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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   21418 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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the audit started back in January has resulted in the revocation of 28,000 commercial divers licences

TIL commercial diving is so lucrative for immigrants...

(You have a typo there)

Good eye.

I'm more concerned about the English pruriency requirement...

To be fair, that attitude would help a lot in gaining English proficiency. Just look at weeaboos.

It is notoriously the main way the more trad British public schools motivate the boys to learn Latin. Something like Suetonius' account of Nero's vices can be read in a scholarly translation, but if you want to someone to let you read Catullus as a schoolboy you are probably reading in in the original Latin. Rated "C" for classical.

Not that I ever saw. Reading about cool battles, yes. What are you thinking of?

I dropped Latin before they started reading Catullus, but among his more notable works (all of which were pored over by my classicist friends) were:

  • A Latin translation of Sappho's Greek "lyric poetry" (this is what classicists call it in learned academic journals, but there is a reason why the old-fashioned term for lesbianism is "Sapphic love")
  • His own erotic poetry about his sexual desire for teenagers of both sexes
  • Invective against his political opponents including sexual innuendos. (The modern equivalent of calling your political opponent a pigfucker, but with more poetic description of the physical qualities of the pig).

Suetonius is the primary source for most of the modern stories about sexual perversion in Ancient Rome. The description of Tiberius' BDSM exploits (he was a sexual sadist to the point where I find him sick, and I'm not exactly innocent here) is the most explicit part - the discussion of Caligula and Nero is mostly a list of who he did and where.

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