The BEST Guide to POLAND
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Posts by Des Essientes  

Joined: 6 Feb 2010 / Male ♂
Warnings: 1 - O
Last Post: 10 May 2015
Threads: Total: 7 / Live: 0 / Archived: 7
Posts: Total: 1288 / Live: 386 / Archived: 902

Displayed posts: 386 / page 2 of 13
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Des Essientes   
16 Feb 2011
History / Was Daniel Fahrenheit a Pole? [138]

People can "claim" whoever they want but it's still silly and especially silly when those so claimed despise the sorts of people who go about claiming.
Des Essientes   
16 Feb 2011
History / Was Daniel Fahrenheit a Pole? [138]

I provided an example of how he felt himself in my original post. I am not going to argue with someone who didn't read and comprehend my post and who obviously hasn't read Schopenhauer. Go to the library and if Schopenhauer's writings are too much for you and you wish to know about Schopenhauer's life I highly recommend Rudigar Safranski's biography of him.
Des Essientes   
16 Feb 2011
History / Was Daniel Fahrenheit a Pole? [138]

Penn boy my post was directed at Guesswho who claimed we have no way of knowing how Schopenhauer felt about nationalism, but we have his writings.
Des Essientes   
16 Feb 2011
History / Was Daniel Fahrenheit a Pole? [138]

Yes Nietzsche's father actually had the family classified as "non-Germans" by the Prussian State because he too believed they were descended from Polish nobles. It seems to have been a family legend with them as the name Nietzsche is not Polish but i think the Poles should "claim" him haha.
Des Essientes   
16 Feb 2011
History / Was Daniel Fahrenheit a Pole? [138]

I don’t think there is any German that has ever wanted to be Polish and not German. The Germans have always been a very proud people.

You have never read Nietzsche either. He despised the conformist Germans of his time and claimed that their best stock had emigrated, and if really you think that other Germans have never admired Poles then you are sorely mistaken.
Des Essientes   
16 Feb 2011
History / Was Daniel Fahrenheit a Pole? [138]

I mean WHAT German would EVER want be know as having Polish blood instead of German blood???

It's a fact of life that the Germans have probably the biggest amount of famous people in the entire world.

Alan Watts once remarked that American Roman Catholics are really Crypto-Protestants. Could it be that some Polish-Americans on this forum are Crypto-Germans?
Des Essientes   
16 Feb 2011
History / Was Daniel Fahrenheit a Pole? [138]

There is virtually no circumstance a German citizen like Nietzsche would ever say he is Polish if it wasn't true.

Nietzsche's circumstance was that he felt soceities with a strong independent aristocracy were superior and he thus he admired the szlachta and their refusal to submit to autocracy. The German aristocracy had submitted to autocracy and Germany's strongest class was its middle class and Nietzsche despised the paltry middle class virtues of hard work and obedience to authority and in this he was truly Polish. I feel many Polish-Americans on this forum respect productivity and efficiency more than the finer things in life like idleness and aesthetic contemplation and that is why they are Crypto-Germans.
Des Essientes   
21 Feb 2011
Language / Polish texts/stories with audio and English translation? [9]

Here is the link to the Librivox.com Polish pages: librivox.org/list-translated-pages-polish/

Librivox has Ferdinand Ossendowski's epic account of his odyssey throught Siberia, Mongolia, and China in English called Beasts, Men and Gods too: librivox.org/beasts-men-and-gods-by-ferdinand-ossendowski/
Des Essientes   
21 Feb 2011
Food / Taste of food in Poland vs other countries [188]

I think the general lack of spice in Northern European cuisine is consequence of geography. In colder regions food doesn't spoil as quickly and thus it doesn't need spices to mask the flavor of decay nor as preservatives.
Des Essientes   
22 Feb 2011
Food / Eat goulash from a cat and a steak from a dog in Poland! [114]

The method that some use to slaughter dogs for human consumption is rather clever if also rather cruel. They starve the dog for a few days and then set a large bowl of uncooked rice before it. The dogs wolfs it all down and then the rice expands after absorbing the dog's gastric juices eventually causing the dogs stomach to burst killing it. Then its fur and viscera are removed and the dog is roasted and the people eat it and its rice stuffing. Man's "best friend" has saved the cook some labor by participating in its own preparation!
Des Essientes   
22 Feb 2011
Food / Eat goulash from a cat and a steak from a dog in Poland! [114]

It is true that Dolphns as well as larger fish, like swordfish, often do have toxic levels of mercury in their systems because they are at the top of a food chain in which mercury is more and more concentrated in the bodies of bigger fish eating smaller fish. Most whales feed on plankton rather than fish, and thus they have far lower levels of mercury. Mercury in the seas is a result of the smoke unleashed by burning coal.
Des Essientes   
23 Feb 2011
Life / What is Poland's view on obesity? How healthy, fit are Poles? [166]

I've heard that the French lack many obese people because both snacking in between meals and taking second helpings during meals are considered taboo. An interesting historical precedent for developing a svelte society is found in the Spartan Constitution devised by Lycurgus. He made citizens eat their meals together in communal dining halls and thus eliminated gluttony because no one wished to be seen acting like a pig in full view of their neighbors.
Des Essientes   
9 Mar 2011
UK, Ireland / Does everyone know about countess Markiewicz? Polish connection. [16]

I see that she converted to Catholicism but she'd been an Irish republican nationalist for years before that. I know W.B. Yeats was a Protestant and an Irish nationalist too. Were these two quite anomalous at the time? Are there many Protestants in Irish nationalist parties today?
Des Essientes   
13 Mar 2011
History / Polish pirates [58]

Piracy is an ancient tradition and if Edward Gibbon is to be believed Slavs from the mountainous region of the area later to be known as MaƂapolska did go South and take up piracy in the Adriatic. I will provide the number of the chapter in which this mentioned in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire if i can find my copy.
Des Essientes   
13 Mar 2011
History / Polish pirates [58]

Poles didn't exist in the period Gibbon was writing about.

Yeah right Poles just magically sprang into existence in the 10th century, get over yourself. Moreover Gibbons great work covers the period up to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks so that shows how much you know.
Des Essientes   
13 Mar 2011
History / Polish pirates [58]

Don't bother.

It is the fifty fifth chapter. Don't tell people what to do you are not the boss of this forum. "....yet the Sclavonian pirates were still frequent and dangerous; and it was not before the close of the tenth century that the freedom and sovereignty of the Gulf were effectually vindicated by the Venetian Republic." The Sclavonian pirates had emigrated from "....the inland regions of Silesia and Little Poland, thirty days journey, according to the Greek computation, from the sea of darkness."
Des Essientes   
14 Mar 2011
History / How much Poles trust to France? [107]

the Poles hate the french...those damned french gave them a partial independence in 1812

One hundred and ninety nine years ago of which the poet wrote: "O spring! Happy is he who beheld thee then in our country! Memorable spring of war, spring of harvest! O spring, happy is he who beheld how thou didst bloom with corn and grass, but glittered with men; how thou wert rich in events and big with hope! I see thee still, fair phantom of my dream! Born in slavery and chained in my swaddling bands, I have had but one such spring in my whole life."
Des Essientes   
14 Mar 2011
History / Polish pirates [58]

well ,er,I guess we can exclude them.....

No read post #8 Slavs from Poland did engage in piracy in the Adriatic. There were Polish pirates. Their lack of rum, parrots, and shoes with big buckles does not exclude them.
Des Essientes   
14 Mar 2011
History / Polish pirates [58]

They may be uninteresting to you, but others perusing this Polish discussion forum may find the story of Slavs leaving Poland and marching thirty days to reach the sea and become aquatic brigands quite interesting. I know I found it so when I first read about it.
Des Essientes   
14 Mar 2011
History / Polish pirates [58]

Except there isn't really very much to say about them - and neither the ethnicity nor the geography correspond to anything recognisably Polish.

Geographically they were from a region of Poland. Ethnically they were Slavs as are Poles. They are recognizably Polish on both counts, a branch of the great Slavic People that many on this forum seem intent on belittling, but to no avail. The thread is titled “Polish Pirates” and you insist that the only relevant pirates are the ones which included few or no Poles in their ranks. It is the Caribbean Pirates, in their fruity garments, that are irrelevant to this thread, not the Slavic pirates of the Adriatic.
Des Essientes   
14 Mar 2011
History / Polish pirates [58]

This took me back to primary school,and the assemblies when for some bizzare reason teachers thought it was appropriate for 6 year olds to sing "15 men on a dead mans chest" and "What do you do with a Drunken sailor?".........

My niece attends a rather hippy-ish private primary school here in California and it bans pirate costumes from its Halloween celebrations because pirates still exist, especially in South-East Asian waters, and they are brutal murderers.
Des Essientes   
14 Mar 2011
History / Polish pirates [58]

I wasnt allowed toy soldiers or army guns,but,could have toy knights and cowboys and indians and cowboy guns

The school my niece attends bans all toy guns and once one little boy was even sent home for the day because he pretended a bent stick was a gun and "shot" at his classmates!
Des Essientes   
15 Mar 2011
History / Polish pirates [58]

However as we know the biggest pirates in Mediteranean were Berbers and Greeks

The United States of America fought its first overseas war against the Berber pirates from 1801 to 1805.
Des Essientes   
24 Mar 2011
Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4500]

might be a slight misspelling when ur ancestors came to America (immigration people did that often)

Immigration people never touched my unpronouncable surname, unpronouncable for English speakers at least, because both pairs of my paternal great-grand-parents immigrated illegally into the USA via ships that docked in Baltimore, and you know what else? I'd sneak into another country too if it suited my fancy, because I don't give a crap about any goddamn laws that say what I can and cannot do. I am the Liberum Veto made flesh!