This person Keturah knows a lot less about the east than she thinks she does, and less about the aristocracy too.
In Japan you are expected not to wear your shoes indoors because they’re unclean (I suspect a callback to when most people lived in the countryside and wore sandals made of straw) and also because they will damage tatami grass mats. You might get offered slippers or you might not, it depends on the place. Certainly nobody is going to wash your feet!
As for aristocrats, they/we don’t go on about taking your shoes off, not because people are expected to want to show off their expensive shoes, but because being fussy about hygiene is considered middle-class and gauche. Like having lace doilies or little silver tongs for the sugar or that little tray for the salt and pepper shaker, or pronouncing valet as if it were French. It’s just a barber pole thing.
I’m reminded of the incident where the Clegg family (Lib Dems, middle class with delusions of grandeur) visited the Cameron’s (PM, Conservative, genuine Scottish aristocracy). Mrs. Clegg was horrified to be given a bottle of Heinz ketchup; she gave an interview later saying as much and talking about how at home they make all the condiments themselves. The Camerons were of course silently contemptuous that Mrs. Clegg expected them to earn her approval by hand-making ketchup. Very much a ‘two worlds collide’ scenario.
Corvos
5d ago
This year's was wonderful, and not just because England won. We got a great, flowing game without the pressure, we got to see some beautiful goals, the story of the match (4 down, recovered, ended 6-4). Way better than England vs. Argentina or Spain vs. Argentina.
(Although I also think Argentina just play in a way that doesn't fit the spirit of the game.)
Corvos
5d ago
I think like this. Increasingly massive consensus that produces an increasingly universal political pressure, making clear that the only choices are reform or closure. If you are emotionally comitted to the principle that the humanities must remain open as academic departments, then you cannot apply the leverage that will produce reform.
Corvos
5d ago
I'm pretty sure Milgram didn't hold up at all. Loads of people said afterwards that it was really fake, and there's also just the glaring confound that nobody actually expects a university psych department to be torturing people to death so they don't take the scenario seriously.
(Now you might say that guilty participants would say this, and that's not provably wrong. It's one reason why deception in experiments just isn't a good idea. I've volunteered myself for one of those economic fairness experiments and I remember getting halfway through before saying to the poor student, "It's just a computer on the other side, isn't it?")
Go the whole hog
There’s a reason I thought the addition of a cane might bump me up from pretentious and funny to pretentious and a twat. I had a much more fun wardrobe in those days but enough social nous to recognise that half a hog is a welcome addition to barbecues everywhere, but a great big squealing hog is a hunting accident waiting to happen.
Corvos
5d ago
Interesting, never heard of it before. I did nearly buy the other kind of cane but decided even I could only go so pretentious without consequences.
Corvos
6d ago
A cane for the blind, or just a cane? The latter have been fashion accessories for centuries, albeit now out-of-date.
Corvos
6d ago
No, but animating a house on mars isn't really more expensive than animating one on earth, whereas doing CGI for it would be expensive. Likewise for drawing manga. So I think you can still say anime fosters creativity. It's one of the reasons I got into it back in the day.
Corvos
6d ago
No, that’s not how you do it. You just open so the handles are open at the top and the blades are open at the bottom. Then you use one of the handles.
I didn’t mean to tread on people’s toes. I was given a Swiss Army knife as a boy and was rather disappointed there never seemed to be anything to use it on.
Actually, no. Chicken sashimi is surprisingly good, and I could eat thin steak tartare for days.
Funnily enough I was at a country house party once. The hosts were very grand but not always very aware of prosaic detail, and they'd cooked a delicious pheasant. Now, I'd had a few glasses of wine and it took me quite a while to actually look properly at my plate and realise that the inside meat was dark purple: they had put it in the oven without defrosting it properly, and the inside was entirely raw.
I remember thinking, If I make a fuss about this, I will humiliate myself and my poor hosts who have been very nice; on the other hand I've already eaten half of this and I've either got food poisoning already or I'm not going to. So I ate the rest of it. Not one of us said a word.
No food poisoning, either :P
Corvos
6d ago
A pair of sharp scissors held open is a knife. In any case, I'm not criticising, it had just never occured to me before.
Corvos
6d ago
What day to day tasks does this help with? I have a swiss army knife somewhere but there never seemed to be anything to do with it, so I'm curious about what I could use it for.
Corvos
6d ago
If I was hosting a [...] barbecue
Don't all men eat using only their personal dagger? The fork was invented by Italians.
Corvos
7d ago
Not begging anything. To my eyes Israel exerts de-facto authority over Gaza. Because it feels it has to, because it doesn't trust the Gazans (understandably) enough to let them alone, but it also doesn't trust them enough to let them be part of the state. This is the circumstance I think of as apartheid.
They're too big and expensive to do fun things with. You could quantise or frankenmerge or finetune the llama 7b models at home, and get features and performance that the big American companies wouldn't give you because it made the lawyers and wokes and little old ladies sad. Good luck trying that with Kimi K3.
Corvos
7d ago
I'm the last person to deny that nasty words have their definitions stretched for political goals, and I don't even like the Palestinians, but Israel really does look like a pretty damn clear example of an apartheid state to me.
Corvos
7d ago
Yes, but this is that thing you do when you strip things of all context and then leap in saying, 'har har! Under your definition, Britain is an apartheid state!'. Resulting in an incredibly long definition which to be perfectly honest I believe you would either nitpick to death or say, 'well, clearly this definition was created to allow Israel to be an apartheid state without Norway or Britain'.
In practice words have fuzzy definitions and 'partitioning your state to exclude a specific citizenry that you hate and fear but nevertheless can't actually kill' is pretty close to apartheid.
I don't think that's quite right. It's saying 'don't fight the war'. So don't try to drive out your opponents, don't chimp out, don't dox, don't dogpile.
Discussing goals and tactics is fine I think.
You might argue that 'if we don't talk about this, we concede' implies that talking about it is fighting, but that's the syllogism that got us to the point where it's almost impossible to discuss in the first place.
Corvos
8d ago
With the implication of ‘this is why I should be in charge of the legislature’ for good measure.
Corvos
8d ago
This strikes as "Lemme at 'im, lemme at 'im!" behaviour. That is, getting fighty while your friends hold you back. It lets you broadcast your furious manly pride and aggression without any risk of having to follow through with it, and you can cast shade on the people holding you back for being cowards.
Sorry, I meant consensus outside the university that academia is in need of reform. In other words, isolate academia from the little storms in a teacup but accept that if there is enough consensus that academia has lost its way then academia needs to be reformed.
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