Kriwaczek makes the point that from an external perspective, civilization can be evenly divided into "Babylonian" and "not Babylonian" as civilization centered in and around Babylon had about a 2000-year hang time. He also argues that they were nasty - a lot of their recorded cruelty to others is likely hyperbole meant to scare the provincials but theirs was a nasty and brutish empire, to themselves and to others. They were also highly regimented - the modern analog Kriwaczek uses for Babylon is the USSR, with its politbureau, its nomenklatura and its cronyism-based welfare state. Babylon didn't use coinage for internal trade, everything was state diktat; not only that, their language and math was deliberately obscure and cloistered so that their technology couldn't be stolen by the barbarians they relied on for luxury goods.

We don't know exactly how the Babylonian empire fell because they started using papyrus rather than clay to write on and all the records are gone. We do know that they were superseded when their trading partners in Anatolia developed a pidgin Babylonian to trade (and do math) among themselves which effectively cut the Babylonians out of their monopoly status. Babylonian was lost as a language for over 2000 years while the barbarians kept at heel for a millennium proceeded to invent science and culture.

History is a push/pull between old and new. Old never wins. You can be mad about that but ultimately the point of language is for dialog and the easier that dialog, the more successful the language.

It was a water main that pinholed, and then that pinhole became a waterjet.

When I found it - under ten inches of water - it took some skin off my thumb from sheer pressure.

https://imgur.com/a/great-flood-ElKd7SS

The basic issue, as I see it, is that the Republicans can pander to divisive social issues (because they don't cost anything) and then give money away to business in the Name of Freedom™. Democrats can be liberal AF about social issues (because they don't cost anything) and then ask for a whole bunch of big government projects that cost a fuckton and interfere with big business.

Spitballing, I'd say Democrats (the voters) care about health insurance, social welfare, global warming, reduced police militarization, cheaper college and cheaper housing. And I would say that for every one of those concerns there's a billion dollar lobbying machine hell-bent on the destruction of anyone who poses even a vague threat to them.

Republicans? When there's money involved it's invariably takes the form of Give Tax Revenue To Crony Capitalists.

Any democrat who actually runs on doing what democrats want is going to get creamed.

Danielle Allen did a series of ten pieces for the WaPo but they didn't exactly set the world afire.

I'll say this: WA state does jungle primaries, which helped contribute to outcomes like this:

Our Trump-annointed gubernatorial candidate was Semi Bird, who walked out of the primary with 11% of the vote (even though the Republicans had registered five candidates with the same name as the Democratic candidate). The most contentious and expensive race in Washington was for Commissioner of Public Lands, primarily because the Republican who was running was a big timber shill who got primaried for impeaching Trump.

EDIT: hot off the presses

I have my favorite solutions

Dawg, I feel you. I feel you bone deep.

But I was politically conscious for Mondale

Dukakis

Gore

And Kerry

And once we get through the circular firing squad we get to do it all over again

Which, again, comes down to capitalism. When your rule of law belongs to the highest bidder, you end up Republican Lite at best.

Democrats are not doing anything because they’re captured. They take money from the same business interests and banks that the Republicans do.

I think I would temper this by arguing there's no real alternative. The 2024 elections cost $16b. Bill Gates gave $100m, Elon Musk gave $150m. Kamala Harris got 74m votes; in order to counterbalance Elon Fucking Musk every Harris voter would have needed to chip in $2. In order to counterbalance Musk & Gates, they needed to chip in 68 cents.

But now we're talking campaign finance reform and we're both already asleep with boredom.

This is an interesting discussion. I've had an abiding hatred for Kurtzman & Orci for more than a decade but I actually kinda like the direction they dragged Star Trek. A buddy of mine storyboarded the first couple movies; it was abundantly clear that they were doing something completely new while also doing what they could to preserve enough canon to keep the nerds on board.

There's a tricky balance to strike there. On the one hand, Roddenberry & Co populated a pretty interesting universe that has lots of things to explore. On the other hand, it's been tromped through incautiously over the ages so you don't have enough internal consistency to explore it without tripping all over yourself unless you exercise some skill.

Star Trek has traditionally followed a nautical metaphor, which is interesting because Gene Roddenberry was a pilot. Star Wars splits the difference between aerial & nautical with fighters whizzing around everywhere (and bombers... smdh) but Star Trek, for whatever reason, rarely ventures beyond "runabout." That gives you a basic "ocean-going vibe" that, whenever Trek fucks with it, turns to shit. At the same time, one of Roddenberry's maxims was anything that happened during an episode had to be resolved by the end of the episode, returning the show to ground state and enabling the episodes to be watched in any order. Kurtzman's direction has been definitely not that which started out interesting but collapsed under its own weight after a couple seasons. There are only so many places to go if you stick with the nautical metaphor and without the nautical metaphor is it really Star Trek?

Get some young hungry directors, producers, and writers passionate about really great science fiction TV, and tell them to pitch me the next Trek as if nobody had ever heard of Star Trek, Starfleet, the Enterprise, or Kirk.

There was definitely an attempt at this. Kurzman and Orci were the it-girls of sci fi when JJ Abrams lens-flared the shit out of Star Trek in 2009. They blew up Vulcan and tied off the entire prior universe behind a time paradox just to shut up the convention-goers. But they also ignored Ron Moore & Naren Shankar, both of whom grew up on TNG and both of whom have done some stellar shit. Gene Roddenberry was a notorious pain in the ass to work with; I have no way of knowing this but I'll bet Eugene is definitely preserving enough canon that the Roddenberrys keep control of the show.

Set an entire series in the Ferengar. A series featuring the Marquis.

It's worth pointing out that Deep Space Nine was originally envisioned as a vehicle for Ro Laren, newly-promoted Maquis double agent, to operate as a bordertown sheriff out past the easy enforcement of Star Fleet. Unfortunately Gene Roddenberry couldn't keep his dick in his pants and Michelle Forbes noped the fuck out of working in the Star Trek universe until both Gene and his wife were safely dead so we got Hawk from Spencer For Hire instead.

Maybe and entirely Mirror Universe series set in a fascist Federation.

Fuckin' they did an entire goddamn season of this on Discovery and it was super-tedious.

Even the Klingon Empire could be somewhat interesting.

I definitely got the sense that there was a Klingon gambit in the first season of Discovery. Unfortunately the new Klingons were tedious, uninteresting shithead analogs for Islam, rather than the promising culture developed by Ron Moore and explored through a few movies.

But come up with a concept that isn’t “hey, look, we got the TNG crew out of retirement, please clap”

Star Trek is home to what, 5? 6? different concepts and I agree, what started out promising with Picard rapidly became Return to Gilligan's Island. Discovery is definitely an exploration of 'return to zero' writing. Prodigy was a new direction no matter how you slice it. Lower Decks has been almost entirely bereft of vintage characters.

or “Hey, we heard you guys like Harry Potter, but have you seen Star Trek: in school”.

The Starfleet Academy idea became Lower Decks, which knew exactly when it should quit. Clearly the team still loves that Starfleet Academy idea which, if it's done right, might be closer to Riverdale than Harry Potter. I'll withhold judgment as I have done since it first reared its head in 2009. I get the sense that they really want to make that one work which is why they keep shelving it whenever it gets dicey.

In short, start trying to figure out the interesting settings in your universe for great science fiction series, then make episodes that fully explore the concept and the settings.

Again, I feel like they're definitely trying to do this while also servicing the "we herd you leik Spock" contingent. Keep in mind that the median television viewer is sixty fucking five years old.

I had Reddit sockpuppets in the names of every major character in The Dying Earth. In my opinion, Jack Vance and American fantasy are the Bauhaus if Itten didn't leave. Don't get trapped into thinking there's a lot of it; the original Dying Earth is an anthology of short stories written prior to 1950, and then there are two legit Sagas written in the '80s. They're okay but not relevant.

I was entertained, but ended up confused by both detractors and praises.

I think the more an egghead likes a book, the more they make it "important." I've never wanted to bother with Salman Rushdie; prior to his fatwah nobody really gave a shit so all of a sudden his work had to take on enough meaning to support an East V West clash of ideals. What was that shit newspaper in France? Charlie Hebdo? Ain't nobody said anything nice about Charlie Hebdo until AQAP started shooting cartoonists.

My go-to is Margaret Atwood. She's a shitty author (shut up, she is). She's self-important. She's, by all accounts, a dreadful person. But because she writes pulp sci fi along the lines of "fear the Republicans" the eggheads support her in her assertion that she doesn't write sci fi, sci fi is grubby and she's important. Lather, rinse, repeat for David Foster Wallace. Meanwhile, Stephen King was out getting rich in the literary wilderness for 40 years, bane of English teachers everywhere, until he started dissing Trump on Twitter. All of a sudden his shit's literature.

No comment on Dean Brown; that thing practically fizzled out by the time I was in 4th grade.

He's a terrible writer and you don't need to read him ever. All you need is the following:

1) Anthony Burgess' review of Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 1980 was "someone should make this into a novel"

2) Dan Brown did exactly that

3) The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail sued him for plagiarism

4) Dan Brown argued "holupaminnit, you said yours was non-fiction" and the authors came back with "well... but nobody really believed that, did they"

5) Things went as well as expected

Holy Blood, Holy Grail? A breathless pseudoacademic conspiracy theory. Da Vinci Code? An Encyclopedia Brown mystery. If you ever come across a copy, voice Robert Langdon as Bullwinkle the Moose and Sophie Neveu (yes, really) as Rocky the Squirrel.

I think LotR was the first to have elves and hobbits and dwarves and orcs in the way that's instantly recognizable.

And I would argue that counts for less than you think. One of the things I like about modern fantasy is the trope that Elves are assholes. Tolkien was basically at "look how cool this lost race of ubermensch are" while modern fantasy is basically "elves love the smell of their own farts."

I agree that its a cozy story, and 1000% caste system, though imo LotR is a lot more thoughtful and I'd argue that the whole 'magic is fading and evil will eventually win but we'll fight while we can' tone makes it not all twee feel-good fluff.

On the one hand, it's a bunch of children's books. On the other hand, it very clearly reflects Tolkien's understanding and trauma of The Great War. I think it's the duality that bugs me; by trying to be both it does neither well.

The thing about American fantasy of the era is the good guys and the bad guys were human. You couldn't hide your actions behind ethnic tension. America fought a war over slavery; the British didn't think it was worth fighting a war over genocide until it was on their doorstep.

That enthusiasm basically halved every season after 2. By the time it was "wannabe vulcan chick in the far future for some dumb reason" I was pretty well over it.

Strange New Worlds will occasionally throw up a "...you know that's actually really cool" episode in among the "ZOMFG who told you people wanted to see Klingons rap" episodes.

I do think it's telling that critical acclaim for Trek parodies tends to vastly outstrip core Trek shows.

GEB waxes poetics about recursion for pretty much its entire body, comparing recursive changes of a structure to fugue and drawing parallels. I have no doubt that, just as SICP, it was mind-blowing at its time. But today? I learned about this shit in high school CS and middle school music classes, respectively. Putting it together is perhaps non-trivial, sure, but with the benefit of GEB doing a lot of the work, people who came after can do it all in a matter of 3 hour lecture.

"Cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms" being the author's summaries of not only GEB (1979) but also Dawkin's The Selfish Gene (1976), I am fully ready to argue that GEB was an intellectual's retreat from Reagan. American culture was big on trite wordplay back then. It was largely insufferable.

Now I'm curious - what "modern takes" have you read?

I'm of the opinion that LoTR fucked up fantasy the same way Star Wars fucked up sci fi, but there are a few bright lights.

Still, it's good, but probably suffers from the same problem GEB does: because it's the first one to do its thing, it means a lot of the stuff it inspired have a better flow even if they only tackle one of its themes/aspects.

There's this idea that LoTR was "first" that has no basis in truth. Tolkien no doubt grew up reading Dunsany. Jon Bauer was a celebrity decades before Tolkien sat down to write The Hobbit. While Tolkien was writing it, Robert Howard pumped out 21 stories of Conan the Cimmerian (and died). The magic system in Dungeons and Dragons isn't taken from LoTR, it's taken from (international bestseller) The Dying Earth, which was published four years before Fellowship of the Ring.

The problem with everything else, though, is it's all dangerous. People die. Blood is shed. Endings aren't always happy. A place without civilization is a tricky place to live and wizards tend to fuck up your shit.

Lord of the Rings persists because it makes everything cozy. Frodo is Pooh. Sam is Eeyore. Aragorn is Christopher Robin. My wife loves it? She had a pair of Pound Puppies named Frodo and Bilbo. Me? I'd read Dying Earth, a few Conans and the whole of Vardeman's Cenotaph Road series before taking on The Hobbit in 4th grade which is probably why I've never been able to see LoTR as anything but trite bullshit. It's the era's Harry Potter - "let's make everything cute and British but also inescapably about the English caste system."

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Sherlock Holmes in SPAA... I mean, medieval HRE.

I think it's fair to say that the enthusiasm behind Bernie Sanders was because of the idea that he'd 'fucking do something.' I think people over 30 were jaded about that because the dude has been in government his whole fucking life and has yet to fucking do something.

It's been interesting to watch AOC turn from firebrand to wallflower. Maybe she's biding her time. Maybe she's been subsumed by the system. It's also abundantly clear that the politicians we see the most are the ones who aren't doing their fucking jobs - MTG, Gaetz, etc. IF: you get into government because you want to 'fucking do something' BUT: nothing can actually be done THEN: (gestures vaguely everywhere)

Jimmy Carter was a populist. Then he got to government and nothing happened. Schwartzenegger was a populist. Then he got to government and nothing happened. FDR came into power by basically taking the wind out of Huey Long's sails; by adopting 70% of the crazy socialist policies Long wanted and dragging them into the mainstream, FDR got four frickin' terms out of it. But that was what, 80 years ago?

The green new deal was a layup. Fuckin' legalized marijuana was a layup. Student loan forgiveness was a layup. Price controls on groceries could have been a goddamn executive order.

And yet.

I've read two of Harari's books. Sapiens is worth a read; it really pisses off liberals for some reason though so gird your loins. I think it's important to note, however, that Harari's academic expertise is on an era without printing presses. His hot takes on artificial intelligence have no more credibility than yours or mine.

The term of art is active measures and there are experts to be consulted. From my armchair, the masterful ploy was shrimp jesus and his ilk - a lengthy and unexplained appearance of fanciful, nonsensical but vaguely plausible images, memes and conversations on Facebook and elsewhere that largely furrowed the brows of Americans everywhere. If I were the CIA? I couldn't do better than Shrimp Jesus to inoculate Americans against disinformatsiya.

Because, you see, it's not about the forgeries. It's about the credibility. The history of mass communications is a history of diminished credibility; the establishment has always faced challenges by upstart channels assuming their mantle of production through innovation and using that credibility to advance its own agenda. Behold, the world's first shoop:

The worry seems to be "how will the hoi polloi know who to trust" without the obvious answer "they'll trust less." This isn't new; we call it 'the Spanish Flu' because the government didn't want people to know it started in Kansas for purposes of morale. It wasn't new then, either; one of the main purposes of yellow journalism was the protection of Tammany Hall. I've heard it argued that the South wouldn't have gone to war if it weren't for plantation control of the press; this theory tends to disregard the plantation control of literally everything for purposes of convenient points-making.

Outfoxed was 20 years ago. By then of course we'd been told by the New York Times about Hussein's "aluminum tubes" and Robert Novak had outted Valerie Plame so really, it was dog-whistle outrage for the Air America Crew. The Bush administration didn't need AI to walk us into war, they had credibility and popular support. If there's one thing AI lacks, it's credibility. If there's another, it's popular support. Would Loose Change have gotten better penetration if it had AI imagery? Would QAnon?

There's this idea that Americans voted Trump because they didn't understand his policies or some shit. And as a contributor to Harris' billion dollar information campaign, that's bullshit. Trump didn't even try for credibility. Neither did any of his surrogates. "they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats" does not require AI, it just requires belief. Even then it doesn't really fucking matter. Henry Ford wasn't stupid, but he published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is every bit as batshit as QAnon. Not because he believed it? But because he hated jews. Everyone who voted for Trump chose their flavor of information, same as it ever was. In my dotage, I've come to notice the patronizing nature of liberals towards conservatives when it comes to disinformation - "they'll choose wrong." Yeah, they fuckin' well will. But they'll choose. And you can be disappointed in that? But clearly, you can't expect a surfeit of information to change the choice.

kinda embarrassed that I linked the GPHG twice tbh

I'll say this: "the butterfly" is archetypal Van Cleef & Arpels, whom I dearly love for a number of reasons:

- They started out as a husband-wife team

- They have a history of doing some seriously bonkers shit that's also really cool

- They have done some real innovation in the past and keep leaning into it

- They have created a line of iconic jewelry for nouveau riche and old money alike that they can fabricate for not a whole lot

- They brought back automata for the sole purpose of draining the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund. I called 'em up once and said "so are these things like on tour or something because I would like to see them" and they came back with "so sorry, sir, but they were all sold before we created them" which means MBS has some cool shit on his boat

I only mention this because during Zoom they started doing classes on gem and jewelry history? And they're free and their enthusiasm is infectious.

You are now aware that all that old jewelry that's got white, gold and purple on it? It's a symbol in support of suffrage same as the rainbow flag was gay rights.

And the winners are

Personally I am also pondering if I should re-adjust my belief that people vote for what's best for their country, instead of what feels best for themselves.

Prior to COVID I believed that people will generally do the right thing. After COVID I believe that people will generally do what they see everyone else doing. With liberals that generally means pulling behind a strong leader that has the requisite number of purity points and guttersniping around a weak leader who can't be everything to everyone. With conservatives that generally means following whoever is in charge, regardless of their charge towards the future or off a cliff like lemmings.

One of the few bright spots of demagoguery is it isn't transferable. If you want your party to survive the demagogue you need to find another demagogue with more charisma than the last. I have an inkling I'll be spending some time on Berlusconi just to investigate some personal blind spots.

I think part of the problem with screaming about fascism is that most people are actually fine with fascism. Discussions about government and its failings follow a very predictable path that is wholly dependent on the civic engagement of my conversational partner: the less engaged they are, the more they want "the president" to cut through the red tape and do what they want. We don't lionize bureaucrats, we lionize leaders.

Tony Judt drew a very different lesson from WWII and the post-war period than Arendt or anyone else: everyone was cool with genocide. Not a single home was returned to a Jew. Nobody tried to make surviving concentration camps welcome. The post-war economic expansion in Europe wasn't driven by dynamism, it was driven by the repossession of the 20% of European economic holdings held by a murdered ethnic sect.

I've voted in every presidential election since Bush V. Clinton and I disagree with your assessment. "A danger to democracy" wasn't on the table until 2020. At the same time, most of those elections were still governed by the Voter Rights Act and most of the candidates were credible legislators - the Left lost their fucking minds over the idea of an actor becoming president but he'd also done two credible terms as governor of California. That said? I (barely) remember discussions around gas rationing in 1979, when inflation was 11%. Reagan won that election 44m-35m, 489-49.