It is not entirely true that the usage has changed; I usually start my emails with this salutation, both to recipients close to me and those whom I do not know well. I address mailing lists with a simple "Dear all".

Nonetheless, this is the first time I have done so in a Hacker News post, and it shall probably be the last too.

Best wishes,

seabass

I'm not familiar with this one but is it misstated here? The barber doesn't only shave men who don't shave themselves. If he doesn't shave himself then he shaves himself and therefore can shave himself without contradiction. If he shaves himself he can shave himself without contradiction. Either way he shaves himself.

(Or maybe I'm just bad at logic)

While young his grandfather told Bertrand about meeting Napoleon. Late in life Bertrand watched the moon landing on TV.

Obviously that two experiences that span more than one life time, but they are very far apart.

https://www.openculture.com/2022/05/philosopher-bertrand-rus...

"He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."

"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."

—Srinivasa Ramanujan

"The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy

If that were the defining line you'd see it for a lot of places and contexts other than just the west no?. Including let's say the arab empires but berbers aren't "recolonising" north africa let alone Saudi Arabia or Yemen and the Ful, Masalit, etc are continuing to be wiped out in Sudan rather than Sudan being taken over by non arabs.

Your second paragraph says nothing.

The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective. That's succinct, not "the minimum amount of words communicating anything that might roughly align with a view".

The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me, they're not fluff or pointless pleasantries for code reasons.

"F off" has exactly zero semantic meaning (unless you actually believe this is a literal expression). Without context, it barely even has emotional meaning.

It's no less or more a spontaneous expression of emotion than yelling some curse word when you step on a piece of Lego.

Hold that thought. Current UK politics have taken a turn and the combination of major party incompetence and rising anger might change that.

Sir Oswald Mosley was member of parliament before starting the BUF. He was the youngest member of the House of Commons when he started as Conservative. He eventually switched to Labour.

He was interned during world war II as a security measure. He was released before the end of the war and never charged with anything.

e.g.

Some lines of note

> The theoretical doctrines of Communism are for the most part derived from Marx. My objections to Marx are of two sorts: one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred.

and

> I am completely at a loss to understand how it came about that some people who are both humane and intelligent could find something to admire in the vast slave camp produced by Stalin.

You say

> Sartre repellent on multiple levels

IMO the group of French intellectuals influenced by the Nazi philosopher Heidegger (of which Sartre is certainly one) looks increasingly creepy the more you look into them.

[0] https://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/opiate/why.html The rest of the page looks a bit crazy but that's the first google hit and they host the whole thing in plain text.

Most Republicans are leftist by today's standards.

It's entirely possible to logically respond to fascists (if you actually find one that isn't just a role-playing fool) and to push back against their extremism. The first step of that is actually understanding what it is that they really purport to believe, rather than attacking the easy strawmen that have been rhetorically established for you.

Anyone who wants to attack fascism should read Evola's critique on fascism "from the right" - really helped me fill in my understanding on what these people were trying to do, to separate the ideology-in-theory from the ideology-in-practice. Just like with communism, where "true communism has never been tried", so too nobody's ever really tried "true" fascism, or democracy for that matter.

When arguing with someone, it's usually best to actually get a mental model of how they themselves think... but that's a vulnerable moment for both parties involved, and not always something that can happen in the heat of verbal sparring.