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Tragically, Pericles’ xenophobic anti-immigration policies kept ancient Athens from being this diverse and angry!
From Donna Zuckerberg’s (Mark’s sister) extremely woke Classics magazine Eidolon, a condemnation of the celebrated Athenian statesman Pericles’ Citizenship Law (which frankly I’d never heard of, but, now that you mention it, sounds like a big improvement over our Anchor Baby Citizenship fiasco):
We Condone It by Our Silence
Confronting Classics’ Complicity in White SupremacyRebecca Futo Kennedy
Classicist, Ancient Historian, Museum Director
May 11… Silence encourages acceptance and even approval of antiquities’ worst tendencies in the contemporary world. Ancient Athens, though a democracy, does not fit a narrative of openness to immigrants and refugees no matter how we try to dress it up.
What, then, is a woke classicist to do? …
Tell me about it.
If we want to reduce the numbers of casual racists and white supremacists who use classics to justify their racist views, we need to stop providing them with “facile narratives of static timeless white purity.” Before we can engage in critical reception, the first step is a critical engagement with the classical past. We must not only engage issues of race/ethnicity, class, and gender in antiquity in our teaching and scholarship, but also we need to stop pretending that the worst thing the Athenians ever did was to execute Socrates and openly engage the true dark side of Classical Athens’ anti-immigration policies and the obsession with ethnic purity that lies at the heart of its literature, history, and philosophy….
Known as the Periclean Citizenship Law, the law passed around 451 BCE restricted access to political power and other legal rights to only those born of both a citizen mother and father. Prior to this law, one needed only a citizen father. We don’t know for certain why the law was passed, but part of the reason may very well have been a desire to restrict the large number of immigrant craftsmen and merchants whom Athenian citizens felt might compete with them for certain work — contrary to what Laurialan Reitzammer suggests, male citizens did many of the same jobs as male immigrants (and slaves), often working side by side (we even have payment lists showing that they got the same pay!).
Commenter Chrisnonymous says:
The exclamation mark indicates “the Athenians, those chumps!”. If only Pericles had had a billionaire brother employing lower-paid immigrants, he would have understood the value of immigration.
Commenter Achilles replies:
Certainly, then, the Athenian elites would have been more than justified in combatting this vile xenophobia among native workers by making extensive use of Eta-1-Beta visas to bring in cheaper and more easily controlled foreign workers to write code for Facebook, er, I mean, uh, to construct the columns and carve the sculptures of the Parthenon.
Chrisnonymous piles on:
In other Classics news:
Unearthing Prejudice: Results of Recent Excavations of Athenian Agricultural Sites
“…were found in soil layers corresponding to the years immediately after the Periclean Citizenship Law was passed. ‘Results are difficult to interpret,’ said Professor Jones, ‘but are generally accepted to mean many crops were left rotting in the fields…’”
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Do we have a pool going for which AR figure is going to jump on this grenade and give her the attention she’s craving?
Yes, forget how many slaves there were in Athens and forget the Siege of Melos. It was that the Athenians wanted to limit their “democratic experiment” to fellow Athenians that was the worst thing they ever did.
She’s playing a long game troll job.
Everyone already knows about Athenian democracy condemning Socrates to death, launching the preposterous Sicilian Expedition, feeding off of slavery, mistreating women, and being totally gay (sorry, that’s one for the plus column). But restricting prerogatives on the basis of parentage? Now, really, that’s too far. If only someone, sometime had been “woke” enough to criticize ancient Athens.
Oh, wait, that’s what we pay classics departments to do every day, in articles and books no one will ever read.
Certainly, then, the Athenian elites would have been more than justified in combatting this vile xenophobia among native workers by making extensive use of Eta-1-Beta visas to bring in cheaper and more easily controlled foreign workers to write code for Facebook, er, I mean, uh, to construct the columns and carve the sculptures of the Parthenon.
Do we need a noisy peri-clean street parade then? Roll out the subwoofer trucks!
I have the bad feeling that General Relativity will be next on the pillory.
We need to openly engage the true dark side of Judaism’s anti-immigration policies and the obsession with ethnic purity that lies at the heart of its literature, history, and philosophy….
Wait, this is real? It’s not a parody from the Onion?
MMMM, you know, the same thing could be done with Ancient Israel…..
Gosh, how terrible, a state that actually wants to protect the jobs of its citizens….
Rebecca Futo Kennedy:
http://denison.edu/people/rebecca-futo-kennedy
It takes a certain amount of willful insanity, idiocy or (((maliciousness))) in the case of Donna, to have reasonable knowledge of the whole of recorded history and yet never consider that the current suicidal ideology of political correctness, which has only been popular for maybe 30 years or so and is something that only whites (~10% of world population) adhere to, might actually be the wrong philosophy of life.
The exclamation mark indicates “the Athenians, those chumps!”. If only Pericles had had a billionaire brother employing lower-paid immigrants, he would have understood the value of immigration.
(Also, does any enterprising person out there have a Classics article from circa 40-50 years ago decrying Xenophon’s attempt to bilk non-Athenians by offerring them residence in exchange for revenue? I’m sure it exists. Imagine what Marx would have said if Pericles were in favor of importing lower-paid immigrants to do the jobs Athenians just wouldn’t assign their slaves to do…)
Surely this “Rebecca Futo Kennedy,” when it comes to Periclean Athens, has more wisdom than Pericles.
Socrates, from an old middle class Athenian family (on both sides) and a war veteran, was full of privilege and probably had it coming.
In other Classics news:
Try telling the Japanese that they can restore their civilization via immigration…..
Of course, the “nation of immigrants narrative” has only been popular since the 1960s….
See, you’re just imagining things when you think that Greece and Rome are the foundation of “Euro-American civilization.” Don’t be confused by people like Dante (with his reverence for Virgil) and Shakespeare (with his use of Roman history) and Whitehead (who wrote:“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”). They’re just imagining a link where none exists….
“Grenade”? This article is like a drunk bimbo at closing time.
Dear, I hate to break this to you, but restoring the pigment to classical statues doesn’t make them look less White…
Frumpy white female – check
Academics who base their positions on fear of bigotry essentially discredit themselves no matter the extent of their training. The article is a thin attempt to influence the present with the past, trying to justify current equality by criticizing past inequality. The author’s leftist slant makes her unfit to interpret history.
Which is why academia should be controlled by a central nationalist government and not just people complaining in the comments section.
The absence of nationalist bias means leftist bias, which is evidently much worse. People need to stop believing there is a neutral ground, and begin to find ways to remove these people from their positions.
But in a sense, she is right. The Greeks did not have an enlightened political model. Athenian democracy is just as wrong as modern democracy.
I still think that law was a good idea.
Time for all whites to go back to Classic Woke.
That word sounds familiar.
Sounds progressive! It’s counting the mother as equally important.
Haters gonna hate. Play her off, boys…
… because we have another contender, goyim.
It’s still reprehensibly unwoke of Donna to keep such a European slave name. She should call herself something like Usury X.
After reading the article by Donna “Usury X” Zuckerberg, it strikes me that perhaps it’s time to take an equally critical deconstructive look at Judaism? It has historically been used to motivate Jewish supremacy (supposedly a literally “chosen people”) and is among other things guilty of numerous genocides, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on.
Indeed, it’s gone so far that it’s now nearly being discussed to kick the Jews out of Israel. (Thanks to whoever posted this link a few days ago.)
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Terra-Incognita-Israel-is-not-a-Western-country-and-never-has-been-490048
It should thus be interesting to cast a long, cold, critical eye on this social construct and what it has achieved. Also how it can be modernized into an accepting and wholesome faith and people, or perhaps replaced by something more scientific.
I take Pericles’ citizenship law as being very important to the foundation of Western democracy. Pericles had also instituted progressive social measures such as subsidizing theater tickets and paying for jury-duty so that the poor could also participate. These generous measures could only be maintained however if the growth of the Athenian citizen body were restricted: hence, citizenship requirements were tightened to those born of two Athenian parents.
Two other very relevant measures at the foundation of Athenian democracy:
* Solon’s “lifting of burdens”: limitations on usury were instituted and wealth concentration was reversed by a general cancellation of private and public debt.
* Cleisthenes’ reorganization of Athens into 10 new districts, replacing the old organization around traditional families and tribes, hence trying to create a new common identity.
All very relevant for nation-building and the creation of a solidary citizen body. Unfortunately, modern democrats and welfare-statists don’t seem much interested in learning from the lessons of their predecessors..
Of course Ms Zuckerberg is blind to the modern day version of ‘separate but unequal’ Athens, which is thriving in the Middle East under the security umbrella provided by her country.
Actually, Socrates was entirely guilty of the charges.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/news/socrates-was-guilty-as-charged
Greek (and Roman) trials were very different from our own. No real judge or rules of procedure. Huge juries that were essentially a committee of the Citizen Assembly. Amateur attorneys, who on both sides industriously threw dirt and abuse.
The trials in essence were not over whether evidence beyond a reasonable doubt had been produced by the prosecution, but over whether they could convince a majority of the jury that the accused was bad for the city and its citizens. Trials were inherently a political process more than anything we would think of as legal.
There’s very little to find in a websearch of “Rebecca Futo Kennedy” because she went by plain Rebecca Kennedy until quite recently. Futo, even though it sounds Japanese or South Asian, is apparently a Hungarian surname; the only person named Futo important enough to have a biography on Wikipedia was a pre-war soccer player from Budapest.
Two years ago, as Rebecca Kennedy, a student at Ratemyprofessor said this about her:
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1470050
About the time this student was calling her “power hungry” she became Director of the Denison Museum, and although we may laugh at this stuff, her LinkedIn page describes one of her Museum Director strengths as “donor relations”. She is, undoubtedly, very adept at giving well-moneyed individuals like the Zuckerbergs the stuff they want to hear. And as the student at Ratemyprofessor noted, you don’t have to be right to be a leading scholar in your field.
For an SJW who spends a lot of time seething at white men in print, Futo Kennedy has very stereotypical white male interests:
https://www.routledge.com/authors/i13981-rebecca-kennedy
And before you ask, she’s married to a male-presenting professor named Max Goldman, although they live in separate states for work reasons.
http://www.denisonian.com/2015/02/features/professors-explain-the-two-body-problem/
Same thing happening today.
It’s the Greek-european good-minded consensus, that the Greek youth is just as good as – let’s say the Austian youth – and therefor can’t be expected to work for wages below those in Austria.
“It’s”, the above mentioned do-gooders claim, “as simple as that!”
Future excavations, made by the succcessors of famous Professor Jones, will show lots and lots of Greek olive trees from precisely the years 1990ff., all terribly rotten in the ground and not taken care of any longer, because of the fundamentally unjust Austrian-Greek wage gap (not to mention the Swiss-Greek wage gap, which is even closer to what Marx once revealed as the universal principal of the capitalist dynamics…)
Another Genius of the history of economics will in the year 3300 find out, that the suppression in Greece in the years 1990 ff. were such, that Greece was even forced ( forced! – by Capitalism!), to import Olive Oil from – – – Germany.
This then will be discussed in lots of journals and History-Conferences all over the world and on Mars…, because the assumption can’t be proven right, that there would have been a German Olive-oil-over-production in the years 1990 ff.
The simple idea, that the Greek bought olive oil in Germany, because th German infrastructure was better than the Greek one and the German olive-oil-traders were more efficient than the Greek ones will be dismissed as repressive ideas of …racists, basically.
For those interested in the actual situation of youth unemployment in Greece and Olive-oil trade in Europe: Have a look at the work of Hans-Werner Sinn and Clemens Fuest. For experts to remember – at least in the future.
For others: Acclaim Michael Hudson, featured today here on Unz Review: Hudson holds, that the biggest danger for Greece comes from the IMF!
The IMF – Hudson has it (unfortunately not exclusively…) “wants” “to destroy” Greece.
And kill the Greek Youthvia unemployment – along with Austria and Switzerland, I might add.
– Why does nobody make a grim Comedy from this stuff?
Well, in a way, Steve Sailer and Chrisnonymus and … do. – Thanks for that!
You are right. Ancient Athens has many deeply unsavoury aspects to modern eyes; the widespread paederacy and use of slaves, and the keeping of women in purdah, to name but some of them. Its restrictive citizenship laws are a minor issue by comparison.
Last time I said the only thing that classicists can write about is how the ancients would have voted for Obama.
I was wrong. They can also castigate them if there are indications they would not have voted for Obama.
Didn’t the Jews in the Italy of Roman times (before their diaspora across Europe), make a change to their laws for whom may be considered a Jew? Originally I think you had to have a Jewish father, and they changed it to a Jewish mother. If my memory of reading about this is correct, they were concerned about how Romanized the Jews were getting, particularly the ones with Jewish fathers and Italian mothers. Only a matter of time before they were subsumed based on the trend. My presumption is that this change was based on observing the effects of a couple of generations of existence in Italy.
One of my pet theories is that regardless of the roles the sexes play in a society, it is the women that propagate the culture. “The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world.”
In other words, a million swinging winkies invading a country stand a far less chance of changing the nature of a place than a million mail order brides from the same society.
Seems to me you could do some real investigation on differences between black children of white mothers, compared to black mothers. Of course you can invoke the heredity argument in this case (children of black mothers overwhelmingly have black fathers; so a black woman’s child is as “black” as the parents – however that may be).
Of course my theory kind of… says women are more important than men, but not in the way feminists might wish to think. If a woman isn’t into having and raising children then by my theory her influence declines drastically.
“””””to only those born of both a citizen mother and father. Prior to this law, one needed only a citizen father.””””
So Zuckerbergs sister is against laws which increase the status/rights/power of Athenian woman.
You have to figure this must be their way of getting dates with naughty right wing boys who read the same books they do.
Though I suppose it’s entirely possible modern “classics scholars” engage in such virtue signaling nonsense to distract people from the fact that they don’t actually know any Greek and Latin.
To merge this thread and the previous, from Wikipedia:
“Cleon first came to notice as an opponent of Pericles in the late 430s …,”
No doubt he must’ve discovered some Thracian or Persian in his family tree. “All the Persian is in my pants,” the ambitious politician was heard to say.
I hope to God her Greek is better than her English: “antiquities’ worst tendencies in the contemporary world”.
A hundred or so years after Pericles, Aristotle worries in Politics that fully two fifths of Attica is owned by women who have inherited it from their son-less fathers. Perhaps Pericles insisting that Athenian men marry actual Athenian women was meant to put their land back under productive management.
Aristotle also lists the mixing of different races in one polity among the prime causes of sedition. He gives several examples, none of which is well known today.
There is a central rationale for Donna Zuckerberg’s online journal Eidolon which I find sympathetic, the attempt to justify one’s study of antiquity to oneself. The journal solicits and publishes mini-essays on that subject, in fact it seems just about its only subject. It is a deep question for anyone who reads an ancient text while all the time recursively thinking about what thoughts ensue from the transaction between the contemporary reader and the thinking of the ancient author behind the words he wrote. The charm of reading ancient texts is leavened by the enormous temporal gulf between author and reader (~2500 years!). What is funny is that Eidolon contributors, all entirely in the thrall of an extreme politically correct mindset, are tripped up by the unchallengeable fact that the ancient Athenians were in fact racially white people with a strong sense of their identity as Athenians, and an equally strong conviction that foreigners were not Athenians. The ancient authors were all men, with the exception of Sappho whose works survive only in fragments, the economy of antiquity relied on slave labor, women did not participate in the political life of the city, nor did the many wealthy resident aliens. The contradiction between this fact and the unexamined, set in concrete, politically correct mindset is unresolvable. Sad!
An especially revealing line:
“Not content with a general idea of indigenousness, the Athenians even promoted a myth that claimed their ancestors were quite literally born from the soil of the land… it was clever way to present the boring reality of their indigenousness as purity and to bind them to their land.”
Isn’t it all kinds of problematic to call being indigenous boring? Oh wait… these are (retrospectively) white people we’re talking about, so by definintion the Athenians were dull white-bread types just waiting for the vibrancy of diversity.
You beat me to it!
No doubt the Zuckerberg mission will be parking its tanks on the lawns of each Orthodox congregation’s Rabbi and conducting guerrilla raids on weddings?
The word “woke” is now a signal for unintentional self-parody. I now see it and just expect a white woman making an ass of herself.
As an aside, are the Zucks of the world trolling the JQ people of late? It certainly feels like they are making a point of rubbing everyone’s nose in the fact that they are in charge and no one can touch them.
Never mind the whole scale copying of Roman legal code, the multi-millennial persistence of Romance languages and transport to the new world, the thousand year dominance of Roman religion centered in Rome, the replication and diffusion of Greco-Roman Art and literature, the turn towards Grecian-style democracy and the dozens of generations Europeans focused on the cultivating the lessons of Antiquity in a period called The Rennaissance.
Other than that, it’s all “supposed” connections. Moroccans have contributed more to western civilization. Duh.
If spending our intellectual capital to deny the root and strength of our civilization is the height of scholarly inquiry, than we are already doomed.
Dude, can you imagine the amount of below the surface cling this woman would bring into your life?
and the obsession with ethnic purity that lies at the heart of its literature, history, and philosophy….
I thought these people told us that ethnic purity was a 19th century invention.
We admire the Athenians but they had laws we find reprehensible, because they emphasized Athenian identity.
Evil racists admire Athenians and think their laws and customs emphasizing identity had something to do with their greatness.
We must criticize their laws then lest evil racists admire their laws now…
If only we had a time machine we could make Athens an Athens worthy of founding multicultural democracy, which is the teleology of all time and space!
Or something
Consider the following:
http://www.openculture.com/2007/12/the_western_tradition_on_video.html
Eugen Weber was a historian and professor of history in UCLA. These lectures are worth their weight in gold. And it’s true HISTORY– not agitprop dressed up as history.
Off-topic
SF communities railing against organizations devoted to the interests of tech workers & other highly paid folks who have not yet moved to the neighborhood.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40509-yimbys-the-alt-right-darlings-of-the-real-estate-industry
Too bad you can’t do this for the entire country. But, by God, you’ll save every Latinx neighborhood :))
Off-topic
Does anyone know if this is true?
http://yournewswire.com/marine-le-pen-election-rigged/
Absolutely nein.
Two off topic:
1) There is a floating list of 11 names that “supposedly” Pres. Trump is considering to replace Comey. Sen. Cornyn of Texas is considered the front runner. Hillary’s old lag (current acting director) Andrew McCabe is also on the list. If Pres. Trump follows true to form, none of the names listed will get the position. ( Remember the games he played with the Sec. of State job and the list of high powered names that were shoe-ins for that job.)
Whoever does get the job will of course want reliable underlings and so McCabe will be laterally promoted out of DC.
2) An American delegation will be going to China to attend the OBOR ( One Belt One Road ) forums. After a decade of American antipathy and overt hostility to China’s plan, it appears that the Trump administration is courting an invite to be a player in the biggest infrastructure development in the world.
113 days into an 8 year run …Incredible.
Two things, if you write or speak using black idioms, as in “woke”, I stop listening and how many subscribers does “Eidolon” magazine have, as in, who reads this shit?
If that is your goal then you should probably stop providing them ammunition. I imagine most supremacists had never heard about this Periclean Citizenship Law until it was brought up.
For certain Jews (80%?) the only good white gentile society is a disappearing white gentile society.
Jewish aggression. Jewish hostility. It’s a constant in a world of change.
Btw Sailer ignored Netanyahu’s public and official retconning of WW2 last month. Assholes like Netanyahu waited until all of that generation passed and now the demonization will be forever.
“In narratives of American greatness, Classics holds a special place because the ancient Greeks and Romans have served as an imaginary source of an inherited Euro-American civilization.”
Clear statement of motive. They’re distorting Classics in order to undermine inherited Euro-American civilization.
Where is all the concerted animus toward inherited Euro-American civilization coming from? The first clue is that Zinn was not a Christian.
As year chases year, it becomes clearer that Kevin MacDonald hit the bullseye. Zuckerberg ‘s propaganda mag would fit right in with the footnotes to MacDonald’s book The Culture of Critique.
Athens was one of the most successful societies of the ancient world. They were also rampantly xenophobic. Obviously, then, the correct thing to learn from them is … nothing at all.
Implicit in the Zuckerberg Thesis is the conceit that she would not have been murdered in her bed by a non-Athenian. The protective bubble of virtue transcends time and space.
The question of our age. Maybe Trump could host a game show centered around answering this question for various examples?
Then there is the “The Real or Onion Game” app: http://roo.gelfmagazine.com/
The example they choose is very iSteveish (note the app publisher as well, some impressive iSteve intersectionality, who is behind this anyway?).
What does everyone think? Real or Onion?
And the best part: by shrieking how the classics are racist/sexist/xenophobic/blah blah blah, they’ll ensure that more and more young people alienated from current bipartisan orthodoxy (especially young men) with a reasonable intellectual capacity become interested in them and actually read them. Which is a really, really good thing if we want increased civic engagement and to breath fire into an American spirit grown cold.
The Washington Post and the rest of the legacy media is dying and quickly losing relevance, so they are free to follow their natural instincts and become respectable versions of Salon. Not particularly shocking. The more they lose subtlety to compete with the Voxes of the world, the better.
Still, if I were Jeff Bezos, I’d really consider whether my money can’t buy more intellectually coherent writers.
In other words, don’t worry about them serving hemlock to a logical thinker who questioned them; be more concerned with how they protectected their own citizens from outside influence.
This line of thought really fits for a globalist- elitist named Zuckerberg.
They’re gunning for our intellectual history…you know, the history that gave them private jets to fly around in. The one that gave them their ENTIRE WORLD.
Note: This paper by this globalist-elitist is just another brick in the wall of the anti-white-gentile establishment. They are allowed to have walls, but we are not. They won’t have it. Walls are for them, but not for us. Protection is for them, but not for us. Purity is for them, but not for us.
This stinks like a pile of bullshit, which it is. It’s bullshit all the way down, and our world sits upon it.
https://thefederalist.com/2017/05/11/middlebury-announces-disciplinary-actions-charles-murray-student-riot/
Four ideas > in ascending order of imprtance.
1) How do they get away with claiming (with fiercely stupid Presentism) that Athenians were gay and transsexuals as proof that it’s a GOOD thing, while otherwise condemning them for…whatever. Doesn’t calling them Good ruin the claim that their other practices were Bad? Or vice versa?
2) Can’t bring up slavery because slaves were largely white. We Need To Stay ON MESSAGE that something something white supremacy.
3) How the hell does the above quoted article make any sense?? Clearly what they were doing was sticking up for Athenian WOMEN by denying men pride of proper parentage from nooky they could get elsewhere. More cheaply. This law is Progressive. Maybe women didn’t share legal rights (as they didn’t in any large sane society) but they could still legally fight and WIN over their horny menfolk by forcing them to keep their gonad members and family members – with their pampered princess asses – rather than being able to sexually exploit disadvantaged foreign (Whiter?) women and thus fulfill their sexual and paternal drives. This may have been the world’s first female Union!
4) Socrates was the greatest. – And he would have had a FIELD DAY mocking the modern gods of the west. And he would have been character assassinated. Or, in Europe, imprisoned. T.H. Huxley wrote in his book on Hume that the Socratic story absolutely shocked him —– How amazingly tolerant a society the Athenians must have been to allow such an intelligent and busybody question-asker to have lived so long! Huxley (like Mencken, who admired him) considered himself lucky to be living in that brief time and place where people who shared their heretical doubts weren’t imprisoned or killed. He (and Mencken) that state of affairs would end as quickly as it had arisen. And to the modern educated people assassinating the great Socrates all over again — How dare they!!
An excellent comment there:
Worse yet was Greek homophobia:
More fun from Antiquity. An example of the Greeks religous tolernce:
“Known as the Periclean Citizenship Law, the law passed around 451 BCE restricted access to political power and other legal rights to only those born of both a citizen mother and father. Prior to this law, one needed only a citizen father.” and our Founders were heavily versed in Athenian Democracy and would have had this in mind when creating requirements for POTUS. Obama didn’t pass muster, neither did Chester Arthur.
Actually, isn’t it absolutely clear that couldn’t possibly have been part of the reason? The law already said that children of immigrant craftsmen and merchants (men) were not citizens. The Periclean law didn’t change their status at all.
Even the confused professor acknowledges that the law didn’t have the slightest effect on immigration:
So what was the real reason for a law that deterred men from marrying noncitizens? I like to think that it was an attempt to assuage angry Athenian women, who were bitter because the best Athenian husband material was marrying beautiful hussies from neighboring cities.
If citizenship does not provide benefits to its people, of what use is it to any individual. The Zuckerbergs and etc. have no right to put their modern globalist memes on the ancients. Such ‘White supremacy’ ideas are inconsistent with an understanding of history. History as White Supremism.
Yournewswire is a fake news site; it’s tabloid clickbait. But that doesn’t mean the story itself doesn’t have a measure of truth in it. I’ve read about the defaced ballots in other, more credible sources. I think it was a mistake for Marine not to contest the election results.
Are there people who actually know or care about what goes on in the field of Classics? Besides the Classicists, that is.
Or careerism. I love the Classics and majored in it in undergrad, but there’s really only so much you can say about the the Greco-Roman era that hasn’t already been done to death. Classics is also a dying field, so job opportunities are absolutely horrendous.
Granted, I don’t know Donna Zuckerberg too well beyond these occasional articles, but writing SJW articles about the Classical world gives her a new avenue to, ahem, “explore” the Classics and acquire her own share of fame.
Don’t underestimate just how much evil you can inculcate in people with careerism.
One additional point.
It is to the advantage of the Elite and Wealthy to distract people from the importance of that fact.
That’s obvious.
But it will become more obvious.
Fifth Century Athens (and briefly, some other city-states) had a “problematic” procedure that it wouldn’t be good for the populace to look upon favorably.
You know the word “ostraca” or, in Greek, “ostrakon”?
It means a potsherd used as cheap writing material on which to convey a short message. Ostraca were, as they are today in that part of the world, Everywhere.
And the word “ostraca” led to the modern, common, word “ostracise”, because (nuanced details aside) the people of the city would meet yearly, with ostraca in hand upon which to write the name of any fellow citizen whom they feared was becoming too powerful and might thus threaten their free and largely egalitarian lifestyle.
A citizen who was deemed too powerful by at least 6,000 of his fellow citizens was BANISHED from the city for a period of 10 years.
Anyone too powerful lost – for ten years – his means of power.
And thus was their republic protected.
Who, today, is the most powerful man in the world. Someone whose individual will can limit the freedom of thought, speech and assembly of billions of his fellow World Citizens. And, more importantly – and actionably – the freedoms and individual powers of his fellow countrymen?
Donna Zuckerberg perhaps?
And her brother – definitely.
The ancient Athenians had their pleasant ways of breaking up a monopoly – or even a potential one. We lack their confidence, both in ourselves and in our confederates. But even WE have reasons and means to engage in trust-busting, as largely bequeathed to us by Colonel Roosevelt (another White Cishet Male who will surely soon be called to account). Why wouldn’t we use them?
We can’t allow the common people to look toward the Athenians with appreciation and for guidance.
Something terrible might happen.
The first scholarly source I found on this says hetairese meant prostituting oneself.
Should men become single-issue voters? I’ve been struggling with this, because I associate it with women. But you can’t argue with success.
I think as many men as possible should become single-issue voters, and the issue is immigration. We should ask every office-holder and every office-seeker, from city to county to state to national office, about their stance, constantly, not just during elections. Their stance should be “Everyone in the country illegally must leave, the borders must be walled and closed. No more legal immigration. No more refugees. No birthright citizenship. No H1-B visas. No public money whatsoever will be made available to immigrants legal or illegal. No drivers licenses, no free public schooling.”
We should be as unwavering in our single-issue focus as women have been on abortion, which is the key issue of feminism.
We shouldn’t be embarrassed to talk about it all the time, and to insist on nothing but progress, and we will never be satisfied until total victory is achieved. If we succeed in getting one anti-immigration Supreme Court Justice, we will not rest until there are two, then three and finally twelve.
I think that women’s politics comes right straight out of their biology and psychology, and men should do the same. We male US citizens have every right to genetically dominate our country’s posterity. We have every right to ensure the physical safety and wellbeing of our families. We have every right to ensure that we have infrastructure that supports our biological need for security and wellbeing. We have the right to insist on a set of laws and an economy that permits men to compete and win.
You get the idea. Thanks for listening.
“although they live in separate states for work reasons.”
It’s tough being an academic married to an academic, unless one of you is top of the heap; then the university will find a job for your spouse.
I believe Mark has also expressed a reverence for ancient Greek literature. I thought it an affectation to express gravitas, but it seems he studied classics at Phillips Exeter. Of course, that doesn’t obviate the possiblity that it is an affectation.
Trans-temporal morality is really the purest form of virtue-signaling possible, and an easy tell for one’s politics. What is so jarring is that it uses history to posture, rather than predict. A clear and salient demonstration that the left is more concerned with moralizing than outcome.
The best Athenian husband material was away on the aggressive wars in Cyprus, Egypt, Phoenecia and mainland Greece that started as soon as democracy ended the conservative policy of aristocratic rule. The measure was probably to do with avoiding the Spartan dilemma, whereby the armed forces could not easily be used for conquest, because the ethically distinct underclass might revolt.
Watching Dr Who is a really bad sign……It’s one of the most SJW shows ever made….
Why is it, when whites do something it is evil, but when other ethnics do it it is excused or lauded? You people want Xenophobia? How about Japan? China? Korea? How many blacks, Hispanics, or whites for that matter, are allowed to migrate to those countries? Citizenship? Fuhgeddaboudit! This Kennedy bimbo rants against “white supremacy”, what about “yellow supremacy” throughout Asia, brown(ish) supremacy throughout the Arab world? You want to see white privilege? Go to Mexco where the political, commercial and social elites are whiter than my butt.
Your particulars of Jewish history aren’t technically correct though of course there’s an element to it.
The previously raised Biblical section is a better reading on things.
As for Italian mothers, Ashkenazi Jews in 1920 comprised ~93% of the Jews in the world (less now due to the Holocaust and massive American and USSR intermarriage) and about half of them are genetically shown to be closely related, descending from a small bottlenecked community.
More relevantly to this discussion, that bottlenecked community appears to be comprised of a large contingent of foreign – Italian! – women whom they converted and married circa the 1st Century.
The clustering is surprisingly close to those of Tuscany and, I believe, Sicily.
Because it is INSANE to do so (until the tradeoff in healthcare is worth it) I haven’t had my own DNA sequenced and stored in the nsa database but I am generally assumed to be an upper class (because I am entirely white) Syrian in the eyes of every Arab I meet.
I have no idea what precisely that means. Or what color the various ancient tribes of Israel were. So we’ll have to wait for worthwhile, genetically individualised medicine, for me to fully find out.
The Italy business (which I first learned from speaking with Razib) is indeed quite surprising and also ought to be a relief to those Ashkenazi Jews with such low self esteem that they were ashamed of their ancestry until they can – now – point out that they are likely, largely, descended from Italian citizens of the Roman Empire.
I like to think I’m from a white Israeli tribe though 🙂
I’m ok with this.
The one-state solution can be implemented and then we can drop BDS again.
Israel will just be “that weird splinter of the Ottoman empire, albeit with nukes” again, instead of the bizarre pivot around which all of US politics (internal and external) must rotate.
If they want they can even implement takeover of the transjordan.
Hmmm. Seems there’s a bit of a diversity challenge at Eidolon.
https://eidolon.pub/about
Side note. Just you wait. Classics will be dominated by SJW Asians in 15 more years.
Her maiden appears to be Dotson..
How is Intro-Colonization better than Extro-Colonization in the long run?
Extro-Colonization conquers and takes other people’s lands, like what Alexander the Great did. Or like what the Persian Imperialists did.
Intro-Colonization allows one’s own civilization, kingdom, or nation to be colonized and conquered by others.
Both lead to the demise and replacement of one people and culture(in their own homeland) by another or many others.
What happened to Palestinians as the result of mass Jewish immigration, which was both intro-colonization and extro-colonization? The ruling elites in Palestine allowed it, but these ruling elites were really foreigners, namely the British Imperialists.
Of course, Palestinians didn’t choose that path for themselves. It was chosen for them by the British elites who ruled that part of the world. British rule in Palestine allowed massive Intro-Colonization of Zionist Extro-colonists. The result was tragedy for Palestinians.
Extro-colonization or Intro-Colonization, it is a form of replacism and displacism. In our globalizing world where all nations are threatened with mass-conquest by others with ZERO respect for national borders, identities, and cultures, all people should be against demographic imperialism. Especially Jewish globalists have NO respect for any nation and its identity and culture. They seek to weaken and exploit any nation with sovereignty and autonomy with ‘multi-culturalism’, ‘diversity’, homomania, and minority-elite-supremacism.
And in the Golden Age of Universal Nationalism following the end of WWII, all peoples agreed on the ideal and necessity of National Sovereignty. European colonists in the Third World had to return home and mind their own business and preserve their own nations. And newly independent Third World nations guarded their own autonomy and sought to develop their own economies. All nations tried to respect one another even as they expanded world trade and exchange of ideas and expressions.
So, what destroyed this balance?
The process of massive Intro-Colonization pursued by Western elites, especially with the encouragement and pressure of Jewish elites. For the Western elites, Intro-Colonization meant cheaper labor and more consumers. For Jewish elites, it meant Diversity and divide-and-rule. And for non-whites in the Third World whose main theme has been nationalism and autonomy following WWII, the siren call of abandoning their own nations, moving to the West, and enjoying better material lives was too much to resist. They betrayed the ideal of national autonomy by favoring narrow self-interest over the national good. In seeking entry into the West, they join with Jewish globalists to undermine the national sovereignty of Western nations. But this will boomerang on their own nations. If they argue that the West must ‘put out’ to the world as a moral imperative, then the same logic will apply to their own nations. Thus, globalism doesn’t merely undermine and destroy Western nations. It promotion the Western Rejection of National Autonomy as the New Ideal for all nations… with the exception of Israel.
So, globalism brought about the New Age of Mass Colonization. Elites sermonize about ‘principles’ to push this madness, but I’ll take their principles more seriously when they make the same demands for Israel as for Poland and Hungary.
*Her maiden name appears to be Dotson.
While in prison awaiting execution Socrates was viited by his friend Crito who offered to help him escape. Socrates refused the offer and explained himself thus:
…but let’s go ahead and speculate as to the worst possible motives based the vastly superior “woke” age we now inhabit.
GR a probably safe even though some German dude named Riemann, who probably had Nazi great grand children, invented the sophisticated mathematical framework.
This is the quality of classics professors you get for \$63,000 a year?
It wasn’t always thus.
However the most recent episodes include a mixed-race, lesbian assistant. It’s mega-pozzed.
The real question is, why would a “woke” individual choose to devote their lives to the study of the classics? Merely to destroy it? That’s going to motivate you to undergo the painful, almost interminable, task of mastering both Ancient Greek and Latin — not any inherent love of the material?
The current Who regime is very Woke:
http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/doctor-who/news/a827028/doctor-who-tackling-race-steven-moffat-says/
Or careerism. I love the Classics and majored in it in undergrad, but there’s really only so much you can say about the the Greco-Roman era that hasn’t already been done to death.
Where’s a good place to start for someone who knows next to nothing? Would it be okay to start with a primary source? If so, which?
I detect some serious leftist projection here. I spend a fair amount of time on what this lady would deem politically taboo sites, and I see very little use of the classical world as a vehicle or historical justification for restrictive immigration policies. But as far as her own political validation via history, well….
She reminds me of the Jewish New Testament scholars whose main purpose seems to be reminding everyone that it was the Romans who killed Jesus, goddamit. The pharisees were just innocent bystanders.
She is a real dumbass.
It’s not ‘supremacism’ if you defend your turf. It is ‘supremacism’ when you invade others and rule over them.
Japanese were not supremacist when they were only defending Japan. They became supremacist when they invaded China and tried to rule over Chinese.
Greeks keeping Hellas for Greeks was not the problem. The problem was Greek imperialism over others. But Kennedy is less bothered by imperialism than immigration, which can lead to reverse-imperialism or demographic imperialism by foreigners.
Btw, most slaves in Greece were white and fellow Europeans. It’s like virtually all slaves in Japan were Japanese. So, how is that a form of ‘racial supremacism’? If Greeks were biased, it was about culture. Greeks thought barbarians had inferior culture.
But then, Kennedy’s argument is oddly western-supremacist too. By arguing that Western Civilization belongs to everyone and not just to whites, she is saying all the world should be ‘westernized’.
Now, given that the West did most to create the modern world, the world had indeed become ‘westernized’. But this IDEA-aspect of Westernization doesn’t need massive transference of peoples. Ideas travel through the minds. Japan, Turkey, and Germany don’t need Hollywood in their own nations to learn to make their own movies. You don’t have to invite an Italian into your house to make pizza. Just learn the recipe from a book.
Nomads cannot abide settlement. It’s boring, it’s stupid, it’s oppressive, it’s dangerous, it’s gross, it’s wrong, wrong, wrong. It needs to be broken up.
Yeah, it’s just one of these bizzarities of the modern age to get lectures from Jews of all people on openness and tolerance.
It’s Western Christian societies that are the most open the world has seen. Every tribe that existed in the post-Roman West–Celts, Gauls, Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Picts, Gaels … — were incorporated into the nations of Europe, including those Jews who weren’t so tribal and just wanted to be part of (or marry into) their local community. It’s only the Jews who were so incredibly tribal, xenophobic and racist that they were able to keep themselves separate from their neighbors down to the modern age.
If everyone else had acted as tribally as the Jews–and Christianity hadn’t provided are larger community foundation–the modern West could never have sprung forth, and the Jews (the Ashkenazim) would have been wiped off the map long ago.
Jews lecturing gentiles on “openness” or “tolerance” is one of those LOL ironies. These folks should be laughed off the stage, but gentiles have been so beaten down they can’t even process the utter ridiculousness of it.
If you can take the time to listen to Donald Kagan’s excellent lectures in Ancient Greece, he covers the different versions of Athenian citizenship law and also their systems of tribes, which was the basis of their military organization. All free as delivered to students at Yale on iTunes U.
I wonder, how is this characterization any different than the current day obsession with identity?
I would have posted a picture of the gospel choir as the muses in Disney’s Hercules.
Not just an academic. The smartest girl I dated in my 20s said she would only be happy working at one of the national labs, the closest one being the JPL 2.5 hours away. My career would not allow me to move once for her graduate school and again for her job.
Indeed. Here’s a choice example:
https://eidolon.pub/a-race-to-the-rational-70e06cf46c1e
No, they don’t. The classics of classical literature have been translated, and we can read them for ourselves. There are centuries’ worth of popular histories on the subject, as well as commentaries, critiques, and so forth.
Classicism is all but dead, and classical scholars contribute as much to our culture as scholars of black lesbian Timbuktuan pottery.
Is that purple drank in the cup? I done heard dat shit was lethal.
Hatred and resentment are powerful motivators……perhaps even more powerful than love….
I care……and our enemies also care. Remember, a sure way to kill a race is by attacking its roots….
Xenophobia, privilege and supremacy in one’s homeland are not evil things. No excuse is needed.
Zuck’s favorite Latin lines are revealing….
“The throne with his succession shall be fill’d
Three hundred circuits more: then shall be seen
Ilia the fair, a priestess and a queen,
Who, full of Mars, in time, with kindly throes,
Shall at a birth two goodly boys disclose.
The royal babes a tawny wolf shall drain:
Then Romulus his grandsire’s throne shall gain,
Of martial tow’rs the founder shall become,
The people Romans call, the city Rome.
To them no bounds of empire I assign,
Nor term of years to their immortal line.”
Aeneid, Dryden’s translation
At a minimum, every Westerner should know these:
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Plato’s Dialogues
Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics , Politics)
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Euripides
Herodotus
Thucydides
Livy
Virgil
Ovid
For an overview of Greece, check out “Ancient Greece” by Thomas R. Martin. I think the author wrote a similar volume about Rome.
From there, just read whatever interests you. It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle with different sized pieces: Homer and Virgil will fill in more of the ancient world than Apollodorus will.
Since I hate waiting:
At a minimum, every Westerner should know these:
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Plato’s Dialogues
Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics , Politics)
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Euripides
Herodotus
Thucydides
Livy
Virgil
Ovid
You are mistaken. This law applied to Athenian citizens who as children willingly prostituted themselves to older men.There is a superb book on the subject by Kenneth Dover <Greek Homosexuality. Dover by the way was not a homosexual. Upper-class males followed the custom of their grandfathers of falling in love with handsome teenaged boys on the cusp of full manhood – this custom is examined by the various upper-class homosexual guests at Agathon’s dinner party in Plato’s Symposium. OTOH, as described also in the Symposium, fathers of young boys went to great lengths to prevent such relationships. It is a complicated question well explored by Dover. The practice was in ill odor with the democratic class. Here again we have another reason to read classics, still the most pleasant way to stand away from one’s cultural milieu in order to see it with some objectivity.
If only Revilo Pendleton Oliver were here…on second thought, if he were, he’d probably die, of apoplexy or of laughter.
We need a meme image of Pericles wearing a MAGA cap.
Hopeless. If you don’t read the writings in their original language, Greek or Latin, you’ll miss out out on the pleasurable disassociation of reading in the now what was written thousands of years ago. Nor will you will be able to understand what they thought because you are not reading the words with which they thought the thought, rather you’re reading a paraphrase which is only an approximation without the nuances of the original.
My parents bought me this for my birthday when I was at Berkeley. It’s a solid intro to the Ancient Greeks:
The Oxford Illustrated History of Greece and the Hellenistic World
by John Boardman (Editor), Jasper Griffin (Editor), Oswyn Murray (Editor)
Jason Liu, I don’t know what you are trying to say. I agree with your statement, therefore, in the U.S. xenophobia, white supremacy and white privilege are not evil things (if they exist at all).
I would add;
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives
Plutarch’s Fall of the Roman Republic
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (abridged)
True, as far as it goes, but the nomadism isn’t embedded in Kennedy’s DNA. It’s the product of a compulsive culture of oikophobia that’s the norm for elites in the West these days- and its quite parochial in its own way.
Jump into the primary sources, sure. Why not? Even if you know nothing of their context, they are literary masterpieces and can be enjoyed in a “timeless” manner. To the list posted by another respondent I would add: Xenophon, Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Livy, Polybius, St. Augustine, Tacitus, and Juvenal.
For secondary sources, I’d have to get back to you. But there’s always Gibbon.
Sure, reading the original texts is always better than using translations….But, that being said, I would rather have people read, say, the Iliad in a good translation (Lattimore’s being my preferred choice) than not read it at all….
Gibbon is certainly worth reading, but he wasn’t a Graeco-Roman author.So, I’m not quite sure that he counts.
I wonder if there’s a direct connection between mistreating women and being totally gay.
That’s been my experience with “totally gay” men.
A lot of it when you strip away the Jewish pathological hatred of whites is just plain old class warfare writ large and which never went away.
We have the cloud people(upper class) and their associates who just despise the white blue collars and middle-class with a undying hatred and are willing to bring down the entire edifice of Western civ to do it.
The amazing this is, the upper class along with the political class(which includes the MSM) doesn’t even bother to hide it anymore. They’ve openly declared war on us and we’re too dense to notice it Sure we see all SJW crap but don’t notice that it’s all being backed by a collection of upper class types.
There is no bargaining with these people either. Had Hillary have won, I seriously doubt sites like this and BB would be allowed to exist.
From http://www.economist.com/Trumptranscript
On another element of Trumponomics, immigration…
Right.
Do you want to curb legal immigration?
Oh sure, you know, I want to stop illegal immigration.
And what about legal immigration? Do you want to cut the number of immigrants?
Oh legal, no, no, no. I want people to come into the country legally. No, legally? No. I want people to come in legally. But I want people to come in on merit. I want to go to a merit-based system. Actually two countries that have very strong systems are Australia and Canada. And I like those systems very much, they’re very strong, they’re very good, I like them very much. We’re going to a much more merit-based system. But I absolutely want talented people coming in, I want people that are going to love our country coming in, I want people that are going to contribute to our country coming in. We want a provision at the right time, we want people that are coming in and will commit to not getting…not receiving any form of subsidy to live in our country for at least a five-year period.
But the numbers of those people could be as high as the numbers that are coming in legally now? You’re not looking to reduce the numbers?
Oh yeah, no, no, no, no, we want people coming in legally. No, very strongly. Now they’re going to be much more strongly vetted as you see. You know, we’ve broken the all-time record [of detentions at the border] by many times, 73, we’re up to 73, it’s going to go up to almost 80% at the border, we’ve…you know, really stopped it. We also want farm workers to be able to come in. You know, we’re going to have work visas for the farm workers. If you look, you know we have a lot of people coming through the border, they’re great people and they work on the farms and then they go back home. We like those people a lot and we want them to continue to come in.
Why are you using terminology like Intro-colonization and Extro-colonization when Steve has already gifted you Invade the World/Invite the World?
Your golden age never existed. What, you think shooing the French out of Indochina was about anti-colonialism or fostering nationalism? Ha! The commies and liberal imperialists fought this thing you may have read about in the history books as the Cold War. Which wasn’t all about keeping the Kaiser out of Darkest Africa, as you may have imagined. It was about competing for those parts of the world not either communist or librral-progressive-capitalist (or whatever I’m supposed to call it these days)–otherwise known as the Third World–to make them communist or liberal-yadda-yadda-yadda.
Now, there’s no more (official) communism, and it’s all about the New World Order eating everything up. But that’s not fundamentally different from the post-WWII world. National sovereignty then is like multiculturalism now. You don’t think our elites actually believe in multiculturalism, do you? It’s a weapon with which to beat the (formerly?) dominant culture about the head. Nationalism for the Others of the world was a weigh-station on the way to making all the world one thing.
“You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster? […] Can you not see that the death of the individual is not death? The Party is immortal.”
-O’Brien, to Winston in the Miniluv
Orwell, 1984
Three more:
Aristotle, Economics
Petronius, Satyricon
Augustine, Confessions
Off-topic,
Gotta respect Lauren Southern for actually getting out there and doing something:
The European contribution to early Ashkenazi is linked with N Italy and S France, not at all Sicilian. There are some interesting Y haplogroups found in Sicilian families linked to Jews corca 1000AD, but that was an outflow from Jewish men living there, not the north Italian/South French inflow still with Jews today.
Not half but all non-convert Ashkenazi are closely related. My 23andme has about 30 false positive 2nd and 3rd cousin matches, all but one of them Ashkenazi. In reality 80% of my second and third cousins are non-Jewish whites, but it was my Jewish half that led to these false positives.
“Upper class Syrian”
How different do Syrian Sunni Arabs, Alewites, Christians, Kurds, and Yazidi look? Seems like Kurds at least range from looking like Balkan whites on one extreme all the way to Egyptian and Gulf Arab dark. The light skinned Kurds seem to have more delicate facial features than light skinned Turks.
And the new spinoff, “Class,” stars a woman warrior as the protector of a gay prince.
Also a Black female science genius.
Also a brave handicapped mother and a toxic English father who gets beat up by his daughter.
On-screen gay sex and straight sex both feature cute English teens getting shagged by moody immigrants. (gay = English guy topped by Polish guy, straight = English girl + Sikh guy)
There is nothing in “Class” that is normal or goes untouched by the hand of SJW. The beeb is disgusting.
“One of my pet theories is that regardless of the roles the sexes play in a society, it is the women that propagate the culture. “The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world.”
In other words, a million swinging winkies invading a country stand a far less chance of changing the nature of a place than a million mail order brides from the same society.”
I believe you have a point there. Remember European history. In the 930sAD Scandinavian men invaded northern France as Vikings. In 1066 their grandsons and great grandsons invaded England as Normans.
On the other hand Icelanders have alot of Celtic DNA in their makeup from the Vikings taking Scottish and Irish slaves there. I think (but not sure) that most of that Celtic DNA came from females. Yet Iceland is clearly Scandinavian. So the sex of the foreigners in the community probably matters but not sure if it always leads a society one way.
I have read most of this list and disagree it is worthwhile to read a lot of this.
These are obviously good. Just to keep the story going in order, finish with the Aeneid.
I don’t consider them to be worthwhile other than the Apology, which is unique in that it is more an exposition of Socrates’ ideas than Plato’s. There is no point to reading the rest unless you have a particular interest in the history of philosophy. Even then, the pre-Socratics are a lot more fun and interesting than Plato, as well as shorter and easier to understand.
If you want to be bored to death. For both Plato and Aristotle, a good intro to philosophy college textbook is a much better idea and will convey their main ideas, which are for the most part wrong. Plato at least was wrong in interesting ways, but Aristotle is painfully dull.
My suggestion is look for a college history of philosophy textbook published before 1990 so there is no risk of anyone being “woke.” Mine from ~1999 was just fine however. A female lead author or more than 25% female co-authors is a red flag for college textbooks, so avoid those. Professors at the military service academies I recall had some of the best humanities textbooks.
Plutarch is also a nicer read than any of those ancient Greek playwrights.
That’s pretty silly, English is the largest language and can accept translations of every classical idea. English is also a semi-direct descendant of Latin via Norman French. Also it is not like the classical authors used every single word in some subtle and nuanced way.
“Don’t read the classics if can’t read Latin” is just about the most destructive idea I’ve heard expressed in an iSteve comment.
“The nomadism isn’t embedded in Kennedy’s DNA.”
A remarkably confident statement. I’m not so sure either way. Probably a 40/60, 60/40 situation. I have an aversion to drink (alcoholism in family); is that the product of “compulsive cultural conditioning”? Can I learn not to get ill from drink by changing my cultural conditioning?
Who knows everything DNA controls and to what extent it controls it? I certainly don’t, and I don’t think you do, either.
Have to disagree. Leaving the ideational content to one side, Plato was a brilliant writer, and works like the Symposium and the Republic are worth reading simply as literary masterpieces.
Aristotle has to be cut a little slack, seeing as how we basically just have his lecture notes. That being said, the works that I selected (Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics , Politics) are accessible to the layman and very interesting. I know that I certainly don’t regret reading them.
Easier to read, sure, but less powerful.
Textbooks are useful, but there’s nothing like going to the source.
More likely status signaling to hoist themselves to the top of the female hierarchy. It is very reminiscent of Mommy Blogger antics.
Yeah, she seems like a complete headache. Dating her for 6 months would turn you into a monk.
Only thing missing is the fatal dose of Skittles put into Trayvocrates’s cup.
If your knowledge of classical civilization is really low, read the following biographies written by Plutarch in this order:
Alexander the Great
Cato the Elder
Pompey
Cato the Younger
Julius Caesar
Brutus
The last four overlap, so by the time you read Caesar and Brutus you will know much of the relevant background. You can find them all free online, and they are not very long, each a nice length to read in a single evening. Here is the first one:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_(Dryden_translation)/Alexander
Is the War on Classics a tactic for denying there has ever existed any such thing as a white or western identity?
“You think you have Athens, well you don’t.”
“You think you have Rome, you don’t.”
“You think you have Jerusalem, you don’t. (We do.)”
“You think you have London/Paris, you don’t.”
“You think you have anything at all? You don’t. But CLICK ON THIS AD to get something to fill your sorry life.”
As requested
What are you, a dammy?
I hate the SJW insertion into a lot of literature, art, cinema, television, etc. However, do not pretend that this has not been common since the dawn of artistry. Watch M.A.S.H. all through and tell me it isn’t pozzed for its time. Same with Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds and Porky’s. What about I Love Lucy, I Dream of Jeannie, the MTM Show or Bewitched? All pozzed for their respective times.
Pozzy, awful, SJW nonsense jammed into culture is par for the course.
Don’t be a white supremacist and exclude diversity.
Welcome it and enjoy the vibrancy. Violence is fun when it’s vibrant.
https://twitter.com/SaveTWest/status/863450112005206016
All are available here: http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/index.html
Since Persia played a role in Greek history,
Ferdowsi is indespensable to understand ancient Persia & modern Iran. More than the Koran.
Futo would be a cool name for a classics scholar; it means “f*cked” in Latin.
For reading lists, a present-day classics scholar Stevonauts might enjoy is the fiercely anti-woke Victor Hanson, who (despite certain neocon tendencies) deeply loves the RealAmerican people and seeks in his work to connect modern RealAmerica to its ancient roots.
That’s pretty silly, English is the largest language and can accept translations of every classical idea. English is also a semi-direct descendant of Latin via Norman French. Also it is not like the classical authors used every single word in some subtle and nuanced way.
Yeah. It is baloney. It’s like the argument that “kill them wherever you find them” has some other obscure meaning it does not possess in the Koran translation. Uh, ok. I guess all those vehicular jihadis just mow down unbelievers because they had a shitty day at work.
“Never let it be forgot, that once upon this very spot, there stood a place called Camelot”
Why do I get the feeling that Donna’s first, true alpha male love was the TWA pilot who pulled her aside into an unlit corner, 8mm film canisters in hand, and asked- “Do you like gladiator movies?”
Like the taliban and the Buddhas. I see.
Actually, China did indeed basically practice a form of citizenship, including a philosopher claiming that “foreigners who practice Confucian ways are more Chinese than Chinese who abandon Confucian ways.” Every empire has had to find something beyond ethnicity or else they would have engage in constant purges and genocides. The difference is that its not assumed that everyone, without limit, is allowed access to the country/culture.
The key phrase being “for their respective times.” We’ve reached peak Pozz.
Also, what was SJW about I Love Lucy? And please don’t tell me it was because it featured an interracial marriage…..
I largely agree. I think that if nothing else, in even a semi-stable society where men court women, any opinions generally held by women rapidly become high status. So if most women argue that they want to be housewives, and that having many children is impressive, men rapidly agree and aspire to provide(since ultimately, men want to make women happy). If most women argue that having a career is most important, it rapidly becomes the new high status view and men come around to agree to it.
Women are amazingly important in setting the fashion and mood of a time.
Interesting to note how many of those shows are in bad odor with SJWs:
Revenge of the Nerds: Condemned for sexism and promoting “Rape Culture.”
M.A.S.H.: Sexism. Whitewashing (where are all the POC?)
Porky’s: Sexism. Rape culture. Sexual assault (Yes, SJWs count voyeurism as sexual assault)
Mary Tyler Moore : Whitewashing (this one is good for any show that is less than 50% POC)
etc, etc
I don’t get it.
Look at the image of the diverse women as Greek columns.
We are told ‘cultural appropriation’ is bad. But non-whites must now appropriate Western Classical culture? What’s wrong with keeping and preserving their own culture? Why must they adopt Greek culture?
Also, should the West be appropriating peoples from other parts of the world and turning them ‘western’, thus cutting them off from their own cultural roots? Sharing Western Culture with non-Westerners may sound generous and ‘inclusive’, but it cuts non-whites off from their own cultures and encourages them to pretend that they are Greek. It’s like converting heathens to Christianity. It may seem ‘inclusive’ and ‘nice’, but the missionaries are cutting non-Christian natives from their own roots, cultures, and spiritual belief systems.
Also, Kennedy seems not to understand what Steve King really meant. There is a difference between Western Ideas and Western Folks.
It’s true that Western Civilization’s achievements don’t belong only to the West. They belong to anyone who will draw inspiration from them and use them. So, even though cinema is an American(and French) invention, other peoples can use the technology too and make Arab movies, Asian movies, and African movies. The gun belongs to anyone who learns how to make them and use them even if the modern firearm is a Western invention.
Also, anyone can enjoy Beethoven or Mozart, just like anyone can appreciate Chinese architecture or Hindu temples or the Taj Mahal.
But there is more to a people than their arts, ideas, science, and technology. There is a thing called ethnos, a sense of national family, and this is deeper than any set of abstract ideas or technological advances. And it is this sense that the West has lost.
This sense of people-hood is more important than high achievements. After all, there are many peoples and nations that didn’t produce anything great. If Azerbaijanis had never existed, it wouldn’t have mattered much to the world. Unlike Jews, Greeks, Chinese, Arabs(with Islam), and Asian-Indians, Azerbaijanis didn’t do anything that fundamentally changed the world.
Still, at least for Azerbaijanis, their history, culture, and sense of lineage/heritage surely mean something simply because they are unique & distinct and imbue Azerbaijanis with a sense of who they are, where they’ve settled as homeland, and how they remember their folklore & history. So, even if Azerbaijanis don’t matter much to the world in terms of ideas and science, their culture means everything to them because it defines what they are in terms of blood, soil, and story. It’s like Jews became a people and culture first before they gained greatness.
And this is why there is something deeper than this thing called ‘Western Civilization’. While it’s true that it did more than any other civilization to reshape the world — and therefore became the template for modern world civilization —, the fact remains that European peoples and cultures would still exist and still have value even without the high achievement. Suppose Germans had never produced people like Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, Heisenberg, and etc. German civilization would have meant far less to the world, but German sense of folk, memory, and culture would still have been of priceless value to Germans. Before greatness is possible, there must be a people and culture. When a people attain greatness, they’ve created something of world significance. If they fail to achieve such, they cannot change the world… BUT their culture, even if not great, has immense value as something that defines a people, guides them, and lends them a sense of where they came from. Consider the Greeks during the Dark Ages. This was before Greeks created a Great Civilization the ideas of which would come to eventually change the world. But even in the Dark Ages, there was a folk who struggled to defend their land and told stories to keep the legends and memory alive. This is the Core of a People. Greatness is the fruits that grow and hang abundantly from a tree, but such outburst of fruits is possibly only if there is tree with trunk and roots. Too often, people regard Western Civilization as the fruits without any regard to the trunk and roots of ethnos, narrative and mythos, and territory.
So, for people like King, the achievements of the West are of secondary importance to the existence and survival of Western peoples and their sense of who they are in terms of ethnos, memory, and territory. And this core sense of blood, soil, and story is one thing that great peoples and ungreat peoples can have in common. However great or however ungreat, there is more to a people than its achievements. It’s like West Germany achieved far more than East Germany when it came to science, technology, and economy, but East Germans were no less German in the sense of blood, soil, and story that goes back for centuries and even millenniums if we count the world of Germanic barbarians.
All peoples, great or ungreat, should have the right to preserve and defend the core of blood, soil, and story in their designated homelands. Whether it’s Great Britain or un-great Bulgaria, it should have the right to preserve its core ethnos, history, and territory.
Also, even though Western Civilization can be appreciated by any people and can inspire any individual around the globe, there is a racial basis to its rise and achievement. In the most basic sense, Western literature conveys European temperament and personality. Western music conveys European emotions and passions. Western art depict European forms and expressions. If Greeks looked and felt like Africans or Chinese, their arts and expressions would have been different.
Even when a people borrow culture from another people, their genetics work on the material and make it their own. It’s like Christianity, originated by Near Eastern Jews, was expressed differently among Arabs, Europeans, and blacks. Black people took much of Western music and created ‘black music’, and whites too black music and made it into ‘white rock’.
“Tragically, Pericles’ xenophobic anti-immigration policies kept ancient Athens from being this diverse and angry!”
Greeks are one people who don’t need diversity to be angry and divided in opinions. Greeks invented drama because they are all drama queens.
Except in….
Well forty years back we had historians trying to be pre-modern Marxists and left-wing anarchists so you can’t make it today as an SJW, you can try standing out as a barbarian rights activist.
Perhaps those underpaid classics professors have income supplements courtesy of some Facebook stock? Imagine the Thanksgiving dinner discussion chez Zuckerberg. “Mark, you gave me noogies when we were kids, so now hand over a million shares for my Classics gang or I go public about your, er, habits.”
Gidget is next, showing that any show may have its turn in the SJW barrel. Are we near the end of the beginning of the foolishness? Societies and cultures adjust and swing around, so when does the fun re-commence?
Shipping in two million Talmud parsers between 1880 and 1920 was a catastrophe of unmitigated and unreported proportioons.
When you’ve just run the ball 100 yards for the game winning touchdown, it would take a lot of self-control to resist spiking the ball, doing a touch down dance and giving the beaten team the raspberry. It’s human nature to enjoy the gloating.
A rejuvenating trip to the spa: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Lose a few pounds of mental flab, tone up thinking muscles, walk out head held high.
I read something somewhere that said the number of none Han Chinese who had been granted Chinese citizenship was about 1,500.
The Neo-Cohens wont be able to pull this shit next time around.
Auntie now portrays a different world than that of Foyle’s War, George Gently and similar productions. The character and the characters were markedly superior. As one eulogized, “I fear that we shall never see her like again”, speaking of the late Foyle’s character Hilda Pierce.
That end-of-an-era feeling is hard on a person, as the comparisons to the modern world render the latter sadly lacking in so many respects. In some regards, late boomers and following generations are cursed to witness, willingly or not, a civilizational peak.
Okay, enough black pill for one day.
“Complicity in White Supremacy”
How come that these people never produce any evidence that us whites are not supreme?
How come all the lesser peoples want to come to white peoples countries?
How many whites are moving to Zimbabwe?
They don’t even try to put into context the time and place of a particular show. Everything must resemble 2017 NYC or something similar.
MTM took place in Minneapolis in the early to mid 1970s. 1975 Minneapolis! This preceded the Somali invasion by over 20 years. Yet to them the metric is 2017 NYC.
let me put this in a couple of sentences.
Societies succeed because they’ve built up, usually over centuries, a widely accepted and practiced set of behaviors; social capital built up of predictable actions and attitudes and beliefs. The core of the culture.
Immigrants; who do not have that ingrained culture are likely to be destructive of social capital and destructive to the host society.
I can’t speak to Alawites or internal Syria or Iraq much but on the Turkish-Syrian border, where Arab (sorta Syrian) Turks and Kurdish Turks live, the range of phenotypes makes it almost impossible to define anyone. But very few are light skinned. Some Northern Kurds -particularly Zaza – look lighter skinned and many Kurdish kids under 7 or 8 have blond (or even red!) hair, but it turns dark brown thereafter.
You know how the Bushmen are the most genetically diverse blah blah blah, I wonder if the Kurdish/Arab practice of only marrying close cousins means that evolution doesn’t have a way to homogenize their looks. That sounds weird but {excepting the still-Asian-looking Turks} Turkish, Laz and Circassian Turks generally have a similar light look (and oh my God, the Turks’ noses!!) while Southern Syrian Kurds and Arabs all have a swarthier look but far too many completely different kinds of swarthiness to speak to. Oh, some have grey eyes but retain a certain swarthiness of color and, somehow, of feature.
Guillaume, thanks.
“Solon’s “lifting of burdens”: limitations on usury were instituted and wealth concentration was reversed by a general cancellation of private and public debt.”
I’ve read of the wholesale cancellation or forgiveness of debts to serve some end in dribs and drabs over the years. Do you know more about the rationale(s) for this? Is the creditor supposed to benefit somehow?
That sort of thing is always said by angry Prophets trying to whip their people into shape. The pope recently said it about atheists and the talmud said it about non-jews.
There are undoubtedly some who believe that literally, especially autistic students of the original speaker, but these sayings were hardly ever an actual appreciation and welcoming of the outsider over their own blood.
Is killings infants via exposure a plus or minus these days?
Comes across as a phony list. Especially the furniture building part. I used to do carpentry and woodwork and have never encountered any woman or girl having that hobby.
Even if she does, the fact remains that women usually have only one of those interests, if they do. None have all of those interests.
It comes across as a list concocted to create a certain impression.
http://quinndunki.com/blondihacks/
Is she a RG or a drag queen?
Judging from an upclose walk by she looks real…
A lot gets lost in translation, although I would never consider reading translations to be a half-baked exercise. Not for classicists or recreational readers in any case. I do think a proper Christian theologian or clergy member would have major gaps in understanding Christianity if they don’t have a decent working knowledge of Greek or Latin. Greek is abstract and indirect whereas English is a linear, practical-minded language, so Greek to English translators invariably have to settle on the closest, most straightforward interpretation out of several. This doesn’t just happen with Greek. The famous “I am the seagull” monologue by Chekhov can be translated in numerous ways into English, and each time Nina’s character and feelings take on a different meaning. But in the original Russian, also a more layered and abstract language than English, the monologue contains all of those meanings at once, and it is up to the actress to decide how to interpret the character. We need to be aware of the limitations of translations when it comes to important philosophical and (especially) religious texts.
Frankly that sounds unlikely. It looks like a first person singular of “futare”, whatever that would be.
(I studied Latin although the insistence on cramming grammatical curlicues and bizarre vocabulary quite possibly invented during the medieval period to the detriment of actually being able to read and talk latin fluently was utterly retarded, depression-inducing and resulted in zero progress overall – a waste of time, money and brain)
If they admitted Athens was that bad, they would have to ask why it was such an evil to restrict immigration there.
I’d bet the fantasy she reads does not resemble the fantasy you read.
In fact alt-right people will suddenly discover that the ancient world is pretty interesting. Expect to see lots of Pericles memes. Maybe Pericles is a distant ancestor of Pepe?
>Trials were inherently a political process more than anything we would think of as legal.
Who you calling we kemosabe? Sounds like a pretty accurate description of the “legal system” to me
Given the scale of her defeat there wasn’t much point. It would have given ammunition to her enemies – they’d have accused her of refusing to accept a clear result and she would probably have been accused of being part of an evil Russian plot.
Next up, Duckerberg and Rebecca Futo Kennedy makes Aristotle a feminist and the Spartans champions of equality!
Politics of Saints and Sinners.
People on the Right tend to believe ALL peoples are sinners. But by cultivation of virtue, they can become more like saints.
People on the Left tend to believe ALL peoples are saints. But due to social conditions, they are corrupted into sinners.
With the rise of Identity Politics, things got a bit more complicated.
People on the Right(or at least the true right) care less about sinners than winners. The Right is about the competition among individuals/groups to win as much as possible. Libertarians emphasize winning on the individual level, whereas identitarians stress winning on the ethno-organismic level. The Right still believes all peoples to be ‘sinners’, but it has pretty much abandoned the Christian Project of ‘saving the world’ through Jesus Christ, the patron saint of sinners seeking redemption.
People on the current so-called ‘left’ believe certain groups are natural saints, certain groups are natural sinners(or historical sinners so stained with sin that it’s almost innate), and certain groups are neither. Jews, blacks, and homos are seen as natural saints. Whites are seen as natural sinners. The rest are neither. But since all groups prefer to be saints than sinners, they emulate the politics of Jews, blacks, or homos OR try to associate themselves with one or all of the sacro-anointed groups. So, we have Muslims bitching about ‘Islamophobia'(which sounds like ‘homophobia’), and we have even successful Asians moaning and groaning as ‘victims’.
The New Identity-Politics Left differs from the Old Universalist Left of the Rousseauean Catcher-in-the-Rye School that regarded ALL peoples as natural saints prior to becoming corrupted by an oppressive society.
The New Leftism of Identity Politics bestows natural sainthood upon certain groups while reviling certain other groups as sinful. This ironically leads to new sins: The sin of pride and moral vanity among certain groups: Jews, homos, and blacks. It also leads to the sin of self-debasement and suicidal mentality among whites. Atonement and redemption are one thing, but self-debasement and destruction of self are another. (Worse, those whites who debase themselves and call for white suicide feel a sudden rush of pride and vanity for being ‘good whites’ who’ve seen the light, lawdy lawd.)
There is a kind of moral exemption for white ‘progressives’ in the current ‘leftism’. True, Identity Politics Leftism says that all whites are natural sinners, but by dramatizing their cleansing rituals, whites can score sainthood points, at least against whites who aren’t so hung up about redemption.
So, even though Kennedy belongs to the race of natural sinners, she feels smugly superior by the virtue of admonishing OTHER whites, alive and dead(even 1,000s of yrs ago) as ‘racist’. She’s the sort to dig up her great great great great great grandfather from his grave and spit on it just to score ‘virtue’ points with PC. This is the ‘sinergy’ that progs like Kennedy draw upon to congratulate themselves.
It never occurs to these smug holier-than-thou prigs and progs that people of different times and places thought and felt differently and had other priorities due to circumstances and crises. They lack empathy and fail to understand the rules of the game in other times and places.
For them, the PC of the Current Year is the absolute truth, and they wield it like a cudgel(or padlock for smashing skulls) and smugly pass judgement on others, even Greeks who lived 1000’s of years ago and struggled to survive in a dangerous and contentious world. (After all, Greeks not only invaded others but were invaded many times by others. It was a very insecure and dangerous world torn asunder with constant warfare, even among the Greeks themselves.) But affluent, comfortable, and privileged in their bubble world of academia, prigs and progs like Kennedy have NO idea of how things may have been different in other times and places.
Any sensible person knows, just as it’d be stupid to judge ancient Greeks with today’s values, it’d be stupid to judge ancient Hebrews by standards of today’s PC.
There was a time when historians and classicists tried to understand and empathize with peoples of different times, places, and cultures. They understood that only a narrow-minded self-righteous idiot studies history just to pass judgement on other times and places as if current values and assumptions the only true ones, the end-all of truth. They studied history to broaden their understanding of peoples and cultures, not to reduce history into Smug Self-Righteousness for Dummies.
Today, we have PC snobs like Kennedy feeling superior to others and even turning up her nose at ‘ancient racists’. She’s like a junkie addicted to smugasms. She needs her daily fix and is on the constant lookout to call something else ‘racist’ to get her next smugasm.
Also, where do people like Kennedy get the idea that today’s PC is the ‘most evolved’ and most moral value-system? If so, why has it led to such decadence, degeneracy, and corruption in the West(and around the world affected by the West) as the world began to adopt Diversity and Homomania as universal truths? Is Sweden really getting better with the invasion of Africans and Muslims? Will Italy and France really fare better with millions of black Africans who come only for sex and money and whose idea of culture is gangsta-tribal rap music? Is it really morally uplifting to associate the venerable institution and tradition of marriage with men who do homo fecal penetration or have their penises and testicles cut off to get fake vaginas? Really? Has Western Europe really benefited morally and intellectually by handing its culture and discourse over to rappers, flaming homos, and Zionist globalists? Really?
As a sinner, one seeks atonement and redemption. When this is sane and sincere, it can lead to moral good and emotional rejuvenation. But when one dramatizes one’s ‘sinergy’ to feel holier-than-thou, it’s just vanity of sainthood by other means. Vanity is an especially corrupt form of pride, and as such, a sin.
Kennedy is saying that, though born of sinful white ‘racist’ blood, she is an honorary saint because she bleats endlessly about ‘racism’, even to the point of spitting on ancient Greeks for having been too white. What an idiot.
In truth, all peoples are sinners. The most they can do is draw some inspiration from saints, but then with caution because there are no real saints or, if they do exist, they are very rare. Also, is it worth being a saint when genuine saints usually get martyred? (Sometimes, I suppose it is worth it. The Christian bakers who lost their businesses and their savings because they refused to bend over to degeneracy and bake ‘gay wedding cakes’ should inspire all decent people for whom there is higher value in life than profits and social approval of the corrupted.)
The best formula is for all people to accept that they are sinners. ‘Sinfulness’ is just the way of human nature. With that in mind, people should also try to be winners since life is about competition, without which there is no achievement. But being conscious of our sinner-nature, we need to observe the Golden Rule that applies to individuals and to nations. Just as an individual shouldn’t do unto others what he doesn’t want others to do unto him, a nation shouldn’t do unto other nations what it doesn’t want other nations to do unto it. The golden rule among nations should be DO NOT INVADE OTHER NATIONS AND DO NOT VIOLATE THEIR NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY. The US is now a sick evil nation because, even as it bitches endlessly about non-existent Russian hacking into US elections, it has done more than any nation to interfere and mess with other nations’ political processes.
The current problem is that Jews, blacks, and homos now act arrogantly, aggressively, and insufferably because they regard themselves as Natural Saints who can never do wrong. This had led to total moral corruption, a kind of moral nihilism or amoral morality. So, blacks now think it is their moral privilege to carry out ‘hate hoaxes’. Even when they get caught, they act like the aggrieved… because they’ve been flattered constantly as being natural saints. So, a black doing wrong is more righteous than a white doing right.
And we have Jews acting the same way. When the Israeli hate-hoaxer was caught defaming white gentiles as ‘anti-Semites’ sending bomb threats to Jewish centers, the Jewish reaction from ADL was the Jewish guy is an ‘anti-Semite’ too and therefore, Jews are once again the pure-as-snow victims even though the Jewish hate-hoaxer had defamed white gentiles to serve Jewish interests.
As for homos, we must believe the fiction that homos weren’t in any shape or form responsible for the AIDS epidemic. Never mind all their foul and irresponsible behavior in bathhouses. It was all the fault of “Reagan’s Indifference”. We must look upon homos as something akin to angels. In the Current Year, men who have other men stick their penises into their fecal holes are to be revered as possessing the cleanest souls.
The cult of Natural Sainthood for Jews, blacks, and homos has led to total moral corruption, not least because Jews, blacks, and homos tend to have out-sized personalities that lean toward pushiness, egomania, and vanity. We have chutzpastic Jews, rappin’-hollerin’ Negroes, and bitchy-flaming homos acting like they are the paragons of all that is good & noble despite the fact that Jewish-directed US foreign policy has wrecked the Muslim World and restarted ‘new cold war’ with Russia, blacks commit the most crime and social violence in the US and other places where they are prominent, and homos have degraded culture into a celebration of narcissism, decadence, and degeneracy. (If the Ancient Greeks should be admonished for one thing, it was letting too many homos and pederasts get out of hand.)
But there is another group of people who are a pain in the ass. The sinner-saints of the White Prog Community. Unlike Jews, blacks, and homos, these white progs see themselves as born sinners stained with ‘white guilt’. So, they must atone and seek redemption. They have an obsessive-compulsive mental disorder of constantly washing themselves of sin. They feel so dirty, having been born with wicked white blood.
But paradoxically, those who feel most dirty and compulsively wash themselves feel so much cleaner than others who don’t share in the obsession-compulsion. If Jews, blacks, and homos feel clean for having been born with clean blood, white progs feel cleansed and replenished with PC blood transfusions. The difference is Jews, blacks, and homos feel clean simply by being what they are since PC deems them to be natural saints. In contrast, white progs must tirelessly, or obsessively-compulsively, undergo self-cleaning rituals to feel cleansed. White progs can never feel clean; they can only feel cleansed, and this requires endless process of expurgation of one’s natural sinner-status. The ensuing hysteria makes the sin-cleanser feel superior to those whites who aren’t as obessive-compulsive in their expiation of natural white sin.
Kennedy the white sinner constantly washes and dries her wicked dirty white soul. Because she feels dirty and constantly lathers her soul with PC soap, she feels so much cleaner and superior to whites who don’t feel so dirty and don’t feel an obsessive-compulsive need to take PC showers. So, Kennedy’s sin-obsession has ironically filled her smugly soul with the supremacist pride of sainthood. She may be not be a natural saint like Jews, blacks, and homos, but boy oh boy, she surely is saintlier than ‘racist’ whites who don’t scrub themselves with PC soap as obsessively-compulsively as she does.
Her ilk doesn’t impress me. They are just snot-nosed supremacists of another kind. They are virtue-nazis wallowing in ideological supremacism. She thinks herself so superior to other whites who don’t preen, sneer, and virtue-signal like she does.
Worse, her moral masturbation is blind to her preferred ideology being the biggest evil in the world, one that is destroying entire nations and communities. ONLY AN IDIOT thinks ‘diversity’ is a panacea for all the problems. Diversity is the product of imperialism and colonization. Alexander the Great created an Empire of Diversity, and how much blood had to be spilled in the process. And eventually, the Greeks became part of a diverse Roman Empire. The loss of autonomy was NOT GOOD for Greek Civilization. PTOLEMY WAS RIGHT IN HIS PRIVATE MUSINGS in Oliver Stone’s movie: https://youtu.be/YK4s2Fjefn8?t=1m3s
The last thing we need is Mark Zuckerberg playing Alexander the Grape, with his snot-nosed sister doing the Angelina Jolie part of the crazy mother hen.
At least the real Alexander, crazy and ruthless as he was, was a real romantic and courageous leader of men. The master-connivers of globalism like Zuckerberg are a bunch of snakes and weasels who risk nothing of their own power and privilege while endangering what is most meaningful and valuable for most people: a sense of homeland, a place to return to. If an Hungarian travels around the world, he may see all sorts of interesting things. But he will always be a stranger in strange worlds. It is only when he returns to Hungary that he can relax and feel ‘this is my home country.’ It’s good to know that there is at least one place in the world where you are not a stranger but the master along with your fellow countrymen.
But what happens when Hungary fills up with foreigners? There WON’T be any part of the world where a Hungarian can feel at home. He will be stranger even in a familiar land, in the land of his ancestors. Globalists and their well-paid and well-connected commissars don’t understand this since they live in a Laputa-Elysium world of their own.
Oddly enough, the only way to clean whiteness is by staining it with color. Oddlier enough, non-whites who denounce whiteness seek to depart from and abandon their colorful societies to go to white nations and live & mix with whiteness because they prefer whiteness over their own kind.
Now, if whiteness is so problematic, then non-whites should stay in their wonderful non-white colorful world and revel in it. But all they ever dream about is running from the world of color and going to where white folks are. Since non-white immigrants prefer whiteness above all, even over their own kind, aren’t they a bunch of ‘white supremacists’?
Obviously one with such an interest should try to educate themselves to the best possible, often in translation. But, similarly obviously, reading in the original language, provided one is somewhat comfortable in it, is richer and more readily appreciated than reading in translation.
It sounds like Sisters of Mercy or even The The under the influence of Robert Mapplethorpe and paint remover. I don’t remember anything about this band.
When you visit Athens you won’t be able to eacape the awesomeness of Pericles. Heck, your sudden interest in him will quickly extend to an understanding of the century he grew out of and of the century he influenced.
Not to mention the Gods, mythology and plenty else.
The modern Athenians, being morons, do what they can to destroy the world of the ancients (replacing The Parthenon with replicas! for example) but, as a far more closely cultural descendant of theirs (and almost equal genetic descendant) you’ll be moved, awed and lusting for knowledge.
Pericles will loom large.
In my free time, I build furniture, do home improvement work…
This reminds me of the Modern Family episode where the gay man tells the lesbian, “I assume you have an unfinished woodworking project at your house.”
You may wish to considerthis piece.
This piece is also well written.
These are twads. What they push cannot even be called ideology. It’s twadology.
This is what Harold Bloom lamented. I’m no fan of Bloom, but he has appreciation for art, literature, and genius as something more than cops-and-robbers and heroes-and-villains.
Without such depth and appreciation, literature becomes a PC game of ideological purity.
Also, the culture has just gotten dumber. Even though there were always ideological hacks and lackeys, there were also many leftist scholars and critics who had an appreciation of arts and history in their own right. There is less of that, maybe partly because there is less stress on emotional development and maturation. An adult mentality tends to be more judicious and reflective, and this isn’t just about intellectual training but about emotional development. But in our current system of perpetual youth-mentality, even those who are well-read don’t develop adult mentalities. Even those who grapple with serious literature think like readers of teen fiction. Even if they are smart and knowledgeable, their emotions have been stunted by PC and Pop Culture. It’s no wonder that so many adults now do little more than review teen fiction.
Ideologues treat literature as political comic books with good guys and bad guys. So, a bunch of authors are bad because they are ‘dead white males’, and a bunch of writers are good because they are ‘women’, ‘gay’, or ‘people of color’.
This ‘gay’ business in the arts is especially meaningless since so many great ones were homosexual. I can understand why certain under-represented groups might want to call more attention to their voices, but stressing the homo in the arts is like stressing Jews in film-making. You don’t need to focus on Jewishness to come across tons of Jewish involved in film-making. And you don’t need to focus on homos to come across tons of homos in literature, fine art, music, and etc.
And those of us on the faculty by our own merits who had to suffer through the unqualified spouses imposed upon us via nepotism well know the horrors of this system.
Don’t shortchange the disorderliness and unconsciousness of this:
Explicate, please. In other words, huh?
I used to enjoy reruns of Dr. Who when it was a clever but campy show anout a fellow in a zany scarf who had adventures with a hot young babe.
I never followed it regularly after a this period of life in Maine (winters in Maine cause even great haters of television like me to take to the idiot box…). When the show became popular amongst hipsters some time in the last decade or so I could tell by the people who liked it that it was now insufferable dreck.
When are we going to get historical films, books, plays, etc. set in ancient Asia, Africa, Australia, and America featuring Europeans in leading rôles to undo the blackwashing, brownwashing, redwashing, and yellowwashing, anyhow? If the Aesir must include Negroes, London in the nineteenth century must teem with metizoes and Somalis, and Robin Hood cannot get ‘er done without a Mohammadan, then surely any day now biopics are coming wherein Ryan Gosling will be cast as Ghengis Khan, Christopher Pratt as Montezuma, and Emma Stone as some magical Australian aborigine or Maori I’ve never heard of because of my white privilege but who it turns out discovered Thorium before first contact with Captain Cook, right?
These are all issues that can be explained in a footnote to the translation.
Culture Warts from 1985
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Feminism-and-literature-6620
Sorry, I forgot an extra “ut” — it’s fututo. (Literally, “to the one who is f*cked”, ie dative case.)
I’ll warrant she reads about magic sparkly vampires, Harry Potter, and similarly vapid fare which all merely explores the shallow theme that one is secretly way cooler and more interesting than one’s mundane life suggests, or that one will any day now be chosen by a dreamboat with superpowers and swept away from it all (cf. Cinderella)….
Most of us interested in worthwhile works of fantasy and speculative fiction, us men especially, are more interested in thought-provoking works such as those of Heinlein, Lovecraft, Howard, Smith, Poe, Vance, Burroughs, Dick, Moorcock, Bradbury, Lewis, Tolkien, Dunsany, Wells, Verne, etc.
The total degradation of culture.
From Pauline Kael to Lena Dunham.
From Susan Sontag to Emma Sulkowicz.
From John Simon to Justin Brown.
Shoot me please.
Get a load of this guy:
https://www.facebook.com/pawsup247/photos?lst=100015738846942%3A1408214226%3A1494736680&source_ref=pb_friends_tl
El Dato seems to’ve had a bad teacher: both incompetent and uninspiring.
My teacher taught us all the dirty words straight away, and this was high school mind you. She had the sense to realise teenagers are goofballs inherently more interested in topics with some cache of rebellion or illcitness; we also learned alot about the sort of giant stone phalluses the Romans erected everywhere, for example (the hermai, I believe; as the whacky Greeks began the tradition.) We ate this stuff up, and it motivated us because instead of “boring” language no one else spoke, we were learning a secret code we could use to dicuss off colour things with no adults the wiser.
“Futue te!” we would shout gleefully at each other in the halls (literally the only adult in the school who could possibly have understood us was the one woman who taught us all this stuff, so who cared?’).
Check out this pretty funny collection of chestnuts.
Actually, Eidolon is just a newsletter put out by an institute whose ostensible function is simply to promote a particular method of teaching Latin. It’s not even a magazine, much less an academic journal.
Why such an organization should have turned into mouthpiece for SJWism is beyond me. Maybe it’s O’Sullivan’s First Law or Conquest’s Second Law or whoever it was who asserted that any organization that isn’t overtly right wing will gradually become left wing over time. (And it seems to me that even overtly conservative institutions like Churches get co-opted by the left these days, so it’s hardly surprising if something associated with academia should promote leftist thinking, even to the point of suicide, which would seem to be the end goal of Classicists attacking the study of Classics for concentrating on dead white guys.)
The Oyveydolon.
A lot of unpleasant things can be attributed to “human nature,” and it takes a lot of self-control to avoid acting like a jerk, which nobody succeeds at completely. Still, the attempt to not act like a jerk is often apppreciated — and even respected — by others.
Almost nobody alive witnessed the peak of Western Civilization, which was 1914. We’ve been massacring each other and wasting in luxury the gifts of our ancestors ever since.
There is this impediment:
“I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.”
–Orwell
In the Eighties, you would have heard them in Michael Mann productions. Notably Miami Vice and Manhunter. Otherwise on college/alternative radio.
Michael Mann is a master of depicting the menace, beauty, and mystery of urban nighttime, and the band was perfect for that Eighties nouveau glitz, particularly with exotic, cocaine boomtown Miami as a setting. Do a rail of this stuff— hoo yeah!
There you are, hurtling along MacArthur Causeway in an ’85 Esprit Turbo .
Ten years from now we may still not have reached the peak. Or ten years after that.
Done: Make Athens Great Again
Yep.
Lot’s list is way too long; it would take even a retired person ten years to read it.
My list would be even shorter than yours. I’d say, read Book 1 of the Iliad and Book 9 of the Odyssey and you’re good to go.
Will Durant’s “Life of Greece” and “Caesar and Christ” are really good introductions to the classical world.
As Vox Day frequently notes, the sci-fi and fantasy genres have become totally SJW in recent years.
Dr Who whom.
Whoa. Socrates as member of the elite? What the hell is ‘woke’ especially when the article is so full of inaccuracies and outright lies I don’t know where to begin? Is the https://eidolon.pub/we-condone-it-by-our-silence-bea76fb59b21 article supposed to be satire?
Sweet Zombie Jesus.
Maybe you read Tolkien, Asimnov, Martin or something of that flavor. She reads the Handmaid’s Tale. Or Harry Potter.
She’s married to a Jewish fella, but her surname and middle name are Irish and (Gentile) Hungarian respectively.
I’m not sure what it would take you for you to handle your drink, but that’s begging the question.
Yes, but read it in Greek. That’s one year of prep by taking 2 classes of ancient Greek or learn it yourself with, preferably, Goodwin and Gulick’s Greek Grammar. I see one for sale currently on Ebay for \$20. A 6 month slog through it is all it will take. Book One of the Iliad and Book Nine of the Odyssey will give you the full flavor of the thing. You will need to work your way through these 2 books using the glossary at the back of the book to look up unknown words, so it is slow going, but it is a real mindblow. Trust me!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
It’s surprising that even academic classicists have adopted Black Lives Matter advocacy slang in a straight, non-ironic manner.
This projection offers a fascinating window into her mind. Her racism comes first, and the justifications later. She has no idea that it doesn’t work that way for the rest of the human race.
Excellent.
Now let’s make sure Donna and Becca see it. LOL. (The goal is to have it appear in the next issue of Eidolon.)
How about “We’ve reached peak Pozz (to date).”
OT but why are there representatives of the Urban Market in a movie that is nominally about about King Arthur?
https://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2017/05/king-arthur-is-bad-in-ways-i-didnt-realize-movies-could-be-bad/
I’m with Moshe. This is pretty obviously a rebuke to Chinese who lose their Confucian ways–even a foreigner is better than you toads.
I don’t mind immigration so much, as long as we test for dominant positive factor traits, and only admit those with the highest scores. As the Olympics are coming up, more testing scrutiny should be applied towards the Kenyans. Note these high flyers do so with a minimum of professional coaching. Let’s get these rocket squirrels a green Card!
Nice writing Anon. Even though TL, i read it anyway. Important concepts well and clearly expressed.
I’ll toss on one point: It appears that in an age of prosperity, media and communications overload, that without the national feeling/rootedness you write about, modern people have a hard time finding meaning, purpose, connection and drift like atoms in the air.
BTW, you should give yourself a name. (Not a hard chore.)
And yet, 50 years ago before blackification not being such a showboat was routine behavior. And being such a showboat was considered poor sportsmanship.
Hard to say. It’s most associated with Sparta, and Sparta could go either way: totally gay commies or slavemasters and rah-rah fighters of Mid-East swarthiness. If only they killed their babies for convenience instead of in the interest of defending their privilege.
Then again, Helots weren’t colored, were they? In which case, was it really privilege? My mind is easily pretzeled by Current Year thinking. 300 made George Bushes out of the Spartans, but I don’t know whether that’s still popular.
Her furniture building could be more on the artistic than the woodworking side.
Maybe home improvement means interior decorating.
Fantasy and sci-fi have been utterly pozzed, like the rest of our culture.
They make girly and SJW-friendly video games.
Nothing is necessarily as it seems.
The crazy idea about getting your kid into organized sports in general, and football in particular, is for character building. One aspect of a healthy, defined, self-processed character is internalizing the notion of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”
Glaring consistent social problems with importing lower IQ minorities for citizenship is:
1) Loyalty to the clan above all else.
2) Using the “weaknesses” in community rules, i.e. The “shorthand” assimilated Americans take for granted, against the host, for the gain of the Clan.
That is, when we willfully import lowbrow hillbilly shit, from lowbrow, hillbilly countries, our communities suffer lowbrow hillbilly activities that lowers the quality of life for… us.
Note in this video, chock full of unassimilated lowbrow hillbillies, pulling their half-brained Clan shit. When the interviewer questions their behavior, not a one even has a vague clue of what the frick the interviewer is talking about. Particularly the kid the coaches manipulated in deference to their Clan.
This is the metaphor for the inevitable outcome of America’s evil immigration policy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=dKE9SFCe0HU
Hah, good one.
That was back when WASP notions of decorum and sportsmanship prevailed…..
Magical thinking. SJWs read fantasy and science fiction because they think that reality reflects fiction. Write stories about Black STEM geniuses and Hey!Presto! Black STEM geniuses will start appearing in real life.
When it becomes clear that the creditors will never be repaid, so that continuation of the debts functions only as malicious punishment (Shylock’s pound of flesh) or a form of serfdom, either of which is seen to retard significantly the society’s economic growth, the political means gently or not so gently suggests to the creditors to let it go. Reasonable creditors go along and resolve to improve their lending standards going forward.
Nah. You could do it in a year. Easily.And it would be time well spent.
Her maiden name is Dotson (unless this is her second marriage and that is hubby one’s surname).
Hey, according to Scott Mendelson at FORBES, they didn’t go far enough:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2017/05/11/whitewashing-doesnt-create-hits-doing-the-opposite-may-save-hollywood-from-itself/#48a574a15db7
S
Copied your comment. A keeper. You said it all and well.
Can you offer any recommendations for which edition of Goodwin and Gulick’s Greek Grammar to get?
It looks like it is even less expensive on Amazon right now, but you have to be careful not to get a bad recent reproduction.
Go for it!
Well, sinicization was a real thing. You can’t really have an empire without some effort at integration, after all. Otherwise, your other option is to exterminate everyone different and at some point, it wasn’t realistic to do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization
Mendelson assumes that “non-whites” are as eager to blacken Arthurian legend as he is. But as the box shows, they aren’t. To them (and a lot of whites, too) it’s just more Zena shit.
If Hollywood were really after Black dollar, it would consider making an epic about Marcus Garvey. (Seriously read his wikipedia entry.) Kanye could star and provide the score. Trump could cameo as Coolidge.
Or if Hollywood really respected Hispanics, it would consider making a movie about Francisco Franco Bahamonde besting the commie invaders and subversives in the majestic Spanish Kingdom.
What about the black ones? I don’t think Scipio Africanus was Actually black, but…
In some cases, sure, a footnote suffices. In many cases, it’s not that simple. How can a footnote explain that Nina’s monologue, depending on the English translation, can veer from comic to tragic, from pragmatic to melodramatic, or from hopeful to nihistic, but that all these things are contained at once in its original language? First of all, the footnote would be much longer than the text itself, and that is a tiring way to get through a literary work. And the English-language actress is constrained by whatever translation she’s given to work with. What good does the footnote serve for her performance or the audience?
Or consider just a single phrase, as in the Thessalonians 5:19. Here is some ways it has been translated: http://www.biblestudytools.com/1-thessalonians/5-19-compare.html
Some of these translations are essentially the same, just moving the order of words about, but some also significantly affect the meaning. I’ve even heard of it being translated as “Do not surrender the Spirit” and “Do not give in to the Spirit.” Those two are practically conflicting in meaning. How woulds a footnote help in understanding the meaning, besides establishing that there are various ways to translate the sentence? You really need to have a feel of the original text to get to the root of its meaning.
That’s not paint; that’s a bronze bust.
I’m sure Mendelson would say that they failed because they didn’t go far enough. After all, Arthur was still European….
I’m waiting for the Jean-Jacques Dessalines biopic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Dessalines
Spain’s European. Hence, they don’t count as POC. Hollywood needs to make a movie about Mestizos….
The copy of Goodwin & Gulick that I saw earlier today on Ebay, according to the seller, is from 1930 and in reasonable good condition. Go for it! (if it’s still available)
build furniture ie., assemble stuff from Ikea
home improvement ie., install towel rack or paint bedroom, plant daisies
read fantasy/sci fi ie., Zena Warrior Princess
play video games ie., Candy Crush
hang out with family — what family?
Is Dr. Who even on any channel anymore?
It isn’t so much bogus as it is a misrepresentation of a bunch of boring ordinary crap everyone does.
I don’t watch much TV either but when I do, it is MLB because that is what my son wants to watch not because I am a super fan. So her spouse watches Dr. Who and she sits there, too!
Sauron, Thank you for your reply.
Reading the comments here, it is pretty obvious that Sailer’s readers are a bunch of dolts. Pointing out that the Greeks had slaves is redundant because everyone had slaves back then. I mean, you do know that we are talking about a civilization of *twenty five centuries* ago? By post-Enlightnment standards, yes, the Greeks were xenophobic, sexist and ethnocentrist. But you need to judge them *in their time context*. For their time, the Hellenes were extremely *progressive*. I mean, what could be more progressive than that Greek idea of Democracy, that no single man shall be an Alpha Male? Back then, the World was ruled exclusively by despots who pretty much killed at will and did whatever they wanted(Alpha Male principle). Then, there were other things such as that they gave their women far more freedom than what was common during their time. Athenian women could ev en own property idenpendent of their husbands. That was more progressive than the American south antebellum. The Greeks were also highly progressive sexually, being more prgressive than Americans during most of the 20th century: while the Spartans, the most sexually intolerant of the Greeks condemned passive male homosexuality, they even tolerated homosexuals in their military. The Band of Thebes comes to mind.
The Greeks were not that progressive if we judge them by contemporary standards, but for their times they were obscenely, scandalously progressive. And our even more libertarian/liberal times came as a result of the Greek political ideals of equality.
I don’t know if it’s as simple as your concluding paragraph implies. Both because it’s roo general and not general enough.
To start with the first.
You concluded by talking a lot about European emotions, European temperament blah blah blah.
But in what sense is this true?
Do Finns and Italians have an easy-to-spot shared European temperament?
Sure, you could torture the issue and find commonalities but if we’re speaking honestly, theu don’t share either peoplehood, temperament, personality or much else.
Different “White People” a generalizing term I find to be lazy and generally useful to the stupid, are different in major ways such as their garroulousness, ways of feeling and thinking, looks, etc. They are also plainlu different in less easy to spot ways, like an interest in penis size.
The barbarian tribes felt a point of pride in penis size because, as with tge Africans, the guy with the longest penis got his sperm in deeper into the sluts. And so it evolved genetically (you should see the size of animals’ dig and balls) and women took a greater generic interest in sexual pleasures, penis size and all the rest because – it mattered. Among people civilized for a longer period of time the matter was of less interest. Most famously among orientals but if you see professional aroman Mosaics, sculptures and paintings it-s obvious rhat the concept of penis envy was something they never considered.
Then there’s the matter of native fascistic sense.
It was obvious and much diacussed from the 1800s already that Germans enjoyed nothing more than losing their individuality in National Greatness.
Nietzsche, a native son, despised them for it. Bismark commented that Germans make the best soldiers. And the best waiters. They follow the rules, indeed love rules, and have since their tribes were unites. Do Greeks (those who deacend from the ancients, not rhe sons of Pakistanis and Egyptians) share this love of authority? Whether it’s Hitler or Merkel, Germabs love and obey their leaders. Their primary sense of fascination with themselves is in analyzing their own stool (not a joke, google “german toilets”). Greeks on the other hand, from Athens onward do NOT trust their leaders, and from then until today they forcibly exiled any who started tp look like one. They have PLANNED yearly demonstrations (on the same dates each year) never mind unplanned ones.
Which is the European Temperament and Personality?
Thus far your over-generalization.
Now, the other way.
Many of here regard the ancient Sumerians and Akkadians as our cultural ancestors whose history we are proud to be seen linked with ours.
How many of us however largely descended from the people of Babel, or Lower Egypt, or Mycenae, or Athens, or Rome?
It’s the odd man out who lacks a feeling of kinship and filial love for the Great Civilized ones of olde, whetger it be Hammurabi or Socrates or Julius Caesar or Shakespeare.
And dare I say that most of us feel a closer kinship with them than we do with the Czar’s functionaries or the Gauls conquered by Caesar.
Most Africans and Chinese people Do Not and pwrhaps Can Not feel this way about the Neolithics who made fine jewelery or the Mesopotamians who invented both cows and wheat.
But some of “them” do anf some of “us”don’t and I feel a greater kinship and brotherhood with the former than with the latter.
Perhaps I am an exception to the Rule of Blood by which an idiotic, cruel and proudly ignorant Semite dullard is more of a brother than someone like Razib, but I doubt that is the case.
Yes, nationhood, culture and genetics count for a lot but
A) No one in Europe sees themselves as “European” (heck, look how quickly their trying ro squirm out of it!), only us mongrolized La Raza Americans
And
B) A man of sympatico temperament has ALWAYS been regarded by First Class men as more of a belived ancestor than were their actual unlettered ones.
Damn, I tried modifying my comment for spelling grammar and explaining my fascination with the gonad matter,
(that I first encountered in the dated but most excellent Before The Dawn where, wisely, he tooks nore about Chimpanzees and foxes than monogamous Chinese and polygamous Bantus) but my battery went out for longer than the comment box’s tolerance for penance allowed.
C’est la vie
I have a better one.
A Christian missionary got a meeting with Khrushchev. At the dinner he put on he tried to explain the sacredness of the soul by quoting to Khrushchev that, “The flesh is weak but the spirit is strong”.
Krushchev’s translator gave it over as best he understood.
“The meat is rotten but the vodka is excellent”
I applaud Ms. Zuckerberg’s bravery. One of the great things about getting anti-Westerners such as herself into studying the classics is we get to beat them with it.
It’s not usually understood outside of traditional Classic groups, but the Old Testament is often considered part of the Classical compendium. Therefore, to be fair to Ms. Zuckerberg let’s examine it as a rebuttal to her furious denunciation of Periclean Athens.
“And thought shalt kill them, man, woman, and child, and every beast. Let not one be suffered to live among the inhabitants of Canaan.” (Paraphrase of numerous chapters and versus from the Old Testament) . This was what Zuckerberg’s ancestors did to non-Israelites. They killed them. All. As in holocaust. Meanwhile, Perecles’ ancestors were coming up with exlusionary laws.
Times havent changed. Israel gets to build a wall, NOT ONLY exclude all non Jews, but EXPELL them. Meanwhile their compatriot Zuckerberg is busy denouncing Donald Trump and Pericles for daring to set up exlusionary citizenship laws while others are ripping up our Constitution to stop us from doing so.
Stateside, it plays on BBC America
Why are there 240+ comments on this moron woman? Can we please go back to golf?!
Don’t. Goodwin is an encyclopedic description of Ancient Greek. You don’t need 5% of that, to tackle Homer.
Get Pharr’s _Homeric Greek_ instead. He’ll hold your hand as you read Iliad Book 1, after a minimum of preliminaries.
You can get Goodwin after you’ve accumulated considerable experience reading Greek. And at that point, just to see what you already know intuitively, laid out systematically. (If you’re so inclined; I’d always prefer to put my time into reading more original texts.)
Racism has no place in the classics
They did make that Andy Garcia movie about the Cristero War, but it was pretty schlocky.
To do it in one year you’d have to give up all your other interests, including reading and commenting on iSteve.
Rules work best if the ruled ones “get it”. If demographics change, the same rules may not work.
A habit not quite as bad as cigarettes and booze, but close to.
With bated breath I anticipate Aristotle’s review of Jim Crow.
In many academic fields, a pretty good way to rack up the publication count is to get together with some of your friends and start your own journal…
How can my personal, admittedly novice understanding of a language be better than a professional translator’s. My father like to read the originals in Greek, Latin, and German. And even tried to learn Chinese (Mandarin?) to read some of their philosophy. But, its not clear to me why he was more qualified to do that than a professional translator. If a Greek grammar book offers more than one English word, how do i know which would be more meaningful? How is my own translation possibly closer to the author’s intent.
Or is there something more satisfying (transcendental?) about translating something yourself? Is there something about the process that makes the content more meaningful? I took at least three years of several languages through college, and I don’t remember anything particularly interesting about having translated something.
Same for modern America.
Some of these translations are essentially the same, just moving the order of words about, but some also significantly affect the meaning. I’ve even heard of it being translated as “Do not surrender the Spirit” and “Do not give in to the Spirit.” Those two are practically conflicting in meaning. How woulds a footnote help in understanding the meaning, besides establishing that there are various ways to translate the sentence? You really need to have a feel of the original text to get to the root of its meaning.
Per my above comment, I haven’t tried to seriously read a foreign language in years. How do you get a better feel for a language than a professional translator? Or am I being naive in thinking most translators are good. How could it vary so much (specifically, let’s consider the admittedly one line example you gave)?
LOL. I was pleased to see the thread still active as am suddenly fascinated by the question of translations.
It would be pretty awesome to have translated a great work of literature into something almost as good, but I’m more likely to win the revived Plunge for Distance Olympic gold medal.
Nah. Just cut out watching TV.
Longfellow took great pride in his translation of the Divine Comedy
https://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-read-dante-in-the-21st-century/#.WRk26fnyvIU
I’m having trouble finding the perfect joke to express what i think are the relative degrees of effort involved in the Plunge for Distance and learning (in order to translate) ancient Greek.
My dreams of being an olympic champion are, more and more, relegated to my time between the sheets. As they should be.
I’d be very content with a few laps in the pool followed by a good (poolside) reading of Longfellow’s translation of Dante. I hear it’s pretty good.
Right, although with the current Pope, he likely meant it in Daniel’s sense.
You’ve motivated me to purchase the audio version of this. Thanks.
What a lying dirtbag. I’m ashamed I ever supported this asshole. I hope the Demopublicans and kritarchs continue to stonewall hos every effort, because at this point the sooner it all burns, the better anyhow.
Thanks, and also to Autochthon. Yep, I was thinking of debt peonage, and all those schemes where you have cash-rich and knowing lenders playing a long game against naïve borrowers.
Reading Homer in Greek is like baking your own bread. You do it for the challenge, for the fun, and to learn how it’s done. Even if your loaves are never as good as the ones in the store.
I understand the self-improvement and satisfaction aspects. And I appreciate the analogy, but I have enough baking experience to doubt that it really holds true.
I don’t think that an analogy involving learning about relativity via graduate texts on Minkowski space-time is appropriate either (which is what some people do rather than cooking bread). It’s just not where I would suggest someone start. Another flaw in that comparison is that, I would expect to be capable of using a Greek grammar textbook to translate a particular, random paragraph in Homer.
I think it is a really interesting topic.
I was at Barnes & Noble recently with my wife, whose English is rudimentary, buying books from the children’s section to help her reading skills (she is really enjoying The Mouse & The Motorcycle). What struck me was that, besides ourselves and (naturally) a bunch of kids, there were a significant number of folks by themselves and in their thirties perusing the stuff about the little boy who has adventures with Greek gods (I forget the name of the protagonist or the series, but it is wildly successful, and films have been made…). Anyhow, that’s all well and good, but it’s for twelve-year-olds, right? These man-children, Americans obviously fluent in English and presumably literate in it as well, stood wide-eyed and grinning as they read these stories which comic-bookified the works of Homer, Ovid, etc. in exactly the way you mention. (Sure, my wife was checking out similar books, but then she can read Cervantes in the original without batting an eyelash; it’s a totally different context if one intentionally seeks simpler material because one is still learning the language than because one refuses to engage with advanced writing and ideas….)
It is indeed a societal problem that grown men and women seek out Harry Potter and such but eschew Sophocles, Dostoyevsky, and Woolf.
There is a type of translation that we may perform consciously or otherwise when reading works in our native language from different eras. That shows, among other things, how languages change over time, how authors apply them, and how they may retain and adapt foreign phrases or structures as well. A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens is one of my favorites for that. Other authors may provide similar experiences for readers.
What exactly do you object to, in my bread-baking analogy?
Do Finns and Italians have an easy-to-spot shared European temperament?
Finns and Italians differ due to culture and/or genetics, but they are still closer to one another than with black Africans and other races. Also, one reason why Italians, especially southern Italians, differ from Northern Europeans is racial because they have more admixture with Arabs and North Africans. So again, it comes down to race. Southern Italians, like European Jews, are less European than the Core European population.
I would say the lunkheaded Pole is the essence of Core European Temperament. Granted, temperaments do vary among individuals. Even within the same group, there are those who are more aggressive, more timid, more expressive, more introspective, and etc. But it’s essentially true that a people tend to have a set of personality traits different from another group. Surely, if we randomly choose 100 Japanese women, they will have a different general personality when compared to a randomly chosen 100 Nigerian women.
Also, Jews tend to have more people like William Kristol whereas Wasps tend to have more people with personalities like Dan Quayle.
Different “White People” a generalizing term I find to be lazy and generally useful to the stupid, are different in major ways such as their garroulousness, ways of feeling and thinking, looks, etc.
You see, you proved my point. This is rather typical of Jewish personality of being dismissive, hostile, contemptuous, and driving-a-goy-crazy-with-the-stuff-about-the-chimney.
You have a very Jewish personality and temperament.
The barbarian tribes felt a point of pride in penis size because, as with tge Africans, the guy with the longest penis got his sperm in deeper into the sluts. And so it evolved genetically (you should see the size of animals’ dig and balls) and women took a greater generic interest in sexual pleasures, penis size and all the rest because – it mattered.
Maybe it had something to do with climate. If you had a long dong in the Ice Age, you might get frost-bitten down there and die of dong-gangrene or dongrene.
Also, most animals don’t have long dongs. Horses need them because it’s awkward for them to have sex. It’s the ONLY way they can reach. But many animals have smaller dongs. Look at cats. Also, cat dongs usually hide inside the body. Also, gorillas got smaller ones too. Why is that? I think it’s because animals fight dirty. A gorilla will grab and bite anything, so it’s not advantageous to have long dongs. Your rival will grab it and rip it off. But maybe among Negroes in Africa, a kind of understanding developed, especially as they began to fight with spears and arrows. The rule was ‘chuck a spear, don’t bite off my dong’. So, Negroes could relax and move more into ‘muh dic*’ mode.
Among people civilized for a longer period of time the matter was of less interest. Most famously among orientals but if you see professional aroman Mosaics, sculptures and paintings it-s obvious rhat the concept of penis envy was something they never considered.
This too is iffy. Most civilizations weren’t into nudity. They all had their own kind of porno-stuff, but their main expression was of clothed figures. It was the Greeks who really love to represent nudity and reveal everything. Given this penchant, you’d think they’d feature guys with ‘biggus dic*us’. But the Greeks actually idealized the flaccid pud not in state of ‘boing’-ness. So, a sexualized culture of the Greeks tended to focus less on genitals than on other aspects, such as face and overall form.
In contrast, why did Jews develop longer dongs than the Greeks? Why are Jews so open about sexual matters? Some might say this is a recent development with rise of Freud and such, but I think Judaism was always more boing-ish than most other civilized cultures. One reason was the basis of the Covenant through the pud. So, Jewish guys felt blessed via the pud and were constantly into pud-pride. Also, since Jews banned idols, they couldn’t really get much out of human beauty. Jewish art couldn’t make a lot of sculptures and paintings. So, Jews fixated more on ideas and life, and life meant having sex than appreciating beauty as something higher than lust. Also, Jewish wit meant a culture of ridicule. So, a bunch of Jewish women with the personality of Erica Jong and Sarah Silverman were always talking about puds and pooters, and they were gossiping and snooping around about which Jewish guy had the biggest dong.
When I moved to a Jewish-heavy neighborhood, one thing I noticed was the difference in how they discussed sexuality. In the city school full of Diversity, sex talk was just ‘suck my dic*’, ‘look at her booty’, and etc. Just a lot of yapping. But the Jewish kids has a theoretic interest in sexuality. One Jewish kid talked about how his sister is a psychology major and said looking at pornography is healthy. Even though we were in only in 7th grade, another Jewish kid knew about Kinsey report and farmboys having sex with ‘animals’. I mean a negro or hispanic in city school would never talk about such stuff. Also, it amazed me how ‘liberal’ Jewish parents were about sexuality with their kids. To the Washington DC trip, a Jewish kid brought a whole suitcase of porny mags. He got caught and the kids got to look at the stash on the bed, and it’s the first time I saw a magazine called Juggs. Anyway, most non-Jewish parents didn’t allow that stuff. But Jewish parents were far more tolerant. And the first porn video I saw was when a Jewish kid invited a bunch of kids to his house and showed us his pa’s porn video on a VCR(that most Americans still didn’t have). The first porn image I saw was this pudgy Jewish guy(later turned out to be Ron Jeremy) sucking his own dic*. The guy was sucking his own dic*, it was so long. So, if the Greeks and Romans were admiring and appreciating the full form of human beauty, I think Jews got more obsessed with the ‘schwarz’ since their rule of anti-idolatry prevented expression of the full spectrum of human expression. Even today, Jews tend to be highly cerebral and highly sexual. You see it in Anthony Weiner.
It was obvious and much diacussed from the 1800s already that Germans enjoyed nothing more than losing their individuality in National Greatness. Nietzsche, a native son, despised them for it.
But was there much individuality to lose in the first place? I would argue Germans were working toward individuality and national greatness as a combo platter. But then, this was the basis of Anglo Power as well. Anglos developed individuality and organization-skills & discipline.
This was more problematic with Germans since their cult of passion was much greater. But then, passion is a funny thing. It is both individualistic and anti-individualistic, both communal and anti-communal. One’s passions puts oneself at the center of the world. It makes one feel independent, like Beethoven’s ego. But passion also overflows and seeks communion with others. So, a great composer like Wagner creates music that creates an emotional community. Also, community is anti-passion in the sense that it seeks order and cooperation than wild individuals doing their own thing. But at a rock concert, sport game, or Nazi rally, we see how a sense of community can be bolstered by the masses surrendering their rational individuality in favor of ecstasy of shared passion.
But then, this is a problem that exists among Jews too. Jews are known for individualism but also for ethno-centrism and egomania. Indeed, many Jews have been highly individualistic to pursue goals that really served group interests. Alan Dershowitz the ACLU member is regarded as a ‘liberal scholar’, but he is also an ardent Zionist full of intolerance.
In a way, individualism, the bigger it gets, seeks to extinguish other individualisms. And this was the problem of Nietzsche himself. He was for Big Individualism, but this could only lead to the Ubermensch individuals ruling over the sheeple. Little individualism is humble and says, “all individuals should have their portion of freedom and liberty and should be left alone, just as they leave others alone.” But Big Individualism says “I know the truth, I know what is right. I know because I’m a Great Individual, so the whole world must bow down to My Individuality.” Such as the Big Individualism of Marx, Lenin, Freud, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, Ayn Rand, etc. My Individualism Uber Alles.
Do Greeks (those who deacend from the ancients, not rhe sons of Pakistanis and Egyptians) share this love of authority?
Greeks bicker a lot and throw lots of tantrums, but Greek society was very repressive. Even democratic Athens was highly regimented, and women were put in their place. Women were freer in Sparta but only because men were too busy training for war and whupping helots.
The later Greeks submitted to Romans and then stagnated under Byzantine rule.
Also, the considerable race-mixing with the Near-Easterners made Greeks increasingly more like ‘Turks’.
It’s the odd man out who lacks a feeling of kinship and filial love for the Great Civilized ones of olde, whetger it be Hammurabi or Socrates or Julius Caesar or Shakespeare. And dare I say that most of us feel a closer kinship with them than we do with the Czar’s functionaries or the Gauls conquered by Caesar.
No, it’s the odd man out who feels such kinship with the great figures. And it’s good thing to appreciate great thinkers, artists, and etc. But such people are rare. And some cultures produced few or none of such people.
My point is a people must have meaning apart from greatness flowing from just a few. It’s true that the rare great individuals do much to change society with their promethean feats(though in the current world, we have fewer giants and more cooperative work in the discovery of new ideas). But do a people have value apart from such feats of individual greatness? I say yes, and I say this is, in the end, more important that greatness itself.
Sure, science and technology allowed us to discover tons of new things and come up with faster means of communication and travel.
But the essential truths and values of humanity can be attained by basic use of reason, inspiration, faith, morality, and some such. That is the Core. It’s like cinema. In the first 10 yrs of the silent era, just about all the basic grammar of cinema was developed.
Likewise, the basic values and meanings of what it means to be human was established long long ago even before people gained greatness. Consider the Old Testament. Arguably the first great Jew is Moses, though a case can be made for Joseph. But here’s the thing. In the stories of fathers and sons and brothers from Abraham to Joseph, the essence of life and its meanings are laid out. Life as organism, life as moral being, life as memory and narrative.
As civilization develops, it begins to fixate on the great man, the hero, the giant. We see this in the Bible too. Beginning with Moses, the emphasis is more on kings and prophets and important figures. There is less and less about Jews as common folks with family and life. Jewish History becomes more like the history of other civilizations that emphasize the Powerful and Great.
In this sense, one can argue that the greatest contribution of Jewish culture is less about greatness of individuals than about the worth of each person, as Abraham had no claim to greatness and was justified only by goodness in the eyes of God, a blessing that is availed equally to all Jews, no matter how humble.
This is why the development of the Novel had a great impact on civilization. It bible-ized the people. Verse was mostly used bu the elites to celebrate themselves or honor the king. Verse was about fancier things, higher things.
But with the rise of the novel, the people came to be represented in the patient telling of their un-great and uneventful lives. This finally gave them a voice and put them at the center of civilization, just like the Old Testament put ordinary Jews at the center of the Narrative before the rise of the greats beginning with Moses. The rise of the novel made humanism possible. Without the novelistic form and its impact on cinema, we don’t have stuff like EMIGRANTS and NEW LAND which finds in ‘ordinary people’ all the basic themes that matter most to what it means to be human. Consider Montague’s rediscovery of human-ness through the novel in FAHRENHEIT 451.
They wouldn’t have had to try. Pick a random word in Webster’s and the chance you can find a single word in Greek (or Spanish, or Hebrew…) that means exactly the same thing is maybe 1%. Maybe it’s 10% for nouns — words like camshaft and television. And it’s close to zero for adjectives.
This is because every word covers a range of meanings, and the best you can hope for is a foreign word whose meanings mostly overlap. The overlap is almost never complete, though. Knowing a language well means the multiple meanings resonate for you, and affect your understanding. Imagine a passage that refers to an adult negro as a “boy”. A Russian who sees that as парень will miss an important nuance.
I agree here. That’s like saying “Don’t listen to any recordings of Beethoven’s piano sonatas if you can’t play them yourself.”
Believe me, the interpretations can vary as much even in the original Greek, which as I said is an abstract language. In fact, in that sense the assorted translations can elucidate rather than obscure our understanding through comparison and contrast (although no doubt there are weak or bad translations too). I don’t think you need to be on the level of a translator (who ideally is fluent) to get a good feel of a language. You can study its structure, worldview, and thought process without becoming fluent, perhaps not even proficient. But I maintain that aiming for precise translations is quite important for religious or other seminal texts.
Seeing as you have an interest in this discussion, may I recommend one of my favorite novels, East of Eden by John Steinbeck? There is a subplot where these Chinese sages spend great effort and time in trying to accurately translate a Hebrew word, and this single word meaning ends up being crucial to the main characters. I think you’d enjoy it.
Nothing shabby at all with being an olympic champion between the sheets;)
I can bake bread that is as good as anything i can buy in a store. And it took almost no practice other than following the recipe a few times. Maybe if i tried, i’d feel the same way about translating Greek or Latin (written 2-3K years ago), but I just don’t think so.
Btw, I very much appreciate a post of yours below here[Edit: above here, now]. But it seems to me to argue more towards my sense of things than does your baking analogy. That there is a heck of a lot more going on in a good translation than what I could do.
I certainly appreciate what seem like informed comments here on the subject, but some of them seem a bit more cavalier than what i would offer if i were asked about a technical subject in my area of expertise.
I met one big league translator — Michael Henry Heim who translated Kundera’s novels into English — and he was a very impressive man.
All right. I expected you’d feel, as I do, that baking good bread is hard to do. But I guessed wrong.
Then substitute for baking your own bread, playing the piano: thus reading Homer in Greek is to reading an expert’s translation, as playing Beethoven’s sonatas is to listening to a recording.
So read his translation? or learn French? Or watch the movie?
(BTW, I checked and the author doesn’t think the movie captures the spirit of the book. So it would be as good as my translation)
So… i was right?
“Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City”
I seriously can’t think of a single fucking person who would want to read this book.
I’ve been on a recent kick of reading (or rereading) some older “classics.” Scott, Melville, Stevenson, HG Wells, Conrad, and the original Conan series. It was set off by reading some really early 20th century sci-fi, which, while not necessarily good literature, was really fascinating to compare to modern sci-fi, as if it gave you a window into how people viewed the world then. I’m sure the other 19thC romantic classics (which bore me) do the same from a different perspective (social mores and what not).
I think the only Dickens I have ever read was a few things I faked my way through in high school.
I’d actually never read Joseph Conrad before, and there’s something about this writing that appeals to me (even if might be a kind of superficial sophistication). In The Secret Agent, he uses a technique of describing large amounts of two or more character’s history, thoughts, feelings etc during a single brief interaction.
Gee, why would anyone named Zuckerberg be opposed to alienage laws? Can’t imagine. Yes, Israel’s immigration law is super-strict (must be born of a Jewish mother — after all, who really knows who his father is?), but we have to separate the Chosen from the un-Chosen, no? The Talmud says that Jews are God’s Chosen people, and that God also created beasts in the form of humans, whose only purpose is to serve Jews, day and night. RHIP.
I don’t even bother with the SF section of the bookstore anymore. The covers are the same as Harlequin bodice-rippers with an added dragon in the background.
So many options!
There is no frigate like a book
Emily Dickinson, 1830 – 1886
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.
I did classics at school and I can report that most surviving writings in Greek and Latin are BORING! It takes an ass of 300% reinforced industrial titanium to read the plays of Terence or Plautus. Seth Benardete claimed to have overheard 2 profs in the quad – What are you reading? I am reading the X of Euripides, it is the most boring play of Euripides I have ever read. Oh, one always says that of whatever Euripides play one is reading.
Steve, you might explain publicly or privately why you okay comments expressing rank jew hate.
Dunno. I have a Miltonist friend who has an excellent command of Greek and Latin, and she adores Euripides…..
Actually, Israel allows anyone in who has at least one Jewish grandparent, and the grandparent can be either maternal or paternal.
“Actually, Israel allows anyone in who has at least one Jewish grandparent, and the grandparent can be either maternal or paternal.”
My 23AndMe DNA results say I am 1/16 Jewish. Is that Jewish enough for Israel? If I go to an Israeli consulate or embassy and show them my 23AndMe ancestry results can I get Israeli citizenship?