#academic debate

[alsofullofflies]

I’d like to bring this to the attention of Tumblr- it’s very funny and very interesting (official academic research into fandom and fanfiction!)

Love You’re Dead To Me, and was very excited when this episode came out! There’s more episodes about literally anything you could want as well!

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[bixels]

Just gonna have to wait and see, right? Just wait and see! Just gotta wait and see! Who knows, we'll just have to wait and see! It's anybody's guess, we'll just have to wait and see! The future is exciting, we just gotta wait and see!

[burningvelvet]

Some of the pages and covers of Percy Shelley’s notebooks (1811-1822) — accessed through the Digital Bodleian Library

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Mehdi Hasan with the mic drop.

Zionism is a nationalist ideology barely a century old. It violates major Jewish principles, was championed by antisemites who wanted to rid their lands of Jews, and many of the great Jewish minds of the past century - including Holocaust survivors and their descendants - have stood against it. So how dare people judge us for resisting this ideology?

Repost from @smohyeddin:

📍 This was a masterful opening argument by @mehdirhasan #munkdebate

[communistkenobi]

there are certain academic writing styles that are insufferable and miserable to read but hard to describe - it’s writing that uses jargon for the sake of it. like jargon is effective when you don’t have anything else on hand, it can be powerful in summarising complex ideas or processes or traditions. I even find it sometimes effective when writing in a more rhetorical/flowery register. but you really do not need to use the word “caesura” when you just mean “break” like come the fuck on dude

[mariocki]

Lalla Ward makes a brief appearance as Lady Augusta, intended bride to an ill-fated aristocrat, in A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Ash Tree (BBC, 1975)

[cemeterything]

Howdy. I know you probably have upwards of like 20k asks or some absurd number like that, but I have a question. My college comp 2 teacher always has philosophical prompts for our essays and the topic for this one is "What does it mean to be a good person? what makes a good person good?" and obviously I'm writing the most commonly listed stuff like open-mindedness and honesty and all that jazz. But all the articles I've read heavily point out Empathy, so wanted to write a paragraph going against that. I'm trying to talk about how having empathy doesn't automatically make you a good person, and that people with low/no empathy are not evil and can in fact be very good people. I'm asking for your thoughts on this because I think you're one of those people (you're also much better with words than I am).

hmmm i'd probably say something about how empathy is not interchangable with goodness, nor is it ontologically good, because empathy alone is just a tool, and tools have no inherent moral or ethical value, it's how we use them that does. you can feel empathy for someone and choose to do absolutely nothing with that empathy. empathy without the choice to show compassion, you can argue, hardly contributes towards a good life for anyone, even the empathetic person. and you do not need to feel empathy to choose to show compassion. i would highlight philosophical arguments which place emphasis on the importance of action/outcome over intention to support your point (although make sure to acknowledge possible counter-arguments).

[backpackingspace]

wait no omg a tired jedi sick of trying to explain jedi relationships to people who just don't get it. (So your master is your dad? No your brother? no So you don't love them? of course I love them) and flips the script. Explain what a father is to me. No no give me an exact list of measurable traits of what makes a father. Is it going to be the same list if I ask someone else? It turns into a month long academic debate.

[iscariotapologist]

What do you think about the resurrection? I struggle believing in a bodily resurrection and in the ascension to heaven. I know most christians would disagree but do you think there are other ways of interpreting it?

i agree with you, and one of the big reasons i stopped considering myself christian was because i felt the incongruity between my perception of how god works in the world and the jesus myth*. there are some people who have sufficient spiritual flexibility to be able to acknowledge this tension honestly and still find their home in christianity, but i do not have this gift lmao (and i do wish i did). there are MANY interpretations of the resurrection and certainly a lot of people who care about orthodoxy would put pretty strict lines around what you can believe about it and still "be a christian" (like that poll going around a while ago where some people were extremely adamant that if you didn't believe in the bodily resurrection you couldn't be a christian) but i think that's silly. there is no way to know the objective truth of the historical events and unfortunately for those of us who like knowing things we all have to deal with that fact. some people meet god in a physical resurrection, some a metaphysical one, some a metaphorical one, and so on. i think god is flexible and gracious enough to inhabit all of these possibilities and more....god is passing osmotically through these barriers we set up.

so anyway to actually answer your question, at this point in time i would say i don't personally believe in a bodily resurrection (also i don't quite believe jesus was god in a different way than anyone else), and additionally the dying part was always more....impactful? to me than the rising part lmao. the suffering of god has always been a vitally important facet of my faith. what can i say my spirituality has always had a bit of a sadomasochistic overtone

[redvelvetwishtree]

People of Gaza are literally leaving their own land and homes on foot so that Israel can take over the land for money, and gas drilling deals and build fckng disneylands or idek whatever and everyone in the world is just watching. They have bombarded Palestinian land into nothingness killed 10k+, forcing thousands away from their homes for $$$. How is the world okay with this???

[mass-angel-exodus]

If Jeffrey from class 0'9 and kyler from dol had a battle to see who's a bigger incel who would win? - cow anon

Thank you very introspective question cow anon

OK so I wanna start this off by saying I haven’t played dol since what uhhh June 2023? So any update from that point on I am completely unaware of, this is completely off memories

Both characters are really similar. They’re both social Pariahs, weebs, greasy, get mercilessly bullied, are sexually deviant and haven’t had any luck with relationships. Fit the standard qualifications for being an incel

But to me personally the difference between being just a guy who can’t get a laid and being involuntarily celibate is the misogyny that stems because of it.

Jeffery is a pervert but he doesnt exactly HATE women. Sexualizes them 100% no question about it this guy is a FREAK but it’s not in the same hateful way incels do. He’s just standard man creepy. HOWEVER, the school shooter ending kinda solidifies his incel status. The worst incels go on violent murder sprees of the women that have wronged them and Jeffery does that in this route after Nicole betrays him by telling the whole school about his weird fetishes which further increased his bullying. Granted he killed everyone in the school , not just her, but his last line to her was like “Nicole you were the only girl i ever loved/trusted”. So yeah in that specific route hes an incel. But the other routes he doesn’t really come off as an incel? Just a loser. Unless there’s something I’ve missed.

Kylar is also a massive sexually deviant loser but he doesnt go on violent shooting sprees. Like even though hes a loser he comes off as more sympathetic and slightly more respectful than Jeffery (before things go south anyway). I dont remember him being misogynistic either. He IS however a kidnapper, stalker and a rapist. But thats not exclusive to incels. It’s the overt misogyny. And as far as I remember he wasn’t overtly misogynistic. Just criminal and abusive.

So yeah between the two of them Jeffery (school shooter route) wins. But not by that much tbh. They both need to be locked up

[representative-democracy]

The children are of course everyone else on the big boats that got stuck

[sapphicacademic]

debate competition notes dump

[oldshrewsburyian]

Persuasion: The Paperwork Problem

I am obsessed with the fact that Captain Wentworth does Mrs. Smith’s paperwork for her, and not just because having a male romantic protagonist do paperwork as part of demonstrating his ultimate worthiness (and swoon-worthiness) proves that no one is doing it like Jane Austen. No, I am obsessed with it because Britain’s transatlantic economy is in flux in the early nineteenth century. And because this Persuasion reread has convinced me that Austen does everything in this novel on purpose to make me suffer.  Here is my theory: what Wentworth is doing is divesting from slavery. What? you may exclaim, gentle readers, and I am here to lay evidence for my tenuous little theory before you.

Point 1: Wentworth’s behavior here is explicitly contrasted with that of Mrs. Smith’s wastrel husband. These are alternate models of masculinity. And Mrs. Smith’s narrative for Anne very clearly links not only the late Mr. Smith’s moral corruption with his mismanagement of this property, but also Mr. Elliot’s lack of moral backbone with his failure to manage it for her. And this is property “in the West Indies,” which at the turn of the nineteenth century means basically one thing: sugar. And sugar, in turn, means slavery. But things are changing! From 1807, the transatlantic slave trade is illegal in Britain and its possessions. I’m not going to dwell here on the obvious ongoing horrors of slavery, but one of the relevant consequences here is that the plantation economy of the British West Indies basically tanks. ...Sort of, at least. There’s scholarly debate on the question of how much this happens, why it happens, and when it happens. Which brings me to:

Point 2: whichever combination of factors we accept for the decline of the plantation system -- Napoleonic Wars, beet farming in South America, British economic commitment (eventually, sort of) to the abolition of slavery -- it makes sense for Wentworth’s management of Mrs. Smith’s property to be part of this. Admittedly, Persuasion is a novel where, in contrast to Mansfield Park, the vast and sinister machinery of the British Empire is allowed to be mostly invisible, especially to the modern reader. But we are told that Mrs. Smith suffers partly because the property is “under a sort of sequestration,” in theory (or initially) to pay Mr. Smith’s debts, but now controlled by the courts because of some combination of greed, incompetence, indifference, and inertia. And Wentworth knows, he knows to his core, he knows from experience, exactly how cheaply the empire values the lives of its subjects. We, in turn, know that he knows this because of light dinner table conversation. Jane Austen, everyone.

Point 3: Jane Austen makes choices about what to emphasize in Wentworth’s naval career. There are a lot of glamorous actions that he could have been linked to. But there’s no name-dropping of the Nile or Trafalgar. No, most of what he’s been doing is chasing privateers and French ships, maintaining a balance of power favorable to the British interest, and making a lot of money while doing so. And routinely risking his life in ways that make Anne very distressed even in retrospect. The exception, the only named military endeavor to which Frederick Wentworth is linked, and which earned him a promotion, is “the action off San Domingo.” This stunning British victory was, of course, aimed at breaking French power in the Caribbean. And this is what we get told about. Among other things, this means that it’s entirely possible that Wentworth also saw action in the Haitian Revolution (again, the British involvement in this was cynical. But still.) Also relevant here, I would argue, is that we are told that the Crofts have never been in the West Indies (and Mrs. Musgrove, a perfectly nice woman but also one perfectly capable of blinding herself to unpleasantness, cannot accuse herself of having ever called Caribbean islands anything in the whole course of her life.) I am convinced that all of this, in this minor miracle of a novel, matters.

Point 4: economic logic. In 1815, there is no way for Mrs. Smith’s economic fortunes to recover and her property to start creating (rather than losing) income if she is trying to manage a sugar plantation. It’s just not going to happen. In a way, this is coming back to Point 1, but without the character-driven elements. If we take this seriously as plausible, I think we have to draw the conclusion that Wentworth has taken in hand arrangements to alter how that property is being used.

Point 5: Anne. The first thing we learn about Anne is that she is not only willing but eager to force irresponsible members of the landed gentry -- even her own family, especially her own family -- to give up luxuries which they think of as necessities. This is the context in which we are introduced to her. This is the first way we learn who Anne Elliot is. The first thing we are allowed to see Anne wanting is “indifference for everything except justice and equity.” In other words, this is a woman who refuses sugar in her tea. And however different she and Wentworth are in temperament, we are also told (from Anne’s perspective!) that there are “no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison.” So I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to take her morality as an indicator of his probable actions.

In short: I think Persuasion’s coda can be read as anti-slavery. Because of paperwork.

[fictionadventurer]

Tagged by @saxifrage-wreath (three weeks ago, but better late than never!) Thank you!

Last Song: Whatever the last song was at church this morning. Maybe "With One Voice"?

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Last internet search: How to spell the first name of William H. Seward's campaign manager/ruthless political boss Thurlow Weed.

Current obsession: After experiencing a lot of museums this week, my history obsession--specifically Lincoln/Civil War history and WWI history--is coming back strong. I've also got a major craving to develop an extremely derivative cozy fantasy universe involving a bunch of different races and characters with cultural/personality clashes.

Tagging: Anyone who has had something sweet to eat today