Marcus

Cultural technologist. Building advanced technology that is human and sacred.
Founder @AltarsStudio - @Outpostmissions

[Marcus @TheBuriedPrince]

Technology makes culture possible, and in turn culture is the most sophisticated technology we have.

[Micheál Ganley @GanleyMicheal]

Although the tech/VC elite have their flaws, it’s good to remember that they’re 10 times better for the country/world than the big private equity guys of the 1970s-90s

It’s good our elite is building rockets and supercomputers instead of destroying our industries for scrap money

[Lefteris Karapetsas @LefterisJP]

For more than a day I have seen people quoting this post and saying how bad Germany is for entrepreneurs due to that.

If your company fails because you had to sit through a notary session then you would have failed anyway.

The actual problems with Germany are a lot worse and much deeper. Notaries are annoying sure.

But the entire country and its system is built to kill enterpreneurship and discourage it at every point.

Some other examples apart from the notaries:

- Dealing with the cross-EU VAT situation the moment your company has more than 10k yearly revenue. (yes you heard it right making 10k in a year ... as a company).
- Having to identify all users online (asking them for address/country), charge them different VAT depending on their country and follow the VAT changes in real time as they happen.
- Absolutely zero help from the state. Zero. Nada. Nothing. Nichts.
- Instead of help you are greeted with utter hostility and suspicion.
- Dealing with the German tax system and getting audited multiple times in a 8 year period. Yes a tiny company of 3-4 people being audited multiple times because hey ... why not? Competing world-wide is not a hard enough task, let's make it impossible to function.
- Social security and insurances. All your employees costs you roughly 20-25% more than their stated salaries.
- If you are a company with more than 10 employees then good luck letting people go when you need to.
- Completely random expenses every year such as the IHK expenses (chamber of commerce membership), some employee accident insurance that you must always have even if you have no offices etc.

These are just some things that popped up in my head as I write this. There is a lot more and it's just sad.

As a country, Germany is made to stop you from being successful. They are stuck in the past for everything and this is why the economy here is failing. And it won't get better anytime soon. Things will get a lot worse before they get better. As I see nothing happening to fix any of these. Instead somehow it's all the immigrant's fault and the far right is rising. /s

Sorry for the late night rant

[ᐅIΟϺΕᐅΕϟ @DaemonDiomedes]

Ζευς σωτήρ και νίκη

[Hoeflator/LJB | Yishun's Greatest Poet | COE/GCB @hoeflator]

This is the fate of striver globalism. In Paris you used to be able to get up at 5am and walk the beautifully designed streets and lose your soul staring at an ornate fixture on one of the buildings before stumbling into a boulangerie to be smacked in the face with the scent of butter and freshly baked croissants. Baker responds to you in a series of nods and grunts before brusquely shoving your order in your face as the queue forms.

Get rudely treated by a waiter asking for a breakfast omelette and be told that they only serve coffee till lunchtime. Hear the city beginning to wake up. People watch as the workers rush off for their affairs and the shops slowly open as the day breaks. Watch a street painter set up his wares and station and begin to craft art upon an empty canvas.

Instead now you have striverist peasants from bloodlines that should have never left the central plains of China enacting their genetic memories upon the world without knowing it. Instead of the deeply roasted, nearly burned French style coffee, it’s a grassy oxidized matcha that tastes like a yeast infection. Instead of a respectable tailor, its oversized garments to hide a stick insect figure and weak constitution. Instead of feasting upon veal sweetbreads in brown butter with slices of fresh bread, it’s a hipster cafe with a vegan owner. And even though the cafe owner says he loves Japan the only city pop song he knows is Plastic Love.

God I hate globalism.

[Athanasius @Athanasius_45]

A happy 277th birthday to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe!

Unter allen Völkerschaften haben die Griechen den Traum des Lebens am schönsten geträumt.
-
Amongst all peoples the dream of life was dreamed in the most beautiful manner by the Greeks.
Kunst und Altertum 5.3

[K🧜🏼‍♀️ @LittleMermaidKV]

Saw a group of Pakistanis (or something like that) and a fam of Africans in rural Czechia this morning. None of them tourists.

[The Aesthetic City @Aesthetic_City]

So the future should look like an outdated 60's sci-fi vision of what the future is supposed to look like?

That really means: the future should look like an already invented past

[Marcus @TheBuriedPrince]

@NordensLjungeld Same

[Anna Lux @theannalux]

My 84-year-old grandmother recently came from Brazil to visit me in Portugal.

She had a return business-class ticket, was in a wheelchair and accompanied by airport assistance. Still, they almost didn’t let her enter because I hadn’t written an invitation letter.

She later went to Ireland to visit my sister and had to enter Portugal again. This time, I prepared the letter and attached my European passport, proof of my address and all our information.

Apparently, that still wasn’t enough. They almost rejected it because it wasn’t the specific AIMA form authenticated by a notary.

An 84-year-old woman in a wheelchair, with a business-class return ticket and clear proof of where she was staying, was treated like an immigration threat because of paperwork.

Then we watch thousands of people enter Europe illegally without passports, visas or any checks at all.

Honestly, it’s an absolute joke.

Two-tier immigration control in Europe.

[Frid 🇪🇺🦌 @Frid45]

Europe is far more than just a continent.

It is a civilisation shaped by centuries of history, cultures and exchanges.

Despite their different cultures and languages, Europeans are one people, united by a shared heritage and called to build a common future.🇪🇺

[apollo @apollophanes]

The modern idea of what a genetically European population looks like is historically backwards.

And the problem with many saying/implying that Southern Italians are “eastern shifted” is that it makes the modern Northern European the baseline for Europe, when the Northern European isn’t the actual baseline for Europe.

Before the Steppe migrations, the European populations were primarily Anatolian-farmer + European hunter-gatherer; the later Steppe influx altered northern and eastern Europe heavily, and among modern Europeans the distance from that older European structure tracks with Steppe ancestry.

However, Southern Italy meanwhile sits first among Greeks, Italians and older Mediterranean populations; Iraq is much farther down the actual distance ranking. So yes, a Southern Italian can be numerically closer to an Iraqi than to an Iron Age Celt or Scandinavian.

But that does not mean they “shifted away from Europe” toward Iraq.

The ancient Greeks and Romans themselves sit closer genetically to modern Southern Europeans than to modern Northern Europeans, which makes Southern Europe the clear continuation of that ancient Mediterranean European profile and the founders of Western Civilization.

Now let’s look at what happens when you swap the historical baseline from a modern Steppe-heavy northern population to the Europeans who actually existed before the Steppe migrations, and suddenly it’s Northern Europe that shifted away and is less European.

[Ramin Nasibov @RaminNasibov]

see you in the next million years buddy

[Arslan @_ai_jedi]

I've tasted the 9-to-5. I've also tasted being a founder.

I highly recommend being born into generational wealth.

[oecolamp @oecolamp]

A young man entering into adulthood doesn't see himself entering into a world of competence to which he might hope to contribute. He sees a world of frauds and rent seekers, and he sees that any work he does first goes to enriching them, then goes to enriching the wretched.

[Fugitive Caesar @ThomBrady5]

When Boomers were starting their careers, they were mentored by successful older men who coached and cultivated their raw talents. After Boomers took power, they refused to help the younger versions of themselves, and instead recruited young women and nonwhite foreigners.

[Pro Italia @ProItalia_org]

Senigallia (AN): è notte e un ragazzo di 22 anni sta tornando in auto a casa dal lavoro. Mentre è alla guida nota qualcosa di strano alla finestra di un palazzo davanti a cui passa tutti i giorni: sul davanzale c’è una ragazzina seduta con lo sguardo fisso nel vuoto e le gambe ciondoloni.

Preoccupato, il giovane si ferma, scende dalla macchina e, anziché chiamare le forze dell’ordine o i sanitari, fa la cosa più umana del mondo: si mette a parlare con la quindicenne, la rassicura e la convince a scendere sotto casa per dialogare meglio.

Tutto è bene quel che finisce bene, quindi?

Ovviamente no. Nella società malata delle maestrine una condotta così buona e giusta non può rimanere impunita.

Mentre i due ragazzi parlano sotto il palazzo, infatti, arriva sul posto una pattuglia della polizia locale di Senigallia che, acclarata la situazione, allerta le autorità e chiama i soccorsi. Alla fine la quindicenne viene portata via da un’ambulanza e il ventiduenne, tornato alla macchina, si ritrova una bella sorpresa: una multa per divieto di sosta. Firmata da chi? Che domande: proprio da uno degli agenti della pattuglia della polizia locale.

Non stupitevi, ormai lo dovreste sapere: la vita nello Stato-maestrina è ‘sta roba qua.

[Georg Hegel Quotes @GeorgHegell]

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.

[Überkierk @UberKierk]

Young boy with legs and neck in captivity but in his mind he is still running. Winds brushing his face remind him of wild past and sunny days. He never forgets

[polemos @polemoskarios]

Let me help a bit then.

It perhaps helps to view the story in context. Mary was made pregnant by a shower of gold. This is obviously a reference to Zeus and Danaë's story. A god-man was created by the union. This is the basic formula from ancient Greece. It was probably from the proto-indo Europeans, they even had the Sky Father term at that point. This is deep in our history, time unknown.

It was the standard way of adding divinity to someone, understandable to local people. Local religions did this across all the Mediterranean.

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Iliad - Homer

Not once, I swear, did I pass a handsome altar of yours,
sailing my oar-swept ship on our fatal voyage here,
but on each I burned the fat and thigh bones of oxen,
longing to raze Troy’s sturdy walls to the roots.

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1 Kings 20:28 New Century Version (NCV)

A man of God came to the king of Israel with this message: “The LORD says, 'The people of Aram say that I, the LORD, am a god of the mountains, not a god of the valleys. So I will allow you to defeat this huge army, and then you will know I am the LORD.

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This relationship of believing in me and I’ll give you power is the basic ritual of sacrifice across the ancient Greek World. Really the same thing.

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Solon, 630-560 BC, Ancient Greece

The gods are envious and messy things.
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Exodus 20:3-5 King James Version

3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
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Notice he knows that he is one god among many, but you must serve me.
If there were no them, he would have stated, there are no other gods, I am singular.

It was only much later when it became a monotheistic religion, but not really I think. Too many angels, saints, and demons. You can try to take the gods out of religion, but people find a way of putting them back in.

On a theistic argument, GOD the Prime Mover is so abstract to people, since he is perfect, needing nothing, is beyond our ken. Only the philosophers thought about GOD that way. See Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas. The local people would not have any emotional connection and hence would not worship. Something that humans could relate to was needed, so this son of god knew suffering like us poor mortals. It allowed for a real connection.

That is why the Greek gods were very human-like in behavior. Zeus was always looking for beautiful women to impregnate and Hera was always upset at him. The ancients knew the value of relatable local gods to get people to bind together. They had a deeper knowledge about human nature. That is why it was so successful.

Abraham's god was a local warlord, very relatable to the men of the time. Just read the old testament, truly a mighty and terrible god. Jesus was his son, the god of forgiveness and love. Islam's god was also a warlord, explicitly for battle and conquest.

Religion is designed by men to structure and propagate the tribe. The tribe must be able to fight as unit, hence the need to get along and it must produce warriors. Most rules and morality serve this function. Remember the first words of the mountain god.

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22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
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He says this even before creating man. Be fruitful and multiply. They knew what they were doing.

Now to Immortals Gods of Olympus.

The gods of Olympus (or any other proto-indo european offshoot) are personifications of the forces of the world and specifically of our mind. They are not the Prime Mover who is beyond space and time. Jesus is but a personification of love and forgiveness. They all "exist" because we "exist".

There is a very deep wisdom in personification. We apprehend the world through personification, we imbue the world with conscious since we are self aware. Zeus is the male impulse, and Hera is the female one. The world is more complex than just love and forgiveness, that's just a simplification. It helps and allows one to see more clearly.

When I pray to Zeus for strength to deal with the world, it truly helps to imagine him as the Greeks did. Athena is real as wisdom is real, it does help to create her in my mind a talk beautiful grey eyed women. It makes it concrete. Human nature is this, otherwise we would not have religion.

The gods in Greece do not guarantee they will do anything, they are more mature. If you pray for a change in yourself, you must make sacrifices though not the ones people think. The oxen thigh bones are but a symbol of them.

One part is ritual offering, the other part is actually doing what is necessary to achieve your ends. The gods require both. It's much more appealing and practical to worship gods this way

We pray to thank the gods for giving us the world, our mind, body and spirit. We only ask the gods to help us become better in ourselves, intervene in only our character and understanding of life. We should not ask for anything else, it would seem ungrateful.

We use philosophies to help answer the fundamental question, how should a man live his life given the world. There is much to draw upon and it should be done as the Greeks, with questioning not commands. Start simply, read the Delph Maxims (147 of them), work forward to better a Logos, there is much richness available.

I've climbed Mt Olympus and see the top. That is not where the Gods live.

What take time is to understand the Gods you must strip away you illusions about life, understand human nature and how the mind behaves and why. This is why it harder for the young, they still want to believe in things.

Finally you must learn that living poetically and lyrically works best. The Gods are for those people who manifest them in their minds and life well, they don't exist for anyone else.

Good luck in your journey. It never to early to start offering to the Gods daily.

[Arjun @devarenewalist]

The male loneliness epidemic is real and if a guy isn’t cerebral or lucky enough to find BAM or some kind of in-group, life is so suffocating. Idk what Nietzsche means by being against pity but I am heartbroken when I think of all the young men that are alone.