BahRamYou
4d ago
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/se_la_v%C3%AC is correct in italian
BahRamYou
4d ago
Sure, but who else is like that, who writes prolifically on the internet for a general audience, in modern times? I think you'd have to either go back to much older sources, or look to some fairly obscure academics who don't even have a twitter or any sort of online presence. Academia in general just... doesn't do a good job of catering towards popular interests.
BahRamYou
4d ago
Yeah, I feel like I agree with you in principle, but in practice that would just lead to awkward cutoffs like what happened to me in this case. I wasn't necessarly looking for a lifelong friend, just one good conversation at a party. Se la vie.
BahRamYou
4d ago
I think I answered @JeSuisCharlie's question of "is he a trustworthy source?" You're now asking a different question- "is he more likely to put forward an argument in good faith?" (presumably you mean, more likely because of his political beliefs?) To that I would say no, but neither is anyone else. Like everyone, you need to read him with an eye towards his potential bias.
BahRamYou
4d ago
I dont believe any source is trustworthy in the sense of "oracle of truth." I just appreciate his perspective. He must be read in context, just like every single other human who ever dared to speak with authority. I so generally trust him about the specific factual details of life in the ancient world, but much less when it comes to editorializing or drawing broad conclusions.
BahRamYou
5d ago
I was having a nice time talking to her until this one mind-killer topic came up. Guess I'll just wait until there's a democrat in the white house until I'm allowed to talk to women.
BahRamYou
5d ago
So you just pretend like you don't know who Trump is or what the US presidential election is? how does that usually work out for you.
BahRamYou
5d ago
They just randomly bring up the Byzantines or 1990s Russia? That's... interesting. (personally I would think those subjects are way more fun to talk about than contemporary US politics, but admittedly I would't want a random person to try to lecture me about them)
BahRamYou
5d ago
I think he's just caught between a rock and a hard place.
If he wants to keep his position as "internet historian," it's essential that he has some genuine academic bona fides. Right now he's an adjunct professor, which is just barely enough to call himself "professor," even though everyone in academia knows he's not a "real" professor.
His specialty is an classics, specifically the military history of the Roman republic. That's a very old-school, white male coded, conservative interest. It's also been out of favor with the academy for, I don't know, at least 100 years. So if he bends too far towards his fan base, he'll get excommunicated by the academy and lose all of his professional bona fides. He'll become just another internet "roman statue guy." On the other hand, if he leans too far towards the academy, he'll spend all his time writing about the queer women of color in the roman republic, or whatever. He wrote a whole series about how women traditionally made clothing and he had to admit that primary sources were sparse because even the primary sources of the time thought that this was an incredibly boring topic which no one cared about. They basically just took a strand of wool or flax then "spun" in a circular motion, over and over and over, for approximately one million hours, until it resembled something like a modern dress. Neat.
In of his recent article, he did admit the contradiction- if he was a woman or Black person, writing about more academia-friendly topics, he'd probably be a full professor by now. Instead he's marginalized as basically a glorified grad student, despite having a huge internet following and way more funding than most full professors. And yet, he has to kind of look down on and despise his followers in order to maintain his standing. Truly a difficult position.
BahRamYou
5d ago
To be fair, she's not wrong. If you had put a gun to my head and forced me to pick between Trump and Harris, I would have picked Trump. She seemed intelligent and fun to talk to just... completely mind-poisoned by politics. I was really hoping we could drop the subject and talk about literally anything else. But no. No compromise, no "agree to disagree," no mercy.
I don't think I could convincingly lie and pretend to be an ultra leftist. I suppose I should have just said "Harris," and then quickly changed the subject to something else. But I suppose it would only be a matter of time until I was found out.
BahRamYou
5d ago
How do you handle it when people ask for your political opinions in real life?
I had a woman ask me suddenly, out of the blue, "who did you vote for in the last election?" We were having a nice conversation before that point (not like, a meet-cute instant love or antyhing, but at least it was a good conversation). I answered truthfully that I had just recently changed my address at that time, so I didn't vote, because I was dealing with a lot and it just wasn't worth the effort for me of updating my voter info on top of everything else. She instantly made an annoyed face and turned away, never to talk to me again. She was obviously a liberal- god help me if I had said I voted for Trump. But like, what are we supposed to do in these situations? Is it just impossible to talk to people with different political opinions now?
I've watched Pippa a lot. I think the overall culture has changed a bit (partly because of her). Vtubers really took off around 2020, when people were stuck inside due to lockdowns, with nothing to do but consume endless content online. And between covid and the presidential election, some people were desparate to find a happy space where people weren't talking about politics, so vtubers became something of a sanctuary. And the En world especially, everything revolved around Hololive, which was set up like a traditional idol company, with them having a carefully curated image and avoiding contraversial subjects (although they could still be pretty edgy sometimes).
Pippa was originally just some random streamer working for a small unknown agency. She wasn't trying to be "based" or political at all, she was just a weird shut-in who spent too much time chronically online looking up weird edgy content, and then she started talking about it in streams. She intentionally referenced 4chan memes, although usually not political ones, and 4chan at the time was a big hub of vtuber discussion, just not one that anyone in hololive or nijisanji would ever acknowledge.
So OK, she does occasionally mention things like how she owns guns or is interested in the Bismarck. But she's really not doing "based" political content at all. She's just cracking jokes, trying to be high energy, and doing whatever she can to be funny. She'll mention people like Asmongold or Alex Jones, but almost never discuss them in any detail. She certainly doesn't stand up on a soap box for any specific political causes. Still, even that much was pretty shocking the general vtuber culture of 2021-2022.
Nowadays, of course, there's a million indie vtubers, and most of them are a lot farther removed from Hololive or any other "idol" types. So now we have some that are explicitly political. It's not that shocking though, it's just... kinda boring, they repeat the same talking points as anyone else on the internet.
All of this is to say that Pippa just kinda pretends to be edgy, but it's pretty tongue-in-cheek and she's actually a sweet girl, so I wish people would just leave her alone.
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