Category: Decline and fall

Today’s quote: classical edition

Victor Davis Hanson:

What Padilla further fails to understand is that classical scholarship’s fascination with the Greco-Roman world rests upon that subject’s singular self-criticism of its own standards and values. The tools of mockery that Padilla employs—caricature, cynicism, parody, sarcasm, and satire—all derive from classical roots, which is to say that they were invented by the very Greeks and Romans he dismisses. Many of the Western pathologies that Padilla cites—class privilege, the “establishment,” male dominance—were long ago objects of criticism more virulent and yet more sophisticated than Padilla’s adolescent rants.

Misogyny? Read the Antigone, Medea, and Lysistrata.

Slavery? “No man is born a slave,” wrote the fourth-century polymath Alcidamas. Aristotle’s argument for natural slavery acknowledges a host of critics who felt otherwise. Slaves in drama from Aristophanes to Plautus often appear smarter than their masters.

The poor and the oppressed? From Solon to the Gracchi, there is plenty of classical admiration for the efforts of the underclass to get even with their exploiters.

Rather problematically for Padilla, the whitest people whom the Mediterranean Greeks and Romans met were often the most negatively stereotyped—whether the savage, milk-drinking, tree-worshiping Germani; the wild, tattooed, and red-haired Britons; the supposedly pathologically lying white-skinned Gauls; or the purportedly innately savage Thracians. In contrast, Homer names as the noblest of foreign peoples the black Ethiopians—a race Herodotus thought the tallest and handsomest.

Settler-colonialism? Recall what Tacitus had his Scottish leader Calgacus say about how the historian’s fellow Romans make a desert and call it peace. For all the “settler colonialism” of Alexander the Great, his ideas of race might be better described as “assimilationist” or as a sort of proto–melting pot, accomplished by forced Persian–Macedonian mass marriages to pave the way for his dream of a brotherhood of mankind.

Today’s quote

Ted Gioia:

It’s a simple concept. Web platforms force people to pay money to avoid the ads—so the more annoying they are, the more money they make.

They used to call it extortion—pay now to avoid pain later. And it always works like a charm.

Today’s quote

Jim:

As Charlie Kirk, martyr for Christ, told us, the proposition that Church and Easter are inessential activities, but bars, race rioting, and burning down Wendy’s are essential activities makes so much more sense if you assume our rulers are possessed by demons.

Miscellany

Noise comes in colors. There are white noise, pink noise, red noise, brown noise, blue noise, grey noise, etc. The various shades are most easily perceived by acousticians and sound engineers.

While wandering around an airport earlier this summer, I realized that there music playing throughout the building. It was light, watery jazzish stuff, difficult to pay attention to. There was a trumpet in the mix, but the sound was bland, not bold. The melodies were trivial and the chords hackneyed. It may very well have been AI slop. What I was hearing could be called “beige noise”: music intended to be ignored.

*****

Joseph Epstein on a biography he never wrote:

In my early thirties I signed on to write a biography of John Dos Passos, who was still alive. I wrote to Dos Passos to ask if I might have his cooperation in writing his biography. He replied instantly, saying that he would help me in any way he could, on the condition that I “put my liberal ideology in mothballs” and pledge never again to use the word “explicate.”

*****

Atomic Fungus shows how to talk to machines:

Mrs. Fungus was trying to get a tech on the phone, and was stuck at the recalcitrant AI prompt. After hearing her say, “I want to talk to an agent!” fifty-odd times, I took the phone from her.

Machine: “Do you want to try to restart your cable box now?”

Me: “NO! BIB GOBBLE WAGLE BAG GAG HANGLE!”

Whenever the clanker would ask me a yes/no question, I’d answer it, but then add random gobbledygook. And I kept making the tone angrier and angrier.

It gave up and shunted us to a human.

Mrs. Fungus: “How did you do that?”

The algorithm that translates what the user is saying into something the computer can understand has a limited capacity for literal nonsense. In theory, after a sufficient number of errors, it should crap out and send the caller to a human.

That was my theory. I’m glad it worked!

*****

A thousand years ago I discovered three records in the University of Dallas library that would determine much of my musical activity over the years to come: Augustin Anievas’ Chopin waltzes, the first disc of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” and Songs by Tom Lehrer1. Lehrer died recently. A few years ago he released his music into the public domain. You can find all the songs here.

*****

One of the places I passed through in Alaska, southeast of Fairbanks. There is culture in the wilderness.

Mw = 8.6 ± 0.2

From Izvestiya, Physics of the Solid Earth, July 23, 2025:

The epicenters of the August 17, 2024 earthquake and its strongest aftershocks fall in a shallow ring-shaped structure (Mt1 = 5.3), which supports the hypothesis of a preparation of a great earthquake in the South Kamchatka region. In the previous works, the correlation dependences of parameters Mt1 and Mt2 on the magnitudes Mw of large earthquakes have been constructed for the western Pacific (in the range Mw = 7.0–9.0). Using these dependencies, we estimated the magnitude of the great possible event in this region at Mw = 8.6 ± 0.2.

I.e., last week’s titanic Kamchatka earthquake had been accurately predicted about a week before it happened. However, there is a paywall; if you want to read anything beyond the abstract, it will cost you $39.95. Consequently, almost nobody saw this prediction.

Volcano Café:

And the bottom line: if you want to warn people about an impending disaster, don’t do it behind a paywall. Those paywalls are there to stop people from reading the work, and in this they are quite effective. You risk becoming a voice crying in the publishing wilderness.

Today’s quote, Prussian schooling edition

Joseph Moore:

Pity poor Horace Mann, Henry Bernard and other ‘educationists’ trying to sell modern schooling to such people. They had to convince such an educated population to hand over their children’s education to experts. Basically, the educators failed to convince Americans. Mann started pitching Prussian schooling, otherwise known as compulsory age-segregated classroom instruction, before 1837, but it took a dozen years and special circumstances to get the first school off the ground. That first school in 1848 in Boston snuck by because it targeted immigrants. ‘Real’ Americans didn’t send their kids there; those ‘real’ Americans became convinced that it was a good to use the state’s power to beat a little of the right kind of Jesus into the skulls of the Irish Papists kids that were showing up in Boston in large numbers at that time (the Irish Potato Famine began in 1845). From the very beginning down to this day, schooling is seen by the self-appointed Enlightened as a way to correct the moral defects – Catholicism back then, all the ‘bigotry’ and ‘hatred’ today (which of course includes Catholicism) – of the unwashed masses.

Today’s quote

Kate McMillan at normblog twenty years ago:

Norm: If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be?

Kate: From the present – the American writer and conservative ‘hawk’ Mark Helprin, and rocker Ted Nugent. Helprin is on a lot of shortlists as ‘world’s greatest living writer’, but that’s not the only reason I’d invite him. I figure that given a few drinks, he could help me convince Nugent to beat the crap out of the third guest I’d invite – Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the socialist Canadian Prime Minister who set into motion the intellectual, military and political decay of a once proud nation.

Today’s quote: At the circus in clown world

JMSmith:

In the present election, we have to choose between a confidence man and a courtesan, two types the American people warmly approve as less obese reflections of themselves. Trump’s talent is the power to embolden nervous investors and make them sign checks they would not sign if they were not under the spell of Trump. Harris’s talent is the power to do whatever she is told to do while cluelessly enjoying dumb luck.

A hundred and more years ago, Trump and Harris might have been working together in a sideshow of a travelling circus, Trump outside the tent persuading the yokels to part with a quarter to take an edifying gander at the Queen of Sheba, Harris inside the tent beguiling the yokels with phony-exotic allure.

*****

I myself am still more likely to write in Dave Barry for his stand on plumbing issues3, though I am considering Vincent D. Furnier for his policy on school reform.