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Brian Schefke

@brianschefke.bsky.social

Historian of biology. Native NCS speaker.

1693 Posts346 Follower507 Folgt
Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 7d ago

You can log on to Bluesky where the Classicists, Archaeologists, Historians, and Culture critics are all yelling at one another about The Odyssey you can log on to X where people are debating if women are "real people"

A.R. Moxon@juliusgoat.bsky.social · last wk.

Propounding a cause isn’t about winning an election. It’s about expanding the scope of social imagination, which expands the scope of practical possibilities, which changes many other things, including but not limited to what positions and candidates (and even slogans!) can and cannot win elections.

Chantal James@chantalalive.blacksky.app · 7d ago

Hey folks! Sitting enmired in my brokeness, it's rough. We have only my partner's income as a service worker plus pennies that dribble in, he's given his whole paycheck to rent. He says, you help, consider getting help sometimes. So that's my appeal if you can support! buymeacoffee.com/chantaljames

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Hello friends! It's me, the author of the novel NONE BUT THE RIGHTEOUS and the novella FES IS A MIRROR and poetry and essay that touches your heart. You might know me from Bluesky where I constantly s

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Brian Schefke@brianschefke.bsky.social · last wk.

This is a fair point to make. I can also understand Abughazaleh's reaction. Yes, we should ask questions about the effectiveness of a proposed policy. But the discourse around social welfare also has been poisoned by a lot of bad-faith JAQing off. (Not saying that Stancil is doing that).

paul khruangbin (Dan Lehner)@danlehner.bsky.social · last wk.

if there’s anything I would want to drill into the public consciousness it’s that there are almost always like a dozen ways to approach any given problem and some of them will be more effective than others and we have to stop acting like the questions around it are against fixing the issue

Raffi Melkonian@rmfifthcircuit.bsky.social · last wk.

There's a lot of things I won't get over from the past decade, but people's willingness to try to memory hole the extremely deadly pandemic we all lived through and killed actual people, on their watch and partly because of their idiocy, is high on that list.

Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu.bsky.social · last wk.

Film criticism aside, Emily Wilson's review of the Odyssey concerned me because it misrepresents Late Bronze Age history and reinforces an old Eurocentric pattern of dismissing the experiences--and reality--of ancient peoples other than the Greeks.

Nolan’s other major addition to Homer’s narrative is the repeated reference to threats to ‘our civilisation’ from ‘the sea peoples’ – a now debunked 19th-century theory about maritime tribes who were thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 BCE and to have also been responsible for the roughly coeval collapse of Mycenaean Greek culture. ‘Our civilisation is under attack,’ Penelope wails. Odysseus comforts her by saying that ‘Bronze Age civilisation’, including literacy, will rise again from the ashes. The current consensus, as Nolan clearly knows, is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’, and that the Greek-speaking world’s shift away from the more centralised, literate palace culture of the Mycenaeans in the 11th century BCE towards the fragmented social formations of the early Greek Iron Age was caused by a range of factors, including climate change, earthquakes and internal unrest. Nolan uses these competing historical theories to create a characteristic narrative twist about the identity of ‘the sea peoples’, which I will not spoil, though you can probably guess it.
Brian Schefke@brianschefke.bsky.social · 2w ago

I'm not against this kind of polling, but I don't like how the conversation inevitably shifts to "wow, people don't understand probability and expected value1!". Maybe they do and maybe they don't, or maybe they could just use 50 grand like, now.

YouGov@yougov.co.uk · 2w ago

If you had a choice between instantly receiving £50,000 or a 50% chance to win £1m, which would you pick? £50,000: 73% 50/50 chance of winning £1m: 21% yougov.com/en-gb/daily-...

Brian Schefke@brianschefke.bsky.social · 2w ago

Exactly, and it's the reason people opposed the economic measures that were taken when the Covid pandemic was at its height. They weren't afraid they wouldn't work. They were afraid that they *would* work, and people would come to expect more.

mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social · 2w ago

The reason Zohran scares the shit out of them so much is that they think this sort of technocrat FDR liberalism/market socialism will *work* and be popular, not that it will fail and be unpopular. They're afraid that he will be a good mayor not a bad mayor.