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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Yes, Moldbug and Xenosystems. Love/Hate. The problem is they are too politics focused which is typically about using power to change other people's lives. Frankly I like it more if people experiment with their own lives first.
This is what I don't understand - is there even a name for that? A non-political conservative/reactionary who experiments with old ideas on himself and not forcing others to do so, is there such a thing (NOT the SCA).
If there was such a thing I would actually try a demo version of it, for example, I love the movie The Last Samurai for example, but strictly on a voluntary basis and I figure that means non-political.
I mean, I guess, if I think deeper into it, the issue is not even whether voluntary or not but the Talebian "skin in the game". The honesty of every proposal is proportional with how much it affects oneself and how much it others. And that is why I hate politics. Too few personal skin in the game and way too much other people's skin.
No, it's about trying to stop progressives from using power to change other people's lives.
I think most reactionaries would settle for forcing the progressives to experiment with their new ideas on themselves before forcing them on everyone else.
As for experimenting with old ideas. What do you mean? If the 1000+ years of data isn't enough for you, a couple of neoreactionaries' self-experimentation won't be either.
Libertarians?
I know only a few places on Earth where it would have any chance of working. Such as the US, maybe UK but from Latin America to Eastern Europe, far too often criminal plunder was covered up with free-market adages. Like "I sell this state-owned thing to my friend for peanuts because private ownership is more efficient."
The point is, ideas, one of the many angles to evaluate ideologies from is how easily they are misused as lip-service cover-up for something nasty. Marxism was misused into Leninism, Keynesianism into "spend in bad times... and not save in good times because fuck it: votes", and Libertarianism into neoliberal plunder.
This makes it not worse than the others, but not perfect either. I would basically use it as part of my political-philosophy toolset but not the whole of it.
Another thing Libertarians don't really understand even in US-based circumstances is that if I own the things I need to work with or live with, then private property gives me freedom and independence. But if other people own the things you need to work with, then private property is a burden, not a freedom for you.
Libertarianism works best with a fairly egalitarian distribution of property - not income, not income redistribution, but property, as in: frontier homesteader farms and suchlike. It is the legacy of frontier equality that made Libertarianism popular in the US, Hayek and Mises come from an Austrian tradition that had much more a small-business focus and thus more equal property ownership than the Mittelstand focus of Prussia-Germany and so on. (May Weber hated small business: he considered shopkeepers lazy and spoke out against the Austrianization of Germany, as in, against small business opposed to middle and big. Needless to say he was anything but Libertarian.) In Europe Switzerland is the closest to Libertarianism and precisely because they have/had such a broad property-owning middle-class, every second Swiss person seems to have inherited 1/4 of a dairy farm or something. This is why The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is the best Libertarian utopia: because it is about frontier with egalitarian property ownership, nobody is proletarian who must work for The Man for wages forever because he never has a chance to homstead a farm.
In all circumstances, Libertarianism works best with a heavy dose of Distributism i.e. small-business economy, entrepreneurial and not corporate capitalism. Family farms, mom and pop shops and so on. Basically the US would have to find a way to re-create the frontier. In Latin America, Eastern Europe, misusing Libertarianism for neoliberal plunder could be avoided similar ways: never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever sell, privatize a big chunk of state-owned property to one person or corporation! ALWAYS spread it around, for example if you want to privatize a state-owned utility company make 1000 shares and distribute it via lottery.
Libertarian-Distributism is something I could get behind. More info: http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/06/the-economics-of-distributism-iv-property-and-the-just-wage/ (best part of a five-part series)
Sure, these people are usually known as eccentrics, cranks, and weirdos X-/
Since you're experimenting on yourself, what's stopping you and why do you want only a demo version?
That depends on where do you live and what kind of politics you are talking about.
Lack of info. Know any good self-help books published before 1700 ? :)
Most of the old stuff was learned by word of mouth. The "sensei" type of learning that we Westerners find so adorable in Asia, but actually we did it too, and that means not a lot of stuff was written down.
Not all hope is lost, though, there are people learning fencing from manuals written around 1470. http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Main_Page
But jokes aside. For example we are discussing akrasia a lot. In my childhood, it was "solved" by scaring the living bejeezus out of children who procrastinated instead of doing homework, everything from punishment to guilt-tripping. This sucked, and also, often worked. Akrasia became a problem largely when it was decided that now we are trying to be nice with each other and ourselves too.
However, I cannot have been as simple as that. I think if I scratch deeper, I could find old methods. The issue is often not being written down.
The Book of Proverbs? The Book of Baruch? Sermons from the past? Writings of the ancient Stoics?
+1 for stoics, actually people like Nassim Taleb are re-inventing that and it seems to be a good way.
No, Taleb isn't "re-inventing" stoicism any more then every mechanic is "re-inventing" the wheel.
You mean stoicism was always alive?
More modern stoicism here, although personally, I think that the Modern Stoicism community treats stoicism too much as a package deal.
The Enchiridion, by Epictetus.
I'll add to the already growing list The meditations by Marcus Aurelius, I've been told is one of the best.
Heck, sometimes I feel that past self-help books are way better than today's...
Essays of Montaigne.
What about Bacon's essays? (I don't remember when they were written, though.)
Sure, lots of those -- from St.Augustine's Confessions (that's way before 1700 :-D) to Machiavelli's The Prince.
It might be worth mentioning that a lot of the people working at reviving Western longsword fencing also have rank in Eastern sword styles, or classical fencing, or both. That isn't really that big a deal from a purity/authenticity standpoint, contrary to what some people will tell you; schools differ mostly in methodology, since the biomechanics of fencing are largely the same whether you live in 21st-century California or 19th-century Japan or 15th-century Germany, and methodology lends itself better to being written down than biomechanics does. But it does mean they have a live body of practice to hang written descriptions of technique on.
I intend to learn HEMA/longsword after I get good enough in boxing i.e. fist-fencing. I wonder what, if anything, will I bring into it. One thing I am doing is to practice both dominant hand front and non-dominant hand front stances because while boxing focuses on the second, the first is useful both for surprising an opponent in boxing and also fencing does that. I hope my footwork will be well translatable, because I suffer like a pig on ice with it, it is really hard for me to learn boxing footwork so I I hope I can use that for historical fencing too.
Another interesting thing I hope to help me with fencing later is the non-telegraphed jab. This means roughly this: turn the hand inward and raise the shoulder during a jab so the elbow does not flare out to the side. I think this can be useful for a side-sword or rapier thrust but I am not so sure for the two-handed longsword stuff.
I think it makes more sense to learn fencing some someone who understands the biomechaniscs well enough to have his own opinion about what should be proper technique should be than someone who simply tries to teach what he thinks some book says.
It was also a radically different environment. Computers provide for new distractions. People used to feel bored and have nothing to do. I never feel like I don't know what to do and there are always multiple options.
I have a sample size of 1 that it is possible today :) Screwing around on Reddit can be boring (and yet addictive). It is not that straightforward to find interesting content online. Maybe I am just unusually bad at it - or maybe because literally zero of my IRL friends and relatives reads Reddit, LW or any interesting blog, so I never get "hey this is cool check this out"emails. They just don't have much free time. This is probably atypical.
Yet, it is very easy for a child to be distracted from homework at any level of technology. It is called daydreaming. You familiar with Karl May novels, I suppose? Old Shatterhand and Winnetou stories caused me huge amounts of daydreaming when I was a child and so did they for my friends.
Imagination always fills the void that entertainment doesn't. Of course you need books because without adventure stories there is not much to daydream about, but that is solved problem since about, 1800-1850? I mean, that was roughly when books were cheap enough that children could have romantic novels. And vice versa - probably this is why experts say watching TV, even perfectly healthy educational shows retards the development of toddlers. Not enough exercise of imagination.
I do. It is hard work for me to race with boredom and not always win. I fill my tablet, Instapaper, FBreader with saved articles and ebooks to read but the activity itself can be get boring, and there is not much left then, I used to be a gamer since 1987 (Commodore...) but grew to be bored with most games except currently the best mods for Mount & Blade Warband (such as A Clash of Kings or Brytenwalda). I have a family now so that fills out my weekends nice, still I sometimes get bored. The way I break it down, there is almost nothing outside our apartment that would be interesting in a random weekend in Vienna, just people drinking in bars or yet another kind of artsy music festival. Inside the apartment, it is each other, and that is great, and the computers, which largely mean stuff to read, and that gets tiresome, or stuff to play with, which already got.
The world feels a lot like a prison, except having my lovely family and the books and games in my computer. What else is out there? Oh, I do some sports too...
Sometimes I almost wish for some kind of social collapse just to be more energized through a survival instinct. But that wish would be incredibly selfish. Still, I am even contemplating writing an "ethics for a boring world" article where I argue it is better to cause others 10 units of pleasure and 2 units of pain rather than 8 units pleasure only, because it makes the world less fucking tediously comfortably dull and more challenging / adventurous.
It's not the same kind of boring that people had 100 years ago. It fills your brain with information that has to be processed.
I think daydreaming is qualitatively much different than outside input for the purpose of this discussion. Daydreaming allows you to process old information instead of adding new information.
Books also don't have the constant change of focus.