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

  1. The problem we're facing today, is that most people believe that giving in to Woke culture is "being good at politics".
    1
  2. If the West chases this distraction, it will do nothing but ensure China's dominance for a century.
    1
  3. “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
    1
  4. He also detests the foundation of Western Civilization, i.e., Christianity. Atheism can only destroy.
    1
  5. 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.
    1
  6. 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.”
    1
  7. 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.
    1
  8.  @kathycoleman4648  In my experience, she just didn't argue, and did whatever she wanted, no matter how destructive it was.
    1
  9.  @ejdep  Actions demonstrate otherwise.
    1
  10.  @ejdep  The women who claim to be feminists. Fortunately, this is a small fraction of the population -- yet so destructive.
    1
  11.  @ejdep  Count yourself blessed if you've never met my ex or her friends.
    1
  12.  @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.
    1
  13.  @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.
    1
  14.  @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.
    1
  15.  @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.
    1
  16.  @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.
    1
  17. "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.
    1
  18.  @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.
    1
  19.  @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?
    1
  20.  @ajsouza3720  Sixty years would work for me. My grandparents had it right.
    1
  21.  @gumdeo  There are militant atheists who are Cultural Christians, though. Usually, all but one or two of their values are deeply, deeply Christian.
    1
  22. Go to your local church, and help build it up.
    1
  23.  @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.
    1
  24.  @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.
    1
  25. Dude... she's married.
    1
  26.  @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.
    1
  27. Lotuseaters is basically in the same category as Timcast, only Timcast is a bit more successful.
    1
  28. 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.
    1
  29.  @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.
    1
  30.  @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.
    1
  31. A free market should decide. China manipulates the market, so it is not free. Other countries must work to counter this manipulation.
    1
  32. 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.
    1
  33. This is the new Cold War -- the Mandarins vs. distributed decision-making, i.e., Totalitarianism vs. Freedom.
    1
  34. The Dead Marshes aren't really an "allegory" for anything... they're part of Tolkien's "personal stock" of stories.
    1
  35. How do the Dulles brothers compare to the Wellesley brothers? (The Duke of Wellington, et al.)
    1
  36.  @jmgonzales7701  What else can a vigilante be?
    1
  37. "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.
    1
  38. 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.
    1
  39. 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.
    1
  40. "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.
    1
  41. "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.
    1
  42. 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.
    1
  43. It's bad for people if everyone they see is probably a stranger.
    1
  44. "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.
    1
  45. Rejection of the traditional nuclear family is child abuse.
    1
  46. The Dao of the universe includes both the Dao of the wolf and the Dao of man.
    1
  47. 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.
    1
  48.  @skylinefever  Citation please.
    1
  49.  @skylinefever  The statistics seem to indicate that divorce is worse.
    1
  50.  @LoliLikesPedobear  That's kind of an intricate point. Again, citation please.
    1