/lit/ - Literature

>>19601728
French authors before 1900 are crap, the notable exception being Proust

>>19530384
I'm German so it's the original - "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft". Fröhlich just means cheerful.

>>15251340
Good prose, crap content

>>13219310
Sorry, but there is an evolutionary basis because there is a selection effect.
Consider two group of animals/cavemen etc. One has the habit of eating its own offspring, the other not. Which one do you think will be around in a generation ? Or take sexual morals. If somebody is fucking around the tribe, the males could never be sure that they invest in their own offspring (which for humans is considerable). The females on the other hand can't accept promiscuous male behavior because promiscuous males will invest in multiple other families. Thus it hurts tribal cohesion, thus long-term survival.

>>13113063
That is Transhumanism as well. It does not define how you augment yourself. In all likelihood it has already started with the limiting gene-editing we are doing now. I mean, how can you stop it if every group/tribe/nation/consortium has huge advantages following it and similarly huge disadvantages for not going that way. Obviously genetic diseases are the first target, but can you imagine what a society with even a relatively low mean IQ of 140 would be like ? I sure can't, but I can easily imagine how they would kick normie ass.

>>12273959
Because they are plebs. I am a German so I know.
Also he detested nationalism and Germans were very folksy in those days.

>>8392597
The West is more than just the current incarnation.

>>7555489
Neural networks may be very are real. Most depends on that. Whether sentience it a product of information processing inside of this universe. I'm not saying they are. The species did not have time to find out.

>>7506731
To be more precise, the driving force of religion is a human desire for Plato's "world of ideas" to be as real as the material world. By itself that idea is not so stupid, google "Mathematical Universe" but most religions with exception of some very abstract forms of Buddhism don't even approach Plato. Instead, they end in obfuscation for the intellectual and simplistic answers for the masses.

>>6947323
Don't really know, I'm just starting again, but Julian is fun. I've read Messias about 20y ago and I like it.

>>6443910
Only decent answer here. Do it OP, also increase the collection and copy them to the most recent digital medium every 5 years, and keep the redundant old copies.

Democracy is just dictatorship of the mediocre. The western democracies are only superficially democratic, they are partially meritocratic. Pure democracy is unstable because such societies are easily out-performed by competing states.