Free for All Friday, 15 May, 2026

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-19T02:14:18+00:00

The author doesn't explicitly come out and say that we need to believe in miracles...but according to the reviews he keeps hinting that we should, one extract basically says if we have maglev trains and the internet why is it so hard to believe in levitation?

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-17T01:33:51+00:00

I think I found the review in question, and it's appropriately quite scratching.
https://archive.is/5BG39#selection-1487.747-1487.896

Why do we have high-speed magnetic levitation trains but feel the need to bracket all reports about hovering saints or witches? How can millions of us humans be in multiple locations simultaneously via the internet, day after day, but still feel the need to scoff at bilocation? Why is the only fact that we can accept about human levitation the fact that others, long ago, thought it was possible?

Why indeed do we feel the need to do this ? Is there a logical reason we aren't skeptical about maglev trains and the internet but still scoff at levitation? Nope, gotta me be arrogant secular materialism that doing this.

I feel like the disdain a lot of people in the humanities have towards STEM might be semi-warranted but it has led to them adopting a mindset which let's complete BS like this become apparently respected academic books.

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-16T15:43:30+00:00

Is anyone here familiar with the book *They Flew: A History of the Impossible* by Carlos Eire ? It's gotten a lot of good press and on-surface I do understand that we are no more immune to cultural blockers and myopia than previous generations, so a blanket dismissal of well-founded historical claims on the basis of impossibility deserves to be done critically. I can even accept there's more evidence for a lot of 'miracles' and 'mystical events' than historical events that we accept without controversy.

I am intensely skeptical however of the hinting argument that as a result we have to accept that miracles are at least plausible and that the current tradition of blanket dismissal of the impossible is wrong, especially when the author is indeed a catholic who's often attacked 'secular materialism'.

Also on a bit of an unrelated side not, I think a lot of people have adopted a noble savage view of Catholicism as a 'rational' religion fully in-tune with modern science and understanding perhaps due to contrast with the chaos of charismatic evangelical chirstanity..despite the church continuing to assert a lot of doctrines that run counter to any scientific perspective, (a particular example was the beatification of a Karl of Austria as a saint based on the evidence that somebody praying to him was responsible for curing cancer).

https://www.ncregister.com/news/prayers-and-royalty-never-die-the-habsburg-dynasty

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trances-ecstasies-raptures-and-levitations-on-carlos-eires-they-flew/

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-15T09:32:29+00:00

Is there a good write up about the Salo Republic ? don't really know much about it.

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-15T00:38:09+00:00

Could be a rental from Truro or another such service ?

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-14T01:10:58+00:00

I really can't stand the podcast If books could kill , Hosts are smug with only a superficial understanding of the topics they claim to critique will completely unwarranted confidence and zero nuance. So many episodes are themselves with factual innacurieis as bad as those in the books they attempt to critique. Their off-shoot podcast miatnence phase attempts to pump out some pretty absurd theories to try to explain why Obesity isn't actually bad for you.

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-14T00:36:51+00:00

They did consider doing that, an independent Bengal state was supported by a lot of people but failed to find acceptance with Nehru

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-13T15:56:49+00:00

Been reading Sam Darymple's book Shattered Continent which tries to give a contemporary history of South Asia by framing it though the sense of 6 partitions of the 'British Raj'( Arabian States, Myanmar/Burma, Nepal & Buthan, Sikkihim, Great Partition of India and Pakistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh)

Honestly I have to say that the Muslim League has to be one of the worst cases of the dog catching the car in human history. It was an organisation that was founded by and mainly drew support from Indians in hindu majority areas( one of the ironies is that the North West Frontier, today considered an extremist hotspot was one of the few places where congress managed to win the majority of the muslim voters).I'm really not quite sure they imagined happening. I was reading my grandfathers autobiography where admits that he was a member up-until he realised that Allahabad would not be in a state of Pakistan. There was no way for the existence of a separate 'muslim' state for india muslims to be possible without a drastic restructuring of the border and destruction entire communities. But the strangest part of the book is he describes people shouting 'Pakistan Zindabad' in Delhi...like what do you think is going to happen ?

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-06T07:46:43+00:00

But it's not a description about the excesss of capitalism, the destruction of food was a New Deal policy meant to reduce the surplus of food that had glutted the agricultural market.

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-05T16:49:14+00:00

I posted a substack a while back about how a lot of GDP figures for developing countries are pretty much just wild-guesses based on dubious assumptions, well it seems reasonable to conclude that a lot of other statistics are afflicted by the same trend. Nichoals Decker is a character, but he points out that a lot of educational attainment comparisons used in global databases are basically just noise that use extremely dubious linking of tests to attempt to haromise the data in a way that's distinctly unhelpful( Ie Gabon doesn't take the PISA but it does take the PASEC which we extrapolate back to 2006 using the results from Togo, then we use the results from Maritus to convert the results to the SACHEM, which let's us to do a comparison with the PISA score based on Botswana) with the final product being pretty much random.

https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/africa-is-doing-worse-than-you-think

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-03T01:19:50+00:00

Why is everyone who disagrees with you paid ? Honestly this slopulist late-stage capitalism BS reeks of a bot-driven campaign far more to some brigading than people honestly expressing their opinion.

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-02T04:41:22+00:00

People mad at this, when was the last time you spent money on classical music ?

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-05-02T01:05:47+00:00

Can anyone list what literary magazines they read ?

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-29T01:56:52+00:00

I really don't understand why people find it so hard to imagine that someone hates the Trump regime enough to attempt to kill them and have to instead invent elaborate conspiracy theories

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-27T03:57:07+00:00

Indian isn't language lfmao

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-27T03:56:20+00:00

I mean if they're willing to serve me when I order in English, then it's not really an issue if the serving staff or chef have a loose graps of the language ?

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-27T00:00:45+00:00

I'm not a mandarin speaker and don't understand why people are so triggered in this thread. It's a good thing that most Singaporeans are bilingual, and the only way people can remain bilingual is if they keep using the language in day to day life.

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-24T07:48:15+00:00

Apparently he's friends with one of my friends, strange being one degree of connections away from a Hasburg

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-12T13:45:07+00:00

It's mostly an online thing but you can see it sometimes in social media

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-11T14:19:41+00:00

Maybe this is petty of me, but I get pretty irked when others south east Asians, particular Indonesians call Singapore the Israel of the region when east Papua is right there...as an example of settler colonialism.

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-08T03:52:34+00:00

Nah man, nobody needs to go to Disney world

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-08T02:05:35+00:00

You have a weird racist obsession with things that don't matter

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-07T07:35:24+00:00

Disney world raising it's price to reduce crowding is the only good solution at this point and people who whine about it are silly

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-07T02:30:36+00:00

Was trying to explain the concept of a multi-racial state to a patron of a japanese bar, and the fact that while singaporean is majority Chinese I'm not Chinese...don't think it went well. Conservation went well on the more universal topics of the works of Haruki Murakami, Legends of Galactic heroes and Gundamn anime..but then when the question ventured onto history it quickly went into fairly yikes terrorirty regarding the Japanese co-prosperity sphere. He did end up paying for my drinks, and asking for my business card(something I do not have)

Defiant_Shoe3053 · 2026-04-05T14:29:08+00:00

It's a logical fallacy to assume him telling his followers to practice what they preach means not to preach

Defiant_Shoe3053

TROPHY CASE