Nietzsche got that last part right.
We were looking through our bookshelves just last night (before I read this thread) and spotted our copies of “Zarathustra” in German and English, still unread after several decades, and jointly determined that (at 70) life was now too short to bother reading them.

Share anything of interest that you find, though; I don’t have to read something to have an opinion on it!

Recall that John Adams was the second president of the USA .

That series also showed folks washing down their wooden floors with vinegar as a disinfectant.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/separatist-leaders-issue-formal-request-russian-army-repel-ukrainian-aggression

Let’s not have too much hand-wringing and virtue-signaling. It’s about time rotten Western Elites saw some Reality they can’t just wave hands and pretend doesn’t exist.

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Zaphod:

Perhaps. Though in general I note that we no longer seem to have the wealth of Cult-Level Intellectuals offered by the 20th C.

I think people were eventually vaccinated (ahem) against Genius Guys boldly pointing The Way to the Future.

“As I sometimes slot things, the three models Westerners have to choose from come down to Judeo-Christianity, Scientific Materialism or Nietzschean self-creation.”

Can I get a refund?

That being said, I’d pay good money to see you do a TED Talk explaining to the Trannies that they’re mostly Fun House Mirror Nietzcheans.

I guess my politics are more Procrustean than Protean, but for sure am no kind of Scientific Materialist Devil.

Zaphod:

Close enough!

Oh, “Thus Spake” is better than the average book. But then I like the mad writers and the high writers.

Nietzsche was big. As I sometimes slot things, the three models Westerners have to choose from come down to Judeo-Christianity, Scientific Materialism or Nietzschean self-creation.

I’m kind of a broken record on this topic (no… not the Joos… Syphilis):

The good old Spirochetes likely did a bit to liven up Nietzsche’s creativity as he aged. As they did for the likes of Schubert and Maupassant amongst many others.

Can’t remember where I first read it but someone pointed out that genius level creativity has gone downhill since the invention of Sulphanomides and Penicillin. Seems not wrong.

“Someone recommends a book, you like what you hear, you order the book and then you start reading?”

Pretty much like that. Otherwise I’d just keep reading more of the same, no? Of course if I don’t like what I hear, I retaliate disproportionately with cruise missiles.

Which reminds me is there a book you can recommend along the lines of “No, you’re not Caspar Weinberger. Relax!”

I think the point with Nietzsche is that he figured out that Western Thought had a gigantic boil on its behind in dire need of lancing. Not entirely convinced that he was the go to guy for reconstructive surgery.

Can’t remember if it’s in Zarathustra or not because been a long time… still I think memory not playing me false here… but any buke with:

(a) a village called The Spotted Cow

and

(b) describing a young child as a Self-propelling Wheel

is better than the average book.

I woudln’t go quite so far as to call Ezra Pound the Ariel Sharon of Literary Critics, but it’s fun to read his pithy diatribes against Anthologists for leaving this or that out and putting other dross in. For someone who grew up with a parental bookshelf of F R Leavis nonsense crit… bliss.

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight.

Someone recommends a book, you like what you hear, you order the book and then you start reading?

You are a strange lad!

Maybe it will catch on.

Latenightways I’ve been reading “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” I tried to read it in high school and had no idea where the book was coming from. Now I find it rather funny. I imagine N. pounding the table and roaring about GREAT HEALTHINESS!

Clearly Nietzsche was mad or high on top-shelf stimulants.
___________________________

We, the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand, we
firstlings of a yet untried future–we require for a new
end also a new means, namely, a new healthiness, stronger,
sharper, tougher, bolder and merrier than all healthiness hitherto.
He whose soul longeth to experience the whole range of hitherto
recognised values and desirabilities, and to circumnavigate all the
coasts of this ideal ‘Mediterranean Sea’, who, from the adventures
of his most personal experience, wants to know how it feels to be a
conqueror, and discoverer of the ideal–as likewise how it is with
the artist, the saint, the legislator, the sage, the scholar, the
devotee, the prophet, and the godly non-conformist of the old
style:–requires one thing above all for that purpose, GREAT
HEALTHINESS–such healthiness as one not only possesses, but
also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one
unceasingly sacrifices it again, and must sacrifice it!

–Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spake Zarahthustra”
___________________________

I understand that Nietzsche wouldn’t have looked ahead at Hitler and Nazis and said, “There. That. That’s the Man and the Movement.”

But the more casual onlooker who connected the dots between the three wouldn’t have been off-base.