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

  1. "In individuals insanity is fairly rare. In groups it's the norm." — Nietzsche
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  2. 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.
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  3.  @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.
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  4.  @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?)
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  5.  @aeoteroa818  The part about having to find meaningful things to do is good.
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  6. 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.
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  7.  @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.
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  8.  @egrytznr8893  Are you ok? Do you think maybe you should talk to someone? I would get that checked out.
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  9.  @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.
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  10.  @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.
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  11. 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.
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  12. 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.)
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  13. 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).
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  14.  @squigglyarmz197  Breathe. Just breathe.
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  15. 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?
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  16.  @protagonist1358  Who said anything about 'no standards'?
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  17.  @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.
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  18.  @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.
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  19.  @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?
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  20. 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.
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  21.  @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.)
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  22. My mama wasn't so nice. Therefore I resent you bitterly.
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  23.  @bitkurd  Whether solitude is a sign of the person's health or illness only knowing them can show you.
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  24. I'm not so sure I like that "Let the lie even triumph" business. It's somewhat invertebrate. But I like the last part.
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  25. 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')
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  26. 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.
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  27. 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.
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  28. Thanks for that knowledge.
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  29. That's fantastic and I congratulate you. (But 'victor' is not a verb. You needed 'be victorious,' 'prevail' or 'win.') Still a great post.👏
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  30.  @squigglyarmz197  "smh"? I'm very glad of that.
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  31.  @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...")
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  32. "Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself." — Wilde😂
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  33. ​ @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.
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  34.  @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?)
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  35. The dude was solid. He's got a million of those.
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  36. His head would pop off. So would Blake's. They'd consider it hell.
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  37. 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."
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  38. This thread is quite accurate.
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  39.  @atlasadonis3752  Why do you ask such a question? I'm puzzled why you're so interested in a harmless drudge.
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  40. 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.
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  41.  @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.)
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  42. 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.
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  43. "The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end." —Max Beerbohm
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  44. 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.
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  45. 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.
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  46. He did commit crimes.
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  47. Ah, but you're on social media right here. What about that self-contradiction?
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  48.  @aquilliusranger2137  What about the Society of Friends?
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  49.  @aquilliusranger2137  I was playing around. The Society of Friends is the official name of the Quakers.😄
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  50. Clever, that Hugo. I had always thought the envious lacking in their capacity to admire. Damn, I resent him so much.
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