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

  1. "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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  2. "Adolts" "Aduhlts" "Addle-ts"
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  3.  @reedmckinney7426  Guess what? Parents have to pay those taxes too. So, freeloading.
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  4. "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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  5.  @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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  6. 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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  7. "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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  8.  @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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  9.  @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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  10. 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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  11. "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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  12. "Jesus helps me win fights" You mean like Cromwell? Or Midway?
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  13. 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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  14. "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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  15. The only "duty" that Democrats conceive of, is the "duty" of every minority to vote Democrat.
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  16. 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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  17. "Asking 'Do computers think' is like asking 'Do submarines swim'". - Edsger Dijkstra
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  18.  @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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  19. 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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  20. 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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  21. I'd really hate to see anything he gives less than 6/10.
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  22. 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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  23.  @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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  24. 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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  25.  @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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  26. 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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  27. 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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  28. So did Victor Hugo steal the plot to Les Miserables from the "gentleman on the roof beam" saying?
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  29. Or as a younger child. No-fault divorce is child abuse.
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  30. For most young people all they need to do is stop trying not to.
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  31. 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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  32.  @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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  33.  @reedmckinney7426  You are freeloading for dollars, and claiming not to because you give parents pennies. Freeloader.
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  34. "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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  35.  @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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  36. "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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  37.  @mysterioanonymous3206  How many of these places could be refurbished for less than the price of new construction?
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  38. 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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  39. If being trapped in a coma is just being asleep, how is that different from the supposed oblivion of death?
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  40. Hormone pills should be banned as an environmental toxin.
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  41.  @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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  42. 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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  43. 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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  44. "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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  45. "It's interesting translating 'iceberg' as 'ice mountain'" Er, you know that "berg" means "mountain", right?
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  46. 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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  47. "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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  48. 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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  49. Any chance you'll do Robert Service's "Call of the Wild"?
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  50. 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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