Pinned
From my copybook.
1. Paradise Lost, Book IX, lines 120-130:
"By what I seek, but others to make such
As I, though thereby worse to me redound:
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts."
T. Greer
15.9K posts
T. Greer
@Scholars_Stage
Long takes on π¨π³ politics, πΊπΈ conservatism, and books I find interesting
- Earlier this year my wife decided to watch Law and Order: SVU from the beginning. It began in 1999. The show tries to stay topical with the news. Some observations.
- Today I encountered a Chinese idiom I had not learned before. It is a very good one, one that we should use in English: δΉ η ζι«γ "A long illness makes a patient a doctor."
- Replying to @Scholars_Stage1. In the early episodes the cops are portrayed as very hard-bitten. Every episode they threaten shop owners with the IRS, rough people up, and generally talk in a way the writers obviously associated with working class New Yorkers. By 2006 or so this is mostly done with.
- Replying to @Scholars_Stage2. There is an extremely noticeable shift around 2017-18 where all of the characters shift towards woker viewpoints and plot topics focus on the things like the problems ICE causes for the SVU detectives. What had been maybe a gradual tilt leftwards becomes a drastic lurch.
- Replying to @Scholars_Stage^woke-er (Side note inspired by this observation: perhaps conservatives underestimate the extent to which the leftist tilt of modern America was born in visceral reaction to Trump. A world where Hillary won is one less culturally leftist than we have now).
- I once had a conversation with a "second generation rich" in Beijing. We met in a Beijing high-rise on a Sunday afternoon at a mutual acquaintance's house--a woman who imported art for resale to the clients like her. I suppose you could say she flaunted her wealth. She droveOzempic skepticism seems entirely based on the animist-like idea that there is a conservation law for good fortune - all good things must have some equal cost imposed elsewhere. Itβs not scientific skepticism, itβs superstition.
- These are extremely good textbooks. Pedagogically unique--very different from most mathematics texts. If you come from a humanist background or otherwise worry that you don't "get" math, I strongly recommend these.
- Replying to @Scholars_StageThis suggests to me that we underestimate how important the Great Recession was for preparing America for the entire discourse around βprivilegeβ β that thought complex was old, the widespread conviction that America is rigged for the benefit of an unaccountable few, less so.
- Replying to @Scholars_Stage3. There are a series of episodes about racial relations and cop violence between 2013-2016, but they are fairly ambiguous, as sympathetic to the cops as the other side. The earliest episode of this sort is from the early seasons.
- Replying to @Scholars_StageAfter the Great Recession there is a clear shift in the way the wealthy are portrayed. They are much more likely to be entitled rapists who either try to use their wealth to shield themselves from justice or who feel entitled to acts of wrongdoing.
- Replying to @Scholars_StageDespite taking place in NYC few episodes 2002-2004 center on either 9/11 or the broader GWOT. You start to see episodes where veterans and their spouses are important parts of the show around 2006.
- Replying to @Scholars_StageThere is, however, an episode about Taliban honor killings that aired *before* 9/11.
- Millions of Americans did this for decades. What do people think the Elks, and Masons, and all those other lodges were about?
