|
Post by Kapitan on Oct 5, 2022 17:18:02 GMT
Yeah, I wanted to share it and yet not overdo it. Because I do think it's easy to take the point the wrong way. Like you said, staying young at heart, keeping a sense of humor, remaining in the world (as opposed to in the past), these are all great things. And I wouldn't say some Victorian English or gruff 40s American stiffness or separation from their kids is a good thing: I don't think teachers and parents ought to dismiss kids, or smack them around.
But there is something almost pathetic about trying to hang on to youth culture, or to be accepted by the young. No, you don't have to become your parents, but neither should you become your children!
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Oct 13, 2022 17:58:00 GMT
I listened to this podcast today, an interview between academic Yascha Mounk (on his Persuasion platform) and guest Joshua Coleman, a psychologist. The topic is the apparently increasing rate of estrangements between adult children and their parents. If I caught the figure correctly, he said something like 11% of parents report being fully cut off from at least one of their adult children.
It was an interesting, if depressing, listen. They don't pretend such a situation is always terrible, but I can't help but think it tends to be more bad than good. In particular, I suspect it's younger adults who think they don't want or need their parents and believe they have a "chosen family" of friends. But those people (in my experience) probably don't understand how many of their peers will get married, have kids, and reconnect or better connect to their own families, leaving those self-inflicted loners more fully alone.
They mention both politics and the current state of therapy/mental health/"self-discovery" as apparent drivers, as well as the obvious things like actual abuse.
I've never been overly connected to my parents, more the "phone call every week or (more often) two" kind of guy. But when a friend of mine talked about literally cutting off his parents entirely if they voted a certain way back either in '16 or '20, I just couldn't understand it. I think more often than not, it's a bad decision--though I should be quick to note that I can't really pretend to speak for everyone's own personal circumstances.
|
|
|
Post by B.E. on Oct 29, 2022 13:15:15 GMT
More infuriating than interesting, but I didn't want to post this in the NBA or politics threads. Kapitan, I'm so sick of antisemitism! And it always confused me. I mean, in a way, I sort of understand the simplistic, generalized, tribalistic racism between whites, blacks, Asians, etc. but there's something different about antisemitism. There are these very specific, and grand, conspiracies about Jews. As in, they control the banks! they control the world! It's just so weird. And it comes up all too often (as we've seen with Kanye and Kyrie, recently). So, I'm continually left wondering, why? This video from youtuber, Mr. Beat, is a good one. I've probably watched it 3-4 times since he posted it 4 years ago. Humanity has a long way to go...
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Oct 29, 2022 14:13:08 GMT
Thanks for sharing that, B.E.. I've got some ideas about the difference with antisemitism, and am curious to see what Mr. Beats has to say (and whether my guesses are in line with his explanations). It's really sickening, and seeing it apparently return to the fore recently is infuriating.
|
|
|
Post by B.E. on Oct 29, 2022 18:52:35 GMT
Thanks for sharing that, B.E. . I've got some ideas about the difference with antisemitism, and am curious to see what Mr. Beats has to say (and whether my guesses are in line with his explanations). It's really sickening, and seeing it apparently return to the fore recently is infuriating. If you had a chance to watch, I'm curious to know if your guesses aligned or if you have anything to add to his video.
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Oct 30, 2022 13:19:53 GMT
I thought it was a well done video: tough to do in a short, digestible form.
I wish he had tried to dig in even more to the "why," which he mentioned to some extent. What I mean is, not only what are the reasons people say they hate Jews (i.e., what are the stereotypes or slurs), but where do those come from? Some people treat that question as inappropriate, with a kind of "hate is hate, it's unreasonable" approach. And I OBVIOUSLY don't condone hate, and yes, I do think it is almost always almost entirely unreasonable. But there are also clearly reasons people choose to hate Group A instead of Group B, and I think understanding the [often deranged] human psyche is useful.
He did address it some. For example, he mentioned laws about lending money at interest in then newly Christian-Roman Europe. No lending at interest basically meant no lending, because who would agree to finance projects or give loans if there were literally nothing in it for them? But Jewish people were exempt from that restriction, and so naturally could take advantage. There is a deep irony in Christian Europeans hating Jews for succeeding in an industry they more or less forced them to succeed in...
He also mentioned their relative health through the plagues as probably a result of both being set off from other people, and better hygiene due to their religious purity rituals of washing.
I think there are two big things (one of which he discussed some, but not deeply) though.
1. Christians taking power over the Roman Empire in the 4th century. The Roman empire (despite having destroyed Jerusalem and fought a few wars in the region) generally was not opposed to the Jewish people, and in some ways favored them. (They generally gave them an exemption from military service, allowed them to take the Sabbath, and exempted them from certain festivals dedicated to Roman gods--though to be clear there were always also exceptions and various worse times, too.) There were the wars around 70 and 130, but they were not about antisemitism, they were about putting down revolts.
Judaism was legally allowed as a "licit" religion in the empire, which is often considered to be a main reason Christianity tried to emphasize its Judaic roots: the Roman empire smiled upon the ancient and frowned upon the innovative of religions and philosophies. (There were many sects of Christianity that either thought there was no actual connection to Judaism--tough sell!--or who thought they should make a clean break, that whatever their history, Judaism had nothing to do with them and vice versa.)
So while there were "Christians" (who are really just a sect of Jews in the first century or so) who didn't like "Jews", that's really like Greens not liking politicians, most of whom are Democrats or Republicans. It was an internal fight, a tiny splinter group sometimes disliking their brethren; there were several other, similar intra-Judaic fights, such as the Qumran community (possibly of militant Essenes, and/or Zealots) despising the main Jerusalem authorities. Clearly, these aren't antisemitism, as everyone involved is a semitic Jew.
Christians wrote about religious tolerance in those first few centuries--presumably because, as the underdogs, they had to. Those sorts of liberties tend to protect the weak; the strong have no need for them. But within a few decades of taking power in the empire, they began restricting and outlawing and punishing other religions, and especially Jews. It was a very predictable, and very pathetic, about-face.
2. Jews continuing to exist as a separate people in small but noticeable minorities among other, larger nations. This could be read wrong, so let me be very clear I am not excusing antisemitism or any hatred at all: it could be taken as "blaming the victim," which I am absolutely not doing.
My point is, Jews have managed to retain a separate group identity that is clearly noticeable to the broader cultures in which they find themselves. Ironically, it isn't a consistent, single identity--Judaism is as diverse as Christianity, for example, and also varied and varies from place to place. But in each place, it seemed that "these stubborn people stick to their weird, old tradition rather than getting with the program." So unlike many of the smaller groups that must have been everywhere in Europe up to and through the Middle Ages who just more or less assimilated into the emerging nation-states, they retained a unique identity. Think about all the Germanic peoples of ancient times: how many of them, once the Roman Empire really took the continent, continued to exist to a point that anyone cared?
Conversely, they were always small enough groups that they didn't have to be reckoned with in the larger sense. The French and British might have their long-standing feuds, but the French couldn't discriminate against or hate the British in the way they could the Jews because neither France nor Britain was going anywhere. When it's 50-50, it's a game; when it's 99-1, the 1 probably blends in; when it's 95-5, and the 5 are distinct ... hatred happens, discrimination happens, scapegoating happens, etc.
I think those two things combined into bizarre circumstances. Imagine, a tiny sect of a fringe Middle Eastern religion ending up a long-standing racial hatred and eventual genocide in Europe almost 2,000 years later! But the wars, especially the Bar Kochba revolt, push both groups out of their homeland. The smaller of the two (likely because it welcomes and seeks converts more than the other, and doesn't require circumcision to convert) ends up the dominant religion/culture of the empire! And then their hazy, ancient disagreements turn into nasty politics and general cultural bias and hatred, eventually wildly out of any sense of proportion or even reality.
Sorry, that's a big ol' ramble from somebody interested in the topics, but by no means an expert! So take it all with a scoop's worth of grains of salt. Also, as a final side note, the guy he mentioned as having a corresponding video is someone I interviewed back when I was thinking of doing my little history/religion/politics side thing. The Casual Historian (Grant). He was a good guy.
|
|
|
Post by B.E. on Oct 30, 2022 14:46:00 GMT
Very interesting and informative post, Kapitan. My interest in this period may have just been renewed! Earlier this year I purchased an audiobook, Turning Points in Medieval History by Dorsey Armstrong. I listened to the first 6 chapters (of 24) while on vacation last month, but I hadn't got back to it yet. I almost want to start over, as the first chapter is about the fall of the Roman Empire in 5th century.
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Oct 30, 2022 15:07:24 GMT
I'm trying to think of analogies that show the almost mind-blowing nature of it all, and while it isn't perfect, here is another thing to think about: America became known as a WASP nation because small, relatively fringe groups of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants ended up the dominant cultural force here; all combinations of southern and eastern Europeans, many of them Catholics and Orthodox, were generally shunned sometimes legally and often culturally as suspicious minorities.
None of these religions or cultures are native to America. Yet they're dominant, and their "old-country" disputes and grudges came to be lived here.
But to make it more analogous, you'd have to imagine that the indigenous people of America a) hadn't been largely killed off by disease and violence; and b) had en masse converted to Protestant religions, too. Imagine them, more numerous than the actual WASPs but identifying as WASPS, as a driving force against the Latin Catholic peoples in America. The onlooker from afar would think, "what the hell do YOU care!?" But these indigenous people would likely have some kind of semi-mythical stories about being treated unfairly by those goddamn corrupt papists, about the importance of the Reformation, and with northern European national storylines built in...even though they never had anything to do with any of it.
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Nov 9, 2022 14:00:37 GMT
Here is a cool thing with no particular significance on anything, as far as I know: it's just cool.
Israeli archaeologists have identified the oldest complete sentence in the ancient Canaanite language found to date, not firmly dated but thought to be possibly from around 1500 BCE. The sentence is carved into an ivory comb, and it reads "May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard."
(How's that for the sentence that gets preserved for nearly 4,000 years? I mean, if you had to be known by one sentence you wrote...)
The Canaanite alphabet is thought to have been invented around 1800 BCE and became the foundation of all subsequent alphabetic systems, including Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew. Canaanites were the Semitic people who lived in the ancient Near East, including what is currently Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Dec 9, 2022 14:17:16 GMT
Here's a fun little distraction I came across: a 35-question test that claims to show which famous philosophers you worldview most resembles, using Aristotle, Diogenes, Epicurus, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Plato.
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Dec 13, 2022 14:25:04 GMT
I thought this was very cool: scientists have discovered and "decoded" the world's oldest known sample of DNA, which was taken from Greenland. The 2 million-year-old DNA wasn't taken from a single specimen, but from organic material found in soil samples, known as environmental DNA or eDNA.
Greenland is mostly an Arctic desert now, but the samples show it to have been 20-34 degrees F warmer during the time surveyed, which would put it around the much more moderate 50s, 60s, and even 70s F, depending on the season. The DNA indicated the area was home to plant life including fir, cedar, birch, and willow trees. It was also home to wildlife including hares and lemmings on the small end, but also geese, reindeer, and even mastodon!
The DNA was preserved because the layers of sediment in which it was buried were covered by more sediment, then permafrost as climate change cooled the region. The linked article quotes a scientist who believes that similar situations could result in DNA dating back even a few more million years.
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Dec 20, 2022 18:31:19 GMT
Stanford, one of the great universities in the world, as part of its multiyear, multiphase "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative," released a 13-page document of no-nos and suggested alternatives. I'm all for not offending people intentionally or otherwise, but I'm also all for just doing your best and accepting correction when you accidentally offend somebody rather than memorizing a silly rulebook from some (wildly overpaid, whatever they're making) schoolmarms whose logic as to what is offensive and why is, to be generous, highly subjective.
Funniest one I've seen so far, Karen. Apparently (after about 2-3 years of being every progressive's favorite insult), you're now supposed to say "demanding or entitled White woman" instead. Pretty funny that it's essential to keep race and gender involved in your insult, actually. Why not just "jerk"?
Imagine if you were told not to use some other racial slur, say "thugs," which has been discouraged in recent years ... but were told instead to say "criminal Black men." Uhh...not solving the problem, is it? When the issue is stereotyping not just the behavior, but a group of people who are (supposedly) engaging in the behavior, that's wrong! There are "thugs" of every race and gender, and there are "Karens" of every race and gender.
THE POINT IS THE NEGATIVE BEHAVIOR! In my opinion, you should always drop the racial and gender aspects unless they're the specific point. The problem with "Karens" (a word I've always hated, btw, as it's pretty misogynistic and racist) is their behavior. The gender and race aspects are just an exercise in stereotyping! This document just took the stereotyping insult's definition and said that's the replacement for the stereotyping insult.
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Jan 4, 2023 13:31:45 GMT
Here is an interesting little summary of some of the work that is newly entering the public domain this year, as their copyrights expire. The list includes literature by Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Virginia Woolf; music by Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Irving Berlin, and the Gershwins; and films by John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Fritz Lang's classic "Metropolis." apnews.com/article/public-domain-2023-5c30746553953b5accffcbaa9e860de0
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Jan 17, 2023 13:25:47 GMT
Archaeologists in Norway announced the discovery of the oldest known runestone, and some of the oldest runic writing overall, ever found in Scandinavia. The stone is roughly one square foot of flat sandstone and was found in a cremation pit, allowing it to be dated to somewhere between 1-250 AD/CE. It hasn't been fully deciphered/translated yet. The linked story says it might contain the name of a person or family--Idiberug--but that not all of the writing seems to make literal sense. For a bit of commentary (i.e., feel free to find something better to do than read my unsolicited opinions), I think it's interesting that some white racist types obsess over "western civilization," by which they tend to mean northern and western Europe. Well, this primitive bit of writing comes a good 2 ,500-3,500 years later than not just writing, but detailed written histories and commercial records in Egypt and modern Iran and Iraq (ancient Sumer, in city-states like Uruk, Nippur, and others). People in Egypt, Iran, and Iraq are hardly those the "western civilization" types have in mind. Anyone who knows ancient histories knows that the people of northern Europe were very late to "be civilized," by which I mean developing literacy, cities in the modern sense of the world (with permanent structures and unrelated citizens), economies with currency, etc. By the time these proto-Scandinavians were learning to scribble names, the Middle Eastern world had already produced complex thinkers and great writers including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, Paul of Tarsus, and the physician Galen, among many others. (All this to say nothing of the Asian literature and philosophies that had already developed, too, in modern China, India, etc.) I don't say any of that to demean the proto-Scandinavians (who are my own ancestors, along with proto-Germans, after all). My point is that it doesn't matter where this or that arose. Different ideas rise when and where they arise, and those populations benefit from them; other populations do, too, as they spread. It's natural and fine, and says nothing good or bad about you (or me, etc.). It's interesting as it is without trying to bolster your own ancestors, or demean others'. Those people don't reflect on you anyway; it's a waste of time to take credit or cast blame for their accomplishments (or lack of same).
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Feb 8, 2023 13:30:20 GMT
This might not be the best thread, as "interesting" isn't the best word for this, feeling awfully flippant a word for the situation, but has anyone been following reports about the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria the other day? The death toll is reportedly now more than 11,000 (8,500 reported so far in Turkey; 1,200 in areas of Syria controlled by their government; and 1,400 in areas of Syria controlled by rebel forces). That is the highest death toll by earthquake since 2011 in Japan (20,000), with the numbers expected to continue rising as aid workers search the rubble.
I can't help think of the context that makes this even worse than it has to be. Syria has been in a civil war for about a decade now--though most of the world has forgotten--with the Assad government, ISIS-backed fighters, Kurds, Turkish forces, and outsiders including Russian and US forces all still in the mix. Obviously that means the country hasn't had the sorts of resources it otherwise would have had to aid those in need, and it isn't even safe to try to save people in some areas.
Turkey isn't in quite as bad a situation, but their economy has been in shambles (with many fingers pointed at the increasingly autocratic longtime ruler Erdogan).
Overarching point being that all in all, these populations are especially unable to deal with this kind of disaster.
And while it sounds petty at a time like this, I have to note that this area is home to some of the best preserved ancient structures and cities on Earth. Every earthquake takes away some of that history forever.
|
|