That's a complete mischaracterization of the stoic philosophy. I don't even know where to begin and I don't have the time to write a detailed comment now so I just want to make a few points:
1) That quote comes from his private diary. We don't know if he ever meant to share those ideas to total strangers. If you read it, you'll find that many passages are open to misinterpretation because we lack the historical context and it feels like it was written for an audience of one. He didn't choose the title "meditations", it's just what the translators and scholars used to refer to his collected works.
2) Marcus Aurelius likely didn't write that quote from the luxury of his own palace. Those writings come from his time at the frontlines of the Marcomannic Wars which lasted almost as long as his own reign. The bulk of his writing was probably written in modern Serbia.
3) Many stoic role models are anything but quiet. They die for what they believe in. They understand their own role, accept their fate (amor fati) and pursue it to the end. Cato the Younger died as a political martyr against Caesar.
4) Epictetus is another major figure in stoic philosophy. He was a disabled slave from modern Turkey. He shares many of the viewpoints expressed by the emperor, which is why stoicism is such a compelling philosophy. For something to inspire both the rich and poor, the strong and weak, there must be something to it.
Agree on what? OP didn't even know the bare minimum (who's the author, what did the author write) to speak up on the subject. You're saying that a pebble is "more or less" like a mountain. OP dismissed an entire philosophy with a quip while your sources are telling a more nuanced – and actually different – point of view.
I just saw this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9mrbIxeBE and it sounded like an interesting topic to bring on HN. I didn't know about the "Cancer Alley" in Louisiana, but I figure most countries have their own alleys of death. I live in Italy and Taranto is notorious for this reason. The city was home to one of biggest steel producers in Europe. The local economy revolved around the steel plant, but people from the sorrounding neighbourhoods have suffered from abnormally high rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses for decades. After a trial which shed light on the environmental disaster, the government seized the plant in 2012. Long story short, its fate has been in a limbo since then.
Although not quite as drastic, same with the IJmuiden region in Noord-Holland (originally Koninklijke Hoogovens, "Royal Furnaces" -- just as royal as Shell) [0]:
> Due to exposure to particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide emitted from the Tata Steel site, Wijk aan Zee residents have a life expectancy that is 2.5 months lower on average
> approximately 4% of the future cases of lung cancer in Wijk aan Zee will be attributable to the current emissions of particulate matter
> around 3% of future [asthma] cases will be associated with the current emissions
And currently, also DuPunt/Chemours in Dordrecht [1]:
> Chemours, which spun off from its legal predecessor Dupont (DD.N), opens new tab in 2015 to regroup the latter's performance chemical business, complied with its permit before July 1984 but that after that it should have better informed the towns surrounding its chemical plant in the city of Dordrecht
And separately, there is an investigation against the local government because then-DuPont was tacitly allowed to exceed the amount of pollution granted by their permit.
I would expect that mining, leather-producing and dye-producing areas may very well have seen similar types of toxic waste leading to negative health outcomes even before large scale industrialization. And the areas downstream.
Here's an example of a mine that has had toxic runoff likely for millenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Tinto_(river) at least partly due to human mining activity. I would expect that people living downstream of the mine would have negative health outcomes, possibly without being aware.
Before the industrial revolution, the primary way to refine gold from diffuse ore was to dissolve the gold in mercury, separate the amalgam, and then boil out the mercury to leave the gold behind. In large-scale mining, this resulted in local air pollution levels that were horrifying even when compared to the worst unmitigated industrial revolution era sites. Entire communities would get mercury poisoning from the air they breathed.
I haven't played the original, but Lode Runner: The Legend Returns is one of my favorite games of all time. The later levels can be very challenging and I don't remember ever reaching the final stage but it was an addicting experience. You can download a faithful remake of Legend Returns here: https://mmr.quarkrobot.com/. Highly recommended!
Lode Runner: The Legend Returns is the best version of the game I think, the old one is too pixely (like the classic version on iPhone) and the later 3D ones lose the simplicity of the original.
Agreed, one of my favourites. I also liked the background art, and the animated clips in between some of the different levels, and the CD's Redbook audio soundtrack. It kind of reminds me of the game Creaks.
I also remember it was one of the games that used WinG[0], before DirectX game out.
Can you point to any place where integration between widly different cultures worked on the long term? One place where mass immigration didn't result in the erosion of social trust, safety concerns and political divide through ethnic lines?
It's pretty interesting, if you read through the Federalist papers, where they were discussing how to set up the US states/government, they were seriously debating and worried about whether a state full of people from England could coexist next to a state full of people from France. They were seriously worried that even people that similar, from almost the same place and culture, would eventually fracture on their differences and go to war with each other. What a world we live in today in comparison.
Except that was an academic discussion and eventually there were no problems between people of English and French descent, whereas what we're dealing with now is a very real issue and I don't think the so-called cultural differences are the main problem here.
30 years after showing up most of them were speaking English and generally living in roughly the same culture (be it Catholic or Protestant) with roughly similar expectations. As opposed to Muslim, East Asian, Aztec, etc.
Like my people were French huguenots (protestants) and rapidly turned into any other VA tobacco farmers
The US was always the melting pot model, where immigrants assimilated into the general American culture. The second generation spoke 'Merican just like the locals. Italians, Germans, Poles, all became standard USians.
And it continues to this very day. Your average latino American or Asian american just about can't assimilate quickly enough most of the time, and within one generation most fully identify as Americans without rejecting the fundamentals of their origin culture. One can wish and wash about racism in U.S. society in many ways but compared to many countries, the country is remarkably effective at assimilating people from extremely diverse places and making them feel like they belong to its society. Canada does a decent job of it too but I've never quite seem any country pull it off as well as the U.S., maybe because it has such a specifically charismatic cultural image from decades of overwhelmingly, globally popular cinema, pop culture and etc.
well, arguably the USofA seems to be doing a relatively decent job managing a multitude of cultures over a few centuries... given that at some point, almost everyone was an immigrant (after a number of violent events removed almost all of the locals)
The US was over 80% white, often over 90% white, for the vast majority of its existence [0]. It was relatively unified in race and culture for the last 400 years. Only since the 1960s/1970s was the immigration floodgates truly opened and the demographics significantly changed. If anything, the way things have been falling apart in the last 50 years is directly contrary to increased diversity of culture being beneficial.
Italians, Jews and even Irish were not considered 'white', which was reserved for descendants of British immigrants, due to the general racial theories that dominated the pre-WW2 era.
> It was relatively unified in race and culture for the last 400 years. Only since the 1960s/1970s was the immigration floodgates truly opened and the demographics significantly changed. If anything, the way things have been falling apart in the last 50 years is directly contrary to increased diversity of culture being beneficial.
It was relatively unified because blacks were subjugated until 1968, despite the bloodiest civil war in history liberating them from slavery 100 years before that. Where are you coming from with this?
Diversity isn't a problem in itself; we just have no singular culture for everyone to assimilate into so we trend towards chaos. "When in Rome" has never applied here.
These are terrible examples.
I absolutely don't want Sweden to turn into either those countries.
Extreme class divide in the 1st case, massive judicial injustice, plus the US has kind of been trending downwards since the 1970s...
And Singapore is an extremely authoritarian country.
Anyway, these countries have not invited 1 million+ people from a dramatically different(read: backwards) cultures that are completely incompatible. Singapore has invited skilled labor from all over the world.
If 1 million Polish or 1 million Portuguese had migrated to Sweden over the last 20 years, I doubt we would be having such problems.
He asked if there were countries, "where integration between widly[sic] different cultures worked on the long term," and I answered that there were. And it was easy as there are many such examples. This was not a claim that Singapore was superior in every way to Sweden. Merely that multi-cultural countries can be stable and successful. You don't want to live in Singapore, and that's fine, but you all have to move your goalposts away from, "multiculturalism doesn't work," because it absolutely can work.
> the US has kind of been trending downwards since the 1970s
The US and Sweden both had a rough 1970s, and both bounced back pretty well.
> Anyway, these countries have not invited 1 million+ people from a dramatically different(read: backwards) cultures that are completely incompatible.
The US accepts about a million new immigrants every year, give or take, and has forever. The accents have changed somewhat over my lifetime time but almost all of them have been from countries that are poor and experiencing very bad things. It is a core strength of America that we collect people from all over, quickly turn them into Americans, and borrow the best things about where they came from, and call them our own. Some of my ancestors emigrated to America from Sweden, and I will say that I am very glad that they did for the economic opportunities they found here and because I didn't have to grow up in a monoculture.
Please. Media hysterics aside, the U.S. is much better than many, many countries on class divide, and incredibly good at turning immigrants from an incredibly broad range of societies into Americans very peacefully with their full, willfull personal involvement. It manages to do this without even forcing integration or making most people feel ashamed of their origins. It's why there are huge ethnic communities spreading around the country to this day despite their children integrating with the essentials of U.S. society.
So much of the claims against the U.S. for the above seem to be based on a deluded idea of how it works in practice with minimal perspective allowed. Compared to most of the world's other big countries and so many smaller ones, the U.S. is incredibly effective at class mobility, social mobility and integrating immigrants peacefully while still allowing vast numbers of them in per year to this day. I don't see Russia or China welcoming one million immigrants per year and peacefully turning them into their own people in all but ethnic origin and underlying pride in cultural roots.
Even western Europe, for all its liberal platitudes, is rife with hardened underlying racism and ethnic social balkanization to a degree that would give even deep red state Americans a run for their money, it just hides it more smoothly (usually).
I would much rather grow up in a poor family in western Europe than anywhere else in the world.
All your arguments are related to migration. I agree there is a lot of racism in Europe. There is a lot of racism everywhere(yes, even in the US).
I am talking about social mobility. Things such as health care, education and the justice system works much, much better for the poor in Europe. Obviously YMMV. Some countries are more backwards than others, France and the UK especially(according to my observations).
While in the US you have to pay tens of thousands of to hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to a good university, in most of Europe all you need are good grades from high school(or equivalent).
Similarly, good health care is accessible to everyone, while in the US it can absolutely bankrupt you, even for the middle class.
Obviously both Europe and the USA are both diverse places. You can't really compare Switzerland to Romania. You can't really compare New York to Georgia.
It will surprise absolutely noone that the repeat offender was black. And yes, I mention the race because it does matter in a world where almost 60% of the violent crimes in the US are comitted by the same minority group. Remember Stop Asian Hate? I wonder what happened to that movement.
You've been a good HN user for a long time but you can't post this sort of thing here, so please don't do it again, and please don't use HN primarily for ideological battle, because we have to ban accounts that do that.
(Also, please don’t forget all of the degenerate white people who were also the cause of “Stop Asian Hate” (i.e. the ones who voted for Trump and complained about Chinese people eating bats.) Speaking of CEOs, there was a viral video of a SF CEO who was fired for harassing an Asian person which was at the start of that movement lol.)
I disagree about Emily Wilson's Odissey. She translated the first line of the poem as "Tell me about a complicated man". She almost went with "Tell me about a straying husband". Neither complicated nor straying husband appear in the original text. Pope's description (The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d...) is closer to the epithets we are taught at school (ricco d'astuzie or dal multiforme ingegno). πολύτροπος means resourceful, of many skills, well-travelled.
That's the first line and complicated tells us nothing about the protagonist. Everyone can be complicated, but only Odysseus is πολύτροπον. It's a quality of character few people possess.
You're welcome to disagree, but I find her choices fascinating, and I loved her translation. (I read the Fagles translation in school and liked that one as well.)
Wilson's Twitter threads on how she decided to translate certain words, lines, passages, etc. were absolutely brilliant, really getting to the heart of what makes translation so subjective.
That said, I disagreed with lots of her choices. Odysseus' "I could not do my exercise routine" (8.232) is a particularly egregious rendition of a line in Greek that says nothing more than "There were not sufficient supplies on the ship". There are many other examples.
This complaint seems odd. First complicated is obviously not in the original text, it's in Greek. I guess what you mean is "No words I would translate as complicated are in the text" but then your complaint just becomes a tautology. Saying Pope's version from the 1700s is more like what you were taught in school is similar, it's probably the version you or your teachers read so it shaped what you were taught. Essentially this comes down to saying it's different, but that doesn't make it bad.
The complaint - which I definetely share by the way - is that for all the critical acclaim it got, Emily Wilson's translation strays so far from the actual text, it is not really a translation anymore and is actually closer to being a new text inspired by the Odyssey. That's fine if that's what you are looking for but it doesn't make for a great translation.
The πολύτροπος thing is a complete red herring by the way. Her translation is questionnable but remains within the bound of what I would expect from a modern translator. I am more annoyed by everything she drops in the rest of the poem. Remarkably and annoyingly, the coverage when her translation was released spend far more time dwelling on her gender than on her actual work.
I don't like the way you handwaved my criticism. Complete red herring? I brought up only the first line because it's the most famous part of the poem and it sets the tone for the rest of the book, which – as you pointed out – is more of an adaptation. It might be acceptable for some people, fact remains that the new sentence hardly resembles the original meaning. If meaning can't be our benchmark, then how do we determine the quality of a translation?
I am not hand waving it. This line was commented ad nauseam when the book was released and is the one people who have no idea of neither what in the Greek text nor what’s in the translation like to discuss. As it’s far from being the most questionable part of the translation, I don’t see the point of centring discussion on it, especially when you consider it’s not an awful translation of the original. It’s not very close but you can find far worse later.
>This complaint seems odd. First complicated is obviously not in the original text, it's in Greek. I guess what you mean is "No words I would translate as complicated are in the text" but then your complaint just becomes a tautology.
The parent's complaint is neither a tautology not odd in any way.
"Neither complicated nor straying husband appear in the original text" obviousy means "the meanings conveyed by those words are not the meanings found in the original text", not that the English words aren't in the original (I mean, duh!).
They translator is bizarrely translating a word that means "resourceful" to "complicated".
It's about Ulysses being like MacGyver, not like Dan Draper.
It'anymore that Greek for fish ("ichthus") would make sense to translate as "
It's not really a matter of opinion when everything is lost in translation. I know it can be hard to understand without a basic intro to ancient Greek, but it's like translating a reference to the "Titanic" with "some boat, I dunno".
C’mon, Pope clearly has the worst parse of πολύτροπος which I will remind you is “many paths”, Wilson takes this as a metaphor internal and external, many roads traveled, many roads within, not perfect, but it’s good. And Pope reads it like who he is, a Latinate schoolboy, and it’s beautiful but he carries so much of himself into that line.
In one reading, πολύτροπος is turn in the Odyssey away from past stories, Odysseus as psychological composite, the previous song in the cycle is about μῆνιν and its manifestation as the hero Achilles, the traditional, singular hero.
If you want to see this shift between the composite and the singular in poetics discussed, read Aristophanes’ Frogs.
These were my first encounters with the stories first hand, and loved them.
I suppose it’s a matter of taste.
We’ve never been through classic texts at school, I think it’s a cultural thing if they are fundamental enough to be taught at school or not.
Probably depends a lot with what expectations you come to the poem. My expectation was that it would be a struggle, but was captivated from the start.
I’ve looked some older translations in english and the ’old style’ verses have been complete turn-offs. The ’simplified’ or more dynamic translations were what made them work for me.
And it’s not the specific turns of phrazes that matter as much as the whole. The stories of both Iliad and Odyssey totally kick ass, and are amazing portals to bronze age life.
Individual solutions are mostly a fantasy. It's what we tell ourselves because the real solutions are fundamentally at odds with democracy and freedom. A few exceptions aside, people have never voted for a lower quality of life and personal degrowth. Instead, we prefer to slice and shift the blame around until no one is really responsible anymore. Your vision hangs on some sort of mass enlightenment that's just not going to happen. How many tragedies of the commons have been solved this way irl? Imagine being a fisherman in a Chinese trawler off the coast of West Africa. You could decide to stop overfishing. What then? You'll get fired and replaced by someone more desperate than you. The real world is a lot more complicated that "building a bird-friendly yard".
>All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".
That's the entire point of having concentration of power though. The decision makers can coordinate and manage things in ways the individual cannot. That alone gives them the responsibility to seek out a solution for worldwide issues. The lone individual is bound to follow basic instincts, rule of law and economic opportunities.
Hi dang. Sorry to ask you here but I wasn't sure how to get in touch with the staff. Have you had the chance to review the email I sent to hn@ycombinator.com? I know you're very busy so I don't mean to rush you. I just want to make sure the spam filter didn't get it first hahaha
It's a very myopic decision on their part if true, even worse than the API pricing update. This will stop any form of viral content on twitter from reaching non-internet people. Forget about sharing that one twitter link to friends or relatives. Instead it will make the twitter echo chamber increasingly detached and irrelevant to the larger discussion. On the long run, this decision changes the narrative of twitter from being a catalyst of political change (e.g. Arab Spring) to a tumblr clone with ecelebs. I don't have an account and never will. I followed a handful of accounts via nitter rss. Now I'll just wait until they build their presence outside the platform.
PHP is still the leading server-side language and it's not even close. 3/4 of the websites you visit everyday are powered by PHP in some form. I would argue that's the perfect server-side language to start solo on anything web-related for the foreseeable future. And if you'll ever need to scale up, there's no shortage of skilled PHP developers for hire. The language just keeps getting better, frameworks like Laravel and Symfony are high quality and battle-tested, most of the issues you might encounter are already documented all over the internet. Continuous learning is a reality for this profession but the "cult of the new" attitude in tech often leads aspiring developers into an endless quest for the perfect tool at the expense of gaining practical experience. Point being, PHP is faaar from dead. If you live in Europe, a solid knowledge of PHP and either Laravel or Symfony will open many doors.
1) That quote comes from his private diary. We don't know if he ever meant to share those ideas to total strangers. If you read it, you'll find that many passages are open to misinterpretation because we lack the historical context and it feels like it was written for an audience of one. He didn't choose the title "meditations", it's just what the translators and scholars used to refer to his collected works.
2) Marcus Aurelius likely didn't write that quote from the luxury of his own palace. Those writings come from his time at the frontlines of the Marcomannic Wars which lasted almost as long as his own reign. The bulk of his writing was probably written in modern Serbia.
3) Many stoic role models are anything but quiet. They die for what they believe in. They understand their own role, accept their fate (amor fati) and pursue it to the end. Cato the Younger died as a political martyr against Caesar.
4) Epictetus is another major figure in stoic philosophy. He was a disabled slave from modern Turkey. He shares many of the viewpoints expressed by the emperor, which is why stoicism is such a compelling philosophy. For something to inspire both the rich and poor, the strong and weak, there must be something to it.