I agree but the argument is better framed as Mary Beard is a modern scholar with a rigid intersectional world view that is highly moralistic and highly judgmental from the perspective of modern norms around violence, feminism and racism. She sneers down on Roman notions of virtue and patriarchy.
I'm not acquainted with her work, but after reading the transcript your comment seems... highly moralistic and highly judgmental?
The whole interview reads as very sober, she mentions elements that are at odds with the pop culture understanding. She very explicitly takes head on this type of criticisms.
>I think the question of how you judge these people is very tricky. People often write in to me and say, "I don't like the way that you do sometimes make judgments about X as a mass murderer, when they're 2000 years in the past. Surely, it's often said, "You should be judging them on their own terms, not on your terms."
> I've got two responses to that. One is, quite often, these people were hostilely judged in antiquity itself, but we rather brush that under the carpet. Julius Caesar, for example, it's reckoned now that he may well have killed about a million Gauls in his campaign against Gaul, and there were people in Rome who said he was committing crimes against humanity. This is not a new invention that Caesar was a war criminal, there were people in Rome who said that. So I think we have to be very careful always to listen out for the discordant voices in antiquity itself. But I think perhaps more important is that the job of the historian, and this kind of explains I think why we sometimes find there's a flip flop here between one sort of judgment of Alexander the Great and another, you know, favorable or not favorable, same with Caesar, whatever, is that the job of the historian I think is to have stereoscopic vision. I think it is important to understand these characters in their own context, and in their own terms, and how people, by the standards of their time, yes, I think you should do that. But I think that the modern historian can't just leave their own moral values, you know, at the library door. I do at a certain point have to say I find the conquests of Alexander the Great, very, very uncomfortable, and I think what I particularly dislike in terms of our modern appropriation of them is the way we somehow seem to go along with approving of what they did. I might not want to disapprove of it, I might want to say, in part, that by the standards of their own time was okay, but I do have to say it's not the standards of ours, and we have to realize that there are moral issues and questions about what happened in antiquity that we shouldn't be afraid of bringing to the surface. I'm very happy to do that. I mean, I think it's quite interesting, I've chosen a group of men for my most influential Rome, I think I had no choice but to do that. I can also say, but I think there is something about the misogyny of the Roman Empire that I deplore. And you have to be able to hold those two views at the same time, I think.
That's not sneering, it's just not falling in to the trap that whitewashes the brutality of the past. Should future historians only consider our proclaimed ideals? Our notions of virtue? Will the War on Terror be seen just as a "cool" period, morally-neutral?
>>But I think that the modern historian can't just leave their own moral values, you know, at the library door.
But everyone knows what those values are, because largely (with a few nuances) we all share them. We don't need an historian to remind us that war or slavery is bad. I want to know what Romans think of slavery. I can probably guess what a modern historian thinks of it.
I think much of our modern day conflicts are about disagreements over those values though.
> We don't need an historian to remind us that war or slavery is bad. I want to know what Romans think of slavery. I can probably guess what a modern historian thinks of it.
But she isn't just saying "it's bad" for no reason, she depicts the problems and the triumphs. It's not about how Romans thought about slavery, it's about providing a full and complete picture of a historical period or person, warts and all.
As a great example: most of the current political movement in America emphasizes that in the 1950s or so one man's average salary afforded him a better station in society than it does now. But that same observation leaves out that... Well, this wasn't true for any woman, or many minorities. If we just never mention that last part because "duh, I don't need a historian to tell me that" we end up with flawed rosy glasses by which we view such worlds and the policies and people who created them.
Ironically, the rhetoric you cited actually demonstrates the GP’s point, in part. Beard gave a weak answer: a shallow deflection that suggests credibility but glosses over her own bias.
> violence, feminism and racism. She sneers down on Roman notions of virtue and patriarchy.
Which is a very anachronistic way of looking at things and very unscholarly, too bad, I really wanted to get into her books. I guess the Protestant moralism and virtue-signalling got to her (there are exceptions to this, especially in the German world, but it is my impression that the Anglos never really fully adopted the Romans and the Roman worldview, and I'm including Gibbon in here).
The US military physically occupied and restructured the governments of Japan and Germany. A better example might be Vietnam, which has become a US partner but it took a couple generations.
Hirohito spoke in a very very rare way that very few humans speak. It took years of a friend who got a masters in 'Peace and conflict studies' to get me to understand, and in the decade since, and after reading Hirohito's book it still takes a significant intellectual effort to distinguish the listening.
The intergovernmental holdings are accounting placeholders representing the Congressional raid on past Social Security surpluses. It's absolutely meaningful because those obligations are coming due as the program runs increasingly in the red. As legal obligations, they aren't binding the way public debt is, but current Social Security retirees have been promised these funds, and the government is already borrowing more from capital markets to meet these obligations. The current pace is $4.1 trillion in new borrowing by 2033 according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Basically the intergovernmental holdings are getting converted to more public debt.
I’m old. They’ve been saying this for 30-40 years. It’s bullshit. We finance social security out of current revenue and always have. If the economy shrinks that creates problems if it grows that does not.
I think what OP might have been getting at is that in reality _every_ western country has assisted dying (the nurse will OD the patient on painkillers at a certain point), it's just not legally acknowledged everywhere or widely understood unless you have actually witnessed the end of life process.
For the record, having suffered the effects of extreme dehydration before, if someone insists on aiding me in the process of dying (against my wishes) please get it over with quickly. End it with the morphine right off. Dehydration is a miserable process; the immediate misery of thirst aside, the delirium, paranoia, and irritability are not the least bit merciful to inflict on someone, in my personal experience.
Only half true. You can, actually, decide to channel increased productivity into involuntary unemployment and it seems that to some extent we do just that.
Productivity and growth aren't zero-sum, but money definitely is. All the assets and liabilities in the economy sum to zero, so if you want to add new jobs you need to either deflate the economy or increase someone's debt level.
"the more people working the more growth and innovation and the more opportunities and capacity for employment"
So if I'm understanding this causal relationship you're suggesting, the problem is too many people are rejecting employment, and if more people wanted to work there would be more jobs?
Housing has perverse economic incentives, mucking it up.
It is also, obviously, a limited resource that doesn't compound directly. Although its usefulness could compound in terms of density and vertical use increasing housing.
The problem that slows that:
In almost all areas, "property taxes" actually tax both the land (the exclusionary resource that should be taxed since its use reduces land available for others) and the property on it (a wealth tax).
The result of it being a combination tax, is that increasing the value of property on land increases its tax as well. So there is a strong disincentive undercurrent reducing investments in increasing housing on property. It isn't as profitable as it should be.
Even worse, land which is underused, is only taxed as land. Basically getting a tax break relative to the same land nearby which has been developed for maximum use. Meanwhile, the land value goes up parasitically, if while holding but not improving land, neighbors invest in their properties.
The result makes owning land a very good passive parasitical value-growing investment.
Which makes it useful for rich people to store vast sums of money in. Driving prices way above the market value that simple housing should have.
Until the tax issue is fixed, housing can't be fixed. Other changes may be needed to, but just that would make a big difference to everyone's incentives.
(It does happen - but rarely. In 2002, Altoona, Pennsylvania adopted a pure land-value tax, meaning they taxed only the value of the land, not the structures. By 2011, this system fully replaced their traditional property tax, renormalizing so the total tax remained stable. I.e. land was taxed more, improvements none. The effect: owners of productive, developed parcels (homes, businesses) paid less tax, while holders of undeveloped or underused land, such as mansions rarely visited with lots of open acreage, paid more—effectively removing the financial instrument advantage, and turning them into money pits. Land prices declined, development increased, and affordability improved for locals. -- Unfortunately, in 2016 the property tax was reinstated as before.)
"More people working" merely contributes to growth and innovation. You need other inputs as well. The number of people working may or may not be a bottleneck.
But once you do have growth and innovation going one way or another, then that leads to more jobs.
That's only true in a theoretical sense. In practice capital needs to invest in the right things for that to happen, otherwise the people are better off working for their own immediate needs as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers.
I support oversight with subscriptions to Consumer Reports and Consumer Labs. I do think government must play a role-- rather than regulate, just regularly test everything and publish the results and ban/recall unsafe products.
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