Dull Academic Incessant Liturgical Yapping: Philosophical Orations on Order & Reaction
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Posts written by a pseudointellectual moron.
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Fake man-made food product is bad? Whaaaaat?

(The "ingredient," which is actually two ingredients because journalists can't grammar, is a set food-science grade emulsifiers called carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate 80. They're both carcinogenic in mice, due to causing changes in intestinal bacteria; we also know that these ingredients cause the same changes in our intestinal bacteria, though inferring that those same changes also cause cancer in humans is a small jump that is empirically unconfirmed.)
Society sure has progressed by leaps and bounds in the last 90 years:

It was Socrates who, so far as can be seen, created the conception of the soul which has ever since dominated European thinking. For more than two thousand years it has been the standing assumption of the civilized European man that he has a soul, something which is the seat of his normal waking intelligence and moral character, and that, since this soul is either identical with himself or at any rate the most important thing about him, his supreme business in life is to make the most of it and do the best for it. There are, of course, a minority of persons who reject this theory of life, and some of them even deny the existence of a soul, but they are a small minority; to the vast mass of Europeans, to this day, the existence and the importance of the soul is a doctrine so familiar that it seems self-evident.
- Alfred Edward Taylor, Socrates, published 1933
The typical Greek “monster of wickedness,” the “tyrant” who has raised himself above all the laws, may spend his whole life “doing as he pleases” with the persons and property of all men, but just because he always does “just as he pleases,” he never gets what he really wishes for. He wishes for felicity, and gets the extreme of infelicity, a hopelessly diseased soul. It would be better to be a criminal under sentence of death, because death may be just the sharp “surgery” needed to cure the malady of the criminal’s soul. Thus, if a man really knew as assured and certain truth, of which he can no more doubt than he can doubt of his own existence, that the so-called “goods” of body and “estate” are as nothing in comparison with the good of the soul, and knew what the good of the soul is, nothing would ever tempt him to do evil. Evil-doing always rests upon a false estimate of goods. A man does the evil deed because he falsely expects to gain good by it, to get wealth, or power, or enjoyment, and does not reckon with the fact that the guilt of soul contracted immeasurably outweighs these supposed gains.
Quintus Fabius Maximus has one motive, and that's to make you as miserable as him. To brainwash you and create misery equity. He offers not even a solitary solution:

"Just keep delaying Hannibal."

If Hannibal were to be defeated, he would have nothing to keep the conscript fathers of the senate engaged.

He mentally breaks you down and then traps you. You're fed new misery every time the senate convenes. Delay is the word of the day. This man is evil.

Want to delay? Say everything is doomed if we attack head-on? Why even fight? If you're going to delay Hannibal constantly, formulate a VIABLE strategy. He never will. They're all purely based in fantasy right now.

"Well if we stopped marching our legions headlong into complete slaughter, Hannibal would eventually be starved out."

That's like saying: "If I had a tree that dropped gold denarii instead of apples, I'd have no money troubles."

If Fabius' solution is not viable, then it's not a solution. It's fodder for the poets.

-The final senatorial speech of Lucius Aemilius Paullus before the battle of Cannae
Very wise commentary on old age and carnal desires from book i of Platon's Republic:

Socrates: Indeed, Cephalus, I enjoy talking with the very old, for we should ask them, as we might ask those who have travelled a road that we too will probably have to follow, what kind of road it is, whether rough and difficult or smooth and easy. And I’d gladly find out from you what you think about this, as you have reached the point in life the poets call “the threshold of old age.” Is it a difficult time? What is your report about it?

Cephalus: By god, Socrates, I’ll tell you exactly what I think. A number of us, who are more or less the same age, often get together in accordance with the old saying [“God ever draws together like to like” (Odyssey xvii.218)]. When we meet, the majority complain about the lost pleasures they remember from their youth, those of sex, drinking parties, feasts, and the other things that go along with them, and they get angry as if they had been deprived of important things and had lived well then but are now hardly living at all. Some others moan about the abuse heaped on old people by their relatives, and because of this they repeat over and over that old age is the cause of many evils. But I don’t think they blame the real cause, Socrates, for if old age were really the cause, I should have suffered in the same way and so should everyone else of my age. But as it is, I’ve met some who don’t feel like that in the least. Indeed, I was once present when someone asked the poet Sophocles: “How are you as far as sex goes, Sophocles? Can you still make love with a woman?” “Quiet, man,” the poet replied, “I am very glad to have escaped from all that, like a slave who has escaped from a savage and tyrannical master.” I thought at the time that he was right, and I still do, for old age brings peace and freedom from all such things. When the appetites relax and cease to importune us, everything Sophocles said comes to pass, and we escape from many mad masters. In these matters and in those concerning relatives, the real cause isn’t old age, Socrates, but the way people live. If they are moderate and contented, old age, too, is only moderately onerous; if they aren’t, both old age and youth are hard to bear.
I'm in an area where Trump best Biden by about 30 points in 2020. Seeing way more Kamala signs than Trump ones. This is a sign of community health
Daily lessons in poverty:

1. Science can make a living; philosophy makes a life worth living.

2. Without philosophy, science is a ship lost at sea.

3. Science traps minds; philosophy sets them free.

4. Science is the servant; philosophy is the master.

(5. Science is gay.)
If there be not an excess of tyranny it is more expedient to tolerate the milder tyranny for a while than, by acting against the tyrant, to become involved in many perils more grievous than the tyranny itself. For it may happen that those who act against the tyrant are unable to prevail and the tyrant then will rage the more. But should one be able to prevail against the tyrant, from this fact itself very grave dissensions among the people frequently ensue: the multitude may be broken up into factions either during their revolt against the tyrant, or in process of the organization of the government, after the tyrant has been overthrown. Moreover, it sometimes happens that while the multitude is driving out the tyrant by the help of some man, the latter, having received the power, thereupon seizes the tyranny. Then, fearing to suffer from another what he did to his predecessor, he oppresses his subjects with an even more grievous slavery. This is wont to happen in tyranny, namely, that the second becomes more grievous than the one preceding, inasmuch as, without abandoning the previous oppressions, he himself thinks up fresh ones from the malice of his heart. Whence in Syracuse, at a time when everyone desired the death of Dionysius, a certain old woman kept constantly praying that he might be unharmed and that he might survive her. When the tyrant learned this he asked why she did it. Then she said: "When I was a girl we had a harsh tyrant and I wished for his death; when he was killed, there succeeded him one who was a little harsher. I was very eager to see the end of his dominion also, and we began to have a third ruler still more harsh—that was you. So if you should be taken away, a worse would succeed in your place."

-Aquinas, On Kingship - to the King of Cyprus
Contemporary philosophical discourse includes theories whose support appears predicated on fundamental misunderstandings—or perhaps willful misinterpretations—of opposing positions. Hard incompatibilism argues against the possibility of free will through the following syllogism:

1. Free will is incompatible with determinism (because if your choices are determined, your will is not free)
2. Free will is incompatible with indeterminism (because indeterminism = randomness, which does not create free will)
3. Either determinism or indeterminism must be true
4. Therefore, free will is impossible


The first premise is relatively uncontroversial; indeed, compatibilists occupy the more contentious theoretical territory in denying it. However, the argument falters at premise 2, which rests upon an unwarranted conflation of indeterminism with mere randomness. This narrow interpretation of indeterminism then infects premise 3—what appears to be a straightforward logical disjunction becomes questionable when we realize that "indeterminism" is being used in an artificially constrained sense.

Libertarian metaphysicians generally advocate for something quite different: the existence of a non-material metaphysical entity capable of transcending conventional causation. This agent-causal view represents a form of indeterminism distinct from randomness, wherein rational agents can initiate new causal chains through reasoned choice. Thus, the hard incompatibilist position fails to engage with the substantive metaphysical claims of libertarian free will, instead attacking a reductive caricature of indeterministic causation.
Forwarded from Coup
Funny how socrates believed everyone is good deep inside