The irony being that the surviving records of antiquity are literally just predominantly the royal propaganda because those were carved into stone which lasted and other writing formats didn’t survive.
The guy carving into the rock here in reality was doing so at the bidding of a guy who would have killed him if he didn’t write the version of reality he wanted recorded.
The idea that what was written down could be instantly disputed and checked against facts at all is the part this dude would find unbelievable.
Then the printing press fragmented and diluted the power of the elites. For example, I believe that it’s no coincidence that Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation came very soon after Gutenberg; in fact, I believe it was inevitable.
EDIT: well what do you know… it was Martin Luther himself who translated the famous Gutenberg Bible. Talk about one degree of Kevin Bacon.
Yes, Martin Luther did translate the Gutenberg Bible from Latin, Hebrew, and Greek into German. His translation was then printed at a high number and distributed in 1534. This was one of the first times that the Bible became accessible for the masses in their own language.
Yeah, cuneiform was interesting in terms of the medium and how much and how broadly it survived. Their folk tale in terms of how they received the writing was that someone from the ocean arrived and was trying to communicate and pressed reeds into the wet mud.
I sometimes wonder if there was an Aegean earlier Bronze Age/prehistory writing system (like the one found on the Dispilio tablet) that has been lost to the ages because it was on a temporary medium and then the Sumerians ended up with a version of writing that persisted in a loosely similar way to their folk history.
And they knew it was terrestrial in origin, because only one dish picked it up, whereas if it was was of outerstellar origin, multiple sites would have received it.
Fredric Brown wrote a fun very short story (he was known for page-long short stories) about a scientist who discovered immortality and took the serum, but he had a cold at the time, so the bacteria also became immortal, took over his body, became pneumonia and put him in a coma. Eventually, his colleagues buried him.
Edit: Found the story. Got the details slightly wrong, but the gist was the same- fb2.top/…/part-16
I just hate how fast we reacted to that damn turtle with a plastic straw in its nose and now we will forever suck on moist paper straws for the rest of our lives if we are lucky. But we do shit about the real bulk of the plastic in our oceans. Oh but the cute turtle… We must act now!!!
The world is doomed by greed brothers. We are fucked.
I dimly remember my grandmother having straws made from actual straw (or something similar at least). I don’t remember how well they worked unfortunately
Every time this comes up I have three words to say that seem like a perfect solution and I don’t understand why it isn’t the default: dry pasta straws.
Compostable, cheap, stronger than paper, even edible if you really want
The good news is the soft plastic bags that turtles think are jellyfish are still getting dumped into the ocean en masse. That’s what you get turtles for ruining our iced latte drinking experience /jk
I think tom scott did a video where he mentioned that in the original languange it was “whale killer” not killer whale but people tranlated it word for word, losinh the meaning.
Yes, the allusion to “bear” is the giveaway. As for guinea pig, that’s a slang term from back home in the late '80s.
You see, I was born and grew up on the western side of urban Pennsylvania — back then, most of my time was spent hanging out at the local school’s playground. Frequently, we’d play basketball, except this one time that two hoodlums beat me up. My mom got so scared from this that she sent me out to California to live with her sister and brother-in-law.
Oh man, west urban Pennsylvania. I remember one time I caught the ferry to east urban Pennsylvania because I needed a new heel for my shoe. So I tied an onion to my belt, excuse was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on then. “Gimme five bees for a quarter”, you’d say.
Essentialism (you’re not born a bear so you will never be) vs social constructivism (the environment is making you live like a bear so you’ve become a bear).
One possible reading of it is that the bear trap is alt-right pipeline, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, toxic stuff like that, and the trapped guinea pig is a probably cisgender, probably straight, probably white young man. They fall into the trap because it’s actually designed perfectly for them. I took it as the moral of the story being to be mindful of pushing away people who may be suffering and also experiencing relative privilege within this soul-crushing capitalistic system.
And like, yeah, unironically, poor cis-het white guys. I’ve seen plenty of men and boys I care about struggle under the pressures of hegemonic masculinity (a particular form of “manhood” that one must adhere to to be afforded the privilege of being a Man ™). My best friend used to say that in an alternate timeline, he could’ve seen himself becoming an angry, edgy incel, if not for the influence of some friends who supported, and, where necessary, laughed at him.
I don’t think that’s controversial. People who fall into traps should be helped, even if they don’t think they need your help before they fall in (and hell, even while they’re trapped, they may still not realise it).
However, there’s a limit to what can reasonably be expected to be done to “bring people over” to the other side. If I’m trying to build community and solidarity than more often than not, I wanna be prioritising the wellbeing and voices of people experiencing structural oppression, over coddling the ego of someone who’s relatively privileged. And yeah, that sucks, and it’s uncomfortable to reflect on how privilege doesn’t mean you’re exempt from suffering, and how that privilege can even serve to isolate you if you’re surrounded by voices saying that men don’t suffer under the patriarchy and if you are suffering, it must be your fault for doing the masculinity wrong.
I’m marginalised along some axes, immensely privileged in many others. In some ways, being marginalised is more comfortable, because I know where I stand: it’s me, and others like me, against an unjust system. Righteous anger, baby. It gets uncomfortable when I look back at my privilege. It doesn’t negate my suffering, but I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist; part of the solidarity and striving for a better world is tearing out the old structures that I, and others like me, have benefitted from, unjustly.
In recent years, I’ve gotten quite good at sitting with my discomfort, which is good, because whenever I think I’m on top of it all, I find something else that makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable about the world. That’s good though, because that means it’s working, I hope. I’m in a trap of my own, you see, and there are countless good people working to free me from this, I just need to stop flailing and let them help me; it’s not reasonable to expect people to put their wellbeing at risk to help someone who seems determined to go down struggling and take others with them.
I thought this was a reference to cultural appropriation. Like it is appropriating the bear’s thing, which is falling on a bear trap. The joke is that it doesn’t make sense in this scenario.
comicstrips
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.