Ed Bithell

On the operational question, perhaps trying to set these things up would also usefully expose a bunch more people in political parties, in a really immediate way, to how it is far too hard to run a pub or similar business right now...

That's the touch grass issue again to some extent right - my dad used to drink in the Tory club in his town because it was the one with a snooker table! The parties might be more "normal" if they had more normal people going through, etc

Why not though! Many young people in particular wish they had more third spaces. In particular I think we are short on places similar to village pubs/student union bars, where you can go and feel you'll run into someone you know without scheduling it with specific friends

this analogy would be better if I had seen Boss Baby of course (I do not know whether the Boss Baby defeats Sparta)

Given how little Thucydides discourse normally acknowledges what actually happened in the war, it's kind of like guy who has only seen the first act of Boss Baby

Romanov Emperor Peter the Great also began to Romanise local elites, pressuring them to speak Romance languages like French and use older (Palaiologian) ritual classics rather than local variations. (When war broke out with the rival Bonaparte dynasty, Romanov elites re-embraced a separate identity)

This claim was not recognised as legitimate by the Habsburg and Ottoman dynasties who occupied most of the historical Roman heartland, although diplomatic texts generally accord the Romanovs the title of Emperor.

Later designated by chroniclers as the non-Roman barbarian dynasty of Eastern Ru, the Romanov dynasty claimed to be Emperors and heirs to Rome on the basis of ritual and cultural legitimacy ultimately deriving from the previous Rurikid dynasty's descent from the Palaiologos dynasty.

"China" is comparably varying as a label to "the Roman Empire" over a similar time period (i.e. c. 750 BC to now) is my Roman Empire

There's probably a whole category of "more people died in this war in China" facts, like even most pretty well-read people haven't heard of the Taiping Rebellion but it probably killed more people than WWI

That's very true - I was thinking about it more from the (potentially somewhat Whiggish) popular notion that the Anglican Church is (/has always been) more liberal on marriage than the RC Church because Henry wanted a divorce, when really like you say he just wanted his convenience and noone else's

Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans? Part I: Beginnings and Legends Who were the Romans? How did they understand themselves as a people and ‘Roman’ as an identity? And what were the implications of that understanding – and perhaps more importantly…

On the last one, @bretdevereaux.bsky.social wrote a great series of essays on Roman identity vs modern myths acoup.blog/2021/06/11/c...

- lost classical texts were mainly lost because people stopped writing them down, not destroyed on purpose (and a huge amount of the classical texts we still have came to us via the Islamic world)
- Romans, even the imperial elite, weren't all "white" and would find modern ideas about race v weird

- the only country that comes close to USSR in WWII deaths is China, and together they're probably more than half of the total
- French Revolution not led by the urban poor against the rich but by the bourgeoisie against aristocrats

picking all new ones for the sake of keeping it going:

- the English Reformation had nothing to do with divorce, which Henry VIII thought was wrong, and the Pope could've given Henry his annulment in 5 seconds if he hadn't been held hostage by Katherine's nephew

Often forgotten/ignored that Euromaidan, and thus the original Russian invasion, was triggered not by any NATO events but by Yanukovych refusing to sign the EU-UA Association Agreement!

Marvelisation of all film franchises continues - most people don't want to have to know what happened in the last film! Bring back self-contained sequels like Terminator 2

I have an impression that this is also a "nobody thinks they're old" situation where well-meaning (and culturally influential) people who finished school literally 40+ years ago will talk about the curriculum as if it has not changed since they did the British history survey when they were twelve

Apple have had a massive cube on Fifth Avenue since 2006 and as far as I'm aware New Yorkers do not mistake it for the Kaaba

Are there attempts to disrupt this market? Especially given that distribution can be almost entirely digital, could a group of sufficiently prominent academics in a given field just found a new journal that doesn't charge ludicrous access fees?

if you're lucky, you might get 200ml of tonic water for £6

Also even among the rest of the racialised stuff, stands out to me now that "Outcast of Redwall" starts like a story that could be pretty meaningful for adopted kids from rough backgrounds then more or less concludes nope genetics is the main thing that determines whether people are good or evil

I like that they think their audience will get in on armour but are not yet sold on having spare cash

Did a little bit for fun during undergrad (mainly jokes and so on shared between classmates, writing 诗 etc) but never since. Studied the language for four years and was never assigned to compose/translate into classical

It's a pity because I think there's an interesting set of questions to ask around why big corporates spend money disseminating poststructuralist social theories they don't understand, but the answer is not "HR are Red Guards"

The gap between news written for retirees who think they already know everything about business, and news for actual business leaders (the woke cabal FT), keeps widening

In short yes there is a whole undercurrent around the self-disciplining supposedly needed to stay thin and how (relevant for TCW!) society associates that with ideals of whiteness, even though it's not necessarily how our bodies work

@katemanne.bsky.social has done some really interesting work on the social and moral values attached to fatness and working for thinness (book is called "Unshrinking")

In fact I think this goes back in many ways to your original point about Trump – he ran a very hostile *primary* campaign which likely attracted a lot of disengaged voters, who were "non partisan" but didn't trust either party, and then yeah like you say partisan GOP voters held their nose and voted

Also wonder whether Obama partly bucks the trend because he first ran as a low profile insurgent against the party machine; voters increasingly partisan but also generally don't like politicians (think this may help explain Trump support from low engagement voters who think of him more like Perot)