Relevant, from deep in the footnotes of a 1820 edition of Nennius I found in a used bookstore
>Not only men, but women were thus occupied, to whose insufficiency the defects of many manuscripts are assignable. (P. Sarti de Profess. Bonon.) This authority refers to the female scribes of Bologna. We may, however, believe the practice to have been general; for Engelhardus (anno 1200) reports an accident which happened to a nun in the exercise of her employment: "Cum soror una cui usus erat scribendi membranam, dum ad lineas punctaret subulam incaute trahens, oculum transfigit." Defective transcript is, however, not solely to be attributed to females; for the accurate and elegant Petrarch indignantly exclaims, "Who shall prescribe an effectual remedy for the ignorance and worthlessness of copiers, who spoil and confuse the performances they undertake?---At this time, every one who can redden letters or guide a pen, though void of learning, skill, or ability, assumes the character of a scribe. I should not censure their defects in orthography (for that is a long forgotten art,) if they would faithfully transcribe what is before them. They might betray their insufficiency, but we should have in the copy the substance of the original. They now confound both together, and, by substituting one thing for another, we can scarce identify the author from which they transcribed. If Cicero, Livy, and many other illustrious writers, could return to life, and re-peruse their own compositions, would they understand them, and doubting the whole, would they believe them to be their own, or rather, those of some barbarous people?"
> Cum soror una cui usus erat scribendi membranam, dum ad lineas punctaret subulam incaute trahens, oculum transfigit.
Ugh! :-(
I didn't know about this part of the process of manuscript preparation. Apparently, awls were used to score or rule the guidelines onto a parchment, or to perforate an entire set of parchment leaves with very tiny "pricking" marks showing the desired spacing for the guidelines (which would then be identical on every page in that set).
David Bull (in one of his YouTube videos [1]) relates a piece of similar advice he was given. An old carver advised him when he was younger to never scratch his face with his carving hand. Apparently accidentally impaling your eye is enough of a risk to make this safety habit an oral tradition.
Back in the days when one did "paste-up", I removed my X-Acto knife from the work with a flourish, and it stopped in my thigh. There was no significant damage, but I was more cautious after that.
With minor modifications I frequently feel that way about various current writers, analysts, bloggers, vloggers, podcasters and influencers (of all genders)
It's impossible to know. You would need to be able to predict how that country would have evolved over the last number of years without British involvement. Comparing it now to how it was when it was colonised by the British is pointless.
is this a new revisionist rhetoric being pushed all of a sudden? I keep hearing the same arguments in Spain about how they brought freedom to the Americas
I understand being unconformable with one's country's past, but the mental hoops to try to get some justification to colonization is so strange.
Even if (and that's a BIG if) those societies ended up "freer" let's not fool ourselves, not a single country went to colonise another for hundreds of years to make it freer, they went there to exploit it. If 500 years later that country is in a better shape now (again a BIG if), that's an unintended side effect.
> not a single country went to colonise another for hundreds of years to make it freer, they went there to exploit it.
Generally speaking the colonisers established their colonies to access natural resources, being new agricultural techniques to undeveloped lands, and engage in trade. The culture of the coloniser naturally came along with them.
Even if there were no specific goal of bringing freedom that may still have been a side effect.
yeah, but that's what I mean, if it's just a side effect then how is it relevant to the whole "illustrious history" of the UK comment which was defended by saying that the colonies are now "freer".
How is that an argument? If I enslave a group of people, force on them my language so they can follow orders and 500 years later that language opens doors for them, how am I "illustrious"? it's a side effect of an inhumane act.
Trying to twist this so my history doesn't make me uncomfortable is historical immaturity.
Arguing that labour camps, apartheid, the raping both literal and figurative as well as outright genocide that occurred were justified because people today are "freer" (IYO) is a stretch.
I don't know man, but arguing for a process that discriminated against people on the basis of their color is something that I thought was a thing of the past. I guess I was wrong.
No one cares about the Fed's muh "consumer prices". No one cares how much the price of furniture or museum tickets or televisions or cigarettes is changing (which together count for over 1/3 of the index, btw)
Now do rent. Or real estate. Or education. Or food.
The Consumer Price Index is published by the BLS, not the Fed(eral Reserve). CPI includes rent (and owner's imputed rent for real estate), education, and food.
The etymology suddenly makes me wonder whether living somewhere in which your "tribe" (race, etc.) is not reflected in the majority might be the cause of many anxiety disorders. It certainly makes me feel anxious. I don't think anyone should apologize for wanting to live somewhere that's relatively homogeneous, with only a small number of assimilating outsiders.
Living in Japan for more than 5 years I've never felt anxious about being surrounded by people not like me. Maybe because I come from a country where all kinds of people live. My idea of my tribe is quite broad..
I don't think it's hard set thing. It depends on one's own view of humanity.
I've certainly made some old ladies anxious with my presence at the start of COVID however.
Lack of language skills, and all the results of that is more a contributor to difficulties of being a minority.
> I don't think anyone should apologize for wanting to live somewhere that's relatively homogeneous
The problem tends to come in when someone's area is becoming less homogenous - which in turn spurs hatred and a desire to expel others. Feel free to move and find said homogenous place, but this desire doesn't give you the right to banish others who are just living their free lives.
That doesn't align with rates of anxiety disorders though. If it even exists it blends with background noise.
Really the idea that the people "like you" by some superficial shared variable are actually more like you is fundamentally a lie. More familiar but the individual variation is far more powerful than just "born in Bavaria".
I don't think this is universal, or at least it isn't my experience.
Context: I'm white, only understand English. At Whole Foods most people look like me, and I understand the snippets of conversations as I pass by. It is overall a stressful experience being there.
When I shop at 99 Ranch, I generally can't understand other shoppers' conversations, and I don't look like the other shoppers. For some reason it is much more peaceful, easier to share a smile with others as we pass by, and just overall a more positive experience.
Just a personal example going the other direction. I don't think there's any deep meaning here.
I would hazard a guess that you are very high on the introvert scale and that explains the situation you presented.
In Whole Foods, you might be expected to answer a question or inquiry since your appearance says that you would understand the query. You might even be expected to engage in banter.
In 99 Ranch, your appearance means that the chances of you understanding a question in the interlocutor's native tongue are approximately zero. Therefore they are unlikely to ask. There is very little chance of an attempt at conversation.
Your difference and assumed lack of ability to interact with in any meaningful way act as a firewall, giving you the same comfort you would derive if the store were completely empty and automated to where you didn't have to interact with other humans.
Not a dig, just an analysis and projecting of my own situation and thoughts on it.
I live in Mexico and present as a very obvious gringo. I'm not an extrovert, when I encounter a situation where I really would rather not interact, I can play up the language barrier. My Spanish is mediocre to begin with, so that helps.
There is at least one other factor, though. At Whole Foods, at least the one near me, a large fraction of the conversation snippets I overhear are complaints, expressions of anxiety, and generally expressions of unhappiness. At 99 Ranch I generally can't understand what people are saying, but on average people's emotions seem to range from neutral to positive. My perceptions may not be a complete picture of reality, but I think they're also not completely detached from reality.
Maybe you perceive, correctly, that the kind of people who shop at Whole Foods are more likely to attack you, socially, than are the kind of people who shop at 99 Ranch.
I think you're missing the forest through the trees, I'm going go guess (I could be wrong) that you haven't lived in another country, because if you did, you'd have drawn upon that experience instead of the one you've described.
Go and move to Thailand for 4 years.
You will probably meet lovely people, be enamoured with all the different 'everything' and probably be in 'awe' for 2-ish years which is how long it takes to get over that 'new' aspect of being somewhere.
Everyone will treat you well - but - essentially as an outsider your entire time there.
While you might have local friends will also likely seek out other ex-pat (if you're English speaking, it'll be from other English nations, not just where you are from) as do the vast majority of the migrants there (ie Chinese will seek out Chinese there) - why? Because you have a lot in common.
For the same reason, the vast majority of XYZ culture people, when moving to a new country, chose that XYZ sub-culture when they arrive.
Obviously, this is not entirely universal, but it's by far more common than not.
FYI I'm literally writing this to you from an English part of the world, but in a tiny community of mostly all native French speakers. They move here for reasons aforementioned.
I think what's really interesting about this is the amount of intellectual hoop-jumping that people do to find an excuse - anything - do deny realities which may be uncomfortable to them.
1) People generally prefer their own cultures.
2) People may have stereotypes of misconceptions of other cultures, but generally don't outright disregard those people. Especially on an individual basis, most people are nice.
3) More people are actively interested in other cultures, than actively antagonist with other cultures, by a wide ratio, with most people being generally ambivalent.
4) Though Xenophobes do exist, so do Xenocentrists, i.e. those who think everything in another culture is 'legitimate, honourable, even spiritual' while the local culture is not. You can see this in the West among those who defend utterly barbaric practices in other cultures (that would never, ever be tolerated 'at home') under the guise of some kind of cultural premise. For example, I remember a David Cameron interview where he was defending the Taliban, i.e. a progressive human rights campaigner glossing over the deeply disturbing and violent practices of groups in that part of the world. It's far to easy for all of us to trivialize broad aspects of foreign culture, that's nothing new, but to do it in a way that diminishes horrifying elements I think is evidence of Xenocentrism.
Edit: ** big caveat of course this dynamic changes a bit when you have some kind of hyper-nationalist leader, or maybe an issue with migration, in which tensions are inflamed etc. etc..
> Being surrounded by 'people like you' feels like 'home' and that anxiety goes away.
What's familiar feels safe. Maybe the long term `solution` to living among/with many different tribe members is to mix more and more people of different origin/background/culture so that it feels normal and familiar (thus safe) to be surrounded by people who are different (actually they wouldn't be different anymore).
But somehow I don't think it's easy to set up the condition for such an environment. I think mixing implies the blending of different cultures and it leads to a new mono culture made up of common or assimilated characteristics (or one culture taking it all with just some minor details from other cultures left) rather than a patchwork of strongly differentiated (untainted) cultures.
This is the great question of "how do we live together ?".
edit: I think there should be a warning about my comment. When I was young I heard a similar reasoning used to justify `racism` because it would seem it's inherent to the humane nature. The adult I heard saying that was a complete racist and he didn't hold this explanation/theory/outlook to find how to live with others but to justify his dislike of others.
'Mono culture' is what happens when people from a variety of groups do live together.
They adopt 'basic civic values' - and all cultural artifacts are thrown out the door, because they can't continue to exist.
Those people go to Starbucks.
When people have actual distinctions from one another - this is where actual 'diversity' exists. People have attitudes, opinions, and especially practices that are stronger and more resilient.
This is why Starbucks can't make headway in Italy -> their local dynamics around coffee are stronger than the power of the Starbucks marketing team.
Though McDonald's does exist there, it's in a totally different capacity.
(FYI Nothing wrong with either of those companies, I'm alluding to the notion of those things being more universal and a more fundamental part of culture, which 'fast food' is in the US, and not Italy).
I really do believe we can live together, and that we mostly do - just fine.
There's some work to do with equal access and opportunity - but by and large most of the advanced world is fair to most people.
No. There's a third side pushing for the Scandinavian solution. Pro-vaccine, but anti-mandate.
A little while ago, everyone wanted to be like Norway or Denmark or Sweden -- now they pretend these countries don't exist.
Edit: of course I got shadowbanned from Hacker News for opposing the surveillance state. Curse you.
Edit 2: someone below says "The Scandinavian countries all have vaccine cards, however, and permit people to discriminate based on whether one has those." Private venues setting access rules is incomparable to a surveillance state mandating rules for every person.
"The U.S. won’t jail you if you refuse the vaccine. But you have to stay home. This is functionally identical to the Scandinavian solution, minus public buildings."
I live in Denmark (mods, who are obviously watching me, can verify from my IP) and this is a lie. In Copenhagen today, you can go to stores, malls, museums, anywhere basically without showing a pas. Why don't you shadowban this person for "misinformation" since he is lying?
The Scandinavian solution works because of it's highly functional education system. When enough percentage of people have at least a basic comprehension of logic and the scientific method the "surveillance state" as you call it does not need to strong arm common sense in its population.
The Scandinavian countries all have vaccine cards, however, and permit people to discriminate based on whether one has those.
The U.S. won’t jail you if you refuse the vaccine. But you have to stay home. This is functionally identical to the Scandinavian solution, minus public buildings and minus a federal vaccine certificate.
They’re the same as in nobody is forced to get the vaccine. Nobody will be threatened with state violence for not getting the shot. They’re just barred from a lot of facilities for the choice they made. We do similarly for children whose parents refuse to give them measles shots.
Enforcement, naturally, varies. In Manhattan, I’m constantly asked for card and ID. In Long Island, it never happened.
So you are walking down the street and the cops say “papers please” and you whip them out with the pride of someone protecting the homeland, because you have permission to walk around?
When comparing Denmark to the US you should really be comparing the Denmark of a few months ago to the present US, because Denmark is way ahead of the US on vaccinations and on taking non-vaccine anti-COVID measures.
Due to Denmark's high vaccination rate and widespread following of anti-COVID measures their delta surge in cases was in the bottom half for Europe (and peaked about 60% below the US delta surge), and their delta death surge was almost undetectable when graphed on the same scale as the rest of Europe (their peak was around 8% of the US peak).
Denmark seems to have made it to the stage where COVID is now just another circulating cold virus (joining the previous four coronaviruses that have become endemic in humans and are responsible for about 20% of colds). About a month ago they ended all COVID restrictions. That's why no one has cared about your vaccination status recently.
A distinction should be made between banned books that were actually censored by governments, and "banned books" that merely featured in pathetic political quarrels at American middle schools and whose "banning" consisted of a school board of boomers removing them from the school library
It's funny that the latter description is probably just as accurate for the people who banned To Kill a Mockingbird as it is for the people who banned Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, given that the two groups are probably diametrically opposed to each other politically. Both groups seem to have a problem with depictions of racism.
So? If the extent of the "ban" is discontinue of availability at a middle school by the authority of a local government or citizen school board in Oklahoma or some such place, it is still a very feeble form of censorship that I don't find interesting at all - just as I'm not interested in what books are or aren't available at the premises of any other local Oklahoma government department building. Anyone can just buy these supposedly banned books themselves if they want to read it. It's not comparable to books that are actually banned.
Yes, the annual banned books list is essentially a list of books favored by the averaged ideology of education majors, librarians, and journalists. There is never anything actually suppressed or controversial on the list.
I'm not even arguing that truly censored books do have intrinsic merit, but the banned books list is just a list of books certain people want you to think are edgy and that you should read to advance their ideology. It's marketing. Amazon and other bookstores are actually banning books, often in collaboration with government funded NGOs. 95% of these books are actual trash fires, sure, but those are banned books. On top of that, public libraries are performing slow, partly ideological purges of existing collections - there's probably more books being permanently destroyed/lost today than in the history of mankind.
These listed books are nonetheless targeted. Yes, they are basically books people want to read, but busybodies complain about these books, not the garbage fire of books that nobody will ever bother reading.
There are plenty of busybodies running the school libraries ensuring books people would read never get bought and purging collections of books now deemed heretical.
There are plenty of busybodies lobbying bookstores to stop selling books.
These books don't, or rarely, make banned book lists. It's done quietly out and out of the public view. The books that get shilled as 'banned books' are all largely (not wholly) books agreeable to a particular class of people.
For example, a very popular children's author who passed away some time ago is completely banned from my library system for ideological reasons.
Even though people are not so familiar with classical Indian civilization, they were very highly literate and the extant corpus is enormous. It easily rivals or exceeds classical Greek and Latin. I have heard that the Mahabharata is 10 times longer than the Iliad/Odyssey.
On that line of thought, probably it’s Tibetan and buddhism that must have an extensive library. Most of these works have survived for a very long time.
Not necessarily - it was literally anything. Any publication whatsoever in Europe up to about 1800 was apt to be in Latin. Science, history, geography, correspondences, laws, records of all kinds, etc.
For example, the career of the great German mathematician C. F. Gauss. His early works, written around 1800, were in Latin. By the end of his career in the 1840s, he wrote in German.
True, though I suspect this probably has more to do with the rise of German nationalism in the 1840s, including a few revolutionary unification attempts. The German language itself was a major political issue of the day.
I have studied linguistics at an advanced academic level, but I cannot parse the title. The article itself is less coherent than those AI random text generators. Maybe the author should focus on basic literacy before worrying about typography.
"The use of lower case in writing as resistance [against the instances of assignment of importance that come with capitalization] in order to support the expression of indigenous aboriginal culture".
The composer clearly has different interests than those you recommend.
About capitalization and attribution of importance: we do process those implicits already, as per "the manual".
I am not sure the cause that the formulator wanted to promote is defended by having people use energies to decrypt. One is satisfied with the exercise, but then sees the expense as largely futile.
Other notes would be possible, but they would be further expense. The writer clearly remained in a world of assumptions similar to "the world is changed by imposing images". Probably itself an image clinger.
The general insanity and incoherence is why I posted this. In this case the medium is really the message. Note that the author is a PhD employed by a Canadian university that was established in 1910.
Have you also noticed odd phenomena coming from Canadian education? I was quite shocked by seeing years ago recordings of debates or conferences involving academicians on the stage of university halls, in which the audience behaved like hooligans in a stadium: "guts, guts, guts, guts, yeeeah, booo...".
In one, the two academicians acted with an appearance of moderation in the exposure of their ideas, but the appearance was really acted, and overacted - look down, hesitate, mumble, modulate, "mhmh, we just believe that this and that"... The website of one presented very violent depictions of said ideas, including cheap mockeries in drawings (again with the implicit, "this is what you think and feel and is sensational to you if you are one of us").
>Not only men, but women were thus occupied, to whose insufficiency the defects of many manuscripts are assignable. (P. Sarti de Profess. Bonon.) This authority refers to the female scribes of Bologna. We may, however, believe the practice to have been general; for Engelhardus (anno 1200) reports an accident which happened to a nun in the exercise of her employment: "Cum soror una cui usus erat scribendi membranam, dum ad lineas punctaret subulam incaute trahens, oculum transfigit." Defective transcript is, however, not solely to be attributed to females; for the accurate and elegant Petrarch indignantly exclaims, "Who shall prescribe an effectual remedy for the ignorance and worthlessness of copiers, who spoil and confuse the performances they undertake?---At this time, every one who can redden letters or guide a pen, though void of learning, skill, or ability, assumes the character of a scribe. I should not censure their defects in orthography (for that is a long forgotten art,) if they would faithfully transcribe what is before them. They might betray their insufficiency, but we should have in the copy the substance of the original. They now confound both together, and, by substituting one thing for another, we can scarce identify the author from which they transcribed. If Cicero, Livy, and many other illustrious writers, could return to life, and re-peruse their own compositions, would they understand them, and doubting the whole, would they believe them to be their own, or rather, those of some barbarous people?"