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dixon pinfold
Academy of Ideas
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Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "Academy of Ideas" channel.

"In individuals insanity is fairly rare. In groups it's the norm." — Nietzsche
22
Yes, and fright must be met with courage. Otherwise what is frightening will devour the afraid. Fear of rejection and isolation lead in a straight line to paralysis and submission, things which themselves cause the self to reject the self, to isolate the self from the self. These are forms of a person breaking apart. Thus courage is no aspirational ideal, frill or luxury. It is as necessary as one's wits, one's food, air and water. In this light, seeking support and giving it to others—support meaning encouragement, the spreading of courage—become necessary to the point of being duties. It dismays me to see you doing the opposite, for your remarks are discouraging—they militate against courage and emphasize and spread fear. Instead you ought to promise to support and encourage, and appeal to others to do the same. Remind them, as I remind you, that with effort they'll succeed in swallowing their fear. Warmly wish them, as I wish you, good luck also.
18
@beingsshepherd I don't sense that giving you direct advice is worth my time. You show a determination to take things in an unhealthy direction (subscribing to a Kremlin-run news service for example, and using your avatar to literally equate Remembrance poppies with swastikas). I'll thank you not to reply.
18
@MrJohnnyDistortion Yes, it's thoroughly, obviously wrong. Indeed in my view there's no way the post was even sincere. It's just an attempt to get the OC ratioed. (Ratioed: when a comment has more replies than likes, i.e. a ratio below 1.0, it is downgraded and shown to fewer people.) The reason is that such comments are presumed controversial, negative and unpopular, thus bad for the platform's atmosphere. For this reason paid commenters identify the comments they need to fight hardest against (i.e. the best ones, from another point of view) and target them with upsetting replies intended to generate many more replies in turn. Just the right remarks, and presto: ratioed, meaning buried. (Did you know about this, btw?)
16
@aeoteroa818 The part about having to find meaningful things to do is good.
14
When you say 'mutual predation' it sounds like code for asserting that free enterprise makes people insane. That would miss the point of the talk we just heard. People naturally want their economic freedom—freedom within certain minimal limits—and freedom is necessary for sanity. A people stripped of economic freedom—one forced into a false utopian socialism or communism—will quite soon lose the rest of their freedoms, and thus a chance at their fullest sanity.
13
@Elazar40 False utopianism, under which injustice would be so entrenched as to be impossible to even speak about, let alone potentially address. You advocate for the twin plagues of the urge towards reckless, destructive, utopian innovation, and the urge to be on a side which is totally triumphant. Reminds me of the arsonist's drives somewhat: set a fire, watch it burn, take satisfaction that oneself did it, that it was really for the best, that the gesture was uncompromising.
11
@egrytznr8893 Are you ok? Do you think maybe you should talk to someone? I would get that checked out.
10
@s7d788 Formerly they had more such potential. I think family life just became so impoverished that how much one generation taught the next fell sharply. You talk to younger people and they're in the dark about almost everything that's going on around them. Hell, older people too, but the young are like they brought themselves up with their phones and PC games. No one taught them much of anything except how terrible it is to offend anyone and how most things are offensive. I'm talking about a sort of emptiness of mind, which is a very dangerous quality to pair with the high emotionality and neuroticism of the recent generations. Anyway, to close on the potential to be independent, maybe what declined can recover somewhat. Btw, I thought your comment was great.
9
@echillykahlil Just to clarify, my real problem is anyone saying real and salutary meaning is religious or quasi-religious in nature, and that's what I hear in this video. I would put it that all religion amounts to an attempt to find meaning, not that all meaning amounts to an attempt to find a religion. Thanks for your reply.
9
The Solomon Asch study about the length of the three lines was stunning. Back when I learnt of it I felt contempt for the social environment of the place and time the results came out of. Little did I realize how likely was the chance that it would reappear in analogous form, in my lifetime, where I live.
8
Not to cavil, but we have multiple other senses besides the famous 5, so 6th is taken already. One is the sense of temperature (enabled by thermoreceptors). Next, the sense of spatial orientation (vestibular organ of the inner ear, also giving us the power to keep our balance). Then there's the sense of time (residing here and there in the brain). We can also sense where our body parts are and what they're doing (proprioceptors). There, that makes 9. (And some also count thirst and hunger.)
6
It's true. Most people are so incapable of moral reasoning, moral insight, and other things requiring a brain and some character, that they do indeed need religion. They need that one book that tells them everything🙄, otherwise they fall to nihilistic pieces. This is why I do absolutely and sincerely support them having their beliefs (which I could never, ever share).
6
@squigglyarmz197 Breathe. Just breathe.
5
On meaning, bear in mind that life was full to overflowing with meaning for the 9/11 hijackers as they raced towards their targets, and for the Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem. On the creative spirit, recall that Hitler was an artist, that Charles Manson was a songwriter, musician and singer, and that Richard Gatling's creative spirit gave us the first successful machine gun. Of meaning we must ask, Just what does this mean, and what is it worth?; of the creative spirit, Just what has it created, and what is it worth?
5
@protagonist1358 Who said anything about 'no standards'?
5
@P7777-u7r I don't throw around the term 'free market.' Best avoided for various reasons, some of which you allude to (although I wouldn't put them in the terms you do). Free enterprise is a different thing, and simpler. It's about having a business, and having the right to have it. A family-owned farm is free-enterprise, for example; so is a restaurant or a chain of them.
5
@thebluedan Against all the odds, it actually is isn't it? Sure beats a riot where people club each other in the face and crack each other's limbs in two. Not even any swearing.
5
@atlasadonis3752 You are also tireless at deflecting. But I still want an answer. (And yes I do know what shadow-banning is. But you appear not to, because it means a post is removed, but the poster is unaware of that because it's still visible to the poster himself.) Again, what is your purpose with this harassment?
5
This one disappoints me terribly. I see no necessity for linking meaning and religion so closely—or at all, really. To me it's like linking nutrition with restaurants.
5
@protagonist1358 That's called beggaring the question. It amounts to: 'God tells us what's good, because He is good. And I know this because He tells me so — in the Bible, which was written by men under his divine guidance.' (So don't ask me to reason about why I don't agree, because you've excluded real reasoning from the conversation, in favour of circular reasoning.)
4
My mama wasn't so nice. Therefore I resent you bitterly.
4
@bitkurd Whether solitude is a sign of the person's health or illness only knowing them can show you.
4
I'm not so sure I like that "Let the lie even triumph" business. It's somewhat invertebrate. But I like the last part.
4
It's always a good idea to check whether all one's beliefs can be easily predicted by knowing just one of them. If they can, in my view it indicates one isn't thinking. It doesn't mean the beliefs are wrong, of course. Only that they've been bought, as it were, off the shelf like consumer packaged goods. No single book, philosopher or philosophy, political party or movement, no single religion, has all the answers. Heterodoxy is best. (Literally 'other beliefs'; among various free translations, '[mixture of] different codes')
3
No it wasn't. It specified the threat as obedience, submission, and people "hand[ing] over complete control over their lives to politicians and bureaucrats." I love the way you throw around the word fascism like you know what it means. You also clearly know little if anything about what this channel stands for.
3
More splendid work. Of course, addiction frequently is a passing thing. Perennially escaping much notice at all are the untold millions who step back from overuse after some period of time and don't return. (Or don't return for a long time, which counts for something too.) The vast majority do it with little to no professional or group assistance. As I say, there's virtually never any mention of it. I found out about it by chance. Perhaps counting them is difficult. I should imagine most of them are a little reserved about it.
3
Thanks for that knowledge.
3
That's fantastic and I congratulate you. (But 'victor' is not a verb. You needed 'be victorious,' 'prevail' or 'win.') Still a great post.👏
3
@squigglyarmz197 "smh"? I'm very glad of that.
2
@nebnik2015 Yes, I see what you mean. Even with silence or neutrality we cast a sort of vote. (Cf. the final lines of A Strange Kind of Love, a song by Peter Murphy. "There is no middle ground...")
2
"Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself." — Wilde😂
2
 @echillykahlil "Meaning is weird." Oh totally. The things that give people meaning, that's where you look for weird. Also their systems of meaning, but it's not necessary to dig that deep.
2
@protagonist1358 No problem. (By the way, did you know that you can edit or delete your posts if you aren't comfortable with them in some way?)
2
The dude was solid. He's got a million of those.
2
His head would pop off. So would Blake's. They'd consider it hell.
2
Fun fact: Huxley was Orwell's French teacher at Eton. As the literary, social and cultural critic Paul Fussell put it in his essay on Orwell titled 'A Power of Facing Unpleasant Facts', Orwell later perceived that "there was something the matter with Aldous Huxley."
2
This thread is quite accurate.
2
@atlasadonis3752 Why do you ask such a question? I'm puzzled why you're so interested in a harmless drudge.
2
15-minute video (including promo) of brief and simplified guidance, telling us that brief and simplified guidance is invariably biased and reliably harmful. Mmkay. Deep and detailed information I love. Yet much of the best information and guidance you will ever receive is brief and radically simplified.
2
@niproda Yeah, I hear the lilt and every once in a while a trace of a Canadian vowel; also, very often clear signs of a mind and ethos I recognize as Canadian Gen-X. But I never would have guessed in a million years that he doesn't work alone. Every bit of the intellect and personality he reveals to us argues lone wolf... except for, I guess—and this is the part I missed—the fact that he wants to be with us, his audience. (Bonus speculation, just for fun: I bet he's left-handed.)
2
I'd say intuition is more a faculty in aid of discovery than a direct way of knowing. It belongs in the service of rational thought a good deal more than the other way around. It's rather like a river, while thought is the irrigation system which uses it to grow crops.
2
"The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end." —Max Beerbohm
1
If you announce that under your system, whether proposed or extant, abusing other people terribly is the way to improve the world, countless followers will come out of the woodwork to sign up. I've been saying this for a few years, but it turns out someone else said it during the era of peak totalitarianism: "The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” —Aldous Huxley I notice in the video's chilling analysis of totalitarianism numerous eerie points of sameness to today's extreme wokeism. We're past the replanting of seeds. Seedlings are now become saplings. The era of peak totalitarianism may soon come to be thought of as the first such era, much as the Great War came to be known as the First World War.
1
The American universities rotted. Far-lefties burrowed into them like termites, and at length the intellectual timbers that kept them up gave way. They are now factories for making unthinking leftists.
1
He did commit crimes.
1
Ah, but you're on social media right here. What about that self-contradiction?
1
@aquilliusranger2137 What about the Society of Friends?
1
@aquilliusranger2137 I was playing around. The Society of Friends is the official name of the Quakers.😄
1
Clever, that Hugo. I had always thought the envious lacking in their capacity to admire. Damn, I resent him so much.
1
Ahh. Not a tr ol I around for miles. Peaceful.
1
From middle boyhood I sensed a perversion in the aspirations of the powerful, that it was ordinarily the sick who rose to the top while the healthy were content with other rewards. Only later did I see that it was envy which motivated the power-obsessed. Envy + a plan = Robespierre, Lady Macbeth, Stalin, and all the rest.
1
Very lower-middlebrow pseudo-intellectual self-congratulatory claptrap—your remarks and the writings of your heroes, that is. Your views amount to a call for, and an attempt to justify and glorify, a bloody revolution and brutal repression...in the name of a utopia. Perfection through destruction and death. No, thank you.
1
Don't be either. Just build your sanity and what other people do can neither tempt nor repulse you: your sanity will be your light. But I guess you're off to a start, kind of.👍
1
Nice attempt at division. Actually the video describes an attack on virtually everyone. On values, not classes—values concerning truth and freedom, which are in fact the concern of people in all classes. How infested this whole comments section is with assertions posing in support of the video which are in fact in support of division, meaning they are against the spirit of the video—a spirit of people maintaining a healthy solidarity.
1
Yes, your last sentence sounds definitely true.👏 But a pit bull makes such a good emblem of totalitarianism that it kind of takes the shine off such a maxim. 🤔 Also, I don't really see how freedom and fighting for freedom are supposed to be (uh, what's the term?) 'mutually ironical,' if you will. Who came up with that?
1
@SomeCanine A pit bull puppy, right? It's a small picture but it looks like it.
1
@sacul135 I agree with every word of that. I just think the creative drive, as impressive as it is, is no better nor any worse than any other of the drives. I would neither put it down nor exalt it in general terms, but instead do both. As it took all of our drives to get us here, we should respect all of them up to a point, and not place any too far above the others. Attempts to bury or annihilate any of the leading ones are mistaken in the sense that they will cost more than they return, over a lifetime or the span of a society or both. In the long run we cannot get away with savaging our natures. This makes moderation the great virtue in a way, by virtue of which we are here as much as any other, or perhaps more; underrated and unsung but actually the star of the show, because it's the only one that's at all very artificial and strained. Intelligence, courage, and kindness reside in people pretty naturally or not much at all. Civilization is little more than an effort to extract it (moderation) from everyone, which explains why it is the primary function of religion and why religion is a permanent part of civilization. So it's fine for anyone to say things like 'religion reveals eternal truth and meaning,' but they only refer to how useful it is for producing moderation in the name of civilization. Whatever system doesn't, we try to deny the status of religion, judging it cultic, heretical, Dionysian, dogmatic, fundamentalist, witchcraft, madness. In the same sense we have always been tempted to call the godless (i.e., atheists) wicked, and many still do. This is how I look at it instead of judging it on its own terms, which is the other option and the more vastly more popular one.
1
@wlm7434 Nice try, insinuating some low-key support for Hilt er into support for this video's message of freedom and sanity, in an attempt to corrode its moral legitimacy by association. Classic technique! 👏👏
1
Going into information quarantine is no answer. An uninformed people will most certainly be ruled harshly, and before long. The task, which is admittedly a difficult one, cannot be avoided: Seek out the best information possible, and encourage in yourself and others the values which made the information climate formerly so much healthier.
1
@joeld8825 Those are all the choices?
1
@joeld8825 I was making that very point with my reply and I regret to say that in my view your questions are unanswerable. (You perhaps feel the same way.) I can only assert the necessity of a sincere individual effort which never really ends. (And I hold that it does end with any religious enthusiasm resembling that which motivates some people to buy consumer packaged goods from a shelf. "All-in-One Moral Kit. Saves Time & Effort!" )
1
@beingsshepherd I notice your efforts to get good comments ratioed with incendiary replies. Classic technique. Your avatar goes right along with that, featuring a Remembrance poppy and a swastika—with an 'equals' sign between.
1
@beingsshepherd I care little whether destructive values or actions are sincere or insincere.
1
@beingsshepherd You've no basis for saying I don't understand war protestors. That's (unsurprisingly) arrogant and dull-minded of you. In 2003 I committed a great amount of time to vigorously protesting the Iraq War.
1
I think it just automatically resulted from a feminization of the world. Women are inherently more fearful, more risk-averse. Women now have far more say than formerly; in numerous contexts, not just child-rearing but a lot of others too, they have far more say than men. Thus the culture has become fear-steeped. Maleness has been ceaselessly denigrated for multiple generations now, to the point that now it has for some time even been labelled toxic, so how could it be otherwise? The unspoken maxim of the age, modelled with some justification on that of Animal Farm: Two ovaries good, two testes bad.
1
War is expensive and will create business and profits. That doesn't mean war should never be fought. It doesn't mean any given war is wrong. It doesn't mean we ought to be pacifists or require people in other lands be pacifists in the face of attack. Arms makers charging a mark-up on needed weaponry is well down the list of ill effects of war. The peril of undue influence Eisenhower warned against (at the time, wisely) comes at governments from many, many directions.
1
@andrina118 Whenever I see a post like yours—one that aims to confuse, to discourage, to attack hope, to make people cynical and rob them of salutary beliefs and confidence—my suspicions are acutely aroused. These are the classic techniques of so-called psy-ops, which are campaigns, sometimes highly successful, to demoralize people by manipulating their thoughts so they stop believing anybody, anything. Key words: confuse, manipulate, demoralize.
1
Who knows what the algo does to a great video like this? It might be dialling it back considerably, allowing it to appear in feeds only half as often, or an eighth as often, as it would without special attention. There are lots of possibilities besides just a total choking off of views. For example, a video, no matter its content, watched by quantities of people whose other viewing tends towards 'wrongthink', may be downgraded for that reason—never mind if it's about cats or curried peas.
1
We need one of those countdown clocks for totalitarianism like the one for nuclear war. Wait, no: we'll get one, and it'll be used to scare us falsely at some times and reassure us falsely at others.
1
Desposition doesn't seem to be in my Oxford. What do you mean by it?
1
"Resist much." I find that sounds reflexive and unthinking, undiscriminating. And it's very common, actually to the point of vulgarity, not to mention its corrosive effects on societies. "Resist if strenuous thought and learning, which you honestly hold to the fire, tells you that you must" is far better. But then all of that's surely implied by the much shorter "Think much."
1
I have a hypothesis that the explosion of youth anxiety has roots in kids watching porn from the age of ten or barely older.
1
Not to be flippant but, en français, 'C'est la vie.' Humanity, and life, are not perfectible. Just improvable, slightly. Be satisfied with the improvements you can make to yourself and hope not to be murdered young.
1
@MrJohnnyDistortion Wow. You'd never heard of ratioing and how it works, but just out of common sense you assumed that the raw ratio of likes to replies was crucial to where the algo places a comment in the section it's a part of? Must be nice having an IQ of 400.
1
@atlasadonis3752 I'm curious why you ask. It's extremely rare for anyone to ask that on social media.
1
@atlasadonis3752 Because it's personal information, I suppose. If one's computer were ever hacked, that would include passwords, which would enable the hacker to, among many other things, download one's entire YouTube comment history. All internet security professionals advise against posting any personal information online. You didn't know that? Anyway, what do you want from me? That's what I'm wondering. You're starting to irritate me.
1
@atlasadonis3752 Why did you delete your last post, which consisted of the question: "Do you contribute to necessity, or do you just suck out as much as possible from the system?" What are you doing?
1
@atlasadonis3752 It is not still up, so I recalled it from memory. So stop deflecting and answer the question: What are you doing? What is your tireless, persistent, rude, creepy and increasingly hostile interest in me and my life?
1
@yaasikasa17 Hahaha, that was my meaning too.
1
Was it a reply? I get the "returned error" message when I reply to a post but the post itself has already been deleted. I have, however, memorized a lengthy list of words which are not allowed. I don't get why they don't just publish the list.
1
@jacksondriscoll98 No, a stymieing of natural selection. The first victim of human intelligence was our sense of belonging in the universe. Deer and bees still have it, we irrecoverably lost it. That loss, which with considerable insight and justice Genesis calls the Knowledge of Good and Evil, stopped us cold in our evolutionary tracks. (Things have been enormously complicated and difficult since that moment, a fact which needs little pointing out.) I guess I'm a bit of a Nietzsche-ite, since I see it as a not-terribly-dignified crutch. But I'm not a thoroughgoing one, because I don't have a hard heart against it. People have their mortality and their questions about the purpose of their existence to deal with, the time allotted for it being both very short and all we have.
1
@obligatoryusername7239 Who said anything about a lack of belief in God entailing a lack of "a metaphysical framework to uphold morality"? Your reply smacks of beggaring the question. At the very least it amounts to a quite a bold proposition or two.
1
@obligatoryusername7239 There's absolutely zero need for belief in God for one to have morals. It's that simple. Moral instruction of the young needn't be a part of religious instruction. The fact that you can even ask those questions is just about all any needs to know in order to understand why slaughters take place in the name of god and religion. Your belief that there's a special holiness or holy "framework" to religious ethics ignores the flagrant reality that religious ethics (all of it, from 'love thy neighbour as thyself' to 'kill the idolaters wherever you find them') came from men, not God. You might as well as ask how state laws and state courts can possibly be just, being not informed by the divine teachings of religious law (Sharia law, for example). Likewise how state schools can possibly know what to teach their pupils, their curricula not being guided by God's hand. Likewise how a woman can possibly know how to dress in a morally appropriate way unless she had the benefit of a "framework" of instruction in a religious dress code. Your questions smack of fundamentalism, of a belief that the non-believer is barbarous, is somehow not fully human. Such a belief on anyone's part is a lack of imagination, and this lack of imagination is why subway cars and airplanes get blown up periodically. Godless people and people of faith alike can be highly ethical. Godless people and people of faith alike can commit atrocities.
1
@obligatoryusername7239 I never said the universe is meaningless, I never implied it, and I've never thought so. You keep saying there's no way to have morals unless one has faith in God, but that's just a fantasy of yours. It may be a help for some people, but by the same token others use religion as a way to justify immortality, so something tells me you doth protest too much.
1
More good psychoanalysts, I suppose. But not simply more. And of course there are other psychiatrists besides psychoanalysts. There are also non-MD therapists, psychologists for example.
1
Why not come out against utopianism and leave it at that? It's untrue that things never improve or worsen. Would you just as soon be a medieval peasant?
1
@starboard9551 Very well. I think you know what you have to do. Tidy up your hovel first.
1