Thinkwert

@Thinkwert

Nov 7

🛸@SeraphBluebook

Nov 6

never forgive Greeks for what they did to Troy

Tim Skellett@Gurdur

2h

Megan McArdle

@asymmetricinfo

9h

In France I brought some sausage to take home to my husband. I cheerfully declared it at customs, which resulted in my spending about an hour in Sausage Jail waiting for the agricultural officer to tell me I had to throw it out. I learned a great deal in that hour.

Jeffrey Gross

@KlassicalKat_88

3h

Maggie Westrum@maggiewestrum

12h

i have never attained humanlike intelligence

Jake Wallis Simons

@JakeWSimons

Nov 11

Patrick Wintour

@patrickwintour

Nov 11

Clear statement from Tom Fletcher head of the UN OCHA on the utterly avoidable tragedy befalling Gaza this winter.
"For months we have sounded the alarm on essential winter supplies for Gaza, including throughout the UN General Assembly.

"Foreign Ministers and partners have assured me of support, but also repeatedly said that progress would be hard until after Israeli elections. Now we’re told to wait for the formation of a government. In case anyone has any doubt about international humanitarian law: this is not an acceptable excuse, as the international community and Board of Peace have made clear.

"We are now seeing the consequences of delays, blockages and funding cuts: lives lost, a population once again at great risk. 
"What makes this even more infuriating is that they are at this needless risk from weather that is not a threat where decent shelter exists. And would not be such a threat had we been able to supply decent tents and essential Winter kit.

"Had Palestinians been allowed to access open areas that are less prone to flooding.

"We have set out a clear plan for the supplies we need to get in. Not in weeks, but weeks ago. This includes durable shelter, warm clothes, blankets, bedding and safe heating solutions. And it includes generators, fuel, engine oil, spare parts, equipment to pump out water, remove debris and clear explosive ordnance.
"No more delay. Open all the crossings, not just one. Let our vital NGO partners work. Allow the commercial markets to function. Stop this collective punishment. Fund the plan. End this predictable, preventable suffering. The world is not powerless here."

Tim Skellett@Gurdur

3h

J.K. Rowling

@jk_rowling

10 Nov 2024

By the old left/right metrics (which I accept have been massively disrupted) I am left wing. Not hard left, but definitely left of centre. However, I believe the left in the West has taken a dangerous and self-defeating turn, embracing a form of identity politics that is fundamentally destructive to values the left once respected, especially freedom of speech and fundamental liberalism.

I'm not a tribal person, so I haven't embraced those positions because 'my team' has decreed that's what we're doing now. Yes, I've received a lot of blowback from the left for not meekly accepting the new ethos. But principles aren't dictated by other people's approval. I was never in this to feel part of a team (one of the undersung benefits of being a true introvert). So I won't be running to embrace a new team to feel good about myself, because that would be just as insincere as pretending to believe in the identity stuff to keep myself in with the left.

Tim Skellett@Gurdur

5h

Peggy Vimes@SamuelVimes10

Oct 17

This is subjective but … Name three PERFECT movies. No argument. No explanation. Just three flicks you think are perfect. Here's mine:
1) Ghostbusters
2) Kind Hearts and Coronets
3) Super Troopers

Tim Skellett@Gurdur

5h

ᴀɴᴅʀᴇɪ

@AIAgentsBuilder

5h

this holds up surprisingly well to zoomers and the hunger games

zoomers grew up in the world millennial s inherited but with the hallowed out institutions replaced by screens

they were the first generation “watched from childhood” to the degree it became inescapable

instead of yearning for the letter that never came for their parents they yearn to feel anything real

panem is the society that feeds on spectacle. survival depends being likeable on camera. surprisingly prescient with ai coming for everything else

and katnis is the quintessential zoomer that’s not fitting in. volunteered for the games to save her sister, bad at the interviews, bad at the charm, bad at the romance. the establishment hates her. she has a washed up millennial nihilist as a role model

and she does not win in some grand final brawl or heroic act..

she wins with an act of defiance

defiance is the defining trait of the zoomers

pretty poetic stuff if you put it like this

Tim Skellett@Gurdur

5h

Devon Eriksen

@Devon_Eriksen_

6h

After some recent trends, I finally decide to read the Harry Potter books.

And I came away with something I didn't expect.

I came away with an understanding of what makes a generationally beloved classic.

It isn't authorial skill. Rowling is certainly talented, but, at was also relatively unpolished, and the series has plenty of rough patches. Uneven pacing, awkward plots, exposition dumps, two-dimensional secondary characters. I could write quite a few lines about what might be fixed. And I probably will at some point.

But none of that matters.

Because a generationally beloved classic is almost never the best book of a generation. A generationally beloved classic is the book that most perfectly captures what that generation yearns for.

Hogwart's School of Wizardry did that for millennials, just as the quest to destroy the One Ring did so for the boomers.

Boomers grew up hearing tales of recent history, and the heroism of previous generations, who got us through the great depression, and the great war. Their father, or grandfathers, or both, were heroes. But they were left growing up in the 1950s, a near-ideal time of growth, happiness, and prosperity.

Near-ideal isn't ideal. Humans need goals. The boomers were left with no great struggles to fight, no great tasks to do, nothing that could make them feel like they measured up.

So they invented something. A new struggle. A moral struggle. They decided that, because the great depression, and the great war, had happened when the institutions of Western Civilization existed, therefore those institutions were responsible. That those institutions needed to be torn down, gutted, and rebuilt in the new Boomer Morality.

This was their great quest, what allowed them to imagine themselves heroes. As an added bonus, it allowed them to imagine that the men who fought WW2 were not. They were, after all, adherents of the old creed.

When the hippies took to the streets, chanting "fascist scum, your time has come", they meant the very same people who had fought the Nazis.

Lord of the Rings dovetailed perfectly into this narrative. Its central struggle, its great quest, is not a martial struggle or a political struggle, but a moral struggle... the quest not to seize an object of power, but to destroy one.

Frodo was not some great warrior, or wise wizard. He was an innnocent, whose virtue was moral worth. The young, unaccomplished, and very small man had to resist the temptations of power, and to destroy it, because it was wicked.

Is it any wonder that the boomers decided to tear down and hollow out the institutions of society, rather than inherit and incrementally improve them?

Even to this day, any younger person who seeks power, wanting to improve the world, is subjected to any number of brain-dead aphorisms about Boromir and the Ring.

Never mind that Tolkien never intended any of this. Never mind that the Ring wasn't a symbol of anything. It was a ring. It was evil not because it represented power... it was simply evil because it was made by evil for evil purposes, and possessed a malign will of its own.

LOTR, the way the boomers read it, fit perfectly into their worldview, and they imagine themselves perpetual revolutionaries, always fighting the evils of power, even now when they are 70 years old and own everything.

Which brings us to millennials. They grew up in the world that the gutting of Western institutions left us. They went to government schools run by characters straight out of a Franz Kafka novel, sent there by parents who inexplicably hated them from the time they were old enough to talk.

When they yearned, they didn't yearn for a great moral struggle, or to tear anything down, or to be revolutionaries.

They yearned for a society that cared about them, for parents who loved them, for a civilization that saw them as the future, and invested in them accordingly.

They wanted to go to Hogwart's. They wanted get a letter by owl, telling them that the reason they didn't quite fit wasn't because they were inadequate, but because they were special.

They wanted to be the special ones, the chosen ones, the boys and girls who lived. And that last sentence may sound a bit conceited... until you realized that when they wanted to be special, they wanted to be special in precisely the way that Harry Potter was special, the way that every child in a healthy family is naturally special... not because he is talented or great, but because his mother loved him.

This is what saved Harry Potter in the inciting incident of his young life. This is what millennials wanted for themselves. Not to be astronauts and war heroes and rock stars, but to fit into a place like Hogwarts. To be mentored by wise and caring elders like Dumbledore. To be part of a community. To have mothers who loved them.

To write a story like this isn't necessarily to understand a generation, because it never seems to happen except by accident.

It is, rather, to help a generation understand itself.

That's why fan fiction, with visions like this picture, matters. Not because it has so large a footprint as to change the world, perhaps, but because it represents the spirit of an age.

It tells us what people want. And if we look carefully, it tells us why.

Jenny Fisher Savage@Hillsideviews

5h

J.K. Rowling

@jk_rowling

14h

You know who would have done better with grains of sand, but the narcissism demanded grandeur. An ego where a soul should be is a huge vulnerability.

Tim Skellett@Gurdur

5h

Tim Skellett@Gurdur

24 Sep 2024

Amazingly, and I'm quite genuinely amazed by this, people who have never interacted with me ever before in any way are queueing up to be offended by me. That seems to have no sense at all, unless of course they had another purpose in mind.