Valentinian's Third Bear

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism... Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.” - Theodore Roosevelt

@AlexNowrasteh Your artificial meritocracy of Excel spreadsheets is propped up by millions of Americans with guns protecting you from the natural meritocracy of extreme violence. And your thanks is to dedicate your life to selling out their country from underneath them.

I just disagree, I think the strain of life affirmation in "Everlasting Yea" and "Es muss sein" and "Heiliger Dankesaang" clearly has a common philosophical and spiritual root, which is also evident in Schopenhauer. If this kind of "elective affinity" thinking is something you refuse to accept, that's fine, but it's common enough in greater minds than yourself or myself (MH Abrams, Erich Auerbach, etc). I pointed out that Nietzsche often vituperates against people he holds closely and dearly, as in the example of Plato. I further argue he treats Carlyle the same way, and that this is evident in the literary treatment of juxtaposing Carlyle to Emerson, who himself adored Carlyle. It is simply implausible that Nietzsche didn't know about Emerson's love for Carlyle, and so I think it's clear that the choice to Juxtapose and give greater approbation to Emerson is implicitly an argument that all three are operating in the same vein. You have not made any substantive objections to any of these points, or this style of reading. You have simply acted as if not finding a positive statement about Carlyle is dispositive, and I have argued that is not an appropriate way to read or understand Nietzsche. Despite your predilection for insults, and ignoring the meaning of what I'm saying, I would prefer to leave this as good-natured disagreement.

I think the statement that the German phrases you cite do not correspond semantically in any way to the English phrases is the very model of a "substantive objection". As is pointing out that the text of Nietzsche's writings contains no single positive reference to the ideas of a man who you claim he felt was "basically on the right track", Your insistence, in the face of this, in saying stuff like "you make no substantive objections" is why I treat you with contempt. You are not a good-faith interlocutor. And please let's just leave it there. You bore me. Go make some money.

x.com/dfLiszt/status… I always found the story of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn to be the most affecting and thought-provoking of fairy tales because it ends on a note of exquisite ambiguity. The reader is left uncertain about whether the magic mountain into which the Piper leads the children is some kind of torment-filled inferno - and the glimpse of apparent paradise that we are given before the rock walls close again just a last deceitful enticement - or whether it really is Paradise and we should feel for the little lame boy left behind not just the pity we'd feel for the single survivor of a school bus crash but the much profounder pity that we feel for someone whose physical shortcomings have deprived him of a genuine eternal bliss. I seek this exquisite ambiguity every morning in vain when I browse @bronzeagemantis's account before breakfast. He's a Pied Piper, certainly, who maintains, as a long train behind him, thousands of needy, fatherless, 105-IQ zoomers whose powers of judgment at least extended to choosing BAP over Jordan Peterson. But there's none of the Hamlyn tale's exquisite ambiguity about the place that he's leading them to. It's not a Hell as picturesquely awful as Dante's, it's true. But it's unambiguously and unmistakably an annexe of that Hell of "quiet desperation" that the overwhelming mass of people live in: namely, an existence lacking all dimension of "the life of the mind". The place to which BAP (mis)leads his followers, in fact, is somewhere much worse than this place bereft of thinking and inquiring in which the huge majority of people live. It's a place with a small but regularly replenished pile of ready-made thought and inquiry maintained in the corner which serves to still any desire that may stir in these poor enchanted children to test, at least, whether their minds and souls have wings. Take this little vademecum of BAPist wisdom about music that one of his little acolytes poasted and that The Man Himself has now deigned to repoast. This will now surely be received and celebrated by BAP's army of 105-IQ zoomers as state-of-the-art, boundary-pushing reflection on the art of music, just as the manifestos of a KIRAC are received by them as state-of-the-art, boundary-pushing reflections on the graphic and plastic arts. But there is nothing in these excerpts except the vague reheating of some two-hundred-year-old remarks of Schopenhauer's. The ideas thrown out about music and our present historical condition don't even rise beyond this to the level of Nietzsche's later reflections and they fail so completely to engage with the one really insightful and innovatory philosophy of music of the last 100 years, Adorno's, that it's fairly safe to conclude that the great Mentor of Youth BAP doesn't even know that this latter philosophy of music exists. It's clear from the few examples of music that BAP does give, in any case, that he has the musical taste, and familiarity with the Western musical canon, of a middle manager in an Ohio tyre manufacturer who likes to keep Classic FM playing while he does the monthly accounts. Beethoven, for BAP, is the Eroica or the tediously familar opening bars of the Fifth. His monomanic concern with Beethoven's music's relation to "the heroic" strongly suggests, if not proves, that he has never actually listened to, let alone studied, those works of Beethoven's which both musicians and musicologists have always looked on as the German composer's real contribution to music and to the European Geist, such as the late string quartets, which cannot be understood at all in terms of this bombastic vitalistic vision of manly struggle and overcoming.

You don't even have any substantive objections! I'm an investor and a businessman, not an intellectual, so even your objurgations against my character and motivation are baseless. Please note I have been polite enough not to reciprocate; I think your more salubrious traits would be better displayed if you too did not engage in such provocations.

@corbinians_bear Again, you're just making shit up because you love the smell of your own intellectual farts. "Muß es sein?" and "Es muß sein" are about as much translations of the "Everlasting Yea" and the "Everlasting Nay" as they are of "Frère Jacques dormez-vous?" Just get lost.

Nietzsche was also unrelievedly scabrous about Platon and Socrates, though he also felt a strong sense of kinship to them (and I believe he listed Platon amongst the five or so people he would read forever). Similarly, in the section of Skirmishes where he attacks Carlyle, he never really disagrees with Carlyle's principles or points, just positing that his dyspeptic polemic being emblematic of a false faith, and compares him unfavorably to Emerson. I don't think it's even vaguely controversial that whatever Nietzsche thought of Carlyle, they were aligned on many beliefs, relative to their contemporaries and relative to modernity. And of course I don't see how it's possible to love Emerson without loving the part of Emerson that arose from Carlyle, to whom he was profoundly indebted personally and spiritually, and their correspondence is required reading for anyone in the 19th century. And if Emerson and Carlyle are actually of a piece, and Nietzsche is aligned with that part of the former pair that affirms life, then surely the marked doublet of Op. 135 which is practically a German translation of the "Everlasting Nay" and "Everlasting Yay" of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, is of a piece with that.

You're bluffing. Your statement "Nietzsche was somewhat critical of Carlyle's hero-worship, but thought he was in many respects on the right track" is something you have just pulled out of your arse, with absolutely no textual basis to back it up. Go to the NietzscheSource website, which contains a fully digitalized edition of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe of Colli and Montinari, comprising all of Nietzsche's published works, letters and so-called "posthumous notes". Type the name "Carlyle" into the search box. You will be directed to about 30 passages (I think about 33 if you include such derivations as "Carlylismus"). Read through them all, assuming you read German (a big assumption, no doubt). Not a single one of them is laudatory. 25 at least of the references are outright contemptuous. I'd be willing to bet that any knowledge you claim to have about Beethoven and his string quartets is pulled right out of your arsehole the way I've just demonstrated your claimed knowledge about Nietzsche's attitude to Carlyle to be. But I'm not going to waste my energy trying to correct you on that. I understand very well that the temptation to post stuff on the internet that you've just made up but that makes you sound super-clever is an almost irresistible one because 99 out of 100 of the people who may happen to read you are sure to know nothing about literally anything, so you can enjoy your cheap little thrill in relative security. Nothing I say is ever going to make people like you - or Bronze Age Pervert or his ten thousand little 105-IQ smartest-kid-in-class imitators - stop doing what you are doing so let's just leave it at that.

Nietzsche was somewhat critical of Carlyle's hero-worship, but thought he was in many respects on the right track. My contention is the late Beethoven quartets reflect a Romantic heritage common to all three thinkers. You suppose - in a fashion that puts you closer to BAP than I am - that Nietszsche is to be taken solely as an unerring and iconoclastic prophet, whereas I see him as one part of the literary Romanticism of his era. I will ignore your scatological suggestions.

I'd offer to explain these things to you in a discussion space - you're clearly confused about Nietzsche,, Carlyle and Emerson, for example, since Nietzsche highly praised the latter and denounced and dismissed the former, so no notion of "Romanticism" can cover all three - but what would be the point? None of you BAP/Yarvin/Trump cocksuckers would ever dare to engage me on this issue or indeed on any other. Just follow your Big Daddy's example and block me and get back to what people like you do best: suck e-celeb cock.

If your family settled Jamestown in 1607, you’re an invader with no claim to this stolen land. If your Chinese mom pops you out in Guam tomorrow, America is your birthright.

I hate this attitude so much. We've basically discovered the way to make humanity smarter, healthier and better forever with no downsides and no coercion — Eugenics without the "ew" part — but no, good things don't exist, it's all a scam! Genuinely evil.

Anyone who knows about Clarence Thomas dissents knows they are almost always short and sweet. The fact that he wrote a 91 page dissent for this monstrosity of a decision on birthright shows how absolutely infuriated he is.

Laughing to myself about how the 1776 larpers will process this. Gosh I don’t even know. Of course Dickinson was a real statesman and Sam Adams an evil little turd

this is really interesting because it challenges a lot of priors

From a conservative perspective the problem with hoping for Alito to strategically retire is that his replacement will be a downgrade. You just won’t find someone with his intellect, legal craftsmanship and backbone. He’s clicking on all cylinders and, by the way, is still younger than our two most recent presidents.

Happiness consists in the delight of enjoying God, and one is disposed for this by love. Thus, one who has a more burning love for God will find more delight in the enjoyment of God (Commentary on John 14).

@GetonTrightside @MartinShkreli Yes immensely, but don't overuse it.

@corbinians_bear @MartinShkreli Going to try Selank soon. Helps with sleep?

RIP peptide retards

If it’s a creedal nation, then this is the easiest deportation case imaginable

.@paul_hundred

The silver lining of the birthright citizenship issue is this: On the constitutional issue, we got 4 votes. When Trump’s EO came out, conventional wisdom was we’d be lucky to get one vote, that it was obviously unconstitutional. And it’s not just the vote count - it’s the quality of the opinions. CJR’s opinion sucks. It has no good account for why the already recognized exceptions to birthright citizenship are a closed set other than “well, that’s just the way it is.” That theory didn’t just lose Alito and Thomas; it lost Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, too. So then the question is: is this the kind of precedent that will stick? What force will stare decisis have? My answer here is: not much. The only people who can claim to be “relying” on this decision are temporary visitors, Chinese spies, and illegal aliens - people who have no inherent right to be in the country in the first instance. In the interim, we obviously need to go full bore on mass deportation. If we do that, and hold on to power, we will be able to get this fixed - not with a Constitutional Amendment, but with a better Court, that will do to Trump v. Barbara what this Court did to Roe.

imagine being a sentient black guy, having to put up with shitlibs and FOBs subverting an 1868 constitutional amendment written to protect freed slaves, listening to them spout cynical bullshit about how it actually applies to all brown people and also rich chinese tourists

@Osirustwits @MartinShkreli Huh? I am obviously responding not merely to one particular post, but to a sustained vein of commentary which this post alludes to and incorporates when he refers to "peptide retards" This is obvious even grammatically, since I don't even respond to the post directly.

@corbinians_bear @MartinShkreli Cool And again how is he wrong he just posted a tweet about the FDA document. Could you convince the FDA to add it to the list to prove him wrong?