Thanks. I have re-subscribed, having moved country I found my way around the censorship of this wretched country. Chat is still blocked but I am now able to see posts better - one of the ones blocked was a sensible discussion on porn. I deleted the app too, and use a browser now which helps. I was thinking, while watching posts of the terrorist incident yesterday which were not as easily visible in the UK, that we may need to go back to old school methods - the newsletters of the 17th century, distributed in print form!
Exactly! I find there is something intriguing about books that were on the papal index. Maybe in the future, substacks banned by the British government will have the same allure.
“The whole modern world is at war with the nature of man, and it calls this war ‘progress.’ It breaks the tools of the soul and then wonders why the soul no longer works.”
With regard to the drop in English Literature study... good for them I say.
I can only comment on A-Level standards 25 years ago: We were forced to read the same few books over and over again, then another token one by the same author so we could name drop it for bonus exam points.
One of my teachers spent 4-5 lessons forcing us to debate the sophisticated thinking being employed by Ian McEwan on keeping the marital status of the protagonist slightly opaque and mentioning 'common law wife' at one point. This drove her to such a distraction she went to a Q&A with him and asked him outright... "I hadn't really thought about it" was his response.
I had another teacher who I can only assume was a failed actor spending an entire lesson talking about the "Oh" at the start of Hamlet.
As Nassim Taleb once mused, there isn't even a word for correcting the mad mental conspiracist models of literature buff's descent into the utter bollocks.
My ageing millenial disposition inclines me to the idea that it's only got much much worse since.
My advice to teenagers would be to read English Literature like mad, enjoy it, contrast it discuss it... but study it? You'd probably get a more cohesive course in Astrology or Soothsaying.
From the 1980s onward we had far too many people studying the liberal arts on the graduate level. Combine this with the need to find your own interpretation of whatever you studied in order to stand out from everyone else = the slide into made up crap and the collapse of intellectual rigor. We may benefit from a sharp decline in people studying English and history, at least on the graduate levels. Just a thought. Wonder what Ed thinks of this idea.
I caught the end of an episode of Civilisations on the BBC the other week. The talking head they had on was Alastair Campbell. To paraphrase Kanye West, I like some of Campbell's dossiers, but what the fuck does he know about the Egyptians?
Yours is OK but Gareth Roberts' Age of Stupid was blocked for me. I think it is a technical problem at SubStack because I pay by debit card so I should be automatically verified, and the Verify button did nothing when clicked. Anyway, I fired up my VPN and visited from the Netherlands...
What happens if you ask Substack to explain the requirement of age verification? And do you understand how the requirement comes to be, i.e., how the UK govt sends the specific demand to Substack, how it's implemented and evaluated etc?
Commenters on Rod's blog have said that the Substack app blocks content, but that they can go to his Substack via a website browser and nothing is blocked.
Re: The Ayatollah has gone woke.
Sounds like the Ayatollah has gone woke only insofar as he can use feminist concerns to point to defects in Europe and North America.
An easy way round the censors is to use a VPN, which you can get easily for nothing. It definitely works when I want to explore prostate cancer prevention strategies, for example.
Thanks. I have re-subscribed, having moved country I found my way around the censorship of this wretched country. Chat is still blocked but I am now able to see posts better - one of the ones blocked was a sensible discussion on porn. I deleted the app too, and use a browser now which helps. I was thinking, while watching posts of the terrorist incident yesterday which were not as easily visible in the UK, that we may need to go back to old school methods - the newsletters of the 17th century, distributed in print form!
Being a banned author is badass!
Exactly! I find there is something intriguing about books that were on the papal index. Maybe in the future, substacks banned by the British government will have the same allure.
“The whole modern world is at war with the nature of man, and it calls this war ‘progress.’ It breaks the tools of the soul and then wonders why the soul no longer works.”
— G. K. Chesterton
With regard to the drop in English Literature study... good for them I say.
I can only comment on A-Level standards 25 years ago: We were forced to read the same few books over and over again, then another token one by the same author so we could name drop it for bonus exam points.
One of my teachers spent 4-5 lessons forcing us to debate the sophisticated thinking being employed by Ian McEwan on keeping the marital status of the protagonist slightly opaque and mentioning 'common law wife' at one point. This drove her to such a distraction she went to a Q&A with him and asked him outright... "I hadn't really thought about it" was his response.
I had another teacher who I can only assume was a failed actor spending an entire lesson talking about the "Oh" at the start of Hamlet.
As Nassim Taleb once mused, there isn't even a word for correcting the mad mental conspiracist models of literature buff's descent into the utter bollocks.
My ageing millenial disposition inclines me to the idea that it's only got much much worse since.
My advice to teenagers would be to read English Literature like mad, enjoy it, contrast it discuss it... but study it? You'd probably get a more cohesive course in Astrology or Soothsaying.
From the 1980s onward we had far too many people studying the liberal arts on the graduate level. Combine this with the need to find your own interpretation of whatever you studied in order to stand out from everyone else = the slide into made up crap and the collapse of intellectual rigor. We may benefit from a sharp decline in people studying English and history, at least on the graduate levels. Just a thought. Wonder what Ed thinks of this idea.
I caught the end of an episode of Civilisations on the BBC the other week. The talking head they had on was Alastair Campbell. To paraphrase Kanye West, I like some of Campbell's dossiers, but what the fuck does he know about the Egyptians?
dear oh dear. That's up there with Ash Sarkar giving her thoughts on the rise of the Nazis.
"We reconstructed multigenerational pedigrees and, using a novel approach to infer ancestry of unsampled relatives, inferred ..."
This sounds a lot like, "We made stuff up."
lol
Thoroughly enjoyed the Russell Hogg episode. Rollicking. Separating out all those characters must be fun. And lovely to meet you briefly on Tuesday.
wasn't it Monday?
Tuesday I think, in the interval. Plenty of good axe players that night!
Ah of course!
was great fun.
I enjoyed slaughtering Duran Duran
you were fantastic!
I can still view the chats from outside the UK.
Yours is OK but Gareth Roberts' Age of Stupid was blocked for me. I think it is a technical problem at SubStack because I pay by debit card so I should be automatically verified, and the Verify button did nothing when clicked. Anyway, I fired up my VPN and visited from the Netherlands...
What happens if you ask Substack to explain the requirement of age verification? And do you understand how the requirement comes to be, i.e., how the UK govt sends the specific demand to Substack, how it's implemented and evaluated etc?
Commenters on Rod's blog have said that the Substack app blocks content, but that they can go to his Substack via a website browser and nothing is blocked.
Re: The Ayatollah has gone woke.
Sounds like the Ayatollah has gone woke only insofar as he can use feminist concerns to point to defects in Europe and North America.
are you telling me that Iran's supreme ayatollah is not a genuine feminist?
That line clearly wasn't shameless enough - prompted me to finally getting around to subscribing :)
thank you!
Top marks for the doom and gloom Ed. The fire watcher phenomenon one is new to me. Is it just a case of the state providing bullshit jobs?
Quote: "all future outcomes are worse than the road we didn’t travel."
A nice way of putting it.
An easy way round the censors is to use a VPN, which you can get easily for nothing. It definitely works when I want to explore prostate cancer prevention strategies, for example.