Americans think they’re kings, but they’re really a nation of debt peons. They have even less hope of amargi (return to mother, or debt forgiveness) than a Bronze Age slave. Those poor saps at least got debt relief every new ruler or so. Westerners live under one constant regime of usury and all they can choose is the color, red or blue. All of this is outside the ambit of Ramit’s show, and that’s fine. I wanted to hate the show because A) the title and B) because most popular media about ‘personal finance’ makes it all about personal responsibility for what is fundamentally societal failure. There’s one season where a young, orphaned man (Frank) in $200,000 of student loan debt is going through a pile of snail mail that he’s been afraid to open. It’s people offering him loans, credit cards, and various forms of debt. This is just a motherless child that is constantly preyed upon by rich usurers, and he’s expected to think his way out of it, and bear the burden of failure alone? The very existence of student loan debt is crazy, the idea is that someone at 17 or 18 makes this decision that makes them a debt slave for life? It’s entrapment. In the Bronze Age children were taken into slavery for debts and we think that awful, but that’s what the American education system has become. And in the Bronze Age they at least got amargi now and then, debts were forgiven. Today the average American dies in debt, and then the usurers come and prey on their children. It’s no land of the free. It’s a nation of debt slaves with strong mythology, that’s all. I say that it’s fine for the show to not address this, because Ramit’s general point is A) about just helping these people and B) helping them talk about money with each other. One couple remarks that they didn’t think this would be couples counseling, but it really is. Money (and financial ‘infidelity’) is one of the biggest pressures in marriage and money can be very difficult to talk about. I am much poorer than my wife and this used to be a problem until we had health problems that put everything in perspective. But we still struggle to talk about money without getting huffy. Whereas we have a culture of sharing to fall back on, what I observe on the show is that western couples have it twice as hard. Within marriages they have separate finances, where one couple is earning $150,000 and the other hustling for $30,000 and they still split the bills. Or where one is drowning in debt that the other could pay off and they just don’t People have so internalized capitalist individualization that it has consumed the very idea of marriage and family. People live in what looks like families, but maintain the rigid division of capitalism within their own households. And they carry so much shame with them about money that it gets in between what should be a sacred bond. One gay man within a marriage said that he felt like he wasn’t contributing, and refused to take help by saying it was better for him to ‘learn’ by paying usurers. It’s sad how much people have internalized systemic abuse. They’re victims of predatory money lenders who think it’s their fault. Another couple — also making $150,000 plus — frets about being able to ‘retire’ their house-cleaner mother who’s still working two jobs well into old age. She came from Colombia to find a better life for her family, and this is somehow it. That man says he was ‘lucky to be born here’, but was he? This is the traumatized tale of the immigrant, where America and the historical White Empire destroys countries, and then the scattered refugees are supposed to be thankful for the opportunity to serve as debt slaves within Empire’s household. People always talk about migrating for a ‘better life’ but the real question is why was life made so bad that they had to move in the first place. Now this son of an immigrant takes a month-long Italian vacation after promising his mother she could retire in two years. But as Ramit told him, he could retire her now. The toxicity of the individual is such that he’d rather go on vacation and buy a multi-family investment property than let his mother move in and take care of her. I feel inclined to judge him, but after watching the show I actually don’t. He is just prey to a bad culture, not a bad person. The family has been destroyed so thoroughly in the West that even filial piety is considered another consumer choice, not a dharmic duty. What a deeply fallen world.
Muhlberger's World History
Ancient, medieval, Islamic and world history -- comments, resources and discussion.
Saturday, June 03, 2023
Are we worse off than Bronze Age peasants? Maybe.
Monday, May 29, 2023
Robin Hood (1922)
American politics on the state level
Jacques le Goff on history
“History is not given, history is constructed by the historian. But the historian cannot do just anything. He must make his construction with the aid of materials, documents. I have personally adopted Michel Foucault’s position that documents are not innocent. Documents have been made to impress, to form thinking, they are what you might call monument/documents. We must maintain toward these monument/documents a critical spirit; but if this critical spirit leads to a purely deconstructive “shredding” of what is being set out before us, we lose ourselves in an intellectual anarchy from which nothing good can emerge. So I think that not only is it necessary that we be moored to documents, I think we must also remind ourselves that historical truth is not one. It is not clear. We no longer believe, like Ranke, that we can recount things such as they really happened, such as they were. But if we don’t believe that there is a historical truth, even if we approach it only through interpretations and approximations, then history, which has made a meritorious effort to be scientific… then we historians may just as well resign ourselves to writing historical novels.” – Jacques le Goff, in an interview with Historical Reflections from 1993.
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
Hildegard is everywhere
Monday, May 22, 2023
Medievalism and fakery: A review you might want to read
The human dimension of arcane research
Today, the vast majority of the geniza is digitized, allowing researchers to access it from their homes. Still, the Cairo geniza attracts a small, quirky group of dedicated researchers that often collaborate on research. “It’s a paradise for researchers, because we’re not too many, but everyone is a specialist in one topic,” said Martínez Delgado. “If you have a question, the other person will stop his work to help you, it’s really a paradise.”If you don't know anything about the Cairo Geniza, the whole article is a good introduction. As it is for research in ancient manuscripts. I've seen an autograph copy of one of Thomas Aquinas works and just a glance taught me something important.
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
The face of Ukrainian resistance
...this is what every [war] has in commmon since the professional military corps starts the war and then teachers, engineers and accountants end it. Everything [falls] on the shoulders of these ordinary people.The whole interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kso0D_-Efs0.
Saturday, May 13, 2023
A Golden Age
A tiny instance: Scientists have long been puzzled by how single-cell organisms (such as bacteria) evolved into multi-cell organisms (including any living being you can see). Thought experiments emphasized the difficulties of this transition. Then someone (can't identify at the moment) came up with the right approach and in the course of a year provoked a bunch of single-celled yeast to make that transition.
I hope that you can appreciate the brilliance (but see below) of this experiment and the potential the knowledge acquired has for further understanding of -- life.
For my purposes the proper context is equally astonishing research in any field you can name, astrophyics and medical research being just two I can name. Re: AI, Artificial Intelligence, well "it's too soon to say," to reuse a quip from a famous Chinese dictator.
Are we so smart then?
Look at the image below. It's Rembrant's famous depiction of an anatomy experiment. Anatomy was on the cutting edge of medical progress in the 17th century, and Rembrant is generally agreed to be the best painter of his time. This is what is called the Dutch Golden Age, and the Dutch are often praised for the religiously tolerant and prosperous environment that made impressive progress possible. Yet it is also true that the Dutch were enthusiastic colonizers and slavers. The Dutch colonizers took control of Indonesia, they created an empire in all but name. The Dutch at home were solidly bourgeois in their political values, using councils to restrain the power of monarchical ideals. But when they handed over power in the "Indies" to their own East India Company (VOC), the same Dutchmen built an imperial capital, Batavia, where the VOC's viceroy was treated with more than royal honors.
The Golden Age of the 17th Century, which was hardly restricted to the Netherlands (remember Galileo!) was in fact played out before a background of horrific wars, notably the Thirty Years War, when the Dutch, like many other Europeans resisted the efforts of imperial Spain to create its own empire. From the Dutch point of view, this took Eighty years.
So you see, the question of Golden Ages is a complicated one. The best one can say is that sometimes a culture is created that allows for talented (not necessarily brilliant) researchers to do valuacculture to form, in which valuable work is made possible, because they can work and work together without being prevented by the authorities.
Sometimes the authorities are even willing to fund science, and substantial progress is made. Golden Ages result.
But while some of us may enjoy the products of the Golden Age, its brilliance will not save us.
Image: Rembrant, The Anatomy Lesson.
The English band King Crimson wrote a song attempting the Dutch point of view, The Night Watch:Friday, May 12, 2023
Hildegard of Bingen and the wildfires in Alberta
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
And now for the bad news -- Texas (but not just Texas)
So much bad news -- and then there is Aoife O'Donnell
Monday, May 08, 2023
The afterlife of pagan inscriptions
Sunday, May 07, 2023
Historians and Judges
A Federal Judge Calls Clarence Thomas’ Bluff on Gun Rights and Originalism BY MARK JOSEPH STERN Federal judges are not historians, but they are increasingly obligated to play them on the bench. In his Bruen decision last June, Justice Clarence Thomas ordered courts to assess the constitutionality of modern-day gun restrictions by searching for “historical analogues” from 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified. Ever since, judges have struggled mightily with this task—in part because most have no training in real historical analysis, but also because the record is often spotty and contradictory. In light of Bruen’s maximalist language, they have erred on the side of gun owners, finding a constitutional right to buy a gun while under indictment for a violent crime, to carry a gun into airports, and to scratch out the serial number on a firearm, rendering it untraceable. In each case, both sides presented a few scraps of historical evidence to support their positions. Judges based their decisions on those scraps without further research, following Thomas’ suggestion that they rely on “the historical record compiled by the parties.” Last Thursday, Judge Carlton Reeves of the Southern District of Mississippi charted a different course: He proposed appointing a historian to help him “identify and sift through authoritative sources on founding-era firearms restrictions” to decide the constitutionality of a federal law barring felons from possessing firearms. His proposal is the first positive development in Second Amendment law since the Bruen revolution. At worst, it will demonstrate the absurdity and impossibility of Thomas’ command. At best, it will restore sanity to an area of jurisprudence that is going completely off the rails. Federal judges are not historians, but they are increasingly obligated to play them on the bench. In his Bruen decision last June, Justice Clarence Thomas ordered courts to assess the constitutionality of modern-day gun restrictions by searching for “historical analogues” from 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified. Ever since, judges have struggled mightily with this task—in part because most have no training in real historical analysis, but also because the record is often spotty and contradictory. In light of Bruen’s maximalist language, they have erred on the side of gun owners, finding a constitutional right to buy a gun while under indictment for a violent crime, to carry a gun into airports, and to scratch out the serial number on a firearm, rendering it untraceable. In each case, both sides presented a few scraps of historical evidence to support their positions. Judges based their decisions on those scraps without further research, following Thomas’ suggestion that they rely on “the historical record compiled by the parties.” Last Thursday, Judge Carlton Reeves of the Southern District of Mississippi charted a different course: He proposed appointing a historian to help him “identify and sift through authoritative sources on founding-era firearms restrictions” to decide the constitutionality of a federal law barring felons from possessing firearms. His proposal is the first positive development in Second Amendment law since the Bruen revolution. At worst, it will demonstrate the absurdity and impossibility of Thomas’ command. At best, it will restore sanity to an area of ff the rails. Reeves’ order is bracingly honest about the sorry state of Second Amendment jurisprudence today. “The justices of the Supreme Court, distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” he wrote. Federal judges “lack both the methodological and substantive knowledge that historians possess. The sifting of evidence that judges perform is different than the sifting of sources and methodologies that historians perform. And we are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791.” Putting oneself in the mindset of rich, white men in the 18th century requiring training and practice. “Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.” To illustrate his point, Reeves wrote that while historians still fiercely contest the theory of an individual right to bear arms, that right remains the law. He quoted the academic Patrick J. Charles, who wrote that advocates of this theory “broke, and continue to break, virtually every norm of historical objectivity and methodology accepted within academia.” Charles’ complaint could be applied to a huge amount of pseudo-originalist legal theory. As he explained: “Minority viewpoints are cast as majority viewpoints. Historical speakers’ and writers’ words are cast in terms outside the bounds of their intended context or audience. The intellectual and political thoughts of different historical eras are explained from modern vantage point. Historical presumptions or inferences are sold as historical facts.” Bruen exemplifies these problems. Thomas adopted a tendentious and selective reading of the record, endorsing a false narrative shaped by Republican-allied academics funded by gun rights groups like the NRA. He started with the false premise that the Second Amendment created an individual right to bear arms—a right that the court established for the first time in 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller—which scholars have comprehensively debunked using originalist tools. He then manipulated or ignored long-established limits on concealed carry to conclude that such restrictions are not rooted in American history. By appointing a trained historian, Reeves could avoid these pitfalls. He would, indeed, stand a better chance of lighting upon the truth. Even as it may be mandated by Thomas’ Bruen opinion, any such undertaking remains fundamentally misguided: Renowned historian Eric Foner recently dismissed the “foolish” belief that the Constitution has “one original meaning,” since it always meant “different things to a lot of different people” who were involved in its ratification. But a historian will at least get closer to a plausible interpretation than Thomas. And if the whole undertaking fails to produce a good answer, it will have demonstrated the absurdity of defining rights on the basis of history alone.
Friday, May 05, 2023
Thus sayth THE SCOTSMAN...
Amazing facts -- South Korea
Any questions?