...when they actually do something, it's invariably a disaster.
Invariably? This passes for insightful? I might have gone for funny, but it's a pretty tired knee-jerk cliche. Don't forget that even Ron Paul, the patron saint of libertarianism is a congressman. He must not think the exercise is utterly futile.
It's hard to say the Roman Empire "lasted" after the city of Rome was sacked.
Not at all. You may define Rome by the city itself, but "Rome" itself did not once Constantine had moved the capital and senate to Constantinople.
Constantinople wasn't even originally part of the Roman Empire, it was conquered later when they grew really large.
Hoo boy, is that ever off. Constantinople didn't exist before Constantine created it, and he did so with the explicit intent of moving the capital of Rome there, to the real hub of the 4th century empire.
AFAIC, you can't have something called "the Roman Empire" if it doesn't include the Italian peninsula and most especially the city of Rome.
AFAIC? OK, then you're being blatantly arbitrary. Did you intend this misconceived analogy to strengthen your argument? It does the reverse. Federalism has its merits, but I suspect from the above that your understanding of the real issues is rather thin.
Actually, Bach hated the sound of the first pianos, though later models were much better. But that isn't really the point here. The violinist in the Times article argues correctly that the power of the best music lies in communication between performer and audience on a deep emotional level. A computer performance is no more gratifying than sex with a robot. You couldn't replace a Wang Chung show with a computer, let alone a symphonic Bernstein score.
In other words, a computer doesn't replace an instrument, it replaces a musician, and does so very poorly.
This is too simplistic. You may argue whether his assessment was correct, but from all the (copious) surviving evidence Jackson believed that relocation was the only solution to a horrific problem. It was an ugly process, to be sure. R.V. Remini puts it very well: "It was harsh, arrogant, racist---and inevitable."
And your representation of Marshall's SCOTUS ruling is misleading. It was rather fuzzy on precisely what property the United States was responsible for protecting. And it lacked any injunction on the executive branch to defend that property. It also stated categorically that the Cherokee were not a sovereign nation.
As an American I am personally shamed by the whole episode. The blame cannot be glibly laid at Jackson's feet. The blame, dear C64 lover, lay not in our leaders but in ourselves.
Seriously, the humanities are in trouble. With over 6 billion people on the planet, it's extremely difficult to have an original thought.
Not true. I work in a field, Classical Philology, that has been hammering on the same material for 2 millenia. Original approaches are still plentiful because new generations approach the old material in new ways. Inscriptions and lucky finds in the libraries of old universities do occasionally appear, but even the most stable texts, like the Iliad, continue to generate fascinating scholarship.
Don't underestimate the ingenuity and creativity of intelligent people.
The best cheaters? Perhaps so, but cheaters are a self-selecting lazy bunch. Deeply obfuscated plagiarism could easily be as much work as an original paper.
> There's probably a philological method for sorting that out; I don't know it.
I do. The bronze age survivals in the Iliad and Odyssey are metrical, and generally restricted to details like place names and personal epithets, the Catalog of Ships in Iliad 2 being the canonical example. Current scholarly consensus is that the society imagined in the Iliad and Odyssey is in large scale no more than 2 generations old. For a quick and well considered overview, see Raaflaub's chapter in the recent Cambridge companion.
Thucydides knew even less about bronze age Crete than we do. A great historian, to be sure, but one best used as a source for the 8th century and later.
As for Plato, there's little cause for wonder. He's making the myths up himself to serve his literary and philosophical purposes. It isn't underhanded; it was a natural part of his rhetorical technique and would have been well understood as such by his audience. Later readers with different expectations misconstrue the text. Regardless, Plato could not be reporting a myth from Egypt accurately because the Greeks knew very little about true Egyptian culture. Their depictions of Egypt are not reliable.
Drop by the local Uni and ask your friendly neighborhood classicist or Mediterranean archaeologist. No one who understands the sources believes in Atlantis.
Tariffs? How does this stuff get started? We know nearly nothing of Minoan culture because there are no written records that we can read. Yes, they were clearly a seafaring people; yes, they felt secure enough that they didn't wall in their buildings. But trade tariffs? On *all* shipping in the Mediterannean? On what evidence can someone make this remarkable claim?
>...it's amazing any memory of the Minoans made it to Plato.
None did. The myth of Atlantis is unrelated to the Minoans, and the legends of Theseus that persist in classical Greece were generated by later Greeks viewing Minoan ruins, not from an oral memory of their living culture.
Those who search for Atlantis based on Plato's didactic myth-making should compare the myth of Er at the end of the Republic. It's no more or less real than the two myths of Atlantis, but no one would ever claim that it's historical.
The Minoans were indeed impressive, though the multi-tiered complexes that you describe were from around 1400, not 2000. And they weren't wiped out by Santorini. They did just fine until the Mycenaean Greeks sailed down around 1250 and conquered them. If Greeks thought the Minoans magical, their reaction seems to have been, "Cool, magic! Let's kill 'em and take it!"
Good on ya, mate. I wrote myself a python script to do the same for mp3s. But if oggs are what you're after, then oggenc in the standard xiph distribution can be compiled to produce oggs directly from flac.
Roman plumbing was very inefficient. Firstly they had no concept of a tap, the water just flowed continuously 24/7, so huge quantities of water was simply wasted.
Rain in mountains + aqueduct + gravity = 24/7 water supply. Waste? So what?
Secondly it was largely done in lead piping. yeah way to go there.
Hard mountain water quickly generates a coating of lime in the pipes. Lead? No problem
Thirdly there was a great deal of corruption. The amount you paid for your water depended on the diameter of the pipe coming into your property. However it was common place to bribe the local water inspector to fit a larger pipe than it said on the records.
Normal bureaucratic graft here. I cannot imagine any sufficiently civilized society without it.
In short, the Romans were not backwards. I've seen (and used) plenty of Roman plumbing. Did you know that the city's system still employs some of the (admittedly refurbished) lines? Best tap water I've ever tasted.
Middle east and china...and Rome (a.k.a. Constantinopolis).
Rome the society didn't fall for another millenium, it just moved east. The culture that was brought back to western Europe by the crusaders was largely Byzantine (a.k.a. Roman). The crusaders were themselves largely responsible for the true fall Rome.
The implementation is everything. Democracy goes back to the Greek demokratia and takes as its model the 5th-century B.C. Athenian democracy, in which the people administered the government as directly as possible. It was marked by wild policy shifts, especially after the death of Pericles, and self-destructed under the pressure of the Peloponnesian war. A perusal of the Federalist papers and Madison's other writings will demonstrate how eager the American founders were to avoid pure democracy.
A republic is loosely modeled on the Roman republic, even though the Roman system, like the Spartan constitution to which the ancients compared it, was only superficially similar to modern republics like the U.S. The founders nonetheless saw in Rome (and Sparta) many ideas worthy of imitation: separation of powers; aspects of monarchy (president), aristocracy (legislature), and democracy (the voting public); term limits.
The key distinction in the modern sense is this: while Americans do elect their representatives, presidents, some judges, and local officials, they do not do so directly. The process is made indirect through the party system and the electoral college. And once the representatives, senators, and president are in power they are not immediately subject to the whims of those who elected them. The idea, for better or worse, is to introduce a measure of stability and keep the government out of the hands of the unwashed masses.
Those who argue that the people's representatives must obey the volatile wishes of their constituencies once in office would do well to read more about Athens and learn where that road leads.
We should be emailing, not posting in a public forum;)
The verb "to be" is a linking verb in all Indo-European languages (or Indo-Germanische if you prefer). It isn't transitive, and therefore cannot have a direct object.
You only think you did. I doubt anyone else will be interested any longer, but I see that you're the editor of something-or-other and really need to understand. Hence:
The Great Relative Pronoun Overview (active clauses only; first things first)
Who: used only in the nominative case, i.e. as the subject of the relative clause (as in your clause; your mistaken "whomever" is the subject of the active verb "said")
Whose: genetive; used in English primarily for possession
Whom: dative/ablative/accusative; the former two require a pronoun, as in "for whom" or "by whom;" the last stands by itself as the direct object of the verb's action
Not to overdo it. I suspect you're merely the innocent victim of underqualified English teachers. Want to understand grammar? Study a rigorous inflected language instead, ideally Latin. Don't care? Then don't pose as an authority. And for god's sake don't take potshots at a linguistic virtuoso like Churchill. Not even at his anecdotal doppelganger. End of tirade.
That would be the case if it were the proper rendering of the anecdote. Churchill was supposedly annoyed by a British schoolmarm who scolded him for ending a sentence with a preposition in his History of the English Speaking Peoples. Legend has it that he responded in fine glibitude: "That, madam, is precisely the type of nonsense up with which I will not put!"
And you meant "whoever," not "whomever," by the way. Nominative, not accusative. Wordsmith indeed.
The parent's definition is spot on, but I must step in to defend poor Euripides. He's been on the receiving end of unfair abuse ever since 4th century critics first laid this misguided charge on him. IMNSHO (classics Prof.) his supposedly contrived plot endings are better integrated than non-specialists realize. Try to catch a good production of Medea or Philoctetes: you'll be blown away.
Slashdot Mirror
...when they actually do something, it's invariably a disaster.
Invariably? This passes for insightful? I might have gone for funny, but it's a pretty tired knee-jerk cliche. Don't forget that even Ron Paul, the patron saint of libertarianism is a congressman. He must not think the exercise is utterly futile.
It's hard to say the Roman Empire "lasted" after the city of Rome was sacked.
Not at all. You may define Rome by the city itself, but "Rome" itself did not once Constantine had moved the capital and senate to Constantinople.
Constantinople wasn't even originally part of the Roman Empire, it was conquered later when they grew really large.
Hoo boy, is that ever off. Constantinople didn't exist before Constantine created it, and he did so with the explicit intent of moving the capital of Rome there, to the real hub of the 4th century empire.
AFAIC, you can't have something called "the Roman Empire" if it doesn't include the Italian peninsula and most especially the city of Rome.
AFAIC? OK, then you're being blatantly arbitrary. Did you intend this misconceived analogy to strengthen your argument? It does the reverse. Federalism has its merits, but I suspect from the above that your understanding of the real issues is rather thin.
Actually, Bach hated the sound of the first pianos, though later models were much better. But that isn't really the point here. The violinist in the Times article argues correctly that the power of the best music lies in communication between performer and audience on a deep emotional level. A computer performance is no more gratifying than sex with a robot. You couldn't replace a Wang Chung show with a computer, let alone a symphonic Bernstein score.
In other words, a computer doesn't replace an instrument, it replaces a musician, and does so very poorly.
This is too simplistic. You may argue whether his assessment was correct, but from all the (copious) surviving evidence Jackson believed that relocation was the only solution to a horrific problem. It was an ugly process, to be sure. R.V. Remini puts it very well: "It was harsh, arrogant, racist---and inevitable."
And your representation of Marshall's SCOTUS ruling is misleading. It was rather fuzzy on precisely what property the United States was responsible for protecting. And it lacked any injunction on the executive branch to defend that property. It also stated categorically that the Cherokee were not a sovereign nation.
As an American I am personally shamed by the whole episode. The blame cannot be glibly laid at Jackson's feet. The blame, dear C64 lover, lay not in our leaders but in ourselves.
That's below minimum wage. Someone needs to find a new employer.
Or a new calculator.
Nice, though the last line should doubtless read:
x = x - y
No?
Seriously, the humanities are in trouble. With over 6 billion people on the planet, it's extremely difficult to have an original thought.
Not true. I work in a field, Classical Philology, that has been hammering on the same material for 2 millenia. Original approaches are still plentiful because new generations approach the old material in new ways. Inscriptions and lucky finds in the libraries of old universities do occasionally appear, but even the most stable texts, like the Iliad, continue to generate fascinating scholarship.
Don't underestimate the ingenuity and creativity of intelligent people.
The best cheaters? Perhaps so, but cheaters are a self-selecting lazy bunch. Deeply obfuscated plagiarism could easily be as much work as an original paper.
> There's probably a philological method for sorting that out; I don't know it.
I do. The bronze age survivals in the Iliad and Odyssey are metrical, and generally restricted to details like place names and personal epithets, the Catalog of Ships in Iliad 2 being the canonical example. Current scholarly consensus is that the society imagined in the Iliad and Odyssey is in large scale no more than 2 generations old. For a quick and well considered overview, see Raaflaub's chapter in the recent Cambridge companion.
Thucydides knew even less about bronze age Crete than we do. A great historian, to be sure, but one best used as a source for the 8th century and later.
As for Plato, there's little cause for wonder. He's making the myths up himself to serve his literary and philosophical purposes. It isn't underhanded; it was a natural part of his rhetorical technique and would have been well understood as such by his audience. Later readers with different expectations misconstrue the text. Regardless, Plato could not be reporting a myth from Egypt accurately because the Greeks knew very little about true Egyptian culture. Their depictions of Egypt are not reliable.
Drop by the local Uni and ask your friendly neighborhood classicist or Mediterranean archaeologist. No one who understands the sources believes in Atlantis.
Tariffs? How does this stuff get started? We know nearly nothing of Minoan culture because there are no written records that we can read. Yes, they were clearly a seafaring people; yes, they felt secure enough that they didn't wall in their buildings. But trade tariffs? On *all* shipping in the Mediterannean? On what evidence can someone make this remarkable claim?
> ...it's amazing any memory of the Minoans made it to Plato.
None did. The myth of Atlantis is unrelated to the Minoans, and the legends of Theseus that persist in classical Greece were generated by later Greeks viewing Minoan ruins, not from an oral memory of their living culture.
Those who search for Atlantis based on Plato's didactic myth-making should compare the myth of Er at the end of the Republic. It's no more or less real than the two myths of Atlantis, but no one would ever claim that it's historical.
The Minoans were indeed impressive, though the multi-tiered complexes that you describe were from around 1400, not 2000. And they weren't wiped out by Santorini. They did just fine until the Mycenaean Greeks sailed down around 1250 and conquered them. If Greeks thought the Minoans magical, their reaction seems to have been, "Cool, magic! Let's kill 'em and take it!"
> I got fucked by this crappy legislation.
No, by the person who stole or lost your coupons.
Good on ya, mate. I wrote myself a python script to do the same for mp3s. But if oggs are what you're after, then oggenc in the standard xiph distribution can be compiled to produce oggs directly from flac.
Roman plumbing was very inefficient. Firstly they had no concept of a tap, the water just flowed continuously 24/7, so huge quantities of water was simply wasted.
Rain in mountains + aqueduct + gravity = 24/7 water supply. Waste? So what?
Secondly it was largely done in lead piping. yeah way to go there.
Hard mountain water quickly generates a coating of lime in the pipes. Lead? No problem
Thirdly there was a great deal of corruption. The amount you paid for your water depended on the diameter of the pipe coming into your property. However it was common place to bribe the local water inspector to fit a larger pipe than it said on the records.
Normal bureaucratic graft here. I cannot imagine any sufficiently civilized society without it.
In short, the Romans were not backwards. I've seen (and used) plenty of Roman plumbing. Did you know that the city's system still employs some of the (admittedly refurbished) lines? Best tap water I've ever tasted.
Middle east and china...and Rome (a.k.a. Constantinopolis).
Rome the society didn't fall for another millenium, it just moved east. The culture that was brought back to western Europe by the crusaders was largely Byzantine (a.k.a. Roman). The crusaders were themselves largely responsible for the true fall Rome.
"Und zo ve zee: ven you're out of Schlitz, you're out of Pier."
The implementation is everything. Democracy goes back to the Greek demokratia and takes as its model the 5th-century B.C. Athenian democracy, in which the people administered the government as directly as possible. It was marked by wild policy shifts, especially after the death of Pericles, and self-destructed under the pressure of the Peloponnesian war. A perusal of the Federalist papers and Madison's other writings will demonstrate how eager the American founders were to avoid pure democracy.
A republic is loosely modeled on the Roman republic, even though the Roman system, like the Spartan constitution to which the ancients compared it, was only superficially similar to modern republics like the U.S. The founders nonetheless saw in Rome (and Sparta) many ideas worthy of imitation: separation of powers; aspects of monarchy (president), aristocracy (legislature), and democracy (the voting public); term limits.
The key distinction in the modern sense is this: while Americans do elect their representatives, presidents, some judges, and local officials, they do not do so directly. The process is made indirect through the party system and the electoral college. And once the representatives, senators, and president are in power they are not immediately subject to the whims of those who elected them. The idea, for better or worse, is to introduce a measure of stability and keep the government out of the hands of the unwashed masses.
Those who argue that the people's representatives must obey the volatile wishes of their constituencies once in office would do well to read more about Athens and learn where that road leads.
I think it only appropriate at this point to ask once again the age-old question: "What's long and hard and full of seamen?"
The grail is hidden in the castle Aaaghhh...
Prior art!
**ping!**
;)
We should be emailing, not posting in a public forum
The verb "to be" is a linking verb in all Indo-European languages (or Indo-Germanische if you prefer). It isn't transitive, and therefore cannot have a direct object.
**pong!**
You only think you did. I doubt anyone else will be interested any longer, but I see that you're the editor of something-or-other and really need to understand. Hence:
The Great Relative Pronoun Overview (active clauses only; first things first)
Who: used only in the nominative case, i.e. as the subject of the relative clause (as in your clause; your mistaken "whomever" is the subject of the active verb "said")
Whose: genetive; used in English primarily for possession
Whom: dative/ablative/accusative; the former two require a pronoun, as in "for whom" or "by whom;" the last stands by itself as the direct object of the verb's action
Not to overdo it. I suspect you're merely the innocent victim of underqualified English teachers. Want to understand grammar? Study a rigorous inflected language instead, ideally Latin. Don't care? Then don't pose as an authority. And for god's sake don't take potshots at a linguistic virtuoso like Churchill. Not even at his anecdotal doppelganger. End of tirade.
And you meant "whoever," not "whomever," by the way. Nominative, not accusative. Wordsmith indeed.
The parent's definition is spot on, but I must step in to defend poor Euripides. He's been on the receiving end of unfair abuse ever since 4th century critics first laid this misguided charge on him. IMNSHO (classics Prof.) his supposedly contrived plot endings are better integrated than non-specialists realize. Try to catch a good production of Medea or Philoctetes: you'll be blown away.
Romani ite domum, you pedant ;)