Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
2hr ago
Gilbert & Sullivan were everywhere when I was a kid, I still have I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General memorized, but I had no idea Americans had ever heard of it. Echo your sadness that the connection to the past has disappeared.
a capella groups and improv
A scourge. I recall touring US colleges and every single one had a moment in the tour where they described their quiiiiiirky acapella group as if they were the only college that had thought to have it.
It does make me wonder, what do you think the image today of the "slightly pretentious but admirably cultured intellectual" looks like today, in the popular imagination? Do any fictional characters come to mind? What are the markers that would identify such a person most accurately?
In the UK, a Daunt Books tote bag, New York Review of Books in the US. New Yorker for the person pretending to be such.
Bartender_Venator
2hr ago
I'm another who's always made the analogy with titles, but hadn't thought about the Euro Dr. thing. Personally I quite like that they do that - as the saying goes "German cars are better because in Germany an engineer is Herr Doktor, and in England he's a bloody mechanic." (Maybe less applicable today, now that German cars aren't so good and English cars ~don't exist). Probably would have completed my PhD for the vanity instead of going into industry at the first opportunity if I was German.
Bartender_Venator
2hr ago
Interesting. I've always heard professors say a-leh-they-ee-a, with a "they" and pronounced "ee" but my guess is that the they-ee is counted as one long syllable (as we know from Greek poetry using long and short syllables for meter, Ancient Greek had some long syllables).
Edit: just asked a friend with a Classics PhD and I'm wrong, it's a-lay-thee-a.
Bartender_Venator
2hr ago
Yes, they certainly had some impressive showings in battle - particularly before the Dukes of Burgundy figured out how to isolate the cities politically and play them off against each other. My mental model of the Dutch cities is maybe too Classicizing, but it's that the militias in the field were like hoplites (dangerous in battle, also dangerous to try and control too much), and the population in the cities, particularly the weavers, were like the Athenian mob, always baying for blood and expecting the militia to go shed it. Of course, there was overlap, but when you look at what happened to Ghent...
Bartender_Venator
2hr ago
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to get at with this whole line of argument, so I may be speaking past you, but yeah that's how literature works you're mostly reading dead guys, i.e. "the authors and musicians whose style they're riffing on and influenced by". There just really aren't a lot of great living novelists (my three would be Krasznahorkai (hates post-Soviet consumerism, hates Russia), Knausgaard (not conventionally political but says things unacceptable to the left), and Houellebecq (self-explanatory)). I guess Pynchon and Delillo (boomerlibs) are still alive, but have not written meaningful work in a long time. For literary culture, which is not the same as literature, the institutions are gigalib but we're also an a hundred flowers moment of right-coded spaces and presses. And that's fine. One of the eternal truths of counterculture is that the people with all the money rarely throw the best parties or write the best books.
Basically, to return to the Olympics stuff, if you are determined to be a fan of the US Olympic team wherever and whenever, you have to accept both the black power salutes and the photo-ops with Trump. The same thing with literature. There isn't any qualitative, and no major quantitative difference in the level of nose-holding conservatives and liberals have to do with literature. The main difference that appears from the outside is that, where possible, liberals downplay the conservativeness of writers they can claim as their own or apolitical, and only exile the real Celine types where you can't hide it, whereas conservatives who read admit they're often reading libs and discussing books with libs.
Bartender_Venator
3hr ago
I misspoke slightly, far-right anti-semitic stuff but not neo-Nazi. https://slate.com/culture/2023/06/cormac-mccarthy-dead-garbage-el-paso-texas.html.
Bartender_Venator
22hr ago
It's actually closer to A-leh-they-ee-ah. It comes from a- (negation prefix) lethein (concealment, being unseen, or forgetting in the sense of the River of Lethe in Hades). I've always found it very philosophically interesting that the Greeks considered truth a negation of concealment rather than a purely positive category as we do.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Music and film, sure, but libs also have to do a lot of nose-holding (or, more often, misrepresenting/ignoring the politics of historical greats) to read literature, poetry, and philosophy. Three out of the five greatest Modernist poets were avowed fascists, for instance. Cormac McCarthy subscribed to neo-Nazi publications, DFW wrote a hagiography of John McCain back when McCain was one of the Evil Fascists, you go further back and you have figures like Updike, Wolfe, etc. Europe is a little different because you have so many great Jewish novelists, who were understandably sensitive about the hard right, but you also have plenty of Problematic figures like Junger. Literary culture is way out to the left because, like other culture industries, you can come in, pack it with your friends, chuck out all the dissidents, and rewrite history (and this certainly didn't start with 'wokeness', it started with capital-C Communists), but great literature is certainly well-balanced between left and right.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
Yeah, and why do beach volleyball players dress like that? It's disgusting!
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
Also, the founder chose their name because he thought it would be funny to hear Japanese tourists try and say it.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
Yeah now you say it I'm probably projecting the Hansards, who were mostly long-distance traders and their armed escorts, down to Italy (the skilled tradesmen, i.e. the weavers, were the most radical in the Low Countries, but tended to melt when they were facing armoured men instead of stabbing people in the streets). I suppose I could go into how dirty and violent Italian city life was at the time but now I've advanced a merchant-centric thesis that feels like cope for my own lazy thinking.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
I feel like Scott must have intended the Straussian reading that The Goddess of Everything Else is just the Goddess of Cancer but better at her job.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
This is the common motte-move of just setting the definitions of the terms as an "I win" in advance, in this case by taking everything modern society likes about the military and putting it in the "soldier" bucket and taking everything we dislike and putting it in the "warrior" bucket. I'm comfortable throwing out Devereaux definition (which quickly gets bogged down in epicycles, as when he has to introduce the "mercenary" as a third type one paragraph later) and using ordinary language. Realistically, if you look at how people use the words, and look at successful modern soldiers, they're someone who can be a soldier when things are going smoothly and a warrior when the chips are down - when you're in the Ardennes surrounded by krauts, you want a "warrior mentality". Any combat vet who is not a lib blogger will tell you something similar, that's just what the words mean. /u/coffee_enjoyer is largely correct about what people mean by a "warrior mentality" politically, but it's also worth noting that a lot of the actual tip of the spear guys sign up in hopes they will get their warrior moments (and often end up having unpleasant encounters with reality/the VA).
Interesting military history question - who were the last warriors not to get their arses kicked by soldiers?
Happens commonly in Africa, not unrelated to their low quality of soldiering. Otherwise, the Arab Revolt is a good example, given its centrality to all this Fremen stuff.
Iirc England actually didn't have that many long-distance trading companies of their own, though they certainly had some. International trade was mostly conducted by the Dutch/Flemings and the Hansards, who were both tough merchant-pirates. What England really had going for them was that they were a much more organized state (by very relative standards), so they could hand off the tough work to foreigners and mostly expect safe trade within the isle, as you mention. But again one has to distinguish between 13th Century England/Italy and 16th Century England/Italy.
True! Though I'd say by that time the dynamic had changed with growing urban populations, greater peacetime safety for trade, and the advent of firearms (something I forgot to mention in my first post is that of course Medieval city-states were at near-constant low-level war with each other, and of course that was long over by the 1600s). The town-dwellers were no longer rough-and-ready armed merchants, and likely "softer" in daily life, but instead good raw material for the sort of training and drill that made gunpowder armies effective.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Well, slightly tangential point, but, before the Italian Wars (i.e. before expensive gunpowder warfare), Italian city-states generally fought using their own citizens, and pound-for-pound tended to beat knightly forces coming down from Germany. Barbarossa's defeat at Legnano is perhaps the most famous. I find the difference in standards between the Italian city forces and their aristocratic opponents telling of, well, a difference in standards - knights had banners, which could easily signal a rapid charge or a galloping retreat, but the Italians carried heavy war-carts which could not easily retreat and so had to be defended to the death.
It's hard for us to see it now, but in the Middle Ages, the urban merchants were the hard men. Sure, the successful ones ended up sitting in fortified towers, but for the most part commerce between cities or regions was a dangerous occupation that demanded the constant capacity for self-defense anywhere outside the walls of your city (and inside, if there was a feud going on). Nobles may have spent much more time training for wars, jousting, etc., but they actually faced significantly less danger than merchants. They would train a lot, charge valiantly, and if the battle turned, they could either ride away or surrender for ransom. And since pitched battles were rare in the Middle Ages, more often they were burning peasant villages or sitting around during a siege. As the saying goes, an armoured knight was an F-15 on a medieval battlefield - well-equipped, well-maintained, very expensive, and very difficult to kill - but the burghers and their urban militias were something more like Toyota Hiluxes, and those win wars too.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Thanks, hadn't caught that post of his.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Good review! I also recently read Rejection and, incidentally, it came up in my most recent writers' group, with opinions similar to yours. We all loved "Pics", and opinion on "The Feminist" and the closing stories were a little divided. Not that it's a bad story, but that it has to compete with writers like ARX-Han who are both more extremely online and willing to be actually edgy. I think Tulathiamutte is masterful in going right up to the limit of "safe edgy" that the uniformly-leftist literary scene will accept, and so he's able to scandalize without any unacceptable transgressions. He's also just not as convincing in his portrayal of the online world, partly because of that (he can't make the actual incel arguments, hence the need for the "narrow shoulders" thing) and partly because, I assume, he's a bit older, has a social life, and all the other things that stop people from being in weird corners of the internet 24/7.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Look, I get that Sparta hecking sucks and Lysander was a freaking pissbaby chud. But Devereaux just can't accept that the ancient world had fundamentally different values from ours, and their best men admired Sparta for reasons which would get them instantly banned from /r/Hellas.
Pop quiz - name a famous Spartan military victory not involving an alliance with Persia. Not a pop quiz - you can't name something other than military victories that is plausibly cool about Sparta.
Sorry bro the agoge was metal. As for battles, there are three aspects to this. The first is the battle of Sardis, if you need an answer to your quiz. The second is that asking for a Spartan victory, or even battle, not involving Persia is like asking for a French battle not involving England (actually, to torture the metaphor, the typical relationship was something closer to Persia's Britain and Sparta's Prussia. Persia had fingers in every pie, and even victories against them usually had some element of deal-making. The third is that the whole neatly-counterintuitive anti-Spartan reading of the Peloponnesian War fundamentally misunderstands Spartan strategy. Sparta had a high-quality army that they knew was very difficult to replace. This led them to essentially adopt a sea command/fleet-in-being strategy on land. The Spartan army could go where it wanted and do what it wanted as long as it didn't commit to a protracted siege or risky battle, and, since they didn't want to give battle either, the Athenians were reduced to a naval strategy which ended up overextending and destroying them at Syracuse and Aegospotami. Devereaux is on firm ground when he claims that Spartan society is unacceptable to modern sensibilities, and that the Spartan setup was fundamentally unsustainable because of their inability to absorb casualties in pitched battles, but he'd have to be a much better historian to "well ackshually" Thucydides and Xenophon.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Devereaux is excellent at finding some idiotic thesis a couple guys (he would say "bros") on Twitter hold, claiming it's the bailey to a sensible motte, burning down the bailey, and claiming he's destroyed the motte.
You know who's actually really good on this particular historical topic?
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
It's also intellectually sanitized.
This etymological complexity has been largely lost in the term's contemporary internet usage, which has reduced "simp" to a simple insult for male emotional availability or respect toward women.
Does this reflect the author's actual views on the modern use of the word "simp", or just RLHF giving the Generic California Ideology interpretation of the terms he's prompted it with? Impossible to know.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Don't forget his "REAL Historian Reacts to Paradox Games?!" posts.
Bartender_Venator
11d ago
If you like Margiela Replicas I would recommend CB I Hate Perfume, as well.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
So you're sold the story that it'll always be your family foundation. You're in control, you set the mission statement, you pick the board, your kids will be on it. But, over time, there's a lot of social pressure to let the right people on the board (if you have other big donors, they'll insist on putting their people on the board, that's "just how it's done"). And then, all of a sudden, the board has total control of "interpreting" your "mission", goodbye and don't forget to wipe the urine off grandpa's grave on the way out. Rich people are infinitely more naïve about using their money than you'd think. If you want to avoid that, you have to make the 501c3 a disposable entity so that you can dispose of the board with it.
It's actually far harder to spend that much money than one would assume, too. You have to hire experienced finance guys just to get it out the door on a reasonable schedule, and that's probably one reason these things swing so hard to the left. The institutional left is a gaping maw for money. They have an infinite recruiting pool for potential salaries, or at least as infinite as there are underemployed kids with fake majors, and you rarely have to worry about them actually achieving their goals because reality is in the way. I have no idea the extent to which the tax code was written for that purpose, but it sure did serve the long-term goals of the various people who made 501c3s what they are today (including the dearly beloved then-Speaker Johnson, known as an idealist who would never twist public policy for personal ends).
Having a single glass of hard liquor at the end of the day was very normal for men of a certain age. You could set your watch by my grandfather's evening whiskey, and he drank one every evening until he couldn't stand up to get it, same with my best mate's grandpa. Vodka is unusual, though. It seems like something that's basically disappeared in younger generations, particularly in America - US drinking culture in general has much more of a binary between "I'm not drinking" and "I'm getting drunk", which I think comes from the high drinking age and reliance on cars. I'd put a "drinking problem" as a matter of escalation: if left to him/herself, is someone going over time from one, to two, to three...
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