Per Transtellung's comment I just switched to the 'reddit' theme, and already I can tell it is much better. It does leave the big 'The Motte' site name in the upper left black (unreadable against the background), but now all links are clearly highlighted in blue, and upvotes and downvotes are clearly visible as orange and light blue respectively. Very much support his recommendation to turn 'reddit' into the official dark theme.
EDIT: it appears that the 'reddit' theme does not highlight unread comments in the same way as the 'themotte' theme does. So if I had one other suggestion, it'd be to incorporate that change into this theme. Thanks!
Publicola
1yr ago
I teach a Chronicles of Narnia class for middle school, and I recommend & assign students to read the books in publication order:
- Lion, Witch Wardrobe
- Prince Caspian
- Dawn Treader
- Silver Chair
- Horse and His Boy
- Magician's Nephew
- Last Battle
This seems to be the biggest news from early voting, besides Florida seeing an overwhelming GOP victory.
Betting market odds for Democrat control of the Senate went from roughly 20% to roughly 40% in a few hours. The surge seems to have paused or plateaued, and the GOP is still favored to win control of the Senate, but it's definitely worth paying attention to. Tonight promises to be a nail-biter.
Publicola
2yr ago
In the last few hours, betting market odds for Democratic control of the Senate have surged. Up to 33-35%, from 21% only a few hours ago...
Publicola
11mo ago
This was mentioned earlier (I think in this megathread), but the Vance interview clip was from a couple of months before Pete Buttigieg finalized the first adoption.
Publicola
2yr ago
The formula for the Trinity is 'three persons, one Godhead' (that is, divine nature). So the Trinity maintains that the Son is a *different *person than the Father, but they both share the same single divine nature.
Publicola
2yr ago
I didn't actually realize there was a 'dark' theme until this comment. White text on dark background is my preferred look, so I switched over. However, I'm pretty sure there's a bug with the dark themes ('dark', 'midnight', and 'tron' all share this issue), where the interface doesn't register if you've clicked the upvote or downvote button, it stays the same color regardless. Any chance this could be fixed as well?
Publicola
2yr ago
It depends on the era of 'medieval', and way more than you think. Medieval community life was heavily influenced by the sacred calendar -- feast days and fast days, holy processions and festivals, based on events from the life of Christ and lives of the saints. Likewise, while illiteracy was common, medieval churches were decorated with stained glass, icons, statues, and other artistic representations of key elements of the faith. Finally, while catechesis (religious education) was a recurring issue within the medieval church, the Carolingian Renaissance (at the tail end of the Early Medieval period) and the rise of mendicant orders (Franciscans and Dominicans during the High Medieval age) represent serious efforts by the church to improve religious education of priests as a means of improving the religious instruction of the laity.
Publicola
1yr ago
As far as I understand, the UN (and the French peacekeepers in particular) were famously useless during the Rwandan Genocide, and their major contribution was in setting up refugee camps in DRC (then Zaire) for fleeing Hutu genocidaires after the Burundi invasion ended the genocide.
In other words, they did little to shelter people from the genocide, but mostly sheltered the people who had committed the genocide.
If that's wrong, I'd appreciate the fact-check. My opinion of the UN places them somewhere between people who talk in the theater and malaria, so I'd be delighted to find that they're not quite as contemptible as I had thought.
Publicola
8mo ago
Not because of his policies, but because of the culture war. Every day they could lead with "You won't believe what Trump has Xeeted now".
Huh. Is that your own neologism, or is that the word we're using for what was formerly known as 'tweeted'?
Also, missed opportunity there for Elon Musk to have named the site 'Y.com' -- then he could have trademarked 'Yeeted'.
Publicola
10mo ago
Class Prep - Great Books
I'm a teacher (high school history/literature) so my 'tinkering projects' are mostly in the class design/class prep category, which is kicking into another gear due to how soon the school year starts up. I'm designing two different 'Great Books' classes, one for ancient lit, the other for ancient/medieval, so that's been most of my focus for the past week. I've mostly finalized the books we'll be reading, but my goal for the next few days is to finalize the specific reading assignments for each week (I plan the year ahead of time) and specific discussion questions to cover each week.
Re: 'Ancient Literature', the plan is to start with Homer's Iliad, then the Book of Job (from the Bible), then Sophocles' Antigone, then Plato's Republic, then Virgil's Aeneid, and ending with Augustine's Confessions. I was hoping to include some Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in there, but I'm not sure it'll fit. Also wanted to include Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, but there's probably not enough time and it'd fit better with next year's Medieval Literature class anyway, even though Boethius is still Late Antiquity.
Re: 'Great Books' (covering ancient/medieval), I'm looking at Antigone, Republic, Confessions, Consolation of Philosophy, then Dante's Inferno and one of Shakespeare's plays. Still figuring out whether I can fit another book in there.
If anyone has good discussion/roundtable questions for any of these books, feel free to send them my way.
Publicola
1yr ago
...The wiki article on the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda is tough reading.
The original UNAMIR mission was given a mandate under Chapter VI, meaning its role was exclusively to maintain a demilitarized zone and to negotiate peace after the earlier civil war. When the genocide began, the UN ignored the urgent requests of the force commander to expand its mandate (it waited 40 days before providing the go-ahead to "provide security" to refugees) but instead withdrew 90% of its local forces (drawing down from 2500 to 270) and ordered the remaining soldiers to prioritize the evacuation of foreign nationals.
UNAMIR also assisted with the evacuation of foreign nationals; a group of Belgian soldiers, who had been sheltering 2,000 Rwandans at the École Technique Officielle, were ordered to abandon their station to assist in the evacuation. After the Belgians left, Hutu militants entered and massacred everyone inside.
The protection of Tutsi refugees in Amahoro Stadium seems almost entirely incidental to the UN soldiers defending their own HQ.
On the other hand, the UN Security Council did authorize a French army (officially a 'multilateral force' with 2468 French soldiers and 32 Senegalese soldiers) to set up a 'safe zone' in SW Rwanda under the name Operation Turquoise. This military mission was officially intended to stop the bloodshed, but mainly served to delay the advancing RPF (Tutsi) army from ending the genocide in the 'safe zone', as well as providing supplies for the mass migration of Hutus into eastern Zaire, which set up the humanitarian crisis (and ongoing border conflict) that resulted in 'Africa's World War' a few years later.
At some point I really need to write up an effortpost about France and the Rwandan Genocide. Where the UN and US can be shamed as merely feckless, France was astonishingly brazen in their embrace of villainy. It takes a special kind of moral monster to sit next to Tutsi refugees fleeing a genocide as you evacuate the country, only to kick them out at a Hutu border checkpoint so you can watch them be butchered mere yards away from freedom. Appalling is far too weak a word.
Publicola
2yr ago
I'm the same, though in my case 'recently' means within the last 24 hours; when I was checking the site yesterday there were no such formatting/column oddities. (To clarify: by default the comments now take up about 1/3 of my screen, with the other two thirds reserved for a single comment thread that starts at the top of the page, above the 'The Motte Needs You', by the 'New'/'Top' drop-down. If I minimize that single comment thread, it shrinks to taking up only 1/4 of the screen, with the other 3/4 used for the normal set of comments). No idea what's going on or why.
Publicola
8mo ago
Nate wasn't heralding before the election that this 6% was the modal outcome, it wasn't really useful information.
I don't have links or citations, and most of his commentary was paywalled so I only saw the public-facing free posts, but as far as I remember, he very much made the point that the '50-50' odds didn't mean the final result would be a 50-50 split. His article on polls 'herding' very much pointed out that polls had a standard margin of error, and thanks to herding it was impossible to say if they would fall one way (polls systematically undercount Kamala's support, and she sweeps the 7 swing states) or the other (polls undercount Trump and he sweeps the 7 swing states). However, by far the most likely outcome was one or the other. I don't think he specifically called out the modal outcome (Trumps wins 312 EC votes) as such, but it was clear to me going in that the final result of the night would be a) very close in the popular vote and b) probably a blowout in the EC.
I was liveblogging the Election Night with my high school 'Government & Economics' class, and I sent them Silver's article on herding for the class to read beforehand, with this commentary:
There's a statistical concept called 'herding' that seems to be affecting many (most?) swing-state polls. Pollsters don't want to be wrong, or at least not more wrong than the rest of the field, so if their poll shows results that are different than the average, they stick 'em in a filing cabinet somewhere and don't publish them. The problem is, we don't know what those unpublished polls say, so the state of the race may be considerably different than the current forecasts -- either more in Kamala Harris' favor, or Trump's. It's very unlikely for this election to be a blowout in the popular vote (though a small swing in popular vote could result in a major electoral college win for one candidate) but be warned that the Presidential results may be quite a bit different than your current expectations.
I followed Silver's model closely, as well as Polymarket, and I was not surprised by the Election Night results. I understood that there was a lot of uncertainty, and that 'garbage in, garbage out' in terms of polls herding (and in terms of that Selzer poll), and I found myself highly impressed at Silver's analysis of the race.
And here was my commentary at the end of Election Night:
the polls were absolutely right about how close this election was. Trump's results tonight are very much within the 'expected error' for most polls -- he isn't winning by 5% or 10% nation wide. The polls indicated that Kamala was favored to win the popular vote by about 1%, but with 'error bars' of +/- 3% or so. Trump is currently expected to win the national popular vote by about 1%, which is a difference of 2%. That small amount is enough to push a bunch of swing states into his win column in the Electoral Vote count, but I want to emphasize that even though he's favored to win, and he almost certainly will win a huge majority in the Electoral College, this was still a nail-biter of an election.
Publicola
8mo ago
In previous elections, I always kept the 538 liveblog refreshed as I followed the election results. Now that it was purchased by ABC/Disney and Nate Silver went independent, I'm not sure if there's a point. I'll follow Nate's substack (but most posts are subscriber-only) and twitter, but I expect it won't be nearly as high-quality.
ElectionBettingOdds (another past favorite) seems to be glitching out for me, or at least causing my screen to freeze -- perhaps too much traffic? I am planning to keep my eye on Metaculus and other prediction sites, but not sure how useful they'd be either.
On Reddit, /r/moderatepolitics tends to be tolerable -- it's the best of a bad lot, as far as politics subreddits are concerned. The top posts seem to lean heavily Democratic in the last month, but I've encountered a bunch of pro-Trump and pro-Harris shills in the comments, and the overall split is much closer to 50/50 than any other subreddit I've found.
Basically: if anyone knows of high-quality liveblogs or election news roundups, let me know!
Publicola
1yr ago
#ReadAnotherBook and all, but liberalism has fallen a long way from 1997 when Fictional Liberal Hero Dumbledore confidently intoned that "fear of a [word] increases fear of the thing itself;" and you knew the really good guys because they weren't afraid to use the no-no words, they said what they meant and meant what they said. Now the left-wingers would be in support of not using the "V-word" because it "re-traumatizes" the victims and their families.
I'd never considered this take on 'You Know Who' before, and I find it utterly fascinating, especially in light of how Rowling backtracked in Book 7 and made Voldemort a literal Taboo where saying the name would summon a small army of 'Snatchers' to attack you and imprison you.
(For the life of me, I have no idea what Rowling was thinking with this plot point. It seems obvious that the Taboo was intentionally foreshadowed in earlier books -- Voldemort is identified as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, after all -- but it's more a little brain-bending to realize that Rowling wrote Dumbledore as absolutely insistent that Harry should always always used Voldemort's name and that there is never any reason to fear a name and that other wizards are funny and weird at their fear of even hearing Voldemort's name. My pet theory is that this was part of 'Dumbledore wants to set Harry and Voldemort on a collision course so the prophecy could be fulfilled ASAP', like the Philosopher's Stone obstacle course in Book 1, but that just opens a whole new set of questions.)
Publicola
2yr ago
Pretty much any feature from the Reddit Enhancement Suite would be a good add-on here. One that springs immediately to mind would be the ability to track upvotes/downvotes by user (so someone I've upvoted consistently would have a big green +112 next to their name, while people I downvote might have a red -22).
Another useful feature is the ability to add custom tags to other users, that exist only in your view of the site. Since I'm Catholic and outspoken Christians are fairly rare in online circles, I had a number of 'Catholic'/'Orthodox'/'Evangelical' tags on other users. Also added a few 'tankie' or 'Nazi' tags as well, just to keep track of who was who. (One nice sub-feature was that clicking on the tag brought you to the specific post that you had added the tag from, if you ever needed to remind yourself).
Publicola
10mo ago
My first sight of Starlink was almost transcendental. I had no idea what it was -- I had to look it up afterward -- but I was immediately put in mind of the sci-fi stories of Dyson spheres and Dyson swarms and humanity making its home in the stars.
Publicola
11mo ago
Civilization IV is usually considered the best in the series, for good reason. I strongly encourage you to try it. It's on Steam, and every once in a while it goes on sale for $6.
I very much second this recommendation, though I prefer the GOG version as it is DRM free and works a bit more seamlessly with mods. It pretty regularly goes on sale for $7.50.
Civ IV has some of the greatest history-simulation mods of any game I've encountered, starting with Rhye's and Fall of Civilization that came packaged with the final expansion pack (Beyond the Sword), with several still in active development (Dawn of Civilization, RFC Europe, and Sword of Islam). I've also heard rave reviews for an ancient history mod (Pie's Ancient Europe), as well as a dark fantasy RPG (Fall From Heaven) that somehow works seamlessly within the Civ4 engine.
Publicola
1yr ago
As opposed to the Romans, who were quite fond of the Christians they murdered...?
Publicola
2yr ago
From your first link (emphasis added):
When asked why he was compelled to revisit Velázquez's Portrait again and again, Bacon replied that he had nothing against popes, but merely sought "an excuse to use these colours, and you can't give ordinary clothes that purple colour without getting into a sort of false fauve manner".[24] At the time Bacon was coming to terms with the death of a cold, disciplinarian father, his early, illicit sexual encounters, and a very destructive sadomasochistic approach to sex.[25]
Almost all of the popes are shown within cage-like structures and screaming or about to scream. Bacon identified as a Nietzschean and atheist, and some contemporary critics saw the series as symbolic execution scenes, as if Bacon sought to enact Nietzsche's declaration that "God is dead" by killing his representative on Earth. Other critics see the series as symbolizing the killing of a father figure.[26] However Bacon balked at such literal translations, and later said that it was Velázquez himself he sought to "triumph over." He said that in the same way that Velázquez cooled Titian, he sought to "cool" Velázquez.[26]
Yes, I think that is the very definition of "a spirit of ugliness".
Publicola
3mo ago
- He did all of the above, and then lied about it in a sworn deposition while being investigated for prior incidents of sexual impropriety (Gennifer Flowers), sexual harassment (Paula Jones) and sexual assault (Kathleen Wiley).
Ken Starr was investigating the Lewinsky matter, to establish a pattern of behavior showing that Bill Clinton routinely treated his female staff as a stable of potential sexual conquests.
The fact that most people's impression of the Lewinsky scandal was 'bfd, he cheated on his wife' is a genuinely impressive feat of PR from the Clinton Machine.
Publicola
8mo ago
You're right, but also that specific Selzer poll was a massive outlier from pretty much all other polls, and Nate Silver admitted that upfront, which I really respect.
Publicola
2yr ago
But Fracophonic Africa is almost exclusively west Africa, while Wakanda is depicted (in its culture and in the very brief glimpses of its location on a holographic map) as belonging to east-central Africa -- specifically near Kenya and Tanzania. I can't really complain, since at least the France angle is rooted in some sense of history, but it's another example of Hollywood and pop culture smearing and blurring the historical lines between different regions of the world. It's comparable to assuming that Cleopatra was black since Egypt is in Africa -- the Ptolemys were Greek, and Egypt has always been closer to Mediterranean culture than sub-Saharan African culture.
If it it 'standard operating procedure' for 'average Christian peasants', can you show me another example of a dog saint? Or do I need to point you to the many many irrationalities of our modern secular world before you'll agree that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that you can't generalize from a single example that was notorious even in its own day?
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