OP blames this on rich people bc all snobbery must now cloak itself in affected class resentment but this is very obviously a consequence of everest becoming more accessible to the broader public over time
"you have to power through the actual text but the story is quite gripping" describes most of the literary fiction assigned in high school classrooms and it is precisely this which young boys find objectionable about it. the Iliad would be no different
@ilikeadamsmith
The Iliad would absolutely appeal to boys. You need to power through the listing of all the ships sure, but the story is quite gripping.
the point is not that the Iliad shouldn't be assigned reading in classrooms (it should), it's that "does this have inherent appeal for young boys" (or young girls, for that matter) is not a serious criterion for inclusion in a literature curriculum
@literally_chad
@shazzity
yeah i have no objection to assigning students the Iliad, i just think it's unlikely to appeal to young male students substantially more than what is currently on offer
this is what actually existing "christian nationalism" looks like btw. no christian commonwealth or return to the political tradition of the magisterial reformation, just room temp IQ dispensationalists who think Tim LaHaye pop eschatology should be the basis of US foreign policy
On last night's livestream, Christian nationalist organizers of today's 'United for Israel' march at Columbia explained that they're actually excited about rising antisemitism: it's a sign the End Times is near & Jews will convert to Christianity. Rally leader Sean Feucht:
bibi is wrong about israel's present situation but he's plainly correct about WW2. the holocaust was totally tangential to our war aims and the fact that the major allied powers were at best indifferent and more typically actively hostile to jewish refugees is well documented
Israel 🇮🇱 prime minister
@netanyahu
:
“In the Holocaust, no nation came to our aid. 𝗜𝗳 𝗜𝘀𝗿𝗮𝗲𝗹 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗲, 𝗜𝘀𝗿𝗮𝗲𝗹 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗲. We will defeat our enemies. NEVER AGAIN IS NOW.”
britain is so cool bc they've managed to develop a speech regime which places onerous restrictions on every kind of speech except the exact kind of rank degeneracy that restrictive speech regimes exist to suppress
Advice for scholars: next time you lecture on Kant and revolutions at “Downing” (
@DarwinCollege
) Cambridge, make sure your hair is neatly tied and that you’re not blonde. Or else your research impact will be on the
@spectator
libido section.
the whole opposing-UBI-to-own-the-landlords shtick has the same energy as lefties getting mad about the fed cutting interest rates because something something big business
the intellectual right has been trying to retcon this episode into something less massively discreditable but the actual reality is that if you were on the wrong side of this, you are simply too retarded to be trusted with full citizenship in a republic
this stuff is why we should maybe build a left movement led by the actual working class as opposed to, say, podcast millionaires and graduates of elite colleges born into wealth
Jokes about Roe aside - this is an ideal time for conservatives to emphatically endorse a large expansion of childcare benefits, tax credits, and other pro-family policies.
Roe is gone, good. Now it's time to vocally support policies that support children and their families.
iraq is not afghanistan is not syria is not yemen and anyone who treats these countries and their conflicts as interchangeable with one another or really even meaningfully similar is not a serious person
not sure if this is a hot take, but i think the desire to punish china for the pandemic is completely deranged. and this isn't even one of those situations where i think the impulse is understandable but incorrect. it's just batshit insane and unambiguously so
The US and the Czech Republic spend about the same % of GDP on welfare, but they have one of the lowest poverty rates in the developed world and we have one of the highest. The difference? They spend on kids and families, and we don't.
In a world where Dems aren’t raising taxes below $400k, I think expanding social security old age pension would be a bad priority relative to expanding the child and disability elements of the welfare state
"i intend on acting to have this decision changed"
imo one of the more outrageous features of the US-israel relationship is their open contempt not only for the united states' legitimate interest in regional stability but also for our basic sovereign right to set our own policy
The ‘Netzah Yehuda’ battalion is an inseparable part of the Israel Defense Forces. It is subject to military law and is responsible for operating in full compliance with International law.
The State of Israel has a strong, independent judicial system that evaluates meticulously
it's pretty funny to me that the lesson that pop culture appears to have taken away from the salem witch trials is "being a witch is cool and subversive" and not "witches aren't real and murdering people in bouts of mass hysteria is bad"
if you don't want to abide by the standards of the current hegemon, maybe you shouldn't have adopted a defense strategy whose viability depends on that hegemon's largesse
"Israel must stop begging to be judged fairly by whatever standards the current hegemon has decreed we all agree upon. We need to look for standards from within our tradition to set a moral example for the whole world, while making it more practically possible to defend our
@literally_chad
@shazzity
yeah i have no objection to assigning students the Iliad, i just think it's unlikely to appeal to young male students substantially more than what is currently on offer
the idea that pagan literature valorizes the human will is the sort of thing you could only believe if you've read literally none of it and learned everything you think you know about it from rw twitter schizos
@FromKulak
The problem with Tolkien is that he is Christian.
Paganism aims at the heroic. In Christianity, there is only surrender and self-criticism - there is no triumph of the will.
@mattyglesias
Guys, I think with one more sardonic tweet poking fun at people pushing the best solution available via the limited means they have we can get this thing licked.
wealth insulates you from consequences and that breeds nihilistic indifference to what happens to other people. wealthy "leftists" are no exception. these people do not share our class interests, and that's why they're so willing to vote against them.
@literally_chad
@gdavis451
i don't think it doesn't work; i think it would work about as well as what we currently teach. fwiw i read the Iliad my junior year of hs and liked it
your intellectual ancestors were the heirs to the puritan ethos of sobriety, thrift, self-control, and moral improvement. you are a grown man fellating frat brothers on social media. you are GAY
thinking about this absolutely ascended lyman stone piece, where he argues for universal child payments, mandating time off on sundays, expanding couples' access to welfare benefits, and increasing immigration from the global south - to own the libs
yikes sorry, thanks for letting me know. was a huge fan of his raid at harper's ferry, i had no idea he massacred five proslavery settlers in front of their families (i like him even more now)
it's astounding to me that people still refuse to acknowledge this, but markets are fundamentally unsuited to meeting the needs of people who cannot work, often even if they live in households with people who do.
watching conservative intellectuals attempt to break with the economic orthodoxy of the libertarian right is amusing to me bc a lot of them have spent so much time fixated on culture war grifts that they just straight up don't understand how the world works on a material level
it's so cool how these people are so ideologically committed to being retarded that they're making an exception to their isolationist ethos in the one case where the nation would actually benefit from its application
I get a strange inkling that all these Columbia and UCLA students running around yelling “Free Palestine” would not be jumping at the opportunity to do a semester abroad in Gaza.
the india bit is uniquely egregious coming from nussbaum given that she built her career on the work of amartya sen, who notably advanced the theory that modern famines are chiefly a distribution problem, citing the *absence* of famine in post-independence india as an example
Martha Nussbaum and
@shadihamid
debate whether human overpopulation 👨👩👧👦or underpopulation 🚶♂️ will be the most important challenge of the future. Listen to the whole thing here 👉
@SeanMcCarthyCom
statistically, black people at the same income level are incarcerated at astronomically higher rates, are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of a violent crime, are much less likely to ever escape poverty, and have a greater tendency to grow up in poor neighborhoods
It's a tragedy what happened to Breonna Taylor, but in the Greek sense. By all means let's criticize American policing, but outrage here should be directed primarily at Jamarcus Glover. His actions put her in danger and *crucially* led her boyfriend to fire his weapon in fear.
it's pretty interesting to me that jimmy dore got more blowback from the left for being mean to aoc than he did for being a paid propagandist for the one of 21st century's worst mass murderers
the GOP results are so funny bc they demonstrate that republicans are not, in fact, reflexive isolationists; in foreign policy, they're just partisans for whatever is maximally damaging to american interests
prison abolitionists are obviously extremely stupid but the fact that most of them are sticking to their guns on this is much more admirable than if they had just carved out an exemption for their political opponents
This reminds me of another topic: “loves America” is a silly standard. What that means is they love to consume or they like the ability to do things they can’t in their own country or something like that.
What “loves America” needs to mean this that they see themselves as a
@MewMewMadness
@peaktransit
unironically, you have pronouns in bio and are therefore likely to run this country better than the overwhelming majority of potential alternatives
The frustrating thing about a lot of leftists who consider themselves anti-authoritarian or opposed to DSA-style dictator apologia is that when you press them on what they think we should do about bad shit happening overseas, the answer, more often than not, is nothing.
trying to make being not retarded about vaccines into like a cringe lib thing was the only option bc there was no other way to avoid facing how embarrassingly, catastrophically wrong their team was on the substance of the issue
sanity to the modern american rightoid is just being too mired in unrestrained sexual license and substance abuse to develop a politics more substantive than kitschy faux-nationalism
@vanillatary
No sane country would allow a genocidal terrorist group to continue wielding defacto state power on their border. Why do you think Israel should?
@SeanMcCarthyCom
I'm not pretending that class isn't the main factor in deprivation in America. Rich black people aren't meaningfully worse off than rich white people and they basically have the same class interests. But acting like race isn't a factor, especially at low income levels, is obtuse.
one of the most offensive concepts to the modern mind is the notion that "needing" something does not entitle you to take it. unlimited genocide on the sKKKy "people"
The thing about Avatar is that obviously the humans should win. I’m sorry for the Na’vi’s trouble and I am eager to transport them to a nature preserve of some kind where they can graze in relative peace but we are gonna need that unobtainium.