L.P. Koch

Philosophy, Current Things, music. German.

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

Why is it that people live in different thought universes that no rational argument can penetrate?

In light of recent debates about cancel culture and free speech, I de-paywalled this piece from May of this year.

You'll also get a short introduction to Heidegger along the way.

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

@Irrationalbasi5 @eugyppius1 I think part of the reason for this beef is that Americans hate the Euro-snobbery and their performative asceticism, and the Euros hate it when their Americanized-globalized culture gets bashed for the few quaint oddities they still keep. Both understandable.

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

Amen.

To add a few points:

1) In most of Europe, people simply haven't felt the need to install 'em. Personally, in the past I have missed AC maybe 3-5 days a year. Not enough to dole out the money. And yes, if the heatwave goes on a bit longer, you start thinking about it and before you know it, it's over.

In Southern Europe AC is much more widespread btw, for obvious reasons.

2) Our old houses tend to keep cool even during a (shortish) heat wave. It's only if the heatwave continues for 6+ days that it really gets uncomfortable. Which rarely happens in most places.

(New houses are actually more likely to have AC.)

3) Europe culturally tends to resist the latest "convenience thing" far longer than the US, Asia, the Middle East etc. See microwaves, giant fridges, tumble dryer, etc. Often we adopt the stuff eventually, but we are more stubborn and traditionalist in that regard, for better or worse. This has nothing to do with Green ideology.

I get it, the Green zealots who would love to see people suffer from "global warming" and who irrationally subsidize heat pumps cause muh oil bad but punish you when you switch them to cooling mode make me wanna install 5 split units and leave them running when I'm away just to spite them. They deserve all the ridicule. But the Eurobashing is retarded.

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

Partially agree, but there is a third alternative that neither falls into the trap of bureaucratic technocracy in the name of the "greater good" nor misguided traditionalism fuelled by hazy nostalgia.

Regenerative Agriculture is actually a good example (which Arnaud dismisses here probably without really having looked into it):

"Organic" is often a scam where another bureaucratic system builds on top of industrial farming, generating overpriced products and tons of money for the labeling agencies.

Regenerative agriculture on the other hand is not really ideological but simply aims at working with nature to build soil as opposed to depleting it with ever-more chemicals.

It's not a hippie pipe dream but something that has been proven to work at scale (not just for "small farmers"). It's very involved technologically and scientifically. It does however require someone who loves his land, who is creative and willing to observe, learn, adapt and experiment. Someone with wisdom and drive.

But you can't "systematize" wisdom and drive; hence bureaucrats (whether Big Ag or Big Organic and their minions in government) don't know what to do with it. Easier to have everybody follow the same rules, turn them into cogs in the machine, all in the name of standardization and convenience, with the predictable degradation of spirit that always goes along with these things.

We're talking about a different kind of evolution here, a different kind of honoring the human spark: boldly and creatively finding new solutions, not based on shortsighted pragmatism nor imposed from top down and cast into rulebooks, but based on individual motivation, love, curiosity and understanding.

We either continue feeding people slop, literally and figuratively, or we reconnect with that spark that transcends both technology and nostalgia, both idiotic bureaucratic KPIs and weak utopian dreams.

That's the true way forward towards the true greater good.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

It says an awful lot about France - and not in a good way - that there is "political divide" on using air conditioning when temperatures literally exceed those of the Sahara desert, and when France has one of the greenest energy mixes in the world (thanks to nuclear).

And it says even more that those who oppose AC are often the same as those who oppose nuclear: the view - presumably - is that you should neither adapt to climate change (AC) nor prevent it (nuclear).

Also the same people, incidentally, who oppose pesticides and fertilizers - basically modern farming - and push for all-organic: a prescription that, if universally applied, would literally starve billions of people (and, ironically, would require so much additional farmland it would devastate the world's remaining forests).

It's all part of the same logical fallacy, the notion that if something causes a problem, then that thing is the problem.

Yes progress and technology caused and continue to cause plenty of environmental issues. And there is indeed something seductive in saying "we've gone too far, let's change tracks, let's head towards a simpler, slower life, we used to be like that."

But not only is this just not feasible without causing far greater harm to ourselves, it's also a fundamentally nihilistic and mortiferous ideology. One that rests on a profound discomfort with what's arguably the single most defining feature of humanity: our ability to shape our environment to suit us, to fight our circumstances rather than surrender to them. That's been the case ever since we discovered fire and invented farming.

It is, at the end of the day, the transformation of humanity's genius - our need to create and improve our condition - into a vice. They make it sound like a humanistic project but how could it be since the core premise is fear of humans and contempt for our very nature?

Conclusion: yes, 100 times yes, use AC. You'd need to be a complete moron to let yourself boil under 43C heat in order to "save the planet." If climate change is to be solved, it will be by getting the ideologues out of the way of the people who actually fix things.

[Plattenbauaristokrat @BAMFBasar]

>deutscher Michel
>40h/Woche
>vom Gehalt 45 % Steuern
>mit Rest einkaufen
>Sekt? Schaumweinsteuer
>Bier? Biersteuer
>Kaffee? Kaffeesteuer
>Kippen? Tabaksteuer
>zahle 19 % MwSt auf bereits versteuertes Geld
>40 Jahre lang abgedrückt wie Findom Zahlsklave
>kaufst ne Wohnung
>Grunderwerbsteuer bis 6,5 % obendrauf
>jedes Jahr Grundsteuer, weil du atmest
>Auto? Kfz-Steuer
>tanken? Mineralölsteuer
>Strom? Stromsteuer
>Heizen mit Gas oder Öl? Energiesteuer
>sparen? Abgeltungsteuer
>mit 67 endlich Rente
>Einkommensteuer auf die Rente
>Kinder sollen später erben
>Geld, was schon zigmal versteuert wurde
>Erbschaftssteuer fällig
>Erben müssen Zeug verkaufen für Erbschaftssteuer
>„Fickt euch, ich verlasse Deutschland“
>Finanzamt will Wegzugssteuer auf fiktive Gewinne, die du nie gemacht hast
>mfw der Staat dich melkt, bis du tot bist
>mfw im Grab noch eine letzte Rechnung mit MwSt.

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

Everything's flooded with AI meme music and videos, so maybe check out our latest song, 100% hand-produced:

[Rusty Weld @RustyWeldMusic]

The Price is Wrong

[Rusty Weld @RustyWeldMusic]

The Price is Wrong

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

What is it with the anti-Euro retard-maxxing lately?

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Europe's disease is not a disease of America.

It is a disease of World War 2.

In 1946, after we rescued them from themselves and each other, Europeans crawled out of the rubble they had made of their continent, looked around at their mess, wept for a bit, and then formed the wrong conclusions.

They decided that ethnic nations are bad.

That patriotism is bad.

That supporting your tribe, in preference to random strangers, is bad.

They decided that these things had led to the horrors of global war and genocide in Europe itself, and so all vestiges of loyalty to one's own people must be stamped out.

Nations were, forever afterward, to be post-ethnic, post-cultural legal and economic units filled with... well, anyone, really. A bunch of people who didn't, in fact shouldn't, share values, goals, morals, customs, or even a common language.

Nations were to be mere fiefs, their boundaries determined by which set of political elites controlled them.

America, having not been smashed to rubble in WW2, did not share this view. We saw WW2 as an expensive adventure in bailing out Europe, which we spent our treasure and our blood on (including my own grandfather's life, and his chance to ever see his grandson) precisely because we shared cultural and ethical values with the people we were rescuing.

But they hate us for it.

They see our patriotism as fascism precisely because they see all patriotism as fascism.

Psychologists have long understood that humans respond to favors with gratitude only up until those favors become so great that they have no hope of repaying them.

At that point, their gratitude turns to resentment.

How dare we believe we did them a favor?

How dare I believe that my father gave up his father so Europe could be safe, peaceful, and free?

Don't we know that, because ${ELABORATE MENTAL GYMNASTICS}, we didn't do them any favors by fighting that war?

Don't we know that, because ${ANY PATRIOTISM = HITLER}, our love of our country and favoring of its interests makes us fascist and problematic?

Well, no. I don't know that.

I don't think any European nation is our ally any more.

Certainly, we have shared interests, but how much does that really matter, when they refuse to act in those shared interests, because they have come to believe that acting in your people's interest is bad?

They hate us too much to work with us.

They resent every ounce of the burden which they are asked to share.

Our support has made Europe into a pack of idle welfare recipients, complete with sense of entitlement and self-destructive behavior.

But if we didn't defend them... who would?

Their native populations have been purged of all patriotism, and who would blame them if they didn't fight for ruling elites that hate them?

Their imported third-world barbarians won't fight for them. The very idea is laughable.

What's left?

And what will make them wake up and think about these questions?

Perhaps they need to dig themselves out of the rubble of another war.

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

@johnkonrad You couldn't confirm all clichés about American stupidity and ignorance any better if you channelled an entire Marshall plan's worth of CIA black budget into the effort. The AI slop language is just the icing on the cake.

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

@johnkonrad You couldn't confirm all clichés about American stupidity and ignorance any better if you channelled an entire Marshall plan's worth of CIA black budget into the effort. The AI slop language is just the icing on the cake.

[Niccolo Soldo (Fisted By Foucault) @FistedFoucault]

"They hate us for our ice cubes", thinks the American to himself, Americanly

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

That's the problem with those hoping to "save the West":

The financial markets alone are not a "casino", not even a "scam", but a madhouse making powerful people obscenely rich based literally on anti-merit---while forcing us to pretend it's all fine and eat up the BS rationalizations by economists and other Baal theologians.

How do you even address THAT?

Let alone the million other temples of our time built on lies, powered by delusion, all hyper-normalized to force us into a fever dream world utterly divorced from reality.

Although the level of insanity is clearly worst in the West, it afflicts the whole world, so no non-Western country can or will save the day.

The good news is that out of this misery, greatness in spirit can grow, madworld forcing it out of those who manage to cultivate that sacred soul spark against all odds.

And then suddenly, things can change.

As Ernst Jünger wrote: "Language can be in full decay, and a poet can burst forth from it like a lion coming out of the desert."

The language here is our hypernormalized pseudo-reality, the poet the cosmic spirit rising from a thousand sparks of half-murdered souls.

[Martyr Made @martyrmade]

*NEW* Martyr Made Podcast

Enemy: The Germans’ War, pt. 2 - The Work of the Men

Available now to subscribers only, to everyone else in a week or two. Help keep the podcast going by subscribing at the link quoted below.

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

Checking in on the p zombies anonymous meeting:

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

TLDR There is no inner self, you're chasing an imaginary concept, the end.

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

@Harry_pitt @JoshFerme Yeah, see also "WTF is an accident of birth?"
https://t.co/Ma3aatvelq

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

Most of this was compiled by @dr_mcgilchrist in his great book, The Matter With Things. For a complete list of references, see chapter 13.

Some further reading:

Ioannidis JP, “Why most published research findings are false,” PLoS Medicine, 2005, 2 (8), e124

Smith R, “Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2006, 99(4)

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

Few people understand what a scam peer review and the journal-fueled Ponzi scheme really are.

Some shocking background:

1. It is estimated that only 20% of papers cited in journals have actually been read by the author!

2. According to a survey published in Nature, a whopping 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce someone else’s experiment. (And the replication crisis not only affects “soft” sciences like psychology, but even such fundamental things as the measurement of physical constants!)

3. “Robbie Fox, the great twentieth-century editor of the Lancet, joked that the Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom.” - Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ

4. According to the same Richard Fox, peer review is ”a flawed process, full of easily identified defects with little evidence that it works. Nevertheless … scientists and editors have a continuing belief in peer review. How odd that science should be rooted in belief.”

5. Hoaxes are legion. One guy used the autocomplete function of his iPhone to compose a completely nonsensical article, using a fake name, and submitted it to the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics in Atlanta. It was accepted within three hours, with a request for payment of a $1,099 registration fee!

6. In one spectacular case, renowned science publisher Springer Verlag had to withdraw 120 papers from its publications because they were found to be gibberish created by computer programs that simulate science writing. (Perhaps it worked because today’s “science writing” is gibberish itself...)

7. In one study, 12 papers with high-recognition authors that had already been published were simply copied and resubmitted to the same journals but with no-name authors from made-up institutions. Only 3 journals detected the resubmission; one was accepted, and the remaining 8 were rejected!

“[N]one of the twenty reviewers who recommended rejection even hinted at the possibility that a manuscript might be acceptable for publication pending revision or rewriting.” Mind you, these papers had already been published by the same journals! What a difference an established name makes.

8. In one hoax, someone submitted to 304 journals a paper whose obviously flawed method “should have been rejected by a high-school chemistry student” and whose conclusions were meaningless. *Only 36 of these* generated review comments that at least detected some of the flaws. But even of those 36, 16 were then accepted, despite a damning review comment!

9. Researchers have found that a whole lot of papers cited in studies are entirely irrelevant and just cited for the sake of it - and if not, they are often used to make a point that the cited paper actually contradicts!

10. Researchers have shown that studies in the high-impact journals are *less* likely to give an accurate estimate of effect size than those in the low-impact journals. In other words, the more "prestigious" the journal, the junkier the science!

11. In his famous paper, “Why most published research findings are false,” John Ioannidis observes that the hotter a scientific field (the more scientific teams are involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.

And this just reflects the things those involved were brave enough to admit or point out, which means it's just the tip of the iceberg.

[Elliot Overton @EO_Nutrition]

This man singlehandedly destroyed science as an institution

His name was Robert Maxwell, and he was the father of Ghislaine Maxwell

He turned scientific knowledge into a commodity, locked it behind a paywall, a created the system which breeds authoritarian, conformist scientists who are terrified to challenge established dogma

His system weaponized science for elite control

British jew, media tycoon, and Mossad agent

He was the first to turn scientific publishing into a ruthless commercial business, locked behind steep paywalls.

In 1951 he founded Pergamon Press, which launched hundreds of niche scientific journals - each a tiny monopoly in its field, demanding expensive subscriptions

Overnight, freely available public-domain scientific knowledge became gated behind high costs, accessible only to an “intellectually elite” class… the new “intelligentsia”

He called this setup “a perpetual financing machine.” and it became the template for the entire industry today.

This commercial monopoly on science extracts free labor from scientists, who work tirelessly to write papers, review work and edit manuscripts to further their career prospects - all at no cost,

The profit margins for scientific journals far exceed almost every other industry. The top publisher’s margins are higher than Google and Apple. Elsevier, for example, brought in ~ $1.4 billion profit in 2024 alone.

This is a huge business which artificially inflates the cost of knowledge dissemination - that is ironically funded in large part by the taxpayer.

Unfortunately the entire business model incentivises VOLUME over QUALITY: Careers, grants, and promotions tie to publication count in "prestigious" (high-fee) journals.

This means that researchers are penalized for publishing less, and are instead rewarded for pumping out high quantity with little inherent value.

In other words, there are tangible benefits to publishing junk science, manipulated data and fabrication.

This model disincentivizes and actively punishes genuine scientific curiosity, independent thinking, long-term/risky work, and controversial opinions or lines of research which challenge established dogma.

It breeds authoritarian, conformist, self-censoring scientists who are averse to risk.

Furthermore, it laid the foundation for a gated elite class of “intelligentsia”. Only those in the “club” at wealthy scientific institutions, who tow the party line, are granted access to scientific knowledge. Those who stray too far from the norm are shunned and expelled.

The ultimate result? A bloated, generic mess of low-rigor, irreproducible papers

This model, which still dominates to this day, facilitated the corporatization and weaponization of of science

What began as a relentless pursuit for truth was coopted and sacrificed for endless greed & elite control of knowledge itself

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

Ah, the good old thing-as-such -> Shia pipeline.

Not even computer science could save the poor man from German idealism, plunging him into anti-materialism, epistemic nihilism and then straight into the clutches of Allah.

Gosh, the American mind.

[Stephen R. C. Hicks @SRCHicks]

Iran’s current top power broker Ali Larijani is an Immanuel Kant scholar.
According to The New York Times, Larijani has effectively been running Iran since January 2026. He was in “charge of crushing, with lethal force, the recent protests demanding the end of Islamic rule.” [Source] He is now the key power broker in Iran’s transition.
A colleague alerted me to the suprising-to-me fact that Larijani is a Ph.D. in Western Philosophy and a specialist on Kant. He wrote his dissertation on Kant and then these three published books:
* The Mathematical Method in Kant’s Philosophy
* Metaphysics and the Exact Sciences in Kant’s Philosophy
* Intuition and the Synthetic A Priori Judgments in Kant’s Philosophy
(I supposed I shouldn’t be suprised that these guys are never students of John Locke, Adam Smith, or John Stuart Mill.)
More here: https://t.co/ECtE8dKCFi

[Rusty Weld @RustyWeldMusic]

Sticks & Stones

[L.P. Koch @LucTalks]

Fed a little piece of mine to @suno's new model, and after some experimenting, it turned it into something resembling an orchestra.

The melody, basic structure, a distinct bass line and a few chords were there in my file.

Fun to play around with, IF you feed it something to go on.

[Mary Harrington @moveincircles]

Instead of endless WWI and WWII replays, we should have a regular remembrance for how completely insane hitherto normal-seeming people became during Covid

Share yours below. Here's a starter for 10: