IF WITTGENSTEIN WAS attracted to the Soviet Union, it may well have been for largely conservative reasons: his respect for order, discipline, and authority; his Tolstoyan idealizing of manual labor (at which he himself was remarkably adept); his high modernist affection for austerity (which he called “going barefoot,” but which in the Russia of the day might more candidly be called destitution); not to speak of his sympathy for a nation that had produced his beloved Dostoyevsky along with a precious spiritual heritage. As for idealizing manual labor, Wittgenstein regularly exhorted his colleagues and students to give up philosophy and do something useful for a change. When a gifted young disciple took him at his word and spent the rest of his life toiling away in a canning factory, Wittgenstein was said to be overjoyed. He did, to do him justice, try to heed his own advice, fleeing from Cambridge from time to time to some more menial way of life, only to be hunted down and taken back into intellectual captivity.
According to Wittgenstein all claims are baseless, so you're fighting the good fight
That said this one might actually be true.
In 1935, during the ice age of Stalinism, Wittgenstein travelled to the Soviet Union and with typical eccentricity requested permission to become a manual worker there. The authorities were apparently less than enthused by this bizarre proposal. That Wittgenstein was a Stalinist of sorts is not the most well-aired of topics among his admirers, yet it seems to have been the case. His biographer, Ray Monk, is affronted by the suggestion and curtly dismisses it as “nonsense,” while at the same time providing plenty of evidence of his subject’s admiration for Stalin’s regime. Wittgenstein was unimpressed by talk of labor camps and Soviet tyranny, insisting that those who denounced Stalin had no idea of the problems and dangers he confronted. He continued to look favorably on the Soviet Union even after the show trials and the Nazi-Soviet pact, and claimed that what would most erode his sympathy for the regime would be the growth of class distinctions.
My point is that when your cooking already incorporates numbing spice, it's easy to see the possibilities with chilis. If your cuisine, like the costal provinces, is defined by not having that numbing spice you're not going to be very inclined to use chilis either. The different types of Chinese cuisine are quite old.
Nah the Sichuan pepper is really old, native to China (and the Himalayas in general) and has been cultivated in Sichuan for centuries. Their cooking nowadays uses the American chili pepper as well because it's delicious, but the mala spice of Sichuan peppers prepared them for the spicy chilis of the Americas.
I was at a rest stop in upstate New York when it happened. Completely surreal. Just random people peeing off the highway breaking out into cheers and applause, and some of the most haunting shit being beamed into the eyes of every child in there. Cursed land.
There's also no societal benefit to having constantly growing populations with vast amount of children if you're not under a capitalist regime of required infinite growth. Obviously you need some kids, but some women will always choose to have kids because there are many people who want that, just not everybody. The massive hand wringing around population loss is mostly from the capitalist class losing laborers and tax payers.
Actually New York is extremely zealous with this shit. They use cell phone tracking, credit card statements, all sorts of crazy things to claw back this money. They really are counting, and they really do target the rich, because it's like winner take all, you know? There's no sliding scale, it's either boom they get millions more in tax revenue or they don't, so might as well go crazy with it.
“We have made a lot of progress on ending that war, which is certainty deadliest war since World War II,” Trump said during a news conference with Zelenskyy.
This line is such bullshit. Even if you assume that both Ukraine and Russia have had 1 million soldiers killed each (which is certainly an overestimate) it still doesn't even crack the top 5. The Korean War, Vietnam War, Second Congo War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the Nigerian Civil War all had over 2 million dead.
Not sure where to post this so it goes here as it's in a newspaper. Just an absolutely insane article I read in the Financial Times today, if you ever need a reminder that the ultrarich are ghouls.
Some of the richest Americans are confronted with a thorny question this time of year: is spending the festive season with family worth paying millions more in taxes? For millionaires and billionaires that declare permanent residency in low-tax jurisdictions but spend much of the year elsewhere, their location in December’s final days can be a determining factor for the size of their tax bill.
And with the full-on return of in-person work meetings and events since the Covid-19 pandemic, the wealthy have increasingly turned to a stable of tools, including the apps TaxBird and Monaeo, to help them make sure they spend less than six months and a day in high-tax jurisdictions such as New York.
What the fuck is the point of having unfathomable wealth if you can't even spend the holidays with your family? Like what the fuck are you doing? Why do you need an app to track whether you spend 183 days in Manhattan per year??
But being prudent comes with choices. One friend recently told Jim Simon, who co-founded TaxBird in 2016, that his “damn app” kept him from visiting family this year.
“I would’ve liked to have taken the grandkids to the tree a few years ago,” said Klein, referring to the famous Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center that is illuminated with lights every December. “But I couldn’t.”
This devotion to keeping down taxes can lead to extremes. Klein said some of his clients fly into New Jersey and wait on one side of the George Washington Bridge, which connects to New York, until just after midnight to avoid triggering another day in the state.
Imagine the sad life you must live where tax obligations of like 5% on income of over $30 million "keep you" from hanging out with your grandkids. Imagine just fucking around in New Jersey until midnight all to save like a million dollars in taxes when your net worth is in the tens or hundreds of millions. Insanity. Being rich rots your brain so much that the rich aren't even good at being rich.
More importantly imo she removes a lot of the Victorian brainworms prior English translations smuggled in, like calling slaves "servants" or calling Helen a "bitch" rather than the more correct "dog faced," which doesn't have the same gendered connotations as "bitch" does in English. Lattimore is still my favorite translator of.the epics, but Wilson's is really wonderful. Both her Iliad and Odyssey are worth reading.
My favorite study that came out of this was that they put on Mycaenean armour they found and then followed the diet and battle regime detailed in the Iliad and concluded "yeah this armour works." Experimental anthropology is fun. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0301494
300 at least had aura, and was definitely closer to how the Greeks like saw themselves as these gigachads. It's cryptofascist slop but at least it has an art style.
Akhilleus was an aura farmer, as was Odysseus for sure. They fought and killed people because they wanted their sick, beautiful armour. There's half a book of the Iliad that describes the armour of Akhilleus and all the pretty engravings it had. Agamemnon's Medusa shield is an incredible piece of work, commented on by all as Art. These myths were all about aura, and the lifeless blandness of Nolan is so sad to see.
That's historically accurate actually, because "Greek" was not a race, it was more like a cultural identity that you could pick up by practice. A black Greek would just be a Greek with black skin. If they spoke Greek, worshiped the Greek gods, understood Greek cultural practices, lived in a polis, boom they're Greek. There were multiple Greek states in Africa, even below the Sahara like the Auxamites, who spoke Greek and ruled parts of Ethiopia until around 1000AD.
Also, there were Ethiopians (people of burnt faces in the Greek) under Memnon at Troy fighting the Greeks, this was in fact the subject of a now lost poem part of the.broader Epic Cycle, of which the Odyssey was part. And in one part of the Odyssey, when Athena makes Odysseus beautiful, she is clearly described making Odysseus' skin black (though the Greeks described colours very differently than us, so wouldn't read too much into it)!
I mean that 100% checks out for Agamemnon, who is famous for declaring himself the best of the Greeks while letting Akhilleus do all the work and then unfairly taking his sex slave because Agamemnon had to give away his own sex slave.
I don't think it's a fair critique to criticize the film for not using period accurate Mycenaean armour given the Odyssey poet was not Mycenaean and the Ancient Greeks in their depictions of the Odyssey used classical era armour, not Mycenaean. That said, the armour does look boring as hell and if you're adapting an adventure story that even the Greeks thought was from an older time that was different enough from their own you might as well have some fun with the designs.
Hey let's not let Hell Korea off the hook, they really are a corporate nightmare where their leaders are controlled by billionaire families and cults. Just like their American overlords.
Yeah the article covers this a bit