I see wonderful things

Medieval Village of Alberobello, Italy at a snowy night.#archaeohistories pic.twitter.com/oFYR0xEyMn

— Archaeo - Histories (@archeohistories) November 22, 2021

 

There Was a Pig Went Out to Dig

Double click to enlarge.

There Was a Pig Went Out to Dig

Lucy Broadwood and J A Fuller Maitland 

 

There was a pig went out to dig,

Chrisimas Day, Chrisimas Day,

There was a pig went out to Dig

On Chrisimas Day in the morning.

There was a cow went out to plough ...

There was a sparrow went out to harrow ...

There was drake went out to rake ...

There was a crow went out to sow ...

There was a sheep went out to reap ...

There was a minnow went out to winnow .. 

 

History

Mayan ruins of Dzibilchaltun are some of oldest in Yucatan of Mexico. There are over 800 structures spread over an area of 7.5 miles, continually occupied for thousands of years, and architecture reached its height between 600-1000 AD.#archaeohistories pic.twitter.com/2hQc8hTG0w

— Archaeo - Histories (@archeohistories) November 21, 2021

 

Offbeat Humor

Now we’re asking the real question pic.twitter.com/qhMxsZowdv

— Pubity (@PubityOnInsta) November 24, 2021

Irony, is that what you really want?

From The Irony Human Centipede by Freddie deBoer.  Discussing a condition apparently prevalent in academia, journalism and the Acela Corridor - self-destructive irony.

He starts with someone else's tweet.

Apparently, many are responding to the tweet mockingly with their own ridiculous versions such as.  

Went down to the ol’ saloon, saw four roughnecks in cowboy hats talking about how that Fauci had some good points after all. Then I went home to the refinery, man said son if it was up to me we’d all be wearing N95s. pic.twitter.com/HYIQxPnAu9

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) December 23, 2021

De Boer - 

There’s been a lot of this sort of parodying of Carl Beijer’s tweet, so I don’t mean to pick on Hanania specifically. But knowing Beijer’s style, the original tweet is almost certainly ironic itself, and so people are insincerely mimicking that which was insincere mimicry in the first place.

Where is all this irony getting us?  To me it is a signal and noise issue.  The more irony, the more the signal is being masked.  The more the signal is masked, the greater the uncertainty.  The greater the uncertainty, the more cautious and hesitant everyone becomes.

Irony has its role.  An ironic recapitulation of your central point can be a cruel reminder when your point is too esoteric or too isolated from broader reality.  

But irony can only work well when everyone is working off a common and shared base of knowledge and  culture.  Without that shared culture and knowledge, it comes across as either nonsense or a mechanism of othering and disparaging the non-insiders.

And it potentially leaves others, even those within your bubble, confused as to what you are actually trying to communicate.  Carl Beijer (a journalist) is making ironical fun of sophisticates who claim facts that seem untrue.  Everyone mistakes his irony and offers their own even more exaggerated version such as Hanania.  And the circle of confusion spirals.

De Boer heads in a slightly different direction.

Those may be problems, but they aren’t my problem here. My problem is that I don’t know what the absolute fuck anyone is saying anymore because they are so terrified of just saying “I feel this, and it matters to me.”

I know, I know, I know: it’s a defense mechanism, it’s a coping mechanism, capitalism killed all my hopes so I’m entitled to this, I hate my dad, yeah yeah yeah. You certainly are entitled to live this way. The question, my friend, is whether you actually want to live this way. How’s that coping mechanism going for you, hmmm? You coping pretty good? Posting Simpsons memes really defending you against the drudgery and injustice of a broken world? I’m guessing not! How many times a day do you have to evince derision without directly stating it to be impregnable? It seems exhausting. And how fucking old are people going to get, exactly, before they decide it’s beneath their dignity to live their entire lives in sneer quotes? You have people drifting towards their 50s who get up every day and find a target to “dunk” on. Are you gonna be in the old folks home, squinting through your bifocals, saying “I’m going to corncob someone today!” My advice is to develop an escape plan. I don’t know why people take that so personally, especially given that their entire personas are built on the premise that they take nothing personally. I mean I can’t be hurting any feelings, right? You don’t have feelings. I know, your Instagram told me.

I have known many, many people in my life who live behind the mask of irony all day, every day. I have never known one of them to be a happy person. Make of that what you will.

Irony is fine, when wielded with expertise by someone knowing their audience.  The problem is that we have a lot of journalists more credentialed than expert at their craft.  When you want to communicate facts and truth, irony gets in the way.  But if you are wanting to communicate status or tribal affiliation, signaling your condition as an insider and a disparager of the outsiders, irony can be an excellent means of doing so.  But as de Boer asks, is that what you really want?

History

For today’s #AncientSiteSunday let’s go to south-east #Turkey, to the site of Nemrut Dağ (Mount Nemrut), a tomb-sanctuary and monument build by a local dynast called Antiochus I. It was built in the 1st century BC and is spectacularly located on a 2,150m high peak. #Archaeology pic.twitter.com/zU4csse9Vp

— Nina Willburger (@DrNWillburger) November 21, 2021

 

An Insight

With a shout to @olivertraldi, most-to-all of the current hostility toward standardized testing comes from credentialed people with good/glib surface-level verbal skills, who did badly on complex exams and refuse to accept this as an accurate measure of their intelligence.

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) November 21, 2021

 

I see wonderful things

An abandoned ksar or fortified village lost in the dunes of the Grand Erg Occidental just north of Timimoun, Algeria. Ksars were traditional pre-Saharan habitats. It probably dates to the medieval period.#archaeohistories pic.twitter.com/9Do1SW8lzS

— Archaeo - Histories (@archeohistories) November 21, 2021

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Click to enlarge.

Today’s rigid enforcement of ideological orthodoxy perpetuates sclerosis and stagnation.

From The Scapegoat by Geoff Shullenberger, a review of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin.  

Is Thiel right about the dangers we face? Is the tepid economic growth of recent decades a premonition of darker, more violent times to come? Chafkin evidently has no opinion. He is ­unwilling, for the most part, to treat his subject’s views as anything other than arcane heresies to be policed and denounced. In this sense, he inadvertently reveals that Thiel is right about at least one thing: The ideologically formative institutions of our society—­universities, ­journalism—have cultivated an elite barely capable of serious reflection on ideas outside of a narrow range of acceptable opinions. In Zero to One, Thiel suggests that contrarians sometimes grasp the future because their heresies reveal the truths no one acknowledges. Today’s rigid enforcement of ideological orthodoxy perpetuates sclerosis and stagnation. This is where Thiel’s two major concerns—political correctness and stalled progress—intersect.

Chafkin, like many of his fellow journalists, is concerned by the “­reactionary turn in our politics and society” symbolized, most obviously, by the election of Donald Trump, whom Thiel supported. But also like many journalists, he shows no interest in the factors that have led to declining or stagnating prospects for many Americans, as well as to social atomization, anomie, and disillusionment. Doing so might require him to apportion some blame, not just to ideological bogeymen like Thiel, but to those who run his own widely disliked industry (the ­media)—not to mention the many Silicon Valley executives who, ­unlike Thiel, share Chafkin’s ­bien-pensant antipathy to ­Trumpism.

Instead, Chafkin seeks a scapegoat. This is just what members of social groupings always do in moments of crisis, according to Girard. That Chafkin finds one in Thiel would come as no surprise to the latter. He writes in Zero to One: “Like founders, scapegoats are extreme and contradictory figures.” The strength of The Contrarian is its examination of the contradictions that have attended Thiel’s improbable rise. Its main weakness is that Chafkin seems more interested in joining in his tribe’s collective vituperations than in understanding the insights that, at certain points, have allowed his complex subject to anticipate the future.