in order to humiliate you doesn’t make it a lie for them.
You have asked a very good question. I think that nobody really knows why life exists in this Universe or why the Universe itself exists. I remember hearing from our chemistry professor in the first year of my University program about the 2nd principle of thermodynamics. It absolutely made sense in a closed system. But when he said that it also applies to the whole Universe, I raised my arm and asked whether the definition of a closed system also applies to the Universe. The professor answered that there is nothing outside of the Universe, therefore Universe is obviously a closed system.
Fact is we don’t know. Life surfes on the wave of entropy. It maintains order in its systems by creating disorder around itself. Why living systems evolved to do this is far from being clear. It is as if nature itself (or God if you prefer) have given the complex systems the ability to evolve towards self-maintenance, self-preservation and self replication.
If someone really wants to ask a materialist a series of tough questions, then one should ask why lithosphere evolved towards biosphere and why biosphere evolved towards noosphere. Why through the process of evolution we have an increasingly efficient information processing in the biological systems. Why we have a development of central nervous system leading to an increasingly complex consciousness. What is the nature of information and what is the nature of consciousness…
“We can look at the concepts of not-permanent(anitya) and not-self(anatman) in objective terms, for example by deconstructing the concept of an aggregated object such as a lotus and seeing that the flower is made up entirely of non-flower elements like soil, nutrients, photosynthetic energy, rain water, genes. All of these factors, according to the Diamond Sutra, co-exist with each other to manifest what we call a ‘flower’. In other words, there is no essence arisen that is unique and personal to any being.”
There is no single cause, all phenomenas arise co-dependently(Pratityasamutpada) and things do not exist in a vacuum, for they are by their nature dependent on something else, co-dependent existence of things is not same as oneness of things, if things would be one, they could not arise co-dependently.
Thing is defined by its relation and to contrast to something else, nothing exists by its own self-power(svabhava), things do not have their own self nature. What would be blue without any other color? What would be softness without harshness? What would be sweetness without other tastes? What would be ugliness without beauty? When something is small, its always small in comparison with something else, when something is big, its big only in comparison to something else, by their mutual dependence do they arise, as do all things.
TLDR; You don’t need first cause, its not in accordance with the nature of our empirical reality, all things arise co-dependently. First cause just doesn’t make sense, such beliefs Bashibuzuk are just grasping, born from fear and anxiety.
Emotion and passion will always trump dry statistics when it comes to influencing people.
You are right that certain elements (in fact a significant portion) of White nationalists do not seem to care about White crime, even if they do acknowledge it. They just brush it aside as insignificant emotionally. Of course this is also what the “normies” do in relation to nonwhite crime.
In the UK particularly, we do not (yet) have a very large black population like America who are committing, in some categories, the majority of the violent crime despite only being 15%-ish of the population, although in London where blacks are 13% of the population, they make up around half of the murder suspects.
Perhaps this strategy of painting nonwhites as the drivers of crime would work in the future when the UK inevitably gets more black immigrants, but right now this strategy is futile.
⁹
I did not write anything about any first cause Altan. What I wrote was that we actually have no answer to these questions. We simply don’t really know because it is impossible to know that empirically or to devise a thought experiment convincing enough to explain why complex systems appeared through evolution. Mr Hack is right, an amoeba is already quite complex. Our organism is a couple of orders more complex than an amoeba. Between these two levels of biological organization is around a billion years of evolution and increasing complexity.
But this increased complexity is not needed from the point of view of a “selfish gene” model. Bacteria are exceedingly efficient at transmitting their genetic information. Life did not really have to evolve any further than that to keep the flow of genetic information going until the sun becomes a supernova and burns everything here.Life did not even really “need ” to evolve an amoeba and of course it did not “need” to develop conscious sentient beings.
Insufferable! I wrote “first cause,” for I tried to avoid harming those of who believe in God.
Or so you have made yourself to believe. Things and beings can interact because they are subject to change, if they are subject to change, they can’t have their own permanent immutable essence like the God is supposed to have. There’s nothing wrong or illogical from a Buddhist point of view to believe that there are superintelligences or smart aliens that have dabbled with human evolution or something, but to claim that there is a being with a permanent and unchanging essence, is same as claiming that magic exists. Such essence would not be capable of change, it could not interact with anything, it would be in violation with everything else. If you want more arguments then read Brahmajala sutta, read The Rice Seedling Sutra and read Atisa Dipamkara’s ‘A guide to the Two Truths.’ Read those Sutras and read Nagarjuna’s Root Verses of Middle way, maybe you are familiar with the first blessed verse of that Holy Scripture,
“Neither from itself nor from another,
Nor from both,
Nor without a cause,
Does anything whatsoever, anywhere ever arise.”
Your college professor was on to something that was proven by three physicists in 1993 in the seminal article “Inflationary Space Times Are Not Past Incomplete’ that has pretty much put the cosmological community on notice that some sort of organizing force is needed to put the creation of the universe into place.
Any universe that expands on average has a beginning implying a causal agent outside space and time that creates space, time, matter and energy
https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0110012
Sorry Altan, but what you have written has absolutely nothing to do with my comment. What I have written has nothing to do with God, first cause or Buddhist theories about codependent arising. My comment had nothing to do with what I do or don’t think about all these interesting topics. I have just written that from a purely scientific, empirical and experimental point of view, we have no knowledge about what drives the evolution of the increased complexity in the biological systems. Our current models do not explain this tendency towards increasing the complexity of biological organization. And we have no idea why biology led to the emergence of a consciousness. Consciousness is not needed from a purely biological perspective.
My college professor was just explaining the 2nd principle of thermodynamics. He avoided any metaphysical implications of what we was talking about.
Thermal dissipation is far incomplete in being able to act as the causal agent of any lifeform from ever appearing. There’s a lot more going on within living organisms that just can’t be explained by thermal dissipation:
https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/todays-new-reason-to-believe/read/todays-new-reason-to-believe/2016/12/07/does-dissipation-driven-theory-explain-life-s-origin
The metaphysical element was fortunately first let out of the box by Stephen Hawkings. 🙂
Are you kidding? It’s forever being piously intoned. And that’s just the mild version. Plenty of people prefer the stronger version: diversity is our greatest strength.
(Pure lunacy from top to bottom, of course, but that’s the age we live in.)
A phrase about religion that has been attributed to various writers applies just as well to diversity: Foolish people consider diversity strength; the wise, weakness; politicians, useful.
I am more inclined to follow Sir Roger Penrose than Stephen Hawking. BTW, AFAIK Hawking and Penrose are both Agnostics, which is the right mindset for any serious scientific exploration. It is only by admitting that we dont know something that we can start trying to figure out this something. Any metaphysical ideas or intuitive understanding are helpful in steering creativity, but they cannot represent a final proof from the experimental point of view.
Yes, they have that quality in common with all other human beings.
And yes, they’re known to react angrily and defensively when you question some aspect of their political beliefs – probably because they assume you’re attempting to overthrow their entire worldview. And they’re not necessarily wrong in this assumption, because even though no one debates WNs in mainstream public forums, they still do encounter considerable debate on their own media platforms, and the purpose of those debates, from the perspective of opponents of WN, very much is to undermine the entire WN belief system.
Lastly, being emotional isn’t intrinsically self-defeating. Jews are monumentally emotional when it comes to defending their interests. They don’t attempt to reason; they go for the jugular. And they don’t let anything slide either. They don’t say, oh he’s just a minor ‘anti-semite’, no need to bother with him; nope, they try to nail them all, big and small. Seems to have been working fairly well for them, I’d say.
I find it odd how the terms “English” and “Anglo” no longer seem to refer to a coherent ethno-national group. Countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and parts of the US are full of people who the greater part of their ancestry is from England, but not full of people who identify as “English”. There seems to be no such thing as an “English diaspora”, in fact it seems to me that many people of English ancestry would take offense to being called “English”.
Being English/Anglo seems to be more a state of mind and indicative of certain allegiances than anything else, like there could easily be Indians and Hong Kongers who are bigger “Anglos” than people in Australia and the US of actual English ancestry.
It seems to me the terms “English” and “Anglo” are more akin to “Jew” than to other European ethno-national groups, in that they donate a group with certain customs, behavioural traits and world view made up of individuals of different races than a coherent ethnic group like say Poles or Germans.
So what exactly is the human race “co-dependent” on, in order to not just exist in its own self nature?
All of this stuff evolved much later though, for survival reasons. First life when it appeared didn’t have any of it.
Original life was most likely some kind of RNA molecule in a soup of supporting biomaterials. It was capable of self catalysis and replication but not much more.
Machinery evolved later to support the replication process. RNA molecules that incorporated machinery outcompeted molecules that didn’t. Eventually supporting machinery became so critical RNA couldn’t maintain it anymore (RNA is a rather fragile molecule) and a more stable DNA replaced it for information storage purposes.
Nature doesn’t reward complexity, nature rewards results. The only reason life has to be complex is because its weak. A diamond crystal can withstand like 1000 atmosphere pressure and 1,000C temperature. Diamond crystal doesn’t need to be complex, diamond is strong. In environments where diamond is just fine, life has to evolve or it gets wiped out.
Life dreams of being as strong as the diamond. (Hollywood superhero movies follow exactly the same desire as amoeba cell wall evolution).
So would you consider the amoeba to be one of the early or later life forms that you’ve categorized?
After all, it does seem to have most, if not all of the properties listed within the criteria list enumerated above (comment #393)?
Amoeba is a later life form. Because of that, you are right, it does have all those properties.
I don’t know the age of every single bug obviously, but it looks like amoebas diversified about 750 million years ago.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/amoebas-diversified-much-earlier-than-thought/
So their technology is a billion years old, give or take a few hundred million. That’s relatively young.
For contrast, earliest life on Earth known so far is around 4 billion years old, and I’m interested in looking for life 5 billion years back or more (for reference, planet Earth and Solar System is 4.5 billion years old). Its not as crazy as it sounds – molecular clouds and stellar forges are very interesting places, with some very favorable conditions.
I guess you could accuse me of poetic license 🙂
Our observed reality is the result of the survival process. Its a universal principle – applies to rocks etc just like it applies to life. No difference. The rocks have adapted to existing environmental conditions just like life has. Rocks that have been crushed, diluted by water or acids in the environment etc and don’t exist anymore, so you don’t see them.
So this is what i meant by “nature rewards results” – your reality consists of the survivors of environmental adaptation process. Those that fail this process, be they rocks or amoebas or Hollywood producers, don’t get to exist, and so don’t get to form existing reality. Evolution never stops, as long as the environment keeps changing. Even for rocks and Hollywood producers. Biological evolution is an important subset of this phenomenon.
I have no problem with your explanation, it is not a bad one.
But why do we have an Universe, especially one which cosmological constants lead to the talk about the infamous Anthropic Principle?
Can we really have a straightforward answer to this question?
As you mention, people have been climbing much more difficult mountains since prehistoric times (Himalayan tribes may even be genetically adapted for it).
The reason I mention Petrarch is that he was one of the first, or actually the first as far as I know, to provide a metaphysical framework for writing such an account, where the ascent as a process and his feelings about it would be meaningful in a certain way.
Not today.
We have a multiverse hypothesis where we are one of many universes which would be convenient but we don’t have evidence for it. It would solve accelerating universe expansion problem though. Imagine inflating a water balloon in a bathtub. Water space exands inside the balloon, contracts outside, total water remains the same.
We need better telescopes to see further back in time and to understand things like dark matter and dark energy. Those things are unknown, constitute vast majority of the Universe, and could have their own laws of physics for all we know. Until we figure out what happens in the bulk of the Universe, we won’t really know why it exists.
Which is what I was writing about in one of my earlier reply to Mr. Hack.
Interestingly enough Sir Roger Penrose has this to say about it:
https://youtu.be/ypjZF6Pdrws
Which is greatly summarized by the picture below:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRWrOoa9QV55fU6vwDSkWVgUShY4QzreZWNRQ&usqp=CAU
I hope you are familiar with this symbol…
In retrospect, it seems pointless those stories of Orban’s “state of emergency” last year, when once coronavirus hit the country, Hungary’s government would enforce a less effective lockdown than in Western Europe.
Hungary now has to rely on the population being happy to be injected with a Chinese vaccine that has a lack of public information about it.
But at least Hungary’s government is operating like a developed country in terms of openly reporting daily information about the high numbers of deaths, unlike in Russia and Belarus where you cannot avoid saying there is an intentional attempt to minimize reporting of the real number deaths, even as the government will eventually admit the real number of deaths months later in the most vague way possible.
I don’t know if anyone here is nerdy enough to be interested in posts about music theory?
Tatu had visionary Japanese anime aesthetics, and the lesbian marketing gimmick (that probably real lesbians should be offended about), but early Tatu was also musically good, with distinctive local Russian, postsoviet sounds.
We can hear there are some very Russian “melodic grammar” in early Tatu songs.
For example, in the song Gay Boy – if you can ignore the fake LGBT marketing gimmick in lyrics (that implies that female singer is heterosexual), musically well written song, with some authentic Russian traits.
If you listen to the intervals in 0:53 in the melody (“apologies, might have beens, malchik gay, malchik gay”) I can hear is a rising second and falling fourth interval of the melody.
This rising second to falling fourth sound, was a bit of self-conscious trademark for a group of Russian nationalist composers (especially Tchaikovsky, Musorgsky, et al, who were both gay) since the late 19th century, and of course it’s very common in Soviet pop songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wRhevyP7pc
It’s since the mid-2000s or 2010s especially, that the Russian pop music has been washed out of distinctive local elements, while in early 2000s Tatu we still hear what I would interpret as local Russian sounds.
The distinctively Japanese sounding harmonic element found frequently in their pop songs since at least the 1990s, was first used in Western classical and jazz music. However, it represents something very Japanese, in the sense of the showing the appetite for more complex and refined sounds.
This shows both the Japanese pop composers have more advanced training in theory and voicings, but also that there is more taste for complexity in the audience for Japanese pop music. And that is something which probably expresses the national quality of the culture (i.e. higher average musicality of the Japanese pop music consumers).
It was also a self-conscious, intention, decision of the Russian government (United Russia political party) domestic propaganda or marketing to the older voters, to say “sure, they might have cleaner water and higher salaries in Austria or Sweden, but you should be happy to support the government because we don’t have those crazy gay parades like they do, and that weird propaganda about sexual minorities and non-binary genders in the schools”.
This geopoliticization of the LGBT issue by both sides (both NATO and the authorities in Russia) has contributed to attacks on the image of Russian society in the West, while at the same time creating a distorted image of the reality: there is no persecuting sexual minorities in Russia, and there currently is a historically unprecedented toleration of sexual minorities. There are gay nightclubs even in quite minor cities, etc – the difference between West and Russia on this topic is more like a difference of cultural etiquette, and even religion in the sense that Russia has not converted to some recent Western religious fashions (as in England you can see LGBT flags have become like religious symbols that are almost used to decorate buildings for good luck or virtue signalling).
Yea, that’s kinda where i was going with water balloon in a bathtub analogy. Gravity pumps spacetime back and forth between dimension sets. Such Ouroboros is possible, but we’ll see.
Does empirical mean deriving from sense experience? In empiricist metaphysics there are core concepts like:
Brute facts are conceivable and at least some exist (brute facts being contingent things which exist without cause and explanation).
A reductive analysis of cause and effect; they are ‘loose and separate’, it is conceivable for one to arise without the other, there is no necessary connection between them.
I don’t accept empiricist metaphysics but I believe these are important positions within it.
Cities were population sinks, but was that because of low birth rates or simply because of very high death rates from infectious diseases?
From society’s point of view yes, you should. But from an individual’s point of view the advantages of childlessness, or of limiting your family to just one child, far outweigh the disadvantages.
And you are never going to persuade people to have children as a social duty, unless you’re prepared to embrace totalitarianism or theocracy.
If you want higher birth rates you have to somehow persuade people that it is in their individual interests to have two or more children. And since in reality it is not in their individual interests to do so that’s going to be a tough sell.
And economic incentives will do little to help since the advantages of childlessness, or of limiting your family to just one child, go way beyond mere economic advantages.
If you want higher birth rates you have to somehow persuade people to act against their own best interests.
It is pretty obvious that you know nothing at all about the Romantic Movement. But you’re still prepared to deny the influence of a movement about which you admit you know nothing.
Urban life and civilisation both mean more choices. Our civilisation offers even more choices than previous civilisations, and we’re more urbanised than any previous civilisation. And our choices have grown steadily over the past century and a half, and a century and a half ago was when the demographic collapse started among the upper and middle classes (who were the first to have access to so many choices).
In pre-industrial societies if you’re a peasant child you know what you’re going to be when you grow up – you’re going to be a peasant. If you were a child of a feudal lord you knew what you’re going to be when you grew up – you were going to be a a feudal lord. In pre-industrial times women had two choices – they could be wives and mothers or (in some societies) they could be nuns.
I don’t think low urban fertility has anything to do with overcrowding or something psychologically bad about city life. Low urban fertility has everything to do with the fact that urban life in our civilisation is so very very pleasant and offers so many pleasant choices. If you have so many choices on offer why would you confine yourself to just one choice – raising a large family?
This explains why fertility has also crashed in East Asian societies – those societies now offer people just as many pleasant choices.
It’s not urbanisation as such – it’s living in a society in which, from an individual’s point of view, having no children mends having lots of pleasant choices, having just one child offers at least a reasonable array of pleasant choices and having more than one child limits one’s choices drastically.
Civilisation and urban life are very very good things from an individual’s point of view. They may be bad things from society’s point of view but nobody makes the decision either to have children or not have children based on society’s wellbeing.
As I said in another comment, to increase the birth rate you have to persuade people to act against their own best interests.
If you had a totalitarian society in which nobody had any choices you’d probably have high urban fertility.
Following your logic, if civilization is good, and urban life offers so many choices to people that they stop having children, then urbanization is logically bad. Assuming, of course, that you are eventually going to need those high IQ urban children to keep civilization.
Am I missing something?
I think it’s a pretty warped understanding of what people’s interests are.
A drug addict would consider it in his own better interest to get high. It’s certainly more pleasant to be high for a drug addict than to be craving the drug. Just as doing those other things is also more pleasant than having children. But is destroying your life as a drug addict really in your best interest? Is indulging in those other pleasures really in your own interest?
I only have two children, but certainly it seems like a good thing, so far. It’s also my impression that people rarely regret having children. Okay, there are cases. Your child killing another of your children. Or a relative. Or just committing something horrible, like a mass shooting. But how typical is it? The typical experience of parents is far more joyful than that. Despite all the difficulties.
A civilization that comes to debating whether it is good or bad to have children is already half-dead. Country people had no time for this kind of craziness, only post-modern urban types have. Having children is not good or bad, it is necessary if we want our genetic lineage to get carried over to the future of the culture we find ourselves immersed in. By not having children we kill that culture in the not so long run
The problem of building a functional human society is that you always come up against irreconcilable contradictions and paradoxes. You can make things better for society as a whole but that will make things worse for many (possibly even most) individuals, so that’s bad. You can make things better for the individual but that will probably make things worse for society as a whole, so that’s bad too.
Anything you do will make things worse, and better.
You have to compromise but nobody will ever agree on which compromises to make.
I think that as a general rule civilisations organised for the benefit of society as a whole are going to be unpleasant societies in which to live.
That may be because in our society the people who have children are the people who really really want children, so naturally they’re happy with their decision. It may also be that the people who may have ended up regretting having children choose not to do so, so they’re also happy with their decision.
It may be that in order to increase the birth rate it will be necessary to force people who are really not suited to parenthood to have children against their will, so the end result will be bad for them and bad for the children. You’ll have a higher birth rate but overall a less happy society.
The first thing we need to do is to figure out whether it really matters if the population declines. Obviously population decline would present challenges and would need to be skilfully handled but it might in the long term be very beneficial for both society as a whole and for the individuals who compose society.
There’s a tendency for people on the Right to assume, without any actual evidence, that population decline would be a terrible thing. Maybe that assumption needs to be challenged.
And no, I’m not a nutjob environmentalist whining about the planet dying or any such claptrap. And I’m not advocating some weirdo Illuminati conspiracy to genocide the population. I’m simply suggesting that we really do need to consider whether population decline is necessarily a bad thing.
If it’s not a bad thing then we don’t need to consider coercing people into having children they don’t want.
If you’re worried about the very long term survival of the human species, or even the very long term survival of our civilisation, it might be worth considering that the optimum population for ensuring that survival might be a lot lower than the present population level.
It is not a very long term that I am worried about. It is a couple of generations time period.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/sep/03/race.world
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/05/future-immigration-will-change-the-face-of-america-by-2065/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/white-britons-will-be-minority-2070-says-professor-8600262.html
https://torontolife.com/city/torontos-population-will-change-next-50-years/
I could add more, but I believe you get the point. And it’s everywhere in the Western countries. The same trend is also apparent in Eastern Europe, although less markedly so. We are facing a world where the European populations and their siblings in the former colonies are made into an insignificant minority in a significant part of the world that they have dominated so completely in 1900.
The change is unprecedented, except perhaps for the fall of the Roman Empire. It is happening right before our eyes. But people are too selfish to think of anything else than their own puny interests and insignificant preferences. The spirit of the collective White man has become weak, he is no more the “Son of the Wolf” that Jack London wrote about. Perhaps we should call him the “Father of the Chihuahua ” today for all those feeble minded who chose to take care of a dog or a cat instead of their own genetic lineage.
Do you own a pet? If not, I suggest you adopt one – a Chinchilla perhaps. Chinchillas are cute and soft, you should try having one. Unlike with children, no strings attached, no significant costs, no problems at all: a Chinchilla is mainly sleeping in its cage.
Or if you are still young and energetic enough, you could try the complicated adventure of having kids. Who knows, you might even like it. They are sometimes surprisingly entertaining and if you do your best, they might even come to visit for the Hollydays when you’re old, sick and lonely.
I don’t know how many children you have or where you get your ideas about the horrors of having children, but in general it’s not so bad. Right now a baby is sleeping on my chest while I’m idly reading these comments and listening to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. My wife talking to my older kid. I can certainly imagine a more horrible fate than that.
It’s everywhere in the developed world. Birth rates are lower in East Asian countries than the West. And even in many African countries birth rates are starting to fall. Fertility has plummeted in Kenya for example. It’s a global problem. It’s going to affect every country, every race.
But what can do about it? We know that economic incentives achieve very little. We don’t even know for sure why fertility has collapsed. There are theories (right-wingers have lots of conspiracy theories to explain it) but we don’t really know.
It’s highly likely that the extreme measures that would be needed to do anything about it would lead to massive political instability. You’d need sweeping changes to the political and economic system and sweeping social changes. That could create political chaos. My feeling is that if you’re serious about getting back to replacement-level fertility you’d need some form of totalitarianism.
You can of course simply blame civilisation and suggest that we go back to subsistence farming. That would reduce population drastically through mass starvation.
Do you have a workable solution that you’d like to share with us?
You’re missing my point entirely. I’m not suggesting that there’s anything unpleasant about having children. What I am suggesting is that a society that compelled people to have children whether they wanted to or not would be an unpleasant society.
You’d need to attach prestige to having many children, and making them believe that having many children is the good and responsible thing to do. For example commercials should show families with 3+ children (instead of 1 or 2 mixed race children with a white mother and black father) etc. Also, I would reduce the pressure on parents by telling them that the outcomes largely depend on genetics and not whatever you do to your children. Interestingly I learned about a couple only children that in both cases the mothers were breastfeeding for 3-4 (!) years. Also in both cases the mother spends enormous energy on tutoring or otherwise improving the children. Is it a surprise that they are unwilling to double that enormous workload?
The tiger parenting East Asians spend even more time, energy and money on their (usually only) children. Again, little wonder they don’t won’t to double or triple the experience.
The Roman patricians’ children cost so much that they often gave them up for adoption (there was a complicated system of this), but basically the richer you were, the more expensive to get your children into a “good enough” position was. Quite logically, since the places on the top were limited, which is why they were on the top. Downward mobility always looks horrible, but it’s usually not a tragedy if you are high enough.
We don’t have to solve the issue. It will solve itself through a collapse cycle anyway.
You don’t seem to realize how enormous pressure our society puts on us already, to eat as little meat as possible (perhaps go vegan), to spend time and money on the children (or not to beat them – I have never hit my children, despite having been spanked often in my childhood), to kneel for blacks, etc.
You would only need to redirect that pressure in a slightly different direction.
Heterosexual people who remain childless should be taxed significantly more. That’s a simple solution, there are others. I agree that it would take a form of totalitarian society to get there.
Yes.
Helicopter parenting is undoubtedly a major factor in declining birth rates. It’s not just the time and effort invested in improving the children – it’s the immense workload involved in supervising them. Because if your children are not supervised 24 hours a day they’ll be murdered for sure.
So would you be OK with that?
Debating the question is not a result of “death of civilization”, but that man has now become too technologically intelligent for nature, and can have sex without children, which is to say now in the position of an experimental mouse which is able to get the reward without receiving the electric shock as punishment.
Throughout all history of our human and non-human ancestors, animals have children, because nature has wired you to want to have sex, and the motive to have sex is not because of anyone cared about the future of civilization (even a century and half ago, our ancestors would not understand about such concepts as “civilization”).
Nature has ensured that we have children, at the most hardware level by connecting our genitals to dopamine pathways in brain, and has installed many other commands in to make you attracted to opposite sex.
In the last century, as a result of technological development, for the first in history, it becomes easy to have sex without having children, – then for the first time in history there is an animal “debating whether it is good or bad to have children”. Thus, it is an inevitable result of the stage of man’s technology, when this reward pathway that was built into us by nature has been bypassed, and the animal can debate whether he should use the newly discovered bypass or not. .
It can be* that our civilization will die if we do not have on average, two children with a partner from the same race/nationality as our own one.
But never in human or animal history has desires for future civilization, been the motive that resulted in children, and it is only in our current technological situation that allows easily to have sex without producing children, that we would need a motive in addition to the natural instinct to have sex.
The major discovery of the “alt-right” is that we already have a totalitarian society. If it’s fine for most people, a totalitarian society with a different direction would be fine, too.
I personally don’t like openly totalitarian societies like Nazism (though the big issue with Nazism was not even the police state, rather that it all depended on the whims of a supreme Leader, who happened to be a fanatical utopianist, leading the whole system into a catastrophe of an unwinnable total war while committing mass murder, tainting the name of his ideology and anything even loosely associated with it forever), but for most people it’s not even that big of a difference. And really, is it? Is what we have now that much freer than Nazi Germany?
I guess we don’t have a world war (yet) and no mass murder, so far. But the whole thing is getting increasingly unstable and unsustainable.