Daniel Stride

@PilpsYT Norway didn't have Margaret Thatcher sell the oil reserves.

@abby4thepeople In the case of Carnegie, he was doing it as Hell Insurance. The man was terrified of being punished in the afterlife for his behaviour in this life.

During the last Gilded Age, the robber barons founded universities, museums, libraries, etc., to discourage workers from organizing & staging a revolution. We know this because they wrote it all down in letters to each other, congratulating themselves on being very clever.

@Realismusjihad @PortoValhe I've read it - together with the rest of his corpus. Anyone who thinks Plato was in any way a crypto-atheist is dreaming. You might have a point with (the profoundly non-spiritual) Aristotle, but Plato is intensely mystical/religious.

@strda221 @PortoValhe Read the Euthyphro, instead, and stop annoying me. If Plato was one thing NOT, it is sincere. You can generally assume he is being mendacious unless there is special reason to think otherwise.

Laughable. Plato was a polytheist who believed in Reincarnation and that salvation comes from perfecting oneself. Christianity's non-monotheism would seem incoherent to him, he would reject Islam's monotheism, and would reject both religions claim that salvation comes from submitting oneself to a creed.

@theceltsdying @AncPhi Yep. If we're going by language, the major Western Christian Platonist, St Augustine, had issues with learning Greek. (More seriously: Plato's biggest issue with Christianity is that he would think the One descending would be absurd).

@AncPhi This is a shallow take. Reducing philosophy to language/culture ignores that Plato’s ideas (ethics, metaphysics, the soul) influenced both Christian and Islamic thought. If language defined compatibility, Plato would “share nothing” with most of the world, which is false.

Plato could speak to Christ in Greek, with Mohammed he shares nothing.

@Realismusjihad @PortoValhe Try reading the Timaeus next time, mate. Plato was many things, but crypto-atheist ain't one.

@PortoValhe People do not read or understand Euthyphro and still consider themselves Plato experts.🙄

@PortoValhe Plato thought traditional polytheism was for the peasants. His conception of the One very much shaped later monotheism. His biggest objection to Christianity: "the One can't descend and become a man. That makes no sense!"

@akarlin The limit on Tolkien's dragons is that they are few in number. There is also reason for thinking they are fairly lazy between their bursts of activity.

This is a Tolkien weakness because OP dragons and the world remaining human-centric violate suspension of disbelief. Realistically Tolkien's dragons should have been the main characters of Middle-Earth. As apex physical, intellectual, AND magical beings, only the most powerful Maiar should have been able to match them. Crass as it sounds, The Elder Scrolls is far more realistic, in that the dragons trivially dominated humans through their human underlings (the dragon-priests), and it took a dragon civil war (= elite defections) for humans to break free. GoT is also perfectly realistic, it is more or less exactly how a world in which one faction in a medieval world gains the biological equivalent of bomber aircraft would look like.

@silvaplum @NoLimitGains The Strait is closed because the USA attacked Iran. Without the attack, the Strait would still be open.

@NoLimitGains Trump calling out allies to handle the Strait of Hormuz themselves is straight America First. No more US blood and treasure subsidizing Europes energy while they lecture us. Time they step up or watch gas prices hit American wallets, too.

🚨 DONALD TRUMP JUST POSTED THIS He told allies to handle the Strait of Hormuz themselves. “The U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore.”

@PronouncedHare Crude lasts rather better than refined. Not that that would particularly help us presently.

We should just stockpile petrol continuously because it never degrades, not even when it’s in vehicles. - Source: Zombieland 2: Double Tap

@Arrogance_0024 Some NATO allies followed Bush's illegal war in Iraq. But even then, it was after WMD lies and copious facades of legitimate action. Bush/Blair put effort in. With Iran? Trump skipped the facade, and just decided might makes right.

Why did NATO allies follow Bush in Iraq but refuse to follow Trump in Iran? What exactly has changed? What is the "problem" now? Or should I rather say: WHO is the problem??

@clickandcollext @NMowbray23 @MarkHubbard33 *cough* Slavery. cough*.

@NMowbray23 @MarkHubbard33 In this volatile world, should we bring back manufacturing and have prisons do the work for free? By absorbing the costs and using free labour, we could keep our country independent rather than letting prisoners have a free ride with food and board.

All tracks back to labour's ideology.

@EPM106 Nope. Dude liked Asimov and Agatha Christie.

tolkien would absolutely hate A Song of Ice and Fire because he hated pretty much all contemporary cultural artifacts lol

@TolkienWorldG It wouldn't be a remake. It'd be another adaptation of Tolkien's original book. Jackson's version wasn't even the first screen adaptation of the book.

Just so we’re clear.

@Stevenmargo007 @robbertleusink Umm... the Pre-Socratics did not have a "full and complete knowledge of the stars and the physical universe."

@robbertleusink The Pagan philosophers who predate Plato and Socrates and dwarf them . A full and complete knowledge of the stars and our solar system and the physical universe , all destroyed. The absurdity, no one baths.

The Dark Ages weren't dark, they were a 500 year rescue operation run by the Church When Rome fell in 476 AD, monks walked into the ruins and pulled out the manuscripts Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil were copied by hand for 500 years in cold rooms for no audience The Renaissance didn't rediscover antiquity, it unwrapped what monks had kept

@robbertleusink Not Plato and Aristotle. The West forgot how to read Greek for a millennium - it got Aristotle back via Islam, and later Plato back from Constantinople. The monks *did* salvage Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, and company. And the Priapeia. And Lucretius.

@saralucia @shouldveknown11 Not quite. The chain goes Middle-Eastern crude > Asian refineries > on a tanker to NZ. The refineries refine into both diesel and petrol. Diesel is skyrocketing because it is far more necessary to the economy than petrol. Demand in a crisis is very real.

Please explain to me how Diesel is now $3.339 a litre when I was paying 1.42 a litre 3 weeks ago. Also how is Diesel a couple of cents off the price of 91?

@theobjectivist In my country, the state provides health care. We all think you are barbaric lunatics.

The day the Affordable Care Act passed was one of the worst days of my life. Not because I lacked compassion for the uninsured, but because I watched a nation founded on individual rights applaud as its government seized control of the most intimate decisions a human being can make about his own body and his own life. Thanks to his so called Affordable Care Act I now pay approximately $29,000/year for myself and my wife's yearly insurance premiums. Obama calls it his "proudest moment." Of course he does. Every collectivist in history has been proudest on the day he fastened the chains. The ACA did not give anyone "access to healthcare." It forced every American to purchase a product under penalty of law, compelled doctors to practice under government dictation, and conscripted the productive to finance the consumption of others. That is not compassion. It is naked compulsion. "Pre-existing conditions" became the moral shield behind which the entire edifice was built. No one dared question it because no one dared say what Rand would have said: you do not have a right to the labor of another human being. Not to his mind. Not to his skill. Not to his time. No matter how sick you are. Need is not a claim. Suffering is not a mortgage on the lives of those who can help. This was not progress. It was surrender.

@HukijuHacks @Rainmaker1973 White Bread was banned in 1942. Bread rationing was imposed in July 1946, and ended in July 1948.

@Rainmaker1973 Did you know? England won World War 2 in 1945 but then rationed bread for the first time. The victory left them so broke that food controls got stricter and lasted until 1954. Peace turned out harsher than the Blitz.

This is what England looked like in 1945