Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Lotuseaters Dot Com" channel.

  1. "There has always been more cooperation between men and women, than a 'battle of the sexes' view of history would indicate" Absolutely true. My parents and grandparents had very traditional marriages and households, and I never got the slightest idea that either my mother or grandmother were somehow out of the loop when it came to decision-making. They never got 100% their own way, which is what feminists are demanding now -- and neither did their husbands, as feminists are claiming now. Feminism is basically a lie that makes everyone unhappy.
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  2. Being judged by the content of their character is a losing proposition for these race hustlers.
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  3. If the Republicans were doing this, the word "Fascism" would be on the lips of every media pundit in the English-speaking world.
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  4. Batman doesn't represent order. Commissioner Gordon represents order. Batman is The Hero, navigating between order (the law) and chaos (crime) through vigilantism, which is a mix of order and chaos.
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  5. The majority can't be "far-right". Whatever the majority is, includes the Center.
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  6. "We shouldn't have children to take care of us when we're old" That is exactly what every imaginable retirement scheme depends on. If you're 80, and you need food, someone's child will be the one growing it for you. If you're 80, and you need medical attention, someone's child will be providing it for you. If you're 80, and you need your housing maintained, someone's child will be the one fixing it for you. If you did not contribute to the task of having and raising your own children, you are freeloading off of someone else's work. If you did not want to contribute to the task of having and raising your own children, you are shirking what will always be a critical duty.
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  7. "How many children benefit from learning cellular biology?" Having a passing knowledge of mRNA can help with evaluating whether products based on mRNA technology have merit or risks, and can assist on spotting careless (or fake) news stories on the subject.
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  8. "Matt Walsh has nothing to offer kids who are worried that they're different" - Everyone is different in some way, and everyone has struggles - There's a lot more to life than the voices in your pants, deliberately ignoring them opens up a whole lot of options you would otherwise ignore - People who "have a lot to offer" to you are frequently just pandering to you to use you, without having anything like your best interests at heart That'll do for a start.
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  9. "You'd think that an organization dedicated mental health would be immune to this sort of insanity" An organization that "determines" what is and isn't sane (as if there's no objective measures to that) is specifically targeted for its authority, by people who want to redefine sanity to suit their own mental problems.
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  10. Considering that redemption is possible in those who have some sense of right and wrong, I think there is a compelling "mad dog" argument for putting down people with insufficient sense of right and wrong to refrain from destroying others. Arkham should be a graveyard, not an asylum.
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  11. "I don't believe in Christianity, but I think it's best when other people do" Everyone has to do their bit, dear.
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  12. "We could talk about the wars of religion" You mean the wars of ambitious noble houses? Do you really think the Bourbons, Hapsburgs, or Vasas would have been any less ambitious or warlike, if Luther had never become a monk?
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  13. "I don't believe in Christianity, but I think it's best when other people do" Gibbon claimed: "All religions are equally true to their adherents, equally false to the philosophers, and equally useful to the magistrate", although looking at the difference between governments and cultures built within Christianity vs. other religions, one feels that Gibbon was missing something important.
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  14. Beethoven was as disillusioned revolutionary -- look at the controversy over the 3rd Symphony, "Eroica". He was egalitarian as well, having little patience for the two-tiered justice system that allowed aristocrats more access to courts -- see his experience with child custody.
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  15.  @michaelsorensen7567  It's approximately the same level of detail. You'd probably get it in the same class.
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  16. "It goes to crazytown" It was never going to go anywhere else, Peter.
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  17. "It's interesting that Constantine was adjudicating arguments between various church factions" To be fair, per St. Paul the purpose of government is to maintain order.
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  18. More Klavan on Lotus Eaters!
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  19. Christian emphasis on consideration for the physically weak, allows for much greater specialization and thus, prosperity. Think about minority cultures who use physical strength and aggression to discourage people from "acting white" -- i.e., doing well in school -- and consider how they have demonstrably wrecked their own economic prospects.
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  20. The legendary Royal Navy was overcome by a flock of small boats...
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  21. Divorce lawyers always have their own best interests in mind.
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  22. "How do you deal with neighborhoods that are collapsing and houses that can't be sold?" If a neighborhood is abandoned and the house purchase price falls below $10 or so (if they can't be sold within a year), then the state government should knock them down and let the land re-wild, or convert to farmland.
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  23. Except we have the best healthcare in the world, as well as the vast majority of the new cures and procedures. Do we have to pay for the non-recurring costs that go along with the research and development? Yes. Does that mean some people can't afford it, at first? Yes, unfortunately, but it's better than never coming up with anything new in the first place.
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  24.  @brendancoulter5761  Gibbon was just anti-Christian. Tom Holland in some ways is an upgrade who has seen the wisdom that Gibbon missed.
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  25. "You may prioritize rightly so your education, rightly so your career" Is it the right thing, though? Is it the right thing, if it means that your society will collapse? Is it the right thing, if whatever you hoped to accomplish with your career or your education has only a <10% chance of ever happening?
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  26. Sounds like the solution involves helping parents straighten things out between them.
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  27. "You never knew whether you were cooking for five or fifteen, must be a nightmare for the people cooking" Nah, you just cook a couple pounds of meat and a few pounds of pasta, expect leftovers, and sometimes the people who show up bring something too.
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  28. "Childless people should be treated as second-class citizens" No. It would be most appropriate for childless people to be denied tax-based retirement benefits, including health benefits. If the working-out of this policy resulted in the privatization of health care, schools, and daycare, that would be fair.
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  29. It would also help if Atheists would stop shooting the front-line defenders of Western Civilization (Christians) in the back. Stop shooting holes in the boat, if you're crying that it's sinking.
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  30. If I could only be on streaming video for five minutes a week, I would watch Klavan's opening monologue and nothing else -- even if it didn't run the whole five minutes.
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  31. Guys, we figured out the balance of Welfare State and Free Market by trial and error. It's kind of what the Cold War is about. Both laissez-faire capitalism, and its antithesis communism, are at this point about equivalent to Monarchism -- a quaint historical idea. We have determined that the best way to use industrialization to produce and distribute goods, is the market-economic welfare state. Where is the current state of the dialectic? Well, it looks to me like Fukuyama's "liberty-minded democracy" is getting challenged by "authoritarian bureaucracy" both domestically and internationally. Brexit, populism, the powers of government officials during an epidemic, a new rivalry with China -- all of these are currently being debated. The sooner we understand that this is where the dialog truly is, the sooner we can develop a strategy to make sure that Authoritarian Bureaucracy does not win. The proper way to frame yesterday's question was, "How do we best use industrialization to produce and distribute goods?" Today's question ought to be, "How do we harness expertise in the service of a free people?"
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  32. “A Little Neglect May Breed Great Mischief” “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost, And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”
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  33. "In the 90's, atheism was something that was inflicted on me, not something I chose." That's a remarkable thing to say. We have "cradle atheists" now?
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  34.  @fatimahsharpe9113  There's some intellectual weight behind the original Reformers as well. Although, having a deliberate structure for good works is a good idea. And churches dripping with religious meaning, where every square foot includes some illumination of some aspect of faith, can help keep you in mind of how full the world is, of meaning. On the other hand, there's something to be said for Protestant simplicity and lack of distractions, or for filling the space with meaning by filling it with music. Christian art, architecture, design - it's fascinating.
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  35.  @Dev-ek6qm  Apparently an "identity" devoted to non-reproductive sex is hereditary though, according to today's conventional wisdom. Yeah, I think they're deeply stupid too.
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  36. "One culture can recognize what is valuable in another, and adopt those norms" Yes. This is one of the major themes in Herodotus, where he writes about interesting things that other Mediterranean cultures do, that are worth remarking on. He finds only one culture in his stories that has nothing to recommend it, which he remarks upon, as he passes on to other more useful matters.
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  37.  @Abyssal86  It was when I was in high school biology.
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  38. When judging Cicero's political skills, please consider that he died at the hands of his political enemies.
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  39. I don't always agree with him either, but I deeply respect his rationales for his ideas, even if I don't weight them the same as he does.
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  40. Find who is responsible for this. Find who they are connected to. Find who is funding them. Tell us who they are. We can speak out against them, but we need to know who to watch out for.
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  41.  @umiluv  Driving drunk doesn't guarantee you'll be involved in a fatal accident, either. Your attitude towards marriage is one of the reasons I just can't respect Libertarianism -- it seems just childishly stupid sometimes.
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  42.  @markzuckergecko621  Attempted murder is a crime that only comes into existence because a very specific other crime (murder) failed to happen. "But nothing happened, how can it be a crime?" is a silly defense. "Reckless endangerment" is the basis for criminalizing drunk driving. While we can argue about degree if you'd like, the same logical basis exists for criminalizing no-fault divorce when children are involved.
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  43. "Jimmy Stewart, Jack Kirby, even Elvis Presley answered their country's call and fought" It's fascinating to see what kind of difference that makes in their art -- compare the veteran JRR Tolkien, who lost close friends at the Somme, and the draft-dodging George Martin. The one who actually experienced the horror was the idealist, and the nihilistic coward died his thousand deaths by inflicting them on his characters.
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  44. Another quotable line from T'sao T'sao is, "Better that I should wrong the world, than the world should wrong me" which is a fairly thorough inversion of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". I have to wonder if this is Christian influence creeping in.
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  45. "The process of discovering the law through precedent seems to me the best way to go" - Either Sargon of Akkad or Edmund Burke. I'm not sure.
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  46. "The printing press wasn't dangerous" Pamphleteering had its fascinations and its risks.
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  47. Rationalism narrows your vision, and puts blinders on you. The Rationalist lens is tightly focused. You can gain much insight into the structure of how things work, abstracting in this way. Romanticism, on the other hand, takes all detail into account and nourishes human intuition with it. While this can lead to superstitions -- correlations without causations -- it avoids neglecting important factors, and takes into account how a combination of factors can override any given narrow concern. Looking at how convolutional neural nets work, and comparing that inexact model to how the human brain actually works, gives you a good notion of the mechanics here.
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  48.  @ThursonJames  Matt's more of a slow burn, and needs more than five minutes a week to appreciate. I absolutely admire what he's getting out there and doing in the wider world, though. SBG is going to be instrumental in getting our country back on track. I'm looking forward to it.
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  49. As far as I can tell, this was written AFTER the Second World War was over. As the war was going, he wrote the following: “I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus [Jeff Bezos?] (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”
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  50. "Any college counselor is going to be highly biased on the transgender direction" In America, a therapist or psychologist can LOSE THEIR LICENSE if they do anything other than affirm a patient's transgender thoughts. The therapist who knows the details of the patient's life and troubles, who thinks that transition is nothing like the best path for their patient, is FORCED to remain silent.
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  51. "The war on the genders is so important and so worth fighting back - and again, I want to fight it back without being unkind to [certain] people" It could well be that G*d made Spencer is who he is because He needed Klavan to be who he is here. Christ insists that we must be kind to everyone, and unless we can see some of us with a non-negotiable relationship -- like between a father and a son -- we could forget just who is included in "everyone".
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  52. "Adolts" "Aduhlts" "Addle-ts"
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  53.  @reedmckinney7426  Guess what? Parents have to pay those taxes too. So, freeloading.
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  54. "The pill should only be available to married women" The problem is, it changes who you are attracted to. Hormonal contraception may well be a contributor to divorce. It should be banned entirely as an environmental toxin.
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  55.  @skylinefever  Sometimes they cheat by picking a different line -- sometimes it's better that way. Per capita GDP is a better line, I'd think.
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  56. The 20th century Cold War established the Market-Economic Welfare State, which was the synthesis of Capitalism and Communism. Saying you're a Marxist these days (kind of like saying you're a lasseiz-faire capitalist) is a lot like saying you're a Monarchist. You're simply a quaint relic of a bygone era, that history has passed by. If you'd like a new dialectic to pursue, one that hasn't been determined yet but instead is actively working itself out in the national and international politics of the current day, I'd recommend Liberty-minded Democracy vs. Authoritarian Bureaucracy. In other words, instead of rehashing the more or less settled question of the Market in an economy, you could point your musings towards the role of Expertise in politics. The answer is not "Experts must run everything". The answer is not "Expertise must always be ignored". What, exactly, will the proper balance be? What mechanics will it involve? How will individual freedom survive? From Xi Jinping's central planning vs the West, to Parents vs. Teachers, to Brussels vs. Brexit, to Trudeau vs. Truckers, this is the common thread running through our most important political questions of the day. A free and intelligent discussion of these topics, along with careful and honest observations about what people trying and whether it works, might actually save us the kind of conflict we saw during the 20th century. One can hope, anyway.
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  57. "The Reformers were so certain of themselves" Have you read Luther's 95 Theses? Mostly he was certain that the Church was wrong, on specific issues. He was thinking for himself, and asking for a debate so that more people could come to the truth.
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  58.  @umiluv  "I don't drive drunk, but criminalizing it for others is [somehow] wrong" Can you hear how crazy this sounds?
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  59.  @umiluv  I've been presenting evidence for all the issues that I've brought up. These are a result of critical thinking, and not at all "blind faith". It looks like you're taking "thinking critically" to mean, "thinking that inevitably undermines whatever is being thought about". It's a common problem in sophomoric discourses. I think it's formally called the genetic fallacy, where the truth or untruth of a proposition is judged not on the proposition's merits, but on the source of that proposition. Blind doubt is no better than blind faith. Worse, actually; if religion is not the literal Word of God, then it's most likely something like the surviving collected wisdom of countless generations. (Which, in case you missed it again, is the logic behind having simple faith in the church.) I think you will find wisdom if you question things -- including questioning the wisdom of questioning everything.
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  60. The argument I've heard from Andrew Klavan about the term "Christ is King", is about the context -- like, crosses are fine, but burning crosses are not.
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  61. "If you're saying that the only people doing things and thinking things are men" you haven't sufficiently established just how valuable having and raising kids is.
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  62. "Jesus helps me win fights" You mean like Cromwell? Or Midway?
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  63. Rational consciousness is not the only capability of our minds. It isn't even the MAIN capability, it's more like an afterthought. Mostly we're a bundle of genetically-mediated instincts, chemically-regulated emotions, and a mass of unbelievably detailed subconscious sense-experience. And when all that ticks over, generation after generation, we get art, literature, and religion. (Unless you assume that there is a God who provides us with some kind of cheat sheet, which is really what Occam's Razor says about that.) When we decided that the conscious application of logic was the ONLY thing worth listening to, it was less like an unshackling and more like a lobotomy.
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  64. "The Cold War was highly ideological" Although, it was extremely practical when it came to the massacres of tens of millions of people that you saw under Communism. You didn't have to be an ideologue to say, "The communists are the baddies".
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  65. The only "duty" that Democrats conceive of, is the "duty" of every minority to vote Democrat.
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  66. The dialectic rolls on. We've dealt with the Industrial Revolution (Capitalism vs. Communism), "How do we maximize the production and distribution of industrially-generated material wealth?" answer: the market-economic welfare state. We are now dealing with the Information Revolution, (Authoritarian Bureaucracy vs. Liberty-minded Democracy), "How do we maximize the production and distribution of expertise?" History hasn't ended, it's just entered a new phase. We're fighting a new Cold War, and unfortunately the forces of Liberty-minded Democracy are on the back foot, as our governments are infested with Authoritarian Bureaucrats.
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  67. "Asking 'Do computers think' is like asking 'Do submarines swim'". - Edsger Dijkstra
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  68.  @ajsouza3720  What she needs to do is help forge a political victory for Conservatives, that will bring society back to the sanity it lost a number of years ago. In that, she may well be doing her part.
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  69. One bonus of getting divorced, from a woman's point of view, is how much society will lionize them for how "stunning and brave" they are for being a single mother. Society should not give these women the benefit of the doubt. Single mothers who brought their situation on themselves by making no attempt to get along with the father of their children, need to be actively demonized.
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  70. Worse, we have a culture that actively tries to destroy real families, while celebrating fake ones. This culture will not last.
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  71. I'd really hate to see anything he gives less than 6/10.
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  72. It's not the "black hobbits" that would tarnish Tolkien's legacy, so much as un-Catholic and deeply un-Christian values overwhelming his underlying message. The Downfall of Numenor is about people seeking eternal life by pridefully setting themselves above their gods, led astray by a power-hungry renegade. They are destroyed for their hubris and treason, with only a few surviving. I can only imagine that the Sea-Kings are going to be "made more relevant" by casting them as imperialists...
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  73.  @sadwingsraging3044  Or thought they were so much smarter than Mom when she told them "no", that they could ignore it and be a brat anyway.
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  74. Before the advent of plumbing, antibiotics, and vaccinations, women have in all times and places been occupied with the vastly more important work of making sure babies don't die before age 5 and have not bothered with silly masculine games like politics, war, and business.
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  75.  @GoldenWolf115  Christianity is certainly against alienation. Radically so. According to one of the shortest books of the Bible (Paul's letter to Philemon), the best thing for a slave is not to leave his master, but for that master to accept him into his household "not as a slave, but better than a slave - as a man and a brother."
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  76. While both Mr. Ngo and Mr. Boghossian are capable of helping to dismantle this evil, they are incapable of building anything good in its place.
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  77. Klavan wants to have R-rated scenes in his stories. Fair enough. Can we put a limit on that though? Say, no making scenes more R-rated than the ones in the Old Testament? I think that gives him some room to maneuver there. Oh, and don't put anything into a children's book you wouldn't put into a children's Bible.
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  78. So did Victor Hugo steal the plot to Les Miserables from the "gentleman on the roof beam" saying?
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  79. Or as a younger child. No-fault divorce is child abuse.
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  80. For most young people all they need to do is stop trying not to.
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  81. Look into the San Francisco political machine. Brothel-keepers have been heavily influential in city politics since 1849 Gold Rush times. This power is now being augmented by Silicon Valley money and media reach. This explains much about United States culture and politics today. How do people whose mediocre talents and character have not earned them the right to govern, get such positions of power? Nancy Pelosi has led the Democrats to defeat after defeat. Gavin Newsom's political accomplishments are virtually nonexistent, except for his reshaping of the fashionable twisting of marriage. Eric Swalwell of the US House Intelligence Committee is dallying with a Chinese spy. Kamala Harris parlayed her s*x work into the Vice Presidency of the United States. And, it explains the steady drumbeat of legitimizing s*x work.
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  82.  @reedmckinney7426  The tax breaks are pennies on the dollar, unless you live in Hungary. You don't? Well, I guess you're talking nonsense then.
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  83.  @reedmckinney7426  You are freeloading for dollars, and claiming not to because you give parents pennies. Freeloader.
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  84. "If the global north disappears, the global economy disappears" Well, the global security apparatus (namely, the US Navy) disappears. The Europeans try to do their part around the Horn of Africa, bless their hearts, but if the US Navy were not out there, container ships would not happen, and the global economy would grind to a halt.
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  85.  @patrykhaber2565  Um, every major economy in the world is a combination of welfare state and free market. The last serious challenge to the Welfare State in America was Social Security reform in 2006 under George W Bush, and that went nowhere. NHS is practically worshiped as a replacement for Christianity, in England. Please take a moment from fighting yesterday's battles, and put at least some efforts into fighting *today*'s battles. From Brussels to Beijing, bureaucrats are relentlessly attacking liberty and subsidiarity, not just in terms of economics but in terms of speech and thought itself. London and Washington are infected as well. The Cambridge Five have metastasized into five thousand, at least. It pains me to say it, but we may need another Joe McCarthy before this is done. Out-of-control administrative structures, from government to medical NGOs to universities to social media companies to HR departments, are tearing down freedoms and reducing humans and human activities to a series of checkboxes. The free market is only one front in this wider war. Yesterday's allies (like corporations) have turned on us. Yesterday's enemies (freedom-oriented Liberals) are being pushed out of their old groups, to join our ranks. We're in a new phase of history now. The Long March through the Institutions was almost complete, only derailed at the last second by Brexit and Trump. History is on the move again. Anyone who loves liberty needs to reassess the situation we're actually in, to have any hope of preserving it.
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  86. "The Right doesn't have a good elevator pitch - do these things for a long time, and things will be better" The Right believes elevator pitches are overrated, quite naturally.
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  87.  @mysterioanonymous3206  How many of these places could be refurbished for less than the price of new construction?
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  88. Brussels sprouts used to be more bitter than they are now. They've either bred them that way, or they've started marketing the breeds that are less bitter, in the last decade or two. No idea why this is.
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  89. If being trapped in a coma is just being asleep, how is that different from the supposed oblivion of death?
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  90. Hormone pills should be banned as an environmental toxin.
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  91.  @umiluv  Browsing a few others of your comments here, there's clearly more to your views than is apparent from the inevitably limited words you've shared in this thread. Taking those other comments into account, I've been much too prickly in my replies. I'm sorry about that.
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  92. One of the "outlaws of the marsh" was warned that the mountain pass he wished to traverse was menaced by a man-eating tiger. In spite of the danger, he got really drunk before crossing the narrow and steep path. I forget whether he slipped and fell from drunkenness or passed out along the trail, but either way, he ended up out cold. He came to, with the hot, blood-smelling breath of the tiger in his face The tiger had pinned his arms and legs. So... ... In spite of a terrible hangover, he proceeded to headb*tt the tiger to d*ath. Because that's just the sort of hero he was. These stories were originally presented as crowd-pleasing puppet shows -- one imagines, much like Punch and Judy.
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  93. I predict that before the end of this decade, hormonal birth control pills will be illegal in multiple jurisdictions affecting hundreds of millions of people. We will finally investigate whether or not they are an environmental hazard, and we will find that they do, in fact, have dire consequences when they appear in water supplies, etc.
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  94. "Gender affirmation surgeries" could more accurately be called "Gender elimination surgeries", as they replace something real and functional, with something fake.
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  95. "It's interesting translating 'iceberg' as 'ice mountain'" Er, you know that "berg" means "mountain", right?
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  96. It's useful to dig further back into the past, for Tolkien's intellectual roots for that quote. “I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.” You can replace the German Chancellor's name with Jeff Bezos, and the meaning does not change much.
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  97. "Be aware of how little you know" And yet you still have to act in the world. This is a great argument in favor of treating tradition as a recipe for living. It has the benefit of being proven in action.
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  98. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis Read it. It's really funny, and explains all this very nicely, and if you're a fan of the Victorian Era you'll enjoy if very much.
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  99. Any chance you'll do Robert Service's "Call of the Wild"?
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  100. Antefa cannot spell. They believe they are what is against fascism. In reality, their brand of street violence is what precedes fascism -- makes it appealing to the masses.
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  101. The problem we're facing today, is that most people believe that giving in to Woke culture is "being good at politics".
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  102. If the West chases this distraction, it will do nothing but ensure China's dominance for a century.
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  103. “I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus [the German Chancellor, 1933-1945] (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.” - J. R. R. Tolkien, on those who would twist and pervert the stories he loved
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  104. He also detests the foundation of Western Civilization, i.e., Christianity. Atheism can only destroy.
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  105. Wedgwood's "Am I not a man and a brother" was a great slogan of Abolitionism. It is also drawn directly from the New Testament, specifically, Paul's epistle to Philemon, owner of the runaway slave Onesimus. 8Therefore, although in Christ I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do, 9yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love. It is as none other than Paul—an old man and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus— 10that I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, b who became my son while I was in chains. 11Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful both to you and to me. 12I am sending him—who is my very heart—back to you. 13I would have liked to keep him with me so that he could take your place in helping me while I am in chains for the gospel. 14But I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any favor you do would not seem forced but would be voluntary. 15Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever— 16no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord.
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  106. Here's another applicable one. “I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus [Jeff Bezos?] (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”
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  107. Ex-Californian here. Oranges are in-season during the winter, so they're more available. If you live inland or northern California and you've had a hard enough frost one winter, your orange tree won't have a crop the following winter. To prevent this sort of hard frost, farmers would burn "smudge pots" in their orange groves, which would cause an artificial overcast at night. This prevented the ground from losing too much heat when the sun wasn't up. It also caused a huge amount of smog in the Los Angeles area, before even the advent of the automobile.
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  108.  @kathycoleman4648  In my experience, she just didn't argue, and did whatever she wanted, no matter how destructive it was.
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  109.  @ejdep  Actions demonstrate otherwise.
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  110.  @ejdep  The women who claim to be feminists. Fortunately, this is a small fraction of the population -- yet so destructive.
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  111.  @ejdep  Count yourself blessed if you've never met my ex or her friends.
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  112.  @ejdep  Er, no. I am talking about specific actions of a specific woman, and a specific point of view she shares with a subset of the women around her. Fortunately, as I may have pointed out already, fewer than one in five women are actually like this. Not a monolith, certainly. A bit narcissistic, perhaps, for these women to believe they represent or speak for all women, but there you go. You should probably think a little harder too, about why you run into so many men who have had these experiences that you can make these predictions. "These people that are so against drunk driving, they've had loved ones killed by drunk drivers, it's sooooo predictable." Honestly. Listen to yourself sometime.
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  113.  @ejdep  What I'm saying is, in practice -- often enough that it's soooooo predictable to you to run across people who have suffered from it -- feminism is about restructuring society to screw over everyone except feminists. Feminism has left more children fatherless than war. Fatherless children go on to suffer (and in their turn, cause) an incredible array of social problems. For this alone, it should be rejected wholesale. You have a cute little theory that sounds ever so simple and fair. In practice, it's one of the worst blights on the human race.
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  114.  @ejdep  I'm doing as well for myself as can be expected considering my circumstances. I can't say the same for the thousands of men who commit suicide every year because of women screwing them over in the Family Law system. I can't say the same for the 60 million American babies, whose abortions are celebrated by feminists. I can't say the same for all the children who have been drugged, institutionalized, abused by unrelated adults, and generally neglected because their feminist mothers have cut their fathers out of their lives. TAKE SOME FUCKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR IDEOLOGY FOR ONCE if you are even capable of doing so.
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  115.  @ejdep  You have no idea what your ideology has become. Either you do not live in reality, or you are gaslighting. Either way, you are pushing this society towards evil. WAKE UP.
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  116.  @ejdep  Step 1: Deny obvious reality. Step 2: Accuse whoever is pointing out reality, of mental illness. Ladies and gentlemen, this is textbook "gaslighting". EJD5, you're a troll.
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  117. "If you don't come from this background you're insanely distrusted by those in power" You're getting very close to the actual problem with today's society, and what the new Cold War (Red Scare etc) is really going to be about. How to maximize the production and distribution of material wealth that the Industrial Revolution gave us, led to the first Cold War - Capitalism vs. Communism. After a great deal of trial and error, we settled on the market-economic welfare state. (Seriously, point to a major country in the world that doesn't implement both of these to a great degree.) How to maximize the production and distribution of expertise that the Information Revolution gave us, will lead to a new Cold War -- Authoritarian Bureaucracy vs. Liberty-minded Democracy. Is the production and dissemination of knowledge / expertise going to be centrally controlled (the authoritarian bureaucracy, "technocracy", credentialism), or will information technology allow it be distributed throughout the population (citizen journalists, memes, elections, liberty, revival of traditional wisdom, individual initiative and dedication)? As far as I'm concerned it's not hard to tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are here, but then, I'm against totalitarianism because I've seen the consequences.
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  118.  @fatimahsharpe9113  I agree with just about all of what you're saying here. =) As a Lutheran, one foundational belief is that the Catholic hierarchy gets it wrong sometimes. As I see it the whole Church is like a great fleet of ships, all trying to go in the right direction. Even the largest (Roman Catholicism) can be blown off-course from time to time.
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  119.  @ajsouza3720  Well, honest disbelief is honest disbelief. I get the inkling, from time to time, that one difference between our current time and times past, is that in times past, non-believers were in the pews anyway. What should we call this category of people? Louise Perry, Tom Holland, and I suspect Jordan Peterson -- who believe it would be better to believe in Christianity, but struggle? Does the old "God-fearing" category apply?
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  120.  @ajsouza3720  Sixty years would work for me. My grandparents had it right.
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  121.  @gumdeo  There are militant atheists who are Cultural Christians, though. Usually, all but one or two of their values are deeply, deeply Christian.
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  122. Go to your local church, and help build it up.
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  123.  @michaelmorgan1427  I said church, not mosque. Although that's basically going to be Europe's future, if things stay on the track they're on. The atheists are the ones who are dying and not replacing themselves.
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  124.  @michaelmorgan1427  And you seem to be unfamiliar with the entire New Testament. Christians don't do that, period. You're arguing in bad faith, and you know it.
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  125. Dude... she's married.
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  126.  @0rnery0verwatch  It's not a reply to her, it's a reply to the commenter. Discouraging men from chasing after married women (and women from chasing after married men) is a good thing for everyone.
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  127. Lotuseaters is basically in the same category as Timcast, only Timcast is a bit more successful.
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  128. Once we've worked out where non-heteronormative s**uality falls in terms of social acceptability, it's going to land much closer to the closet that it is to be celebrated as it's been for the last ten years or so. The inevitable working-out of toleration, has been increasing calls for everything to be tolerated, no matter how vile. We're going to return to standards, and those standards are going to be the same as those for the vast majority of the world, for the vast majority of history.
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  129.  @skylinefever  "How many of us are just the result of no effective birth control?" Enough to make sure the species survives. Current demographic trends indicate that when you decouple fun from reproduction, not enough people are born to continue the human race. This suggests that the Catholics have been right all along.
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  130.  @skylinefever  Unplanned is not the same as unwanted. It's true that with the prevalence of birth control, we're selectively breeding a race of humans for whom it isn't effective or desirable for one reason or other. Long before that works itself out though, I suspect we'll have banned hormonal birth control as an environmental toxin. In any case, our present bepilled population is nothing but a passing fad, which will be looked upon as a quirk of our times before we became wiser by returning to wisdom.
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  131. A free market should decide. China manipulates the market, so it is not free. Other countries must work to counter this manipulation.
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  132. The French Army wouldn't have gotten as far as it did without Napoleon Napoleon wouldn't have gotten as far as he did without the French Army History is both forces and decisions.
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  133. This is the new Cold War -- the Mandarins vs. distributed decision-making, i.e., Totalitarianism vs. Freedom.
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  134. The Dead Marshes aren't really an "allegory" for anything... they're part of Tolkien's "personal stock" of stories.
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  135. How do the Dulles brothers compare to the Wellesley brothers? (The Duke of Wellington, et al.)
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  136.  @jmgonzales7701  What else can a vigilante be?
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  137. "If you spent even one day at the family courts..." ... you'd figure out that you needed to manage risk a bit. You minimize your risks of getting screwed over if you don't go for feminists, full stop. This isn't to say "all women are" anything. Just don't get involved with feminists, or older red flags like promiscuous, etc. Just be careful.
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  138. Should g*y people just live quiet lives in private, without broadcasting their preferences publicly and insisting everyone adore them? I thought that was the Libertarian claim, that peace was all they wanted. Supposedly, they weren't going to insist on indoctrinating children, they weren't even going to insist on having their relationships celebrated as "marriages". At this point in 2023, anyone who makes the claim that the Libertarian view was not all some kind of lie, charade, or Trojan horse (or at the very least incredibly naive), has a very heavy burden of proof to carry.
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  139. Um, wasn't the first formulation of the "Chinese room" test, asking whether other human beings you meet have souls or sentience? I know I'm sentient. Whether other humans around me are sentient is a leap of faith on my part. It's one I'm willing to take, but it's still a leap of faith. I suspect we won't know whether it's possible to have the subjective experience of consciousness on a silicon substrate, until someone actually comes up with a machine that will allow us to experience that subjective experience of consciousness even when we're measurably biologically unconscious. We can speculate about this stuff all we like, but this is one of those things I think we'll have to physically explore before we can trust any conclusions about it. We just don't have the data, right now.
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  140. "If girls are not given a vision of themselves that isn't centered in their own uniqueness"... then all of the narcissistic women will have their fee-fees hurt. Boo f*cking hoo.
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  141. "The printing press led to the 30 Years' War" Because without the printing press, the Hapsburgs would never have tried to unite Germany and conquer Europe? Or maybe, they would never have had the Spanish throne and all the precious metals from the New World, that allowed them to support such a war? Re-Catholicization was just an excuse. As usual, Caesar's Gallic Wars (both the act, and the documentation afterwards) had FAR more to do with imperial ambitions and their execution than the Bible ever did.
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  142. If you want a taste of the absolute depravity of the class of people Joan was sent to redeem, look at the accusations against Gilles de Rais, the one in charge of the armies she was inspiring.
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  143. It's bad for people if everyone they see is probably a stranger.
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  144. "Highly medicated white women laughing through the pain" Once you get them hooked on The Pill, making them pay-pigs for life for Big Pharma is easy.
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  145. Rejection of the traditional nuclear family is child abuse.
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  146. The Dao of the universe includes both the Dao of the wolf and the Dao of man.
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  147. As much as I admire Christopher Lee (both as an actor and as a man, read a biographical sketch sometime) I think that Patrick Stewart might have done a better job as Saruman - smoother, more persuasive.
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  148.  @skylinefever  Citation please.
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  149.  @skylinefever  The statistics seem to indicate that divorce is worse.
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  150.  @LoliLikesPedobear  That's kind of an intricate point. Again, citation please.
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  151.  @franzmeier4472  Mitt Romney's political obituary will have the headline, "What Did Mitt Know, and When Did He Know It?"
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  152. Phenomenal crossover!
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  153.  @latinhero1818  Therapeutic professions in America are basically a joke. Britain should look carefully into the terms of licensing for their own doctors and therapists -- American madness frequently spreads to Britain.
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  154. "What will they think of next?" Yes. The period of time between the Apollo program (1969) and the present day (2023), has a much slower pace of technological and social change than the period between the completion of America's Transcontinental Railroad (1869) and 1923. Anyone with a contrary position is just trying to grease your brain to accept whatever social change (mostly depraved, mostly unwise) they happen to support.
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  155. There are high-functioning delusional people who do not believe in objective truth. Instead they believe that "truth" is determined by official governing bodies, and they attempt to infiltrate and control those governing bodies. While they have gone unnoticed, they have been successful in this corruption of our institutions. Now that they're out in the open and exercising their power, they're going to find that "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
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  156.  @NotSoObvious  Please turn this into a series. Each other articles you flash on the screen is worth rebutting. Also highlight success stories, and local support networks for couples who are taking the plunge into new life.
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