I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask for lodging), and what really impressed me was how much reading every one of these farmers was doing. Soil science and so forth is apparently a continually evolving field, and a modern farmer has no choice but to keep up with it. It really challenged my citybred prejudice of farmers as somehow uneducated.
"For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat." They certainly were in the context we are speaking of here. Official Soviet terminology, apparently starting at least from Lenin but I haven’t checked this thoroughly, divided the proletariat into rural proletarians (in Russian селские пролетарии) and urban proletarians (городские пролетарии). In any event, in colloquial contexts the word serves handily to refer to a life of rather menial trudging wherever it’s lived.
This reminds me of the wide range of reactions sparked by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, his most avant-garde film. On one hand, you can put that film on before a gathering of fairly open-minded cinephile friends, and even they might reject it as artsy-fartsy or unintelligible. On the other hand, a number of ordinary proletariat people in the USSR wrote to Tarkovsky to say how his film touched them deeply and felt directly relatable to their own lives.
Exactly. Those churning out such posts on LinkedIn, would very much prefer if other people did not even carefully read the actual content, but rather simply assumed “Wow, this person is capable of generating a wall of text day in and day out, he/she must be a subject-matter expert and have great English skills”.
I wonder if that means that lower sex drive does not necessarily mean lower testosterone?
This is not a purely theoretical question. I spend half the year traveling the world in ways that let me talk a lot with local people, and I am astounded by the number of young men in developing countries who venerate Andrew Tate and are frantic about physical access to women. As a somewhat older man, I can’t share their desperation and I wish I could communicate to them “Just wank it and then get back to doing something productive with your time”, yet I fear being accused of being a “low-T man”, which in that social-media world is an object of contempt.
Taping your camera doesn't necessarily look like anything. I have a small piece of electrical tape over my webcam, and it blends in so perfectly with the background that other people probably wouldn't see it unless they were specifically looking for it.
(I personally just leave the tape there all the time, because if I need to videoconference, I’d rather connect my mirrorless camera with a much better lens and sexy bokeh.)
I don't think you realize how powerful OpenWRT is. It's a whole Linux environment where you can write your own shell scripts and schedule jobs, etc. If you have created a set of your own personal customizations over the years, then it is nice that you can bring them over onto any subsequent OpenWRT-capable router you buy.
I did some FOSS hacking as a teenager a quarter-century ago, so learned Emacs, but then ultimately chose a career unrelated to software development. I still use Emacs for anything and everything text-related: email (Gnus), RSS feeds (elfeed), org-mode where I write up both personal TODOs and serious academic research. The keyboard-driven interface is powerful and now muscle-memory. The in-built Lisp environment makes everything nicely extensible, but Emacs as an IDE, as something people have used to create general software projects, is something I rarely think about.
The Nordic countries have a longstanding tradition of state-run “folk high schools”. In fact, in modern economies where it is harder for unemployed middle-age people to find new work, and AI might cause unemployment in more sectors, this kind of state intervention seems like a good way to keep adults doing something enriching instead of doomscrolling or drinking all day.
> It would have been much more useful if you could just mount it like a hard drive without special library management software.
When I got my first iPod in 2006, I immediately put Rockbox on it, where the iPod indeed mounted like a hard drive and files (including all my .oggs, remember those?) could be dropped right onto the device. Never used Apple’s own UI even once.
I still miss the iPod. It let you really immerse yourself in the music without all the distractions inherent in a smartphone. I occasionally considered getting a used one and installing larger storage and a new battery, but by now I think that ship has sailed.
In Muslim society, one can choose not to believe in Islam and have no problem, as long as one continues to outwardly perform the expected public rituals, recite the shahada etc. (Quiet personal atheism is much more widespread in the Muslim world than outsiders might suspect.) But if you are a black slave or a descendant thereof in a society based on blood purity, you can’t change your skin colour or descent no matter hard you try. So, while both bases for slavery and segregated society are indeed bad, it’s hard to claim that one might not be a more preferable fate for some unfortunate people than the other.
> the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans
I think that you are being disingenuous here. The African tribes that sold slaves were not necessarily the slave’s own tribe, but rather a different tribe that proved victorious in war or raiding. The slave’s own tribe, as I mentioned, would hardly have been unable to ransom its own people from the US due to lack of literacy, lack of communications, and lack of financial means. Meanwhile, postal connections between North Africa and Europe were reliable enough by the 17th and 18th centuries that slaves could message home for ransom, and this was frequently allowed as it proved highly lucrative for Barbary slaveholders.
> white slaves in a non-white country
This is a completely ahistorical way of describing the matter. In terms of race linked to skin colour, Barbary slaveholders very much considered themselves white in opposition to the black African populations to the south whom they exploited. (This survives in modern Mauritanian slaveholding.)
Moreover, Muslim slaveholding here and in the broader region was bound up with with issues of religion, not race as the modern USA understands it. In as little as a single generation post-manumission, those descendants of raided European slaves were no longer necessarily regarded as an outcaste, provided they were observant Muslims, which is why so much of the power in the Ottoman Empire famously ended up in the hands of men of Eastern European descent. At least in terms of knowing your progeny would be better off, they had privilege that African chattel slaves in the USA could only dream of.
It's easy to see African chattel slavery in the US as worse than the Barbary practices: European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans were rarely in a position to do that for abducted Africans in the US. Secondly, African chattel slavery in the US was bound up with rigid notions of blood purity, which can seem bizarre to us today, that severely hobbled the opportunities of former slaves and their descendents even after manumission.
"eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much 'there' there as they supposed."
Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there' on the myriad university-press books available free on Anna's Archive, than on HN. The reason we still hang out here is desire for socializing, laziness, or pathological doomscrolling; information density doesn't really factor into our choices.
The US is frequently called late to ending African chattel slavery because it already happened in France and England decades before, and even English conservatives were calling for an end (of various degrees of gradualness) to slavery long before American emancipation.
You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-structuralism" correctly. The term "structuralism" has its roots in Saussure, in linguistics and the notion of l'arbitraire du signe. Semiotics and the post-structuralists then took this further. While today people might talk of "structural racism", the similarity to the term "structuralism" is merely coincidental, through sure, one might try to apply the idea there, too.
> no consensus that Jesus is divine, or about the nature of the divinity ascribed to him, even after the declaration in 325 of the Nicene Creed
Which shouldn’t be surprising, because by 325 CE (and really, by 100 CE) Christianity had been around long enough for groups to take it in all kinds of directions, just like some Asian or African peoples have created new religions that are ostensibly Christian but preserve little of the Christianity originally introduced by colonial powers. In my own academic field, I deal a lot with third-century Manichaeism, where it is obvious how popular preachers could repurpose existing monotheistic religions into something that bore little resemblance to them.
> This NPR interview with a former Evangelical…
You really ought to state plainly in your post that this is Bart Ehrman. While he is a prominent scholar, even researchers of early Christianity who are not themselves Christians take issue with some of his claims.
People often consider the 2000 X-Men film to kick off the explosion of superhero films in the new millennium, and that was pre-September 11, so I’m not sure that correlation is causation here. Moreover, a lot of European artists in the early–mid 1960s remarked how superheroes were oddly prominent in American pop culture, and at that point the USA was still on top of the world and hadn’t been shamed by Vietnam.