How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
If you have anger issues, this one is a great tool (h/t mindyourbusiness)
This week’s book:
Discourses and Selected Writings
Disclaimer: I’m not your Supervisor. These are my opinions after reading through these books a few times.
Epictetus was born a slave around 50 ad. His owner was Epaphroditus, a rich freedman who was once a slave of Nero. Though he was a slave Epictetus was sent to study philosophy under Musonius Rufus.
Epictetus was lame and there are some stories it was caused by his master and others that it was caused by disease.
He was a freedman when all philosophers were banished from Rome in 89 by the Emperor Domitian. He then started his school in Greece, and had many students. He did not leave any writings from his lessons, but one of his students, Flavius Arrian, took notes and wrote the Discourses.
Epictetus did not marry, had no children, and lived to be around 80-85. In retirement, he adopted a child that would have been abandoned and raised him with a woman.
He died sometime around AD 135.
He is my favorite Stoic teacher. I love his bare bones and very straight forward approach.
Following is a paragraph-by-paragraph discussion of one of his lessons. Epictetus’s text appears in bold, my replies are in normal text.
Of Freedom Part VIII
85Now when you face things in this fashion, what man can inspire fear in you any longer? For what has one human being about him that is calculated to inspire fear in another human being, in either his appearance, or conversation, or intercourse in general, any more than one horse, or dog, or bee inspires fear in another horse, or dog, or bee? Nay, it is things that inspire man with fear; and when one person is able to secure them for another, or to take them away, then he becomes capable of inspiring fear.
If I have no reactions to the things I don’t control, then no one can threaten me with anything meaningful. I am not at that level and probably never will be, but it is a goal to strive for.
How, then, is a citadel destroyed?[19] Not by iron, nor by fire, but by judgements. For if we capture the citadel in the city, have we captured the citadel of fever also, have we captured that of pretty wenches also, in a word, the acropolis within us, and have we cast out the tyrants within us, whom we have lording it over each of us[20] every day, sometimes the same tyrants, and sometimes others?
My inner fortress can only fall if I open from the inside, like a traitor opening the gates for the invaders. As long as I choose what to keep close and what to ignore, nothing can threaten my peace of mind or cause me to expend energy for a useless undertaking like being mad at other drivers. I failed at this on the drive home today after I had a guy start to pull out in front of me. Luckily there was no one coming in the other direction so I was able to swerve into the other lane. He saw me in time to not come out across the yellow. It was 1 minute from my house, so I was still a little worked up when I got home.
But here is where we must begin, and it is from this side that we must seize the acropolis and cast out the tyrants; we must yield up the paltry body, its members, the faculties, property, reputation, offices, honours, children, brothers, friends—count all these things as alien to us. And if the tyrants he thrown out of the spot, why should I any longer raze the fortifications of the citadel, on my own account, at least? For what harm does it do me by standing? Why should I go on and throw out the tyrant’s bodyguard? For where do I feel them? Their rods, their spears, and their swords they are directing against others. But I have never been hindered in the exercise of my will, nor have I ever been subjected to compulsion against my will.[21]
Because I still have things to work on, I do not control my fortress and it is not as strong as it should be. Looking back though, it is easy to see that it is much stronger than it used to be. In the past I would have been royally pissed at the other driver and taken awhile to calm down as I relived the close call over and over. Now I was able to tell my wife what had happened and then calm myself down.
And how is this possible? I have submitted my freedom of choice unto God. He wills that I shall have fever; it is my will too. He wills that I should choose something; it is my will too. He wills that I should desire something; it is my will too. He wills that I should get something; it is my wish too. He does not will it; I do not wish it. 90Therefore, it is my will to die; therefore, it is my will to be tortured on the rack. Who can hinder me any longer against my own views, or put compulsion upon me? That is no more possible in my case than it would be with Zeus.
While it is not my will that I still get out of breath so easily, I have accepted it. I am still improving and will again attempt to start walking/running with my Husky and go back to the gym. I thought I would be able this week, but not quite. I really need to get back to it, I do not enjoy being weak and out of shape. However, I continue to be grateful it was nothing serious and focus on that instead of negativity.
This is timely as I am at DCA. Much stoicism required.
Thoughts and prayers.
That place is a nightmare.
I am still improving and will again attempt to start walking/running with my Husky and go back to the gym. I thought I would be able this week, but not quite. I really need to get back to it, I do not enjoy being weak and out of shape.
Hopefully next week you can do it.
Thanks DEG.
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”
I don’t buy it.
Yeah, that one has always bugged me. Freedom can certainly arise from having nothing and nobody you care about, true. It can also arise from a willingness to accept the consequences for your decisions and actions.
Stoicism and Buddhism share a core. It’s sort of fascinating to see the different outward elements that arise from that core.
A lot of good ideas come from many places.
Daoism and Hinduism seem to agree with some of that core as well.
I’ve noticed the similarities as well. I’ve spent more time studying Buddhism than Stoicsm.
It’s a calling, not a career
“Any evidence-based news organization that reports critically is going to be accused of left-wing bias,” Schiller says. “Journalism and government funding in the United States — those two things are incompatible.”
“That said, when I see these accusations of bias against what I consider one of the finest news organizations in the world, it’s very, very painful,” Schiller says. “These accusations against NPR’s news organization are flat-out wrong. So that’s where we are. It’s excruciating.”
I love seeing the voice of establishmentarianism prancing around in drag, portraying themselves as the outsider underdog speaking truth to power. What a narcissistic circlejerk. Those people should all be working in carwashes.
So they’re actually putting forth an iteration of truth has a leftwing bias as a defense of NPR and published by NPR no less? Get bent Mr. Folkenflik, you’re a folken hack.
We have heard that ‘truth/reality agrees with us’ question begging before. It takes an astonishing lack of awareness or gall to say that out loud.
Anyone using “evidence-based” is lying. It’s much like someone proclaiming how smart they are really not being the smartest person in the room.
I’ll bet they are all “critical thinkers” too.
‘Evidence based’ is usually paired with no evidence cited, isn’t it? Also, the phrase is essentially meaningless. Flat earther theory is evidence based. Global warming is evidence based….kinda.
Without federal subsidy, some stations will wither
There’s some information contained in that fact.
While NPR receives just a small amount of direct federal government support — less than 2% of its annual revenue — PBS and local stations rely on it far more heavily. For public radio stations, federal funding makes up, on average, 8-10% of their budgets; for PBS and its member stations, the figure stands on average at about 15%.
So in other words, NPR itself would probably not even feel the change if all federal funds were cut off tomorrow. And these other stations could easily be made whole again with donations from various “progressive” billionaires or implementing a small amount of ad time?
And she points to the $545 million saved annually — less than 1/100 of 1% of the U.S. government’s multi-trillion-dollar annual budget.
This is the rhetoric that makes people OK with the cycle of spend-print-borrow: The big expenses (military, Social Security, Medicare, interest on the debt) are too important and must always increase, and everything else is “just a drop in the bucket” and not worth cutting. That’s kind of what most budgets are: A few large items, and tons of smaller ones adding up to a significant amount.
Just to be fair, I’ll bitch out the Republicans on this one too:
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana — said … “They’re not objective. They pretend to be so.”
The primary issue isn’t that they’re not objective. The problem is that there’s nothing in the Constitution that allows the federal government to run a media network.
This. The issue is not the money and they know that. They are not crying about the money, they are crying because they dont want to lose their propaganda platform.
When people want to do something that no one is willing to pay for they simply force people to pay for it by taking it from them in the form of taxes. Unfortunately the people that do that are lined up to the horizon. Every fuckin’ penny of that should be taken away. Cut the Fed budget by half. People are going to die? Yep. Sorry ’bout that.
The late former CEO John Lansing, who retired in early 2024, considered diversity in hiring and programming choices both a moral imperative and a business strategy to broaden its reach. NPR’s staff came closer to reflecting America’s racial and ethnic complexity. Its audiences did not appreciably budge.
Diverse faces, preaching to the choir with one voice.
It’s not as if they had much of an audience to lose.
How was the diversity of staff relative to their placement in,say, the Nolan chart?
It looks like a short bar extending from home plate to the visiting team on deck circle
I don’t think the Stoics would argue with the seven cardinal sins, either.
I was recently reading Israel and Civilization by Josh Hammer. It did not turn out to be what I thought it was, not what he pitched when I decided to read it. It is not bad but it is mostly pro-Israel Zionist stuff. Nothing I necessarily disagreed with but there is this…
The Golden Rule. He claims the Golden Rule, do unto others and you would have them do unto you, as Jewish in origin, yet when I started digging into that I found iterations of it going back before the Jews in china, India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, etc.
It turns out that universal truths are…universal. We do a lot of things the way we do, have the ideas we have because they work. That is how evolution operates….the culling of what doesnt work. Ideas, culture, economics, physics, chemistry and biology are all subject to it.
If ideas were subject to culling based on failure to work socialism would have died with Robespierre.
It is culled every time it is instituted. The problem is that it keeps being born.
I am in a bit of a quandary. I am dead certain that AI, quantum computing and robotics are going to put every single one of us out of work.
What then? Some kind of socialism? UBI? I find that repellant but no one has come up with a better idea.
The industrial revolution destroyed the old economy and replaced it with a new one. Many people lost their jobs. Many new jobs were invented.
The information revolution will destroy our current economy and bring a new one. Many people will lose their jobs. But many new jobs will be created.
AI and robots are not going to eliminate all human jobs.
Suthenboy:
Learn to play chess?
There is no gAI at this point, LLMs are garbage when it comes to interactions. They can follow scripts, and make it sound more human. I’m more impressed by the images, audio, and video they generate than the text. For the rest, that’s where the discussion of post-scarcity comes from, but I’m pretty sure humans will always find some scarce resource to use to measure status. It’s what animals do.
I saw something on X the other day, about a woman who was hired to fix the writing on web sites created by AI. She ended up redoing it all. AI just wasn’t good at identifying the unique things the company had to offer. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I do think AI will be used for more mundane work, and humans will always be needed for high-end expertise. I see the same thing when I use AI to help with coding.
There will never be, can ever be, a true post-scarcity economy. The notion overlooks the critical importance of time and place utility. A dose of insulin is useless to a diabetic in sugar shock unless it is immediately at hand. Ditto for so very much else. It’s impossible to have everything wanted within reach in the very moment of the wants.
Economics is as spatial-temporal as it is mathematical.
After Berliner’s essay was published, conservative critics of NPR scoured Maher’s social media posts. They found she had condemned Trump during his first term and proclaimed support for then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020. Being CEO of NPR is Maher’s first job in journalism; the network’s board said she was entitled to such views in a prior life. She nonetheless became a lightning rod for Republican lawmakers in the 16 months since.
Bless their hearts. How gracious and openminded of them.
I remember seeing an interview with some news icon…Mike Wallace?….after they retired. Not being on the teevee anymore he was asked if he really was unbiased. He got visibly angry and ranted about What have the conservatives every done for us the soviets had it right McCarthy was the devil for trying to punish the pure sublimity of communism blah blah blah to that effect.
TMITE more than we know.
This Maher woman is no different. I dont think any of them are any different.
To add to that a couple of hints…
If you have to lie to make your case, you dont have a case worth making.
If you have to hide what you are you should take a good hard look at what you are and consider something may have gone wrong.
If you have to subsidize it it is a bad idea.
I will think of more later.
Akira-
While NPR receives just a small amount of direct federal government support — less than 2% of its annual revenue — PBS and local stations rely on it far more heavily. For public radio stations, federal funding makes up, on average, 8-10% of their budgets; for PBS and its member stations, the figure stands on average at about 15%.
Also, according to the article, those stations pay the network for content, so that money also gets funneled to PBS through the back door.
Re: Road Rage…
I tried to impart to the stepdaugher during our driving lessons that you can yell and scream all you want about how people drive, but it’s not going to change anything. All you can do is practice VERY defensive driving, even going to so far as to avoid dangerous intersections and roads (there are a few of those around here that are badly designed and tend to have constant accidents).
And it’s trivially easy to be a courteous driver and probably costs you nothing in time. Don’t get the mindset that it’s a race and you win a big prize if you get in front of everybody else and get to your destination first.
The most important lessons (IMHO) are:
1) Be predictable
2) Drive in a way that causes minimal disruption to others
It’s YOUR duty to provide valuable and instant feedback regarding other drivers.
I decline.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/1m2oj5b/oc_to_the_person_in_the_grey_bmw_i_hate_you/
This would require feedback.
That’s what happened to me, except he was coming off a highway ramp, so I swerved left.
Leaving Brookshire’s parking lot with wife. I go to the side street where there is a light at the end of the side street entering the highway.
“Why didnt you go to that exit directly on the highway? That would be faster.”
Me – Because it is a death trap. I would have to take a left turn onto a 4 lane highway. I dont do that.”
Her – “No it’s fine. Everyone else is doing it.”
Me – “No, it’s not fine. There are constant…..”
*SCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH!BAM!SHATTERINGGLASS….* half second later *SCRRREEEEE!BAM!* <—–coming from direction of highway exit
*Wife slowly scooches down in her seat* "I am glad you are driving"
I am not making that up….it literally happened while I was saying that.
Headline:
Scoop: Trump’s new Alcatraz could cost $2 billion
Less than remodeling the Federal Reserve HQ. A drop in the bucket.
Could as in that’s what is budgeted, or could as in hey, we have no idea what it will cost so that means it could be 2 billion dollars?
The latter. It might as well say “Trump’s New Alcatraz Could Be the Size of One Million Bananas”
“I mean it’s one banana Michael. What could it cost, 10 dollars?”
I was thinking of you when I sprained my wrist two weeks ago. It was non-stop pain for the first eight days. It was nothing in comparison to what you have been going through. I bandaged up, realized I could not magically make it better and I continued my routine (sans weightlifting). It’s an exercise setback, but I will recover. As will you. I think remaining Stoic about it helps immensely.
Say no more! Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.
Hahaha! Leave it to you folks. Where would I be without you all? Probably back in Area 51.
He claims the Golden Rule, do unto others and you would have them do unto you, as Jewish in origin
Trying to claim authorship of the golden rule, for any civilization anywhere, is spectacularly moronic.
Yes. I quit reading the book at that point. Cultural arrogance is a common thing. “We invented breathing”. Sure you did Jan.
Tragedy
Comedian and political commentator Stephen Colbert announced Thursday night on air that CBS will cancel his “The Late Show” starting in May 2026.
Though CBS said in a statement that canceling the show was “purely a financial decision” not related to its performance or content, the announcement follows Colbert’s criticism of a settlement between President Donald Trump and Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company.
Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over edits to an October 2024 interview conducted on CBS’s “60 Minutes” with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Colbert, who frequently skewered Trump on his show, called the settlement a “big fat bribe” on air this Monday.
Does anybody actually watch that?
“…canceling the show was “purely a financial decision” not related to its performance or content.”
Uhm….I am not sure what to make of that. I suppose if you dont understand the principle of free markets you might say something like that. Or maybe the guy is just lying.
‘..frequently skewered…’
They should have named the show ‘Trump is a Poopyhead’.
Also, comedian does not apply. A comedian is someone who makes you laugh.
I remember Colbert’s debut. He was always an America-hating shithead. He was moderately funny with his visual gags but Americans were always the butt of his crappy jokes. Being able to laugh at yourself is good but people can tell when the line is crossed between poking good fun and outright insult.
“…canceling the show was “purely a financial decision” not related to its performance or content.”
Nobody watches it, but there is no reason to think that’s because it sucks.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who had “just finished taping” with Colbert, said America “deserves better.”
“If Paramount and CBS ended the late show for political reasons, the public deserves to know,” he wrote on X Thursday.
Colbert alluded to the settlement made by Paramount earlier in the week.
“I don’t know if anything, anything will repair my trust in this company,” Colbert said Monday on his show. “But, just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help.”
Did any of those paychecks bounce? That’s pretty much the sum total of their need to cater to your feelings and “trust”.
–Google’s AI summary.
Sounds like he could give his corporate overlords the $16 million to help keep his show on the air.
If he did something he was good at, he might have been richer than Elon!
https://x.com/USCCA/status/1946229640349036895
…and there was much rejoicing.
Aside from “Fuck you” has anyone ever given justification for what are really just arbitrary infringements on firearms?