CVLR: I’m not benefiting from this. If South Dakota has no income tax, inheritance tax, or capital gains tax, then how are the citizens of South Dakota benefiting? Pass the horn of plenty, please.
CVLR: Sam, want to provide a reasonable summary for someone without two hours to dedicate to this guy’s rambling?
CVLR: Harry, skydiving is incredibly safe. Sam, clearly you’ve never experienced the love of a climber chick. I prefer extreme sports requiring exotic machinery, myself. Kite surfing, paragliding, that sort of thing. If you want something fun but pretty safe check out OpenPPG. It’s also the least expensive way to get into aviation.
Kirk: Harry, I take a slightly different viewpoint on that issue; it’s not just the “need to face danger”, it’s also a timing thing during the maturation process. I think that there are “behavioral gates” akin to the ones we know exist for language acquisition, relating to behavioral patterns and so forth in the human psyche. If you don’t hit those gates while your brain/mind is still plastic, then you’re going to be lacking in those regards for the rest of...
Harry Jones: I have a theory a male human has an instinctive need to face physical danger in order to prove to himself he’s a real man. I was put in harm’s way frequently as a child, and I never went for extreme sports. For me there was no point. But I knew guys who went in for skydiving and the like, and they seemed oddly innocent to me, as if they’d never been close to death growing up. I’ll risk death for a good reason. I won’t do it for its own sake.
Sam J: Here’s a really good interview of a guy who was a LRRP that morphed in hunter killer team member as the war carried on in Vietnam. Part of series chronicling Vets experiences for history. I watched quite a few of these but O’Connor’s stands out. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=tdUpzpIjJLg https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=q88wSZAWtgE
Sam J: I watched that movie Free Solo and all I could think about was what a fool that guy was to for doing that. The only explanation for him free climbing at that level was status. I can’t image giving that much of a shit what people think of me that I would do something so stupid.
Sam J: Kirk says,”…I think that an awful lot of the insanity we currently see displayed by the Democrats in the US stems from their lost status as slave owners, able to dictate the minutiae of daily life to their property…” The whole comment above is excellent. I can’t imagine owning slaves. It would drive me nuts. Having had to supervise people I hate trying to get people to function properly. I guess if I could whip them it might make it easier but don’t care to whip...
Wang Wei Lin: Import the 3rd world…become the 3rd world.
Lucklucky: This is my heresy: most science has been wrong most of the time, and most scientists have been wrong. Just a small proportion of scientists have been correct.
Neovictorian: Kirk: It’s also true of the over-educated excess numbers of the elite we’ve bred up in our education/indoctrination system. They all feel entitled to run things, and they’ve been brainwashed to think that they can run things better than anyone else, but the sad reality is that they’re merely the latest version of the sad old “ancien regime” excess of nobles. Yes–this is Peter Turchin’s “elite overproduction.” The British could send their excess to America or India or...
Slovenian Guest: We generally call it “American” circumstances.
Long: You know a great country for immigrants? Uzbekistan. It’s a paradise. Pack them all up and send them to Uzbekistan. Sheer unadulterated bliss, I promise you. Even better than Myanmar.
Graham: Up to a point that sort of gown on town violence and class abuse had a long history in Europe, and vice versa, as well as between colleges if there was more than one. Makes most modern stuff seem tame, and seems both striking and incredible to some today. It’s not immediately clear to me from that passage that what Jefferson saw was just a Southern thing. There’s a decently strong history on the degrading influence of a slave society on the master class, though, and it’s not...
Harry Jones: Any struggle involving more than two individuals will be a struggle between groups, and a group needs an identity in order to function as a group. An idea is an identity. Maybe not the true common interest, but at least a rationalization. This is why there is no such thing as collective genius. A breakthrough idea can only be discovered by distancing oneself from all established group ideologies whatsoever. In order to lead, you must first learn not to follow.
CVLR: “Most struggles, whatever they’re really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It’s easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the...
Paul from Canada: “The most insidious damage done by slavery isn’t to the slave, but to the master….” This too! As usual, Kirk finds the decisive angle. Today, while reading an article about Thomas Jefferson and his plans for education reform, I came across this passage about his experience as a student; …”Taylor demonstrates that Jefferson, who had begged to enroll at “the College” at age 16, nurtured an ambivalence about William & Mary that eventually hardened into...
Bomag: When taking a risk you must ask yourself, “Is it worth dying for?” Well, then, considering the risk of automobile travel, I can now stop running around in service to the wife’s vanity projects!!! I’m not too keen about the girls keeping up with the boys in this type of endeavor.