#Women scholars in Classics

[jeannereames]

Hello, I hope you're well :D I have some questions related to Olympias.

Was she "de facto leader of Macedonia" as it says on wikipedia? She was also regent for her cousin Eacides, and for a few months also regent on behalf of Alexander IV?

I’ve actually written a fair number of entries on Olympias. But in most, I refer to THE leading authority on her life: Elizabeth D. Carney. The number of articles (and books) this woman has written is a just a little scary!

If you are interested in Olympias, ignore everything on the internet (even me) and go and buy Beth’s book: Olympias: Mother of Alexander the Great. It’s been out a while, so you can probably find it used at a fair price, or find it in a library, especially a university library. If you can’t find it or afford to buy it, ask the library to get it for you via “interlibrary loan.”

Bonus. She’s easy to read, has a very good narrative style (imo). And yes, when she gives lectures, she talks just like she writes. Ha. (Not all authors do.) When I’m reading Beth’s stuff, I can almost always “hear” her voice in my head, amusingly.

Anyway, just start there; she will answer every question you have, and some you never would have thought of. Very rarely can I give such a singular “Go read this” suggestion as with Beth’s book on Olympias. She has several other good ones, including on Macedonian women generally, and on Eurydike, Philip II’s mother (e.g., ATG’s grandmother).

Now, as for my own posts on Olympias, here are some. I mention her quite frequently (as a search of “asks” + “Olympias” will show), but these are some of the longer ones.

Olympias’s role in Macedonia was complicated, and she was not de facto leader except in some respects, especially as it involved religion. When it came to war, and politics, that was Antipatros. That may be one reason Olympias eventually retreated to Epiros later in Alexander’s campaign, where she had more influence. But again, Beth’s book is much better about explaining all of that.

How Old Was Olympias When She Married Philip? A general post on Olympias herself and her background, that should help contextualize where she came from and what expectations she may have had, for her role as Philip’s 4th or 5th wife.

Olympias’s Relationships with Philip’s Other Wives. This discusses dynamics in a polygamous household like Macedonia.

Did Philip and Alexander of Epiros Have an Affair? While this is more about Olympias’s younger brother, it addresses, again, family dynamics in Epiros and Olympias’s role at the court (both courts).

Finally, a pair of posts on Philip’s murder, and Alexander and Olympias’s (non-)role in it. IMO.

Who Killed Philip of Macedon?

Did Alexander and Hephaistion (and Olympias) Know about the Plot?

Hope all this helps!

[peemil]

oh come on man

[oh-dear-so-queer]

Elizabeth Carter, the classical scholar and translator of the Greek poet Epictetus, called Catherine Talbot 'my passion, I think of her all the day, dream of her all the night and one way or another introduce her into every subject I talk of.'

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[probablyasocialecologist]

Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered. Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth. The Spartans were at best tactically and strategically uncreative. Tactically, Sparta employed the phalanx, a close-order shield and spear formation. But while elements of the hoplite phalanx are often presented in popular culture as uniquely Spartan, the formation and its equipment were common among the Greeks from at least the early fifth century, if not earlier. And beyond the phalanx, the Spartans were not innovators, slow to experiment with new tactics, combined arms, and naval operations. Instead, Spartan leaders consistently tried to solve their military problems with pitched hoplite battles. Spartan efforts to compel friendship by hoplite battle were particularly unsuccessful, as with the failed Spartan efforts to compel Corinth to rejoin the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League by force during the Corinthian War. Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats. But while Sparta’s military performance was merely mediocre, no better or worse than its Greek neighbors, Spartan politics makes it an exceptionally bad example for citizens or soldiers in a modern free society. Modern scholars continue to debate the degree to which ancient Sparta exercised a unique tyranny of the state over the lives of individual Spartan citizens. However, the Spartan citizenry represented only a tiny minority of people in Sparta, likely never more than 15 percent, including women of citizen status (who could not vote or hold office). Instead, the vast majority of people in Sparta, between 65 and 85 percent, were enslaved helots. (The remainder of the population was confined to Sparta’s bewildering array of noncitizen underclasses.) The figure is staggering, far higher than any other ancient Mediterranean state or, for instance, the antebellum American South, rightly termed a slave society with a third of its people enslaved.

[hopeless-eccentric]

disco elysium and the male gaze

spoilers for the game ending under the cut! this one's gonna be long, but bear with me, i promise it's interesting

ok ive been losing it about this game's conversation with gazing in detective fiction for WEEKS and ill do my best to quickly summarize it (again, quick credentials, i did an undergrad thesis on detective fiction with a focus on hard-boiled genre and gender/sexuality)

in short, classical detective fiction (especially hard-boiled, which granted, disco elysium is NOT, though it's referenced often), there's a constant interplay between the ideas of knowledge/gazing and power, as well as power and gender. Looking, deducing, and investigating are highly gendered (male) acts that emasculate or feminize what they look at. the goal is essentially for the gender-transgressive killer (often a woman or man who needs to be punished for killing, and thus penetrating other men) to be "fixed" through gendered punishment or "removed from society," either by killing or jailing them

so ideally for these fictions, a man (the "body in the study," to use scholar kathleen gregory klein's phrase) has been Known About and killed/penetrated by the bad guy. the detective has to fix this by removing the perpetrator's agency through the penetrative gaze and power of the State, in short, emasculating them back into their place

if this feels like a weirdly erotic way to describe detective fiction, that's because it's WEIRDLY EROTIC! theres a history of the "corrective" violence against gender-transgressive women in these fictions being highly sexualized, though often these obsessions with controlling gender-transgressors bodily are a little more repressed (joy palmer's article tracing bodies: gender, genre and forensic detective fiction does a really nice job summing it up and expanding on klein's habeas corpus: feminism and detective fiction, which was the first work to note these patterns)

so what instantly struck me about disco elysium was that 1) the game punishes you for abusing police power against and taking autonomy from queer women 2) instead of being a pathetic, embarassing thing that needs to be corrected, the "emasculated" corpse is treated tenderly, noting the eroticism of autopsy which Palmer raises, and 3) there's a character who behaves exactly like The Detective in terms of gazing at women, emasculating men, and controlling women's bodies and sexualities: the deserter

so breaking things down in an internet-friendly numbered list--

first, the game is actively harder/full of more meaningless, haunting tragedy if you arrest klaasje or break ruby's machine. mechanically, you're punished for using police power to control and punish queer women. even though the classic "femme fatale" is often a cisheterosexual woman, her transgressing gender boundaries (often being a "maneater," having agent sexuality, harming men, often in a phallic manner, etc) marks her as queercoded in a way i really appreciate the game embracing in its more femme fataleish characters. you get the option to Gaze at and Know About women suspects, but the game will NOT make it easy for you

second, the game breaks the idea that the body's murder is a shameful act of gender/sexual transgression that needs to be fixed. the body's objectification (even by a couple of traumatized pre-teens) is treated as a tragedy, and the game does everything it can to humanize lely, even if it humanizes him as a real piece of shit. the autopsy is tender, bordering on romantic/erotic, because the game is constantly trying to remind you that you are exploring a human being's body. the "failed" or "penetrated" man isn't untouchable, which instantly breaks the patriarchal structure of detective novels trying to stamp out unspeakable threats to patriarchy. the further penetration of his life and body by the strange, uncaring investigator figure is also treated as something which could be uncomfortably exploitative, but isn't because you're given the option to be delicate and loving. (i was reminded a lot of lay your sleeping head by michael nava, wherein the protagonist solves his lover's murder, which is portrayed as no less intimate than exploring his body in sex. great book btw)

third, the deserter. dros is everything the hard-boiled detective is meant to be: obsessed with an idealized past, a man out of time (this is more common in neo-noir fiction, including adaptations of a few novels referenced in the dick mullen book), angry at the world for its corruption, unable to escape it himself, and obsessed with gazing at and sexually punishing women. the only difference is that he doesnt work for the government. his matronym is especially ironic, a remnant of a more progressive ideology which has been abandoned in favor of misanthropy. hes become convinced of the same terrifying, comedically corrupt world described in classical detective fiction (read an iconic hard-boiled author's description of that here, at the start of part 7*)

it's such a rejection of the way gazing and patriarchy usually acts in detective fiction. if you gaze destructively, the game gets harder. it emphasizes the sexual connotation of gazing at murders and forces you to be gentle, while empowering the voice of the victim to ensure you treat him like a human, instead of a stock "failed man." the character who thinks and behaves like a detective is a paranoid, sick, elderly murderer who is treated as desperately needing help.

it's amazing stuff

also, if you can't access any of these articles, dm me and ill get you pdfs!

*this article has a lot of issues. dont take it as gospel. it actively contradicts itself like five times and a lot of really good writing has been done roasting it. Miranda Hickman's history of it is really good. that being said, the description of the kind of world the detective thinks he lives in is VERY accurate, even if Chandler describes it as if it's realism. im including it just because it's a famous enough article that it's had a major impact on how detective fiction is written/culturally thought of, and that part is verifiably true

[titleleaf]

side note: if you want to read some killer late 19th century weird fiction by a queer writer: run, do not walk, to Vernon Lee's Hauntings. Lee's queerness falls right in that valley where modern identity categories fail due to the complexity of gendered experience, and it doesn't seem useful to retroactively pronounce One Definitive Label for her life and experience-- she used a male pseudonym and embraced gender-nonconformity by the standards of her era, both in physical presentation and in her career; she had powerful romantic relationships and long term collaborations with women; she had a complex relationship to physical intimacy; she lived a generally offbeat independent life as a scholar and international traveler -- but holy fuck her supernatural fiction is a first-class treat and has a lot of queer valences. Curious phenomena surround a charismatic orphan girl as Italy's pagan Classical past perseveres into its heavily Catholic present; a visiting academic becomes enthralled to a long-dead Renaissance femme fatale; a super-normie-looking married couple manifest troubling echoes of their ancestral forebears in the presence of the artist hired to paint their portrait; an uptight classical musician is tormented by a long-dead CASTRATO SEX GHOST who exerts preternatural force to seduce or to kill through the power of his otherworldly voice. It fucking rules. And you can read that shit for free. Please do.

[monstercangirlofficial]

Recommending some of my favorite rap songs. As a latin american trans woman, I didn't grow up with rap, but I learned to listen to and appreciate it. These are some great songs I think everyone should hear, and hopefully add to their playlists. These are Spotify links, but you can find these songs elsewhere too. My favorites are in blue:

Pop Rap: She's a Bitch by Missy Elliot (1999); Comfortable (ft. Babyface) by Lil Wayne (2003); Savage (ft. Beyoncé) by Megan Thee Stallion (2020); Too Many Nights (ft. Don Toliver & Future) by Metro Boomin (2022); Never Lose Me (ft. SZA & Cardi B) by Flo Mili (2024)

Classic Rap: My Mic Sounds Nice by Salt-N-Pepa (1986); South Bronx by Boogie Down Productions (1987); Welcome To The Terrordome by Public Enemy (1990); Born and Raised In Compton by DJ Quik (1991); When In Love by MC Lyte (1991)

Gangsta Rap: Gimme the Loot by The Notorious B.I.G. (1994); Cloverland (ft. Botany Boyz) by DJ Screw (1996); The Art of Peer Pressure by Kendrick Lamar (2012); Norf Norf by Vince Staples (2015); Tear Gas (ft. Rick Ross & Lil Wayne) by Conway the Machine (2022)

G-Funk: Nuthin' But A "G" Thang (ft. Snoop Dogg) by Dr. Dre (1992); Funkdafied by Da Brat (1994); It's Supposed to Bubble by UGK (1994); Dusted 'N' Disgusted (ft. 2Pac, Mac Mall & Spice 1) by E-40 (1995); Can't C Me by 2Pac (1996)

Conscious Rap: Proletariat Blues by Blue Scholars (2006); 4 Your Eyez Only by J. Cole (2016); Blood of the Fang by clipping. (2019); Iman (ft. SiR & JID) by Rapsody (2019); I Love You, I Hate You by Little Simz (2021)

Abstract Rap: Accordion by Madvillain (MF DOOM & Madlib) (2000); Mural by Lupe Fiasco (2015); The Punishment of Sisyphus by Hermit and the Recluse (Ka & Animoss) (2018); Magician (Suture) by Milo (2017); Arugula by Junglepussy (2020)

Jazz Rap: Jazz (We've Got) by A Tribe Called Quest (1991); 93 'Til Infinity by Souls Of Mischief (1993); The World Is Yours by Nas (1994); Yesterday by Noname (2016); Live! from the Kitchen Table (ft. Ghais Guevara) by McKinley Dixon (2023)

Trap: Ridin' N' Da Chevy by Three Six Mafia (1999); Love Don't Live (U Abandoned Me) by Gangsta Boo (2001); Kay Kay by Chief Keef (2012); Digits by Young Thug (2016); Poppin by Rico Nasty (2017)

Experimental Rap: Spiritual Healing by dälek (2002); Persistence by Lil Ugly Mane (2015); Ain't It Funny by Danny Brown (2016); Thug Tears by JPEGMAFIA (2018); Superman That by Injury Reserve (2021)

I strongly recommend checking out other songs by these artists, the albums these songs are from, more songs from these genres and others I didn't include, and to explore everything hip hop has to offer (especially hip hop made by women). Feel free to add any artists and songs I (obviously) missed, that you think deserve more love and recognition, particularly independent music. Enjoy!

[city-of-ladies]

Queen Insu (1437–1504), also known as Queen Sohye, was a shrewd political figure of the Joseon dynasty and Korea’s first female author.

A scholarly lady

Born and raised in the capital, Insu was likely taught Confucian moral principles from an early age. Coming from a family with a strong scholarly tradition and ties to the royal court, she was immersed in an environment of learning. Fluent in Chinese, Korean, and Sanskrit, and well-versed in literary classics, her education was exceptional for a woman of her time. She likely learned alongside her brothers.

At around 15, she married Crown Prince Uigyeong, and her father-in-law, King Sejo, praised her as a filial daughter.

Widowhood and regency

Insu’s life took a dramatic turn when she became a widow at just 19. Her husband, who had never ascended the throne, left her with three young children. After King Sejo’s death, his son Yejong briefly ruled but also passed away. In 1469, Insu’s second son, Seongjong, was chosen as king by her mother-in-law, Queen Jeonghui. The following year, her late husband was posthumously enshrined as king, and Insu received the title of Queen Insu.

Initially, Queen Jeonghui, was offered the regency but hesitated, suggesting Insu take the role instead. Though Jeonghui ultimately accepted, she lacked Insu's knowledge of classical Chinese. Insu, with her exceptional education and powerful family connections, became a key figure at court, wielding significant influence. While she didn’t hold an official position, she likely co-ruled with Jeonghui, assisting in crucial state decisions.

The Naehun

It was during this period that Insu authored the Naehun (Instructions for Women), establishing herself as Korea’s first female writer. This conduct manual outlined how women should behave according to Confucian ideals, emphasizing chastity, discretion, gentle speech, and etiquette.

Insu advocated for female education, arguing that it reinforced moral integrity and prepared women for their roles as wives and mothers. She criticized the trend of teaching daughters only poetry and music. However, she maintained that women’s roles should remain advisory and supportive.

The Naehun may also have served a political purpose, legitimating her mother-in-law's regency by citing examples of capable Chinese empresses. It reinforced the idea that women could govern wisely. Insu was thus also able to empower herself and present herself as a matriarch.

Queen mother

When Jeonghui’s regency ended in 1477, Insu continued to hold an honored position as the king’s mother. A devoted supporter of Buddhism, she argued against suppressing the religion, fearing it would lead to public unrest. In 1492, she spoke out against excluding commoners from monastic life and taught her five grandsons Buddhist and Confucian texts, which she recited from memory.

However, family tensions escalated when Queen Yun, King Seongjong’s consort, physically attacked him, leaving scars on his face. Insu took decisive action, first sending Queen Yun back to her family, then ordering her execution by poison.

The ascension of Insu’s grandson, Yeonsangun, in 1494 marked a dark chapter in her life. Yeonsangun, a violent and tyrannical ruler, was Queen Yun’s son. Upon discovering the truth about his mother’s death, he directed his fury at Insu. In 1504, Yeonsangun attacked his grandmother, leading to her death on May 11 at the palace. She was buried in a tomb that symbolically outranked her husband’s.

Enjoyed this post? You can support me on Ko-fi!

Further reading

Duncan John, “The Naehun and the politics of Gender”, in: Kim-Renaud Young-Key, Creative Women of Korea The Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Centuries

Kang Jae-un,  The Land of Scholars Two Thousand Years of Korean Confucianism

Park Si Nae, “Re-reading Queen Sohye's Naehun”

Pae Yong-Yi, Women in Korean History

[motogp-museum]

do u know why and when marc stopped using this ant design

and started using this one?

the second one is good but the first one is iconic in some sense

Hi!!! Thanks for the ask! Agreed. the first one is soooo cute.

So i don't have an exact answer for either of those questions (so scholars weigh in) but i will share what i do know on the topic.

So! In the context of when Marc stopped using the cartoon ant design, he actually didn't!

He just doesn't use it as much. Not sure why. If i had to hazard a guess, I think maybe he thinks it's a little young or cute for him. This is based on the fact that the march he did decide to use it for is mainly for kids or for women (I don't subscribe to clothing having a gender, but that's what it's marketed under). Link to his website

And as for when Marc first started using the ant outline design, I don't know exactly, but I do know that for most of 2012 he switched between his boring ass striped one and the classic blue and red ant one (and I don't remember an ant helmet before that, but I could be totally wrong). Neither of which had the cartoon ant on them I don't think. BUT when he won the championship in 2012 I remember he had a gold ant helmet with the cartoon ant. Let me find a pic.

I cropped it so you can kinda see. (It's blurry but you get the idea) X X

and in 2012 he also had the iconic white ant test livery. Y'all know the one. Where he had the cartoon on his leathers and the ant on his helmet. You will be missed, white ant Marc. X

So he did, and still does, use both design. I think he just grew to prefer the outline one more.

Oh! And as for when he started using the outline one more for merch, also don't know (i am not a scholar rip) but I do know that when I was making my tag headers, his cap had the outline ant on it and that was 2015. (idk why I remember that) X

Anyway! did i answer your question? absolutely not. But here are some Marc pictures. Enjoy!

[sagelasters]

𓇼 Metaphysical philosophers, connection to the mind.

Anne Conway 

Lady Anne Conway was one of the few female philosophers in the seventeenth-century and notable for her legacy in STEM. Her work consisted of the three layer hierarchy, in which she classified them as ‘species', Anne believed that although all creatures are born with a body, the spirit/soul/mind is better and has the possibility to be perfect like ‘God’. She rejects the material world and explains that suffering is a part of spiritual recovery. All creatures have the potential to be ‘perfect’, but nowhere near the perfection of ‘God’, she stated. The context of ‘God’ here can be interpreted in a different lens, it doesn’t necessarily entail religions. The context of so-called creatures are human beings limited by the laws of our Earthly realm. ‘God’ however are the ones who broke free, it is the limitless consciousness, it is the ego. 

Gargi Vachaknavi

Gargi Vachaknavi is a notable Vedic scholar and daughter of sage Vachaknu, she explores the knowledge of metaphysics and what was beyond the body. Gargi explains the journey of ‘koham’ (Who AM I?) and that the inquisitive mind aids us in the revolution of finding ‘soham’ (I AM). She challenged the notions of existence by daring to ask challenging questions like, what was the ‘woven, warp and woof’? Referring to what is beyond human understanding of the world beyond the sky and earth. It is notable that Hinduism seems to be the few religions where divine knowledge can be passed to both men and women equally. Although there is sadly a lack of English source materials, Gargi’s philosophy revolves around the fundamental ontology of the world. 

Plato

Plato is one of the oldest philosophers during the Classical era in Ancient Greece. He is a big believer in Dualism, separating the body and mind into two substances (the mind can live without the body even after death). His most famous theory is allegory of the cave where prisoners trapped in a cave believed that the shadows on the wall were their reality, the prisoners regarded the cave as true and nothing else outside of it exists. Eventually, one of the prisoners steps outside and is faced with true reality or enlightenment. The prisoner returned to the cave and tried to tell his peers, only to meet with hostility because everything they’ve known their entire life was false. The lesson of his allegory was the escape from ignorance, one must question every assumption they have about the reality they call ‘real’. Plato believed that reality is created by the mind. 

Hypatia of Alexandria 

Hypatia was a renowned astronomer, mathematician, hellenist, and philosopher in the Classical era of the Roman Empire. Most of her work did not survive through the test of time, but she was a strong believer in Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism was coined from Plato’s Platonic theory that argues that the world which we experience is only a copy of an ideal reality in which lies beyond our material world. Overall, Neoplatonists believed that happiness and prosperity can exist without an afterlife. Hypatia’s belief in Neoplatonism drove her to seek knowledge in mathematics and astronomy.  

[whencyclopedia]

Fatima Al-Fihri and Al-Qarawiyyin University

Fatima Al-Fihri (c. 800-880) was a Muslim woman, scholar and philanthropist who is credited with founding the world’s oldest, continuously running university during the 9th century: the University of Al-Qarawiyyin, located in Fez in Morocco.

Born in Tunisia in the city of Qairouan (Kairouan), after which she named the mosque and educational institution that would later become a leading centre of intellectual exchange, Fatima Al-Fihri migrated with her family to the city of Fez, located along the north-western coast Morocco, as a young adult. During the 9th century the city of Fez grew into a thriving cosmopolitan centre of commerce, culture, scholarship and trade. It reached its apex as an intellectual, cultural and trade epicentre during the 13-14th centuries, while under the rule of the Berber Marinid Dynasty (1248-1465).

Qarawiyyin University

Abdel Hassouni (CC BY-SA)

According to the historical chronical Rawd al-Qirtas (The Garden of Paper) written during the 14th century by Ibn Abi Zar (d. 1315), Fatima’s father, Muhammad al-Fihri al-Qayrawwani, was a successful Arab merchant, who hailed from the tribe of Quraysh (a famous Bedouin tribe that used to live in Mecca). Although not born into riches, Fatima and her sister Mariam inherited a vast fortune when her husband, brother and husband all died within a short time span.

Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque (Jami' al-Qarawiyyin)

Uninterested in commerce and the accumulation of wealth, both sisters chose to invest instead in sadaqah – the Islamic idea of pious charity. Both used their inheritance to build mosques and schools in Fez. Mariam built the Al-Andalus Mosque, while Fatima built the Al- Qarawiyyin Mosque complex, which included a madrasa; madrasa is an Arabic word that refers to any kind of educational institution –both secular and religious, elementary or secondary. In the Muslim world, mosques often became community centres that were utilised not only for religious purposes, but also for social gatherings, charitable services, educational classrooms, market places, and even political rallies.

Fatima first purchased a plot of prime real estate, near the Suq al-'Attarin or Spice Market, in the centre of the city of Fez. On the first day of Ramadan in 859 she, along with her sister, laid the foundation for the mosque and adjacent madrasa – perhaps unaware at that time that it would become the world’s first degree granting university; or perhaps she knew it all along. Fatima named the mosque after her birthplace, the city of Qairouan in Tunisa. Qarawiyyin means "belonging to the people of Qairouan."

The architectural design and layout of Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque was ambitious to say the least. Fatima employed the most skilled engineers and craftsmen of the times, and used materials of the highest quality. Following classical Islamic architectural layout for a mosque complex, Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque included a large ceramic-tiled courtyard that housed a fountain basin for the faithful to perform their ablutions before prayer. A customary arcade both frames the courtyard and ventilates the interior spaces, which lead to the large prayer hall. In addition to the tall minaret from which a muezzin would call the believers to prayer, the mosque also housed a library and separate praying quarters for women. In addition to the tall minaret from which a muezzin would call the believers to prayer, the mosque also housed a library and separate praying quarters for women.

Figure of Fatima Al-Fihri from the Jordan Museum

Anass Sedrati (CC BY-SA)

Historians believe it took about two years, from 857 to 859, to construct the main buildings of the Al- Qarawiyyin Mosque, under the patronage of Fatima, who it is said, oversaw every detail of architecture and craftsmanship herself. Between 1134 and 1143, the Almoravid ruler, Sultan 'Ali ben Yusuf further expanded the mosque complex to its current size. Sa'did Sultan 'Abdallah ibn al-Shaikh added additional fountains and blue tiles to the courtyard between 1606 and 1623.

Some scholars suggest that some teaching and instruction probably took place at al-Qarawiyyin Mosque from a very early period  or from its beginning. Major mosques in the early Islamic period were typically multi-functional buildings where teaching and education took place alongside other religious and civic activities. From its very early days, the mosque housed a neighbourhood madrasa. Over time, the Qarawiyyin madrasa developed into an institution of higher learning that attracted famous scholars from all over the Muslim world, and later even from medieval Europe.

Continue reading...

[foursaints]

helllo! u sometimes talk about ur mutuals circle and i was just wondering would u like to namedrop them? cos i think i already follow some of them but i feel like they probably all have very correct opinions and good taste and would like to follow them

oh i would love nothing more than to namedrop. in fact i will make you an index of what i admire about them (readmore for length)

@fernhelm <- leading scholar on the black sisters, arthuriana, and the overlap between marauders & ancient greek classicism. we are neighbors and childhood friends irl but that's unrelated

@jewishregulus <- THE regulus black understander & originator of the carrow twins. half of everything i say is paraphrased from the essay length saintsivy dms

@carniferous <- THE james potter understander & creator of nuanced tenderness and melancholy & one of my favorite fic authors before we became friends.... read their theatre-based fic NOWW

@sixlane <- i passed the Premiere Bartylily Understander hat to lane long ago.... we all definitely already know lane of "get him back (read on ao3)" fame but it bears repeating. one of the few fic authors who i stalk for updates. but i also stalk for anon responses because they are always uniquely thought-out and hilarious

@itsjaywalkers <- LAURIEE is one of the best people on here & i scroll their blog like the morning news. the vibe on there is always so fresh and fun and kind and playful (and occasionally searingly tragic or erotic). THE james potter enjoyer on this website. this is the other fic author who i stalk for updates.....

@quillkiller <- jen was my first mutual on here 🥺 (hi jen). our most beautiful resource for Bellatrix Black enjoyment and nuanced discussion of feminist theory. i consider them half of the powerduo of Rarepair Creation on this site (hi kara) that has given us bangers like effiebarty and regtunia and the most searing wlw fic

@static-radio-ao3 <- im embarrassed to talk to mil because their jegulus fic is just genuinely that good. its crazy how every single one reads like a fully fleshed-out romcom novel i would read in one sitting at barnes & noble. another barty understander i daresay

@sugarsnappeases <- THE OTHER HALF OF THE RAREPAIR BUREAU. kara's microfics hit me like 9/11 every single time (that searing bella sirius-death character study? the BARTYLILY DRESS FIC?) and they are another lesbionic understander of women. when people say they want more marauders girls content they should just go to kara lmfaooo

@rottin6 <- can't talk about layla without offering my hand in marriage sorry. princess of the bartylilysphere i rather think... hottest most erotic microfics i've ever read in my life, thank god for the people who understand barty's Trashboy Dick on a cerebral level

@veryinnovative <- we all definitely already know ino but that's okay. probably divinely gifted to come up with the most unexpected & niche AUs that still manage to make perfect sense and hit every single time.

@moon-seas <- KAYY. my favorite artist on here hands-down. a true dirtbag barty understander & they produce the most stunning digital collage-work. a privilege to see

@sommerregenjuniluft <- now where would i be without lune's barty understanding... yes their jegulus microfic porn is masterful but WHAT ABOUT their ability to put barty in the strangest situations ever (he's an electrician?? a circus clown, now???) and have it integrate perfectly with his character. that's good writing babe!!!!

also you should follow @dracure @royalthorned @morsmortish and @katakosmos for more good rosekiller content. we don't talk but I admire from afar ......

[blueiscoool]

2,000-Year-Old Book About Roman Emperors Enters Bestseller Charts

The Lives of the Caesars, translated from Latin by The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland, details everything from ancient policy failures to sex scandals.

A gossipy account of the lives of Roman emperors has entered the bestseller charts – 2,000 years after it was written.

Sex scandals and foreign policy failures don’t only beleaguer the modern politician, it turns out: in the early second century, the scholar Suetonius chronicled the dramas of the first set of Roman emperors, and now, their indiscretions and eccentricities have been dug up in a new translation which is proving popular in bookshops.

The Lives of the Caesars, translated from Latin by The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland, made the Sunday Times hardback nonfiction chart this week. Publisher Penguin Classics said that the book is the first of their hardback nonfiction classics to appear on the list.

The book is a collection of 12 biographies covering the rule of Julius Caesar and the first 11 Roman emperors. On hearing that it was in the charts, Holland was “delighted for Suetonius, to see the lad is capable of getting on the bestseller list after two millennia”.

The book, published on 13 February, comes 18 months after ancient Rome became the centre of a major internet pop culture moment, when women began asking men how often they think about the Roman empire, and posting their responses online.

Holland cites several reasons for the continued fascination. Rome has “always” been the ancient civilisation that people in Britain and the west have been most interested in, partly because Britain was part of the Roman empire, and the English alphabet is Latin. “We feel closer to the Romans, perhaps, than we do to the Egyptians or the Assyrians.”

However, “it’s also partly because our understanding of power derives from Rome more than anywhere else”. The US “Republican system was modelled on that of ancient Rome, but the [Roman] Republic ended up becoming an autocracy, and so in America, there’s always been this anxiety that a Republican system of government may end up an autocracy, and I guess that at the moment, that anxiety has a particular salience.”

Suetonius wrote The Lives of the Caesars, commonly known as The Twelve Caesars, in the early second century AD during the reign of Hadrian. “I think the reason that it’s always been popular is the fact that it is full of the most sensational gossip. It is kind of ancient Rome’s Popbitch. It is full of scandal, and extraordinary detail, but it is also very psychologically astute,” says Holland. “It has the quality of a very highbrow gossip column.”

“Had there been bestseller lists in second-century Rome, Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars would undoubtedly have been on them,” said Stuart Proffitt, publishing director at Penguin Press.

Holland says the reach of The Rest Is History will have helped the book’s sales. The podcast released four episodes on Suetonius and the same month had 17.5m downloads.

He compared the process of translating Suetonius’ work to a marriage. “You spend a long time, a long period with someone who you think you’re going to enjoy the company of, so it’s always good to discover that actually you do.”

By Ella Creamer.

Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, commonly referred to as Suetonius (c. AD 69 – after AD 122), was a Roman historian who wrote during the early Imperial era of the Roman Empire. His most important surviving work is De vita Caesarum, commonly known in English as The Twelve Caesars, a set of biographies of 12 successive Roman rulers from Julius Caesar to Domitian. Other works by Suetonius concerned the daily life of Rome, politics, oratory, and the lives of famous writers, including poets, historians, and grammarians. A few of these books have partially survived, but many have been lost.

[mitigatedchaos]

You Won't "Beat Trump at His Own Game"

Post for July 8, 2024 5,500 words, 25 mins

[ @morlock-holmes ]

Like, can you guys imagine Donald Trump ever admitting that he lost a debate? Let alone imagine his party *withdrawing him as nominee* because of it? And we're going to beat him at his own game by, uh, doing literally the exact opposite of his game?

[ mitigatedchaos ]

Your plan is to beat Trump by being better at being Trump than Trump is? Damn, son. You got a Texas oil baron lined up or something?

-★-

I watched the first hour of the debate. At one point the moderator asked Trump about abortion. As the Republican candidate, this is a tricky question for him, since evangelical voters would like abortion banned in most cases (and thus presumably every state). Trump then argued that he was leaving it up to the states, and the states would decide. He says that he agrees that the abortion pill should be legal, and agrees with the court ruling in favor of it, and that he supports the exceptions for rape, incest, and health of the mother. Further, he's against third trimester and 'post-birth abortion.'

While banning most first trimester abortion only has 38% support, banning most third trimester abortion has 80% supermajority support. The views of the median voter are in tension: they don't want to force women to have babies they don't want, but they also don't want to kill babies.

Biden stumbles in his delivery of his canned line in response, which appeared to be based on the idea that strict limits on abortion access would de facto nullify the exceptions.

Democrats have repeatedly lied about abortion. Republicans have repeatedly lied about abortion. The whole argument about 'after-birth' abortions appears to be based on political fencing with bills, which Democrats also do. (Something like the classic, "Oh, sure, it's illegal, but will you make it super double illegal? Oh, you won't? That means you support it, then.")

(I should note, at the time, I wrote, "I don't think Americans should trust a single word either of these guys is saying.")

But later, Biden trips over Roe v. Wade and the three trimesters to the point that it's unclear just what the hell he means.

The main CNN video doesn't support comments, but there's a clip that does. The top comment?

we're fucked as a nation

In my opinion, these comments overall agree with my post...

Man, both of these men are so old and tired, though Biden is the older and tireder of the two. ... This guy's like a cat with 6 months to live.

It isn't that Biden "lost" the debate, as in he morally failed to engage in enough preparation. The man is simply too old; no amount of preparation would have worked.

-★-

With the abortion argument, we get a good example of Trump's pattern of exaggeration: "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states. Every legal scholar, all over the world. The most respected."

There was a substantive debate about this, and in fact there were a number of legal scholars that believed that the issue was, on a legal basis, on shaky ground. This was a common argument over the past two decades. There was not a complete, unanimous consensus.

People talk about Trump lying a lot. For a lot of that, I think they have this sort of thing in mind, but I don't take it all that seriously. This is salesman lying. He is trying to sell you a Trump steak.

Each message has a [social] component and a [content] component. Trump is weighting the [content] component lower, making it less accurate, but the [social] component lacks tactical depth.

I think this gets into some sort of personality conflict.

All politicians lie. They put on a nice suit, tell you some flowery speech, and then go bomb some country in the middle east. Obama was a genius at public speaking, like Hollywood President tier, but the drone war continued.

So, to make up an example (that's less controversial), a regular politician will start talking about "the human dignity" of guys that break into cars, or something, and the initial language will be quite empathetic. But rather than going where this is supposed to go, and improving the quality and safety of the prisons, they'll get you to agree to this nice-sounding language as part of a multi-step maneuver, and then they won't fix the prisons, and they won't properly rehabilitate the guys that break into the cars, and they'll just... release them, to break into your car.

So if someone starts talking about "human dignity," I start looking for where they hid the knife. (I also consider their personal record; I'm willing to entertain that they're serious, but I have to see the evidence of pragmatism first.)

Trump comes in and he starts talking about how, "All the legal scholars agree with me, all over the world. The most prestigious." This translates to, "I'm popular. I make great decisions. Vote for me."

It's so crass that it has a tactical depth of like, one. It's not part of some long and complicated chain. There is no sophisticated ideological permission structure being setup. He's not trying to redefine the language. There is no second maneuver.

So to me, this feels safe.

I'm not expecting to be attacked from some high-level social plane or whatever, so I can relax. This man is a salesman. A lot of what he says is bullshit, but he just wants to sell me something.

I know it's bullshit. He knows it's bullshit. He knows I know it's bullshit. But this deception is so unsophisticated that it loops back around to being somewhat honest, or even friendly. (It's like if you had a mandatory prison gang fight, and technically, they have to "fight" you, but they're not really trying.) Obviously it results in a lower rate of information transmission, though. (What will he actually do? It can be hard to say.)

This is not the same as "lock her up," from Trump's 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. That was concerning, and in fact in the 2016 election I voted for Clinton. But then, he didn't follow through on that.

-★-

Thinking from the other direction, why would someone find the general, "we have the best cows," approach to be disconcerting rather than just annoying? (The Wall was kinda also like that. It's just a big, dumb object.)

Well, if you're used to everything having three layers of social misdirection in order to protect everyone's reputations and social position, and using this to demonstrate loyalty to others, maybe the crass rhetoric makes it sound like anything could be up for sale, with enough votes.

So you're supposed to say the stuff that your network socially agree sounds nice, and if you aren't saying the stuff, that might mean you're planning to coordinate to do something bad. (Why aren't you following the network? Do you think you're better than other people? Sounds like you might be planning to subordinate others.)

But the actual content of the messages doesn't get properly evaluated.

To quote some swing voters from the famous Reddit "sanewashing" post:

Only one participant here agrees we should "defund the police." One woman says "That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said." 50% of people here say they think Biden was privately sympathetic to the position. We are explaining the actual policies behind defund the police. One woman interrupts "that is not what defund the police means, I'm sorry. It means they want to defund the police." "I didn't like being lied to about this over and over again" says another woman. "Don't try and tell word don't mean what they say" she continues. Rest of group nodding heads.

During the early part of the 2014-2022 era, when we had the feminist push, there was a term called "mansplaining," intended to mean roughly "a men condescendingly explaining things to a woman."

In discussion with each other, men may try to assess who is the most knowledgeable or sharpest (in order to lead the discussion), so they may throw a piece of information out there like it's a tennis ball, and they expect you to hit it back. So a man might tell a woman about a book that she wrote, and then expect her to respond with some insight about the passage he was discussing.

From what I've seen, among men this is social statusy, but it's not like, hardcore. From some women, we got tweets along the lines of, "How dare he lecture me about my own book! Does he think he knows better than me about the book I wrote myself?!" It's basically mismatched systems of etiquette. (An autistic woman might have powered through and info dumped about the book to the man anyway until he got tired of the topic, and perceived no insult.)

This was a triple failure.

First, the men did not realize that the women (this kind of woman) have different discursive norms from men, and adapt in a way that makes them feel more comfortable in mixed spaces.

Second, the women did not realize that this was not a male plot to subordinate women. Feminists connected this etiquette mismatch to a larger ideological construct ("patriarchy"). Some of them are probably still angry to this day.

Third, the two groups largely did not reach a mutual understanding on this issue, except for a few honest people (and people less prone to viewing the opposite sex adversarially) in small spaces, coming into maturity.

Which is to say, in this clash of norms, the view based on multiple layers of social indirection as a form of politeness may be socially astute within its own culture, but may be socially maladapted outside of that culture.

Because these social norms are social, they are a product of a local social equilibrium rather than a more universalist analysis, which in practice makes them more particular. Compare economic or scientific ideas, which, while they exist in a social context, have a non-social framework for discovery and resolution.

I don't find it that difficult to understand the median voter wanting first trimester abortion to be legal and third trimester abortion to be illegal.

In the same way, to the median voter and not just conservatives, a slogan like "defund the police" means "defund the police." A lot of the more confrontational slogans produced by this process sound positively unhinged to outsiders - in a way that makes Donald Trump seem normal by comparison.

-★-

There are a good number of right-wing grifters who are out there regularly lying. I don't post much about them, because they just aren't that interesting. The field of politics is constantly shifting, anyway.

But I think it's worth considering how Democrats got into this situation.

To pick another Trump example, some readers may have seen this 2018 video of Trump telling Germany they're too dependent on imported Russian natural gas, and the German delegation smiling at him.

I vaguely recall that this was part of a Trump push to sell more liquefied natural gas from the US to the Europeans.

Of course, Russia did expand their war with Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Germany was importing 55% of their natural gas from Russia.

Brookings interviewed some economists about how the results went down. Russia cut down on gas supplies into Europe in 2021, reducing the amount of stored gas in Germany by the expansion of the war in early 2022. They raised and lowered the amount of gas coming in to Germany until the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline in mid 2022.

So it's likely that Putin's Russia were, in fact, trying to gain leverage over Germany. Estimates from industry CEOs predicted a major recession.

The economists predicted that the situation would be expensive, but manageable, and the damage to Germany's economy was less than expected. Why?

First, the demand for gas was not perfectly inelastic. The dire predictions were based on gas as a bottleneck causing a cascade of missing production inputs ("for want of a bolt, the bulldozer is lost; for want of a bulldozer, the factory is lost; for want of a factory..." one might say). It turned out that it was possible to substitute at multiple points in the production process, so more gas-intensive components could be imported if needed. (As the war was in Ukraine, Germany was not blockaded.)

Second, gas was imported from other sources, including Norway... and liquefied natural gas from the US. (A second source claims that 5-6% of the gas is still coming from Russia.)

Third, the disruption was already on the horizon from 2021, so it was easier to coordinate actors.

So was Trump right? Was he wrong?

Germany was getting about 26% of its energy from natural gas in 2021. If 55% of that is from Russia, that makes for about 14% of Germany's energy supply, not including imported Russian oil. As of 2014, Russian troops were already occupying Crimea.

What I want to argue is that, less than right or wrong, "Getting ≥14% of your energy from a powerful geopolitical rival, particularly one currently engaged in a military occupation just two countries away, gives them potential leverage, and this makes it risky," is obvious.

Going, "Haha, look at this ignorant buffoon who thinks that Putin might exploit providing us with 1/8th of our energy for leverage," is just... It's cringe.

Germany had to reactivate their coal power plants to deal with the energy crisis, but they still had coal power plants to reactivate. The long-term storage problem for renewables hasn't been resolved yet. If they had an energy economy that was 60% natural gas, 40% renewables, and 0% nuclear, they'd be in an even worse spot.

(Lately it looks like people are making a stab at sucking CO2 out of the air and converting it to fuel. Will that be online as a replacement in 2030? That's harder to say. It would be fortunate, because combustible fuels don't have the same security concerns as fission power.)

-★-

Anyhow, that was all background.

How did Democrats get into this mess?

Well, obviously Democrats and left-leaning people in the media made a huge deal of Trump as the exception, Trump as the risk, Trump as would-be dictator, Trump as the erosion of norms, and so on. And of course, the Covid-19 pandemic landed on Trump's term and was very abnormal.

The point of running Joe Biden, from the perspective of the median voter, was a "return to normalcy." This is what voters were telling them by picking the pre-Trump Vice President from Obama's term.

After Trump got in and stopped caring about pursuing Hillary Clinton, I found it hard to buy the idea of Trump as an emergency.

Democrats always seemed to use "Trump is an emergency" as an excuse to behave in worse ways. For example, Democrats argued that protests against lockdowns of community centers like churches were too dangerous to be allowed due to the risk of spreading the virus, but then argued that nation-wide race riots needed to be allowed and that this was the position of 'science' as an institution.

Did the race riots accomplish anything of value? No. The opportunity for normal police reform was squandered on braindead slogans like "Defund the Police," which swing voters think are insane. There was a significant increase in homicide, and this is before accounting for significantly-improved trauma surgery since 1990. If LA is any indication, most of the victims of the increase in homicide were black and hispanic.

They complained constantly about Trump eroding institutional norms... and then eroded institutional norms. By 2022, trust in mass media among independents and Republicans collapsed to 27% and 14% respectively.

This is going to be a long-term problem; conspiracy theories are proliferating due to a lack of trust in sense-making institutions, and sense-making institutions have had their reputations shredded by wasteful partisan behavior that barely moved the needle electorally.

One way to assess how much someone values something is to ask what they're willing to give up to get it. Ask any Democrat on Twitter - what concessions are they willing to make to the rest of America to ensure Trump doesn't get back into office? The answer is none.

A "return to normalcy" would mean using the racial identitarians as expendable shock troops and then dropping them after the election, not getting shut down by the courts for doing "race conscious" policy.

The administration would quietly make changes to shore up the practical (not mere messaging) legitimacy of the institutions in order to cover for the spent legitimacy from the Trump era and run a boring administration focused on policies with supermajority support.

So now Democrats are the weird theater kids, and Trump is the normal guy. (And he's already been President, so publishing a magazine cover calling him Hitler just comes off as hysterics.)

-★-

Why did this happen?

First, as the guy that won the election, Joe Biden is the primary guy with the political capital to reshape the Democratic coalition's priorities. In 2020, Joe Biden had the same problem he has in 2024: he's too old.

There is no Democrat strategic command to impose discipline on the coalition members. There are lots of factions all fighting each other to pursue policy that's aligned with their own interests rather than the national interest, and it's resulting in what I call a coalitional interest deadlock. (For a relatively uncontroversial example, Left-NIMBYs and boneheaded environmentalists oppose housing construction, while pro-immigrationists bring in millions of people... who, when they get here, would need housing. One of these two factions needs to lose.)

Nasty identitarian rhetoric requires no immediate material concessions from these factions, nor does it require any discipline, so we get nasty identitarian rhetoric that does not benefit the country in any way, and is not connected to positive programs (that would require actual work and limiting claims to what's realistic, which defeats the point).

Some of you are probably familiar with the idea of a "leveraged buyout." This is when a private equity firm buys a company with debt, and then typically put it on the balance sheet of the company they just bought out. A firm with too much debt is said to be "overleveraged."

The second problem is that Democrats are epistemically overleveraged. They are making too many bets based on incomplete information, and a lot of the assumptions they're making in the process are not accurate.

Some tech-related online right-wingers believed that mass schooling was having almost no effect on learning or performance, and that it was almost entirely just selecting for conscientiousness and intelligence.

Learning losses from online schooling during the pandemic showed that mass schooling was having an effect - by removing it.

However, in researching the literature on education shortly before the pandemic, I found that getting educational results beyond what schools were achieving was very difficult, and that many educational interventions would fade out. Charter schools only produced modestly better results (for about the same price), in a way I couldn't differentiate from selection effects on parents. (I did find that online charters performed horribly. Well, I guess that's one finding verified by a larger-scale experiment.)

It isn't a matter of funding. Baltimore schools are highly funded and get terrible results.

We lack means to convert funding into results.

(Roland Fryer reportedly managed to beat the average for one class, but as a sign of things to come, he got politically sidelined in 2019. Naturally, he's an economist.)

Line voter Democrats are likely to claim that sub-par US school results are due to underfunding. The condition of scientific institutions is not as bad as right-wingers think it is; researchers know that just blindly slapping more funding on to education won't work. However, the guys in between, the 'officers' of the Democratic coalition, are quite happy to leave the line voters in the dark.

They're probably patting themselves on the back, thinking, "I should leave out the most damaging information in order to protect the weak and marginalized," and then not accounting for the possibility that everyone else in their information chain is doing the same thing.

Because of this, we don't get a more serious conversation that would establish a better method to convert funding into results. (This applies to other domains as well. Public transit in the US is ruinously expensive to construct, particularly in CA and NYC. A "car tax" without the ability to practically construct public transit is just a hateful punishment.)

When a Democrat is talking about "beating Trump at his own game," for example, by pretending that Biden did OK at the debate, this is generally of the form, "we should be more aggressive, deceptive, and selfish."

The Democrats are already too deceptive. It's inhibiting their ability to govern effectively. The Democrats are already too aggressive. A number of the online right being read by Chris Rufo and Elon Musk were once self-identified liberals [1] who were driven away and radicalized by the hostile messaging (which was not connected to practical benefits for society, so this isn't "mere selfishness"). Democrats are already selfish enough; forgiving student debt without fixing the system to reduce the origin of that debt polls 30-40 approve-disapprove.

And for the debate itself...

Bro why do we have 70+ year old[s] running for office? Shouldn't we have someone at least young and more modern? This is like watching a retirement home cafeteria fight 😭

Do you think telling someone like that, "Biden didn't lose the debate," sounds, you know, hinged? At the very least, it certainly doesn't inspire trust or confidence.

-★-

A little while ago, collapsedsquid posted:

Seeing a lot of the "This Trump thing is because everyone was so unfair to Romney in 2012 and he lost" out there again and this is fucking abuser logic man, "Why did you make me hit you? If you'd only put away the dishes like I'd asked then this wouldn't have had to happen" shut the fuck up man.

I had been writing a draft response to this.

Basically, seriousness is both a substantive position and a rhetorical stance. The Bush administration undermined the rhetorical stance on the Republican side due to the Iraq War, which was mismanaged, and in which no nuclear weapons were found. (Some old chemical weapons were found, but not an actual development program.)

Throwing the line "binders full of women" at Mitt Romney didn't help, of course, but it's more like that faction of the Republican party failed to regain its footing.

During the Bush administration, there were comparisons of George Bush to Hitler (it showed up on protest signs, for instance).

In practice, the Bush administration were libcons. Looking at Afghanistan, a mountainous, dry, landlocked country that has a GDP per capita of around $500, they were neither 'anti-racist' enough to decide not to invade and respect the local rule of the Taliban (and their local cultural traditions), nor conventionally racist (or culturalist) enough to conclude that national development would be a tremendous challenge requiring a radical reorganization of Afghan society.

Utilitarianism is generally about maximizing "utility," or subjective positive experience, and assumes that this can be summed across individuals. For example, there is a utilitarian thought experiment in which a surgeon has one healthy patient and five sick patients. If he kills the healthy patient, then he can harvest the man's organs in order to save the five sick patients. (Yes, like in Rimworld.)

There are many problems with a naive utilitarian approach.

However, if we rotate the concept of utilitarianism, we get the idea of moral prices, and morality as something that can be traded off against other factors of production, such as land, labor, energy, capital, and so on. Morality is not like these other resources; immorality can incentivize more immorality. However, this provides us with a potential frame with which to view a more violent and exploitative past.

One way to view the situation is that a radical reorganization of Afghanistan would be morally intensive, not just financially draining.

For example, Afghanistan has a high rate of cousin marriage, which is not common in developed countries. Overriding that would mean prioritizing foreign marriage norms as superior, taking on epistemic debt as the relationship between marriage norms and democracy or economy is more correlative than rock-solid causative, and to the degree that Afghan people resist this change, enforcing it at gunpoint.

While Democratic voters of the era would joke about Republican-voting "rednecks" being cousin-married, the appetite for such a program likely did not exist.

Another way to view the situation is that, from the outside, the Bush administration believed that democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation, were simply what happens in the absence of dictatorship. This view legitimized American power and influence as simply the natural order asserting itself, and argued that asserting American influence was morally cheap.

If democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation are non-trivially the product of particular cultural norms and values, then American interventionism is much more morally expensive.

In either case, Trump represents a "correction" in reaction to the failed project of the Bush administration: conflict and oppression are still undesirable; bombs are morally expensive; borders are cheap.

-★-

As we know, the United States lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban. A joke emerged at the time:

"Now the Taliban have to govern Afghanistan."

Discussion in right-wing circles claims that the Taliban won by doing a better job of maintaining basic property rights and resolving disputes than the US-aligned forces did, despite being in a state of war with the US:

The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.

There were, reportedly, complaints from members of the Taliban after their victory, but it would seem that the Taliban were already governing Afghanistan.

Richard Hanania may be a troll, but he went through some Afghan War documents posted by the Washington Post, and I don't think he's making it up. It would seem that while the Taliban were governing Afghanistan, the US forces, well, weren't:

Six months after he was appointed, Bush didn't know who his top general in Afghanistan was, and didn't care. General McNeill had no guidance about what he should be doing in the country.

He has a whole long thread of this sort of thing. It reminds me of reading through the Wikipedia page on the Vietnam War many years after high school history, which made it sound like the US was quite adept with high-technology weapons, but failed to properly identify and manage the political source for the conflict.

Let's return to the student loan debt forgiveness issue.

A typical firm only has a profit margin of about 7-10%. A firm can keep going as long as it's breaking even, so even a low profit margin can still pay wages. However, if a firm is losing money, it will have to sell off assets or lay off employees, reducing its production capacity.

There is investment, in which we spend current production in order to increase or maintain future production, such as by building a factory. If we make a good investment, we'll get the production value back later. There is insurance, which involves moving risk around. For example, you are unlikely to be in a car accident most of the time, but if you have car insurance and you do get in an accident, the insurance company will pay for repair or replacement of your car. [2] This may make you more likely to buy a car in the first place, or more likely to structure your life around the assumption that you will have a car.

Governments can (in theory) spend a great deal on investment or insurance, but they can only spend a more limited amount on consumption spending.

For a college degree that pays for itself, government can loan money at a low interest rate, and the value will be paid back by the person who took the loan later.

For a college degree that doesn't pay for itself, someone has to supply the production that builds the buildings on the campus, fixes the water pipes, reloads the toilet paper in the bathrooms, and so on, and if that's not "the person taking the degree, but in the future," then it has to be someone else.

Someone like collapsedsquid might have the view, "I want the state to subsidize college education. Why should I pre-compromise and reduce my negotiating position?"

To expand on this, "Guarding the state treasury is the work of the right and of capital (business); why should I do their work for them?"

From this perspective, the role of the Democratic presidential candidate is to be the leader of America's left-leaning coalition, the blue team.

But the median voter or swing voter does not necessarily have this perspective. The median or swing voter is choosing between two candidates to lead the American enterprise.

The actual job is President of the United States.

If you win the War in Afghanistan, you have to govern Afghanistan. If you win the US presidential election, you have to govern the United States of America.

That's the prize. If you don't like it, don't run for office.

-★-

Nonetheless, this causes a tension. In order to become President as a Democrat, you first have to win the Democratic primary, which makes you effectively the leader of the Democratic party.

How do you deal with this?

That's "simple": split the issues.

A political coalition has a lot of people and those people have diverse interests. Representing them all at once is too difficult. Talking about them all at once is too difficult. Generalization of coalitional interests into a smaller, more manageable set of principles yields ideology.

Take the issues, and order them by how important they are to the functioning of the country, and how important they are for mainstream voters.

For the issues most important to mainstream voters, aim for a very broad coalition using very general principles. Pass legislation that has supermajority support in the polls, and be loud about it so that voters know what you've done for them lately.

For more niche issues that mainstream voters care less about, aim for a narrower coalition with narrower principles, to reward your base.

The second is the reward for the first. The median voter should be able to trust you on the things that he cares about, and where he doesn't trust you, it's on things he doesn't care about.

Core issues for the functioning of the country will seep into more generic voter dissatisfaction with things like inflation, so it's better to keep on top of those. Whether to be loud about it depends on whether the individual policy that's actually needed has good optics or not.

-★-

If you want to "beat Trump at his own game," you don't do so by talking about how America has the best steaks.

You identify his most important issues, and then you work out how to best steal them from him.

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[1] "They were elves, once." Extradeadjcb is probably the most prominent example, but it comes up for a number of them. I've written about this before, but ethnic conflict theory by one player creates an equilibrium more favorable to ethnic conflict theory by other players. Lefty Twitter users asked Razib Khan why he attended Extradeadjcb's natalism conference; he replied by asking where the left-wing natalism conference was. That's probably still 20 years out.

[2] It's more complicated than this.

[hypokeimena]

wait ur thesis sounds so interesting, I'm researching for funsies friendship and love a a broader topic (crazy how often people talk about merging and becoming one with their beloved). can you dox your thesis just a little? just the bibliography?

this isn't a thesis bib it's just for you (focus on friendship and romantic love; some other related topics useful for consideration). links are pulled from google scholar where possible (generally open access sources preferred). Most of these authors have also done other work on the topic(s) in question.

Moran, W. (1963): "The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy," in CBQ. (jstor) <- seminal

Leighton, S. (1982): "Aristotle and the Emotions," in Phronesis (jstor)

Roberts, R. (1989): "Aristotle on Virtues and Emotions," in Philosophical Studies (jstor)

Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator's Invisibility. (academia.edu)

Brenner, A. (1997). The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and ‘Sexuality’ in the Hebrew Bible. (publisher)

Ackerman, S. (2002): "The Personal Is Political: Covenantal and Affectionate Love ('āhēb, 'ahăbâ) in the Hebrew Bible," in Vetus Testamentum. (jstor)

Lapsley, J. (2003) "Feeling Our Way: Love for God in Deuteronomy," in CBQ (jstor)

Van Wolde, E. (2008): "Sentiments as culturally constructed emotions: anger and love in the Hebrew Bible," in Biblical Interpretation. (academia.edu)

Mirguet, F. (2016): "What is an “Emotion” in the Hebrew Bible? An Experience that Exceeds Most Contemporary Concepts," in Biblical Interpretation. (brill)

Fleming, I. (2016): "Political Favoritism in Saul’s Court: חפץ, נעם, and the Relationship between David and Jonathan," in JBL. (jstor)

Schweizer, I. (2016) "Making Equals: Classical Philia and Women's Friendship," in Feminist Studies. (jstor) <- couldn't find the article I was looking for online so take this one as a substitute

Akiyama, K. (2018): The Love of Neighbour in Ancient Judaism. (brill) <- could not find this one full text online but it's about how the understanding of whether a neighbor is "like you" or different from you impacts the emotion in question. it rocks.

Mermelstein, A. (2021): Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism: Community and Identity in Formation. (academia.edu)

Milstein, S. (2024): Editorial introduction "Translating Emotion," & Article "The Misleading Nature of »Love« and »Hate« in Biblical Translation," in HeBAI. (publisher) <- could not find the article open access anywhere but the introduction should be available and contains an overview.

Konstan, D (multiple):

"Introduction: Defining Emotions Historically," in Emotions across Cultures: Ancient China and Greece (ed. Konstan, 2022)

Friendship in the Classical World (1997) (doi) (archive.org)

Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (2006) (jstor) <- seminal

"Friendship and Patronage," in A Companion to Latin Literature (ed. Harrison) (2005) (doi) (wordpress)

"Before Jealousy," in Envy, Spite, and Jealousy: the Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece (eds. Konstan, Rutter, 2019) (publisher) (researchgate)

[loving-family-poll]

the bible stuff irritates me first because it's dull and secondly because the actually interesting incest did not make it into the polls smh. now could i have submitted this? sure. but i'm mostly of the mind the bible stuff's the least interesting & most overplayed stuff anyway. derrrhurrr lets make fun of jesus and the two other figures we know from veggietales or w/e. i'm jewish and have superior taste. hmph (that being said, it's still mostly played out. i just want to throw things out there)

cain/abel BORING, PREDICTABLE

lot & his daughters? somewhat more interesting. we have the only good place in utah from that story (moab). yes father, drink this wine so we can have babies with you!! potentially hot, depending on kinks. not as interesting bc there's like classical paintings about it & w/e

noah & ham? intergenerational father/son bonding experience! some scholars argued that ham fucked that old man after the flood. also hot & honestly noah probably deserved that prostate orgasm! interesting! hot! also ham went on to sire nations which is kind of cool

rachel/leah -- cmon. you might say here 'nonnie! this is like cain and abel!' no! this is taking two women who were otherwise competing over a man (boring, worse bc theyre sisters) and making their relationship better!! also leah & rachel are usually depicted as fucking smokeshows and i'm gay and it makes me kinda hot thinkin about it ngl this one's self motivated. but they spend a lot of time with each other or with the two of them and bilhah (rachel's maid, also slept w jacob) and like... feelings develop u know?? also i read this book the red tent as a kid and it was mid but did kinda get me hot too idk (bonus because jacob was already their cousin) reuben/joseph -- reuben was the only brother who was nice to joseph. u got some classic yaoi elements here & ok i'll be honest i think this is an objectively good idea but i saw that the red tent is a mini series w minnie driver as leah and morena baccarin as rachel and i think someone jacked the temp up so i better send this & figure that out lol

sorry for the spam i apparently have stronger feelings about biblical incest than i thought. but hey, minnie driver & morena baccarin as rival sisters turned lovers?? something good came outta this whole thang lol

thank for this EXCELLENT take anon. The bible relationships that people talk about here are just. it's literally only cain and abel and jesus and judas those are the only ones. They don't know any other ones. And the way people talk about them has no actual reference to scripture. Tumblr users just like the religious ~vibes~ and the light edginess of it and those pairs are popular for modern poems and plays and songs to allude to which generates quotes they can use in their web weaves about dog coding and pomegranates (I'm hating but I love those dog motif posts don't be fooled)(still hating but still don't be fooled it is Always Correct to put adam raised a cain by the boss o7 in ur web weave). I for one would like some variety in there and I appreciate ur suggestions! Very intrigued by the apparent existence of scholarly arguments in favor of dadson yaoi in torah. I like Rachel/leah a lot, omg morena baccarin rachel i had such a huge crush on her as a kid my 13-year-old baby lesbian ass watched firefly and it was overrrr 😵‍💫 speaking of lot some other people have mentioned lot and his daughters and I love that one too mainly for the novelty of it. I don't think i can think of a single other depiction of father/daughter rape specifically for the purposes of reproduction in which the daughter is the aggressor like, anywhere else? I love that. There was that episode of house I guess but I dont think that girl wanted to be pregnant 🤔 in general i just think parent/child rape where the child is the aggressor is really fun 🤪<- me getting silly w fictionalized rape

I would like to propose some of my own ships. wholesome one: miriam/aaron/moses. 40 years is a long time you know? Gets lonely out in the wilderness. And they clearly love each other, they do a lot for each other, maybe Miriam and Aaron welcomed back their long lost little brother with VERY open arms. Plus they're pretty mad when he gets married so 🤨

tragic one: absalom/tamar. Two prettiest girls in the world they hated them bc they ain't them 😫 king david's amazingly beautiful daughter and his equally beautiful femboy son? With many half siblings but they're each other's only full siblings? Tamar goes to absalom when she is raped by her eldest half-brother, which David dismisses, and absalom is so furious he kills the rapist brother and has to flee, only returning once he's raised an army against David, which fails and results in his death. And Tamar then raises his daughter (who is named after her) and is left "a desolate woman in his house" 🤧 so sad clearly they should've been king and queen together

Toxic one: Jacob/esau. Twincest ❤️ kind of gay to come out of the womb holding onto ur brother. Kind of gay to spend ur life hunting ur brother for stealing ur birthright with sporadic periods of reconciliation. Kind of gay for this rivalry to continue on to ur ancestors. If the rivalry lasts beyond ur lifetime you are no longer rivals. You are gay